Two of the most widely used internet browsers are: Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The feature to open multiple tabs simultaneously in these browsers is both a boon as well as curse. How often have you faced the issue of browser hogging memory space because several tabs are open? Whenever your Chrome browser or Firefox browser runs slow, it can be attributed to too many tabs opened parallely or due to too many Chrome extensions or Firefox add-ons being used.

We shall check out how to know about the memory space consumed or used by extensions as well as tabs of Firefox and Chrome browsers. In this article, we shall study how the new Tab Data add-on can check Firefox tab memory usage and how the Task Manager [about:memory] extension can display Chrome tab memory usage. This shall help you to understand which tab or which extension is using more memory and slowing down the browser. Thus, you can get rid of those tabs or extensions to improve your browser performance and increase internet browsing speed.

Checking extension and tab memory usage for Google Chrome

For this browser, there was always a keyboard shortcut available in the form of ‘Shift+Esc’ to display and monitor the memory usage by Chrome extensions and browser tabs in the Google Chrome Task Manager window.

Apart from the above option, there is an extension available with the name ‘Task Manager [about:memory]’ that can be used to keep track of the tab memory usage and browser extension memory consumption. You can download it from the Google Chrome Web Store.

Once you download this extension, you will get the shortcut added to your Chrome taskbar at the top as seen below.

You can then click on it to open the Task Manager About Memory tab add-on as ‘chrome://memory-redirect/’. This high-utility add-on can measure memory usage in a multi-process browser like Chrome.

Monitoring add-on and tab memory usage for Mozilla Firefox browser

To check which Firefox add-on is consuming more memory and get rid of it, you can download the ‘about:addons-memory’ extension from Mozilla Add-Ons Store.

This Addons-memory extension offers an experimental ‘about:page’ for advanced Firefox users to showcase memory usage statistics about their Mozilla browser add-ons. Once it is downloaded successfully, you can simply type ‘about:addons-memory’ in the URL bar to open the Firefox add-on memory usage statistics display window.

However, to know how much memory is used by every Firefox tab, we need to download a new Tab Data extension from Firefox AddOns Store.

This particular Tab add-on uses the ‘nsIMemoryReporterManager’ interface to fetch required Firefox tab memory usage statistics. It not only shows the memory usage in title, but also informs us about how many tabs are currently open as well as how many tabs were opened in this Firefox session or how many tabs were opened since the installation of this extension. Thus, you get a count of tabs along with how much memory is consumed by them using Tab Data Firefox Add-On.

Additionally, to get rid of the problem of high memory usage by tabs and slow browser performance, you can even try out Bartab extension for Firefox. Further details of this extension to load tabs on demand can be found in our article here: Reducing Firefox Memory Usage By Loading Multiple Tabs on Demand.

I am sure you would find the above information shared about tracking memory usage by Chrome and Firefox browsers (tabs or extensions). You can take necessary measures to improve the speed of your browser by regular monitoring to check tab memory usage. Please feel free to share your experience of handling multiple tabs and extensions in these browsers!