Since its inception, Firefox has been notorious for excess RAM usage, often in the form of RAM leaks. While Mozilla claims to have fixed RAM issues in recent Firefox updates, and has done a fairly good job for the most part, it is still possible to see Firefox consuming a huge chunk of your RAM — especially if you keep the browser continually open for long periods of times and have a lot of tabs open.

I have recently gotten into the (bad) habit of not closing Firefox after a session due to not wanting to lose my research and open websites. (Yes, I know Firefox has the ability to restore sessions, natively and with add-ons.) Yesterday my computer was going extremely sluggish so I decided to take a look way. As it turns out, Firefox (v15.0.1) was consuming more than 1.4GB of memory — a massive amount, by anyone’s standards. (I probably had anywhere from 50-100 tabs open — I didn’t count.) The sad part is that isn’t even the highest I have seen it go. Prior to capturing the screenshot you see above, I actually hit over 1.5GB of Firefox RAM usage. However, I was about to start a League of Legends session and my computer was literally grinding to a halt (almost 90-95% memory usage) so I couldn’t snap a screenshot.

Can you beat my record? Sound-off in the comments below!