Following this week’s release of Firefox 140, Firefox 141 was promoted to beta. Most exciting for Linux users with next month’s Firefox 141 release is finally lowering system RAM use! I’ve been running some benchmarks looking at the impact.
With this week’s release of Firefox 141 Beta, it notes an exciting change for Linux users:
“On Linux Firefox uses less memory and no longer requires a forced restart after an update has been applied by a package manager.”
Less memory use by Firefox on Linux is certainly welcome as it’s become quite bloated… I’ve grown frustrated myself with the direction of Firefox and the insane RAM use in recent times. While being a long time Firefox user since the Firebird days, I’ve contemplated switching to Chrome given the rampant memory use of Firefox on Linux with my 64GB RAM laptop triggering the OOM daemon routinely due to excessive memory use with Firefox.
Thus with the Firefox 141 Beta release, I was curious to run some benchmarks of Firefox 140 vs. Firefox 141 Beta on a test system for seeing the difference.
With this testing I was just looking at the single-tab/window impact for reproducibility while running various web browser benchmarks but that alone was enough to show a nice improvement over Firefox 140.
This round of benchmarks were done on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X desktop running Ubuntu 25.04 with the Linux 6.15 kernel and NVIDIA graphics.
