Understanding Firefox's existence in report

[paulri]

I just installed this, and have now satisfied my curiosity about the footprint of my 13 addons. I was told that apart from this and Adblock, none are over 1 meg of RAM (I have 8 gigs total).

I do have one question. Firefox is using 38-45 megs every time I run a report. What does this mean? That this is how much RAM FF is consuming, being devoted to the addons? Or should I be dividing that FF ram useage equally among the addons, or ????? Not sure why FF is being shown there. Could you explain?

Thanks for making this. I read about this on the Mozillazine forum, but with all the complaining about extensions and overhead, I'm surprised its not more widely known. Best wishes in the future.

[vsiegel]

Interesting point - like it is, you have to guess something. For total memory used by FF it is too smal, so at least that wrong guess is sorted out.

It may be hard to explain, as all memory management. Removing it may be a good idea.

[InternalError503]

@paulri @vsiegel

Note: Many Add-ons, especially non-JetPack ones, may include static or dynamic overlays that may add scripts, DOM or styles directly to the browser. Such things cannot be distinguished from the browser itself and hence cannot be counted towards the add-on. As a result the actual add-on memory usage may be a lot higher than reported here!

At the bottom of the about:addons-memory page the above message is shown, From my understanding the browsers usage shown reflects the above un-measurable elements in a single read out.

To see Firefox itself memory usage one can measure this in about:memory or task manager on windows.