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Over the years each version of Firefox has been worse than its predecessor at leaking memory overnight; if I go from 56.2 to 57, will it be possible to revert ?

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  • Last reply by cor-el

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A few years ago I only needed to restart Firefox every fortnight due to memory requirements steadily ballooning overnights. Then within the last 18 months, version roll out became more rapid and the pace of memory leak increased so that I had to restart every few days. Now with 56.0.2 I'm having to restart several times each day as memory usage balloons from 700MB thru' 1900MB and then becomes unbearably sluggish when it reaches about 2400MB and I have to re-start after 3 or 4 hours use.

Almost every FF version has been worse than the last in this respect so if I "upgrade" to 57 and this is completely unusable, will I be able to roll back to 56.0.2 and, if so, how exactly, please.

A few years ago I only needed to restart Firefox every fortnight due to memory requirements steadily ballooning overnights. Then within the last 18 months, version roll out became more rapid and the pace of memory leak increased so that I had to restart every few days. Now with 56.0.2 I'm having to restart several times each day as memory usage balloons from 700MB thru' 1900MB and then becomes unbearably sluggish when it reaches about 2400MB and I have to re-start after 3 or 4 hours use. Almost every FF version has been worse than the last in this respect so if I "upgrade" to 57 and this is completely unusable, will I be able to roll back to 56.0.2 and, if so, how exactly, please.

All Replies (3)

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Yes, you will be able to revert it by re-installing 56.0.2 which can be grabbed from here: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/56.0.2/

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I have also reverted back to FF 56.0.2. FF 57 is the pits. After clicking on a link, it seems to take an eternity for a web page to come up. The subsequent tweak for FF57 did not help in the slightest.

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Did you check for issues caused by one of the installed extensions?

Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions ("3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem.

  • switch to the DEFAULT theme: "3-bar" menu button or Tools -> Add-ons -> Appearance
  • do NOT click the "Refresh Firefox" button on the Safe Mode start window

If you use Adblock Plus then you can consider uBlock Origin as a replacement to see if that works better (lower memory footprint).