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Besides its slowness, one big problem of Firefox to me is whenever I leave the app (e.g. looking up a translation in a dictionary) and switch back via ALT-TAB or long press HOME, Firefox reloads all tabs, they are already empty when reopening Firefox (so Ff seems to lose the tabs and only saves the URL's).

Is this due to low memory of Smartphone (500 MB RAM) or does Ff show the same behaviour on Tablets and high-specs smartphones? I also need Ff for Tiddlywiki and switch between apps and reopen Ff quite a lot. So a solution/explanation for this problem would be fine.

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  • I guess that's about the way FF is implemented, I don't think it's about your device configuration, besides, 500Mb of RAM is pretty good for a phone, isn't is?
    – mdelolmo
    Commented Jan 18, 2012 at 11:07
  • @mdelolmo it's true, but 500mb is also min. required RAM for ff to run on any phone. All the high class phones have 1GB RAM
    – Hauser
    Commented Jan 18, 2012 at 13:18
  • I guess that's one of the reasons I'm giving up with FireFox step by step. I didn't even tried the Android version, maybe I should... But, my guess as an Android developer is that they don't check any device property of that kind in runtime, in fact, I don't think that is possible, at least with the API.
    – mdelolmo
    Commented Jan 18, 2012 at 15:23
  • Someone with more clout than me (who knows the ins and outs of how to do this) should file a bug report on this. It is annoying to the point of making Firefox useless when I have a web page that takes 30-45 seconds to load and Firefox decides it needs to be reloaded just because I switched to another app that was already loaded and did not exert any more memory pressure!
    – Michael
    Commented Sep 19, 2013 at 21:22

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Android never removes applications from its memory, unless it has no memory left, then it initiates a low memory warning to unused applications and kills them when needed...

Android WebViews (The default android implementation of web browser) consume lots of memory, and so is Firefox's implementation of their web browser. Actually, Gecko (Firefox's rendering engine) is much slower and a bigger memory consumer than Android's default Webkit rendering engine.

So when you exit Firefox on your Android, the memory is probably nearly full, the system kills it, but Firefox has a mechanism that saves the URLs of the previously opened tabs, and though it starts the application again (and not resuming it) it loads everything you left open again...

And no,512MB are no enough, Android 2.3 takes approx 300MB to run.

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