It does release it back to the system. It only doesn't if you actively have a ton of windows/tabs open, in my experience. Even then, it'll cache stuff to disk after awhile. Like on my phone, I've easily had over 20 tabs open in Firefox (Android) and it doesn't suck up all of my phone's ram (which only has 12GB). If your system is running less than 16GB, then that's another matter and you really should add more, as 16GB is pretty much the baseline on computers these days.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Mine is 32GB and Firefox as consistently and repeatedly refused to release the excess RAM back into the pool. So it doesn't work out as well in practice as it does on paper. I would agree that 16GB is the bare minimum though and if you have less you absolutely should get more if you can. Firefox needs at least 8GB to run smoothly, but a system that only has that amount or less will be bogged down by Firefox alone.

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 5 minutes ago

I'm on 4gb of ram right now (travelling so I'm away from my desktop) and firefox is using ~2gb I think (only 4-6 tabs open though)

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I don't know what to tell you, then. I've never had Firefox or chrome be that stubborn on a consistent basis. Are you using extensions? Some extensions are very poorly optimized, especially so when combined with certain websites (gotta love badly implemented JS in some places). Even if the extension is well made, they can still get overwhelmed sometimes, e.g. ublock origin on sites with very aggressive ads.

That being said, browsers are very complicated and the fact they all heavily use sandboxing now (as they rightfully should be), I guess I'm not surprised where they don't function as intended in various use cases.