Firefox now offers an option to manually unload tabs to improve performance

Mozilla is experimenting in Firefox Nightly with a manual tab unloading feature via the tab context menu. This lets you speed up Firefox on demand by freeing up memory and improving performance.

Firefox, with version 93 on Windows, can unload tabs if it detects system memory is low. Firefox only unloads tabs to prevent crashes. It does this to tabs in the least recently used manner. Tabs playing videos, playing in Picture in Picture mode, mostly won’t be affected. Firefox follows certain criteria to unload tabs, and you can notice this and manually unload tabs by visiting the “about:unloads” page.

Speed up Firefox by unloading tabs on demand

This was a thing of the past. Most common users that use Firefox for normal browsing may not know or discover about:unloads and may not know Firefox has a tab unloading feature. Mozilla has now started to test tab unloading again, but this time Firefox is showing user-facing options. Yes, Firefox Nightly now offers an unload tab option by default in the tab context menu. You just need to select it.

When you select it again, it will be loaded. If you select one to unload, you will immediately be switched to another tab. This is the way tab unloading works. You can apply the feature to multiple tabs by selecting tabs with “Ctrl” and selecting the option.

Firefox may change the “unload tab” text to something like “Freeze tab”, “Sleep tab”, “discard tab”, or “Snooze tab”. The latter will likely be grayed out to visually differentiate active and unloaded tabs, similar to Chrome’s memory-saver mode.

Instead of unloading tabs automatically, Mozilla is leaving that to users. Right now, it does not seem like a good implementation. We will see how Mozilla may improve this going forward.

Apart from this, Firefox is retiring the ‘Do Not Track’ feature from version 135, adding a proofreading prompt to AI chatbots, and enabling a new Tab Groups feature for Nightly users.

What’s your take on tab unloading in Firefox? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.