Mozilla Firefox 67 released three days back with Cryptominer blocking and WebRender features. Till now there are no major issues reported by users after upgrading, but we have an issue that is disturbing our workflow already with the change introduced in 67, that is automatic suspending of unused tabs.
Current Firefox stable discard tabs to free up system resources when it detects memory on your system is too low, for now, Mozilla set this to happen when available memory goes below 340 MB.
FYI, not all unused tabs get suspended, Firefox browser follows this order to unload tabs.
- First tabs not playing audio and not pinned
- Pinned tabs not playing audio
- tabs that are playing audio
Firefox shouldn’t be suspending tabs that haven’t been visited for a while if the user system has more Physical RAM, in our case, we have 16GB RAM and plenty of free memory but still Firefox doing this.
Visiting suspended tab and reloading may annoy user, do note the data entered in form or websites won’t be lost when you reload but we think this could be a bug or wrong behavior and this issue has been brought to Mozilla attention, expect them to fix the issue, for now, to disable this
1. Visit about:config
2. Find preference browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory and set its value to “false”.
3. Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.
Have you noticed Firefox unloading tabs even if you’ve more memory?
