When Firefox is in low-memory situations on Windows, it will begin to unload tabs to prevent the browser crashing.
Version 93 of Mozilla’s Firefox browser has arrived, and chief among its new features is tab unloading. Available at the moment only on Windows, with macOS and Linux to follow, the feature kicks in when the browser believes an out-of-memory crash is imminent, and it will unload tabs with the least recently used ones unloaded first. Tabs that are in the foreground are never unloaded with tabs that are pinned, using picture-in-picture, or playing sound are less likely to be unloaded. On Windows, the threshold is around the 6% mark, Mozilla engineer Haik Aftandilian wrote in a blog post. « We have experimented with tab unloading on Windows in the past, but a problem we could not get past was that finding a balance between decreasing the browser’s memory usage and annoying the user because there’s a slight delay as the tab gets reloaded, is a rather difficult exercise, and we never got satisfactory results, » Aftandilian said. « We have now approached the problem again by refining our low-memory detection and tab selection algorithm and narrowing the action to the case where we are sure we’re providing a user benefit: if the browser is about to crash.
