I don't think it's so much Firefox that's memory hungry as it is modern frontend development. React in particular seems to drive a lot of memory allocation.
YouTube On Chromium on Linux (so that's both the UA and page coming from the same company and should be optimal) with ads blocked just on the front page uses almost a third of a gigabyte for that tab alone just looking at a short list of recommended videos. Short of rewriting the page yourself (in the case of YouTube Google works hard to make that impractical) there's really no solution to that, you just have to suffer whatever bad ideas the other end sends you. OpenBSD's default approach of limiting memory usage is the same thing I ended up doing on Linux with cgroups because the alternative is letting it take down the rest of the machine by pushing things into swap/thrashing/eventually OOMing. For YouTube itself you have yt-dlp so you can spool the videos locally, I've done that from time to time when I've gotten really frustrated with just how bad it gets. Again Google is always working hard to break it though. --Stephen On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 10:06:37AM +0100, Martijn van Duren wrote: > On 2/25/26 8:15 AM, All wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Just wanted to see if OpenBSD community has some advice on this. > > > > When I open several youtube tabs - sooner or later firefox crashes. > > > > When I open zoom conference call - it will crash after 1 - 2 minutes. > > I did fiddle with limits and stuff but it seems that firefox just likes to > > crash. > > > > I tried Iridium, but it has the same issue - crash with youtube. > > > > Anyone had luck with a web browser and youtube/zoom etc? > > Will be trying chromium, but thought to reach out for guidance. > > > Firefox is memory hungry, and is usually the reason why it crashes on > me. Try increasing datasize limits (ulimit, or login.conf). But try > to keep this reasonable for your setup (assuming single user: what > do other applications need, how much memory does your machine have, > ...) > > martijn@ >
