Mozilla confirms memory leak in Firefox

[harlan4096]

Mozilla confirmed a rare memory leak in recent versions of its open source web browser Firefox that occurs under rare conditions.

The organization released Firefox 112.0.1 a few days ago, the latest stable version of the web browser. The update addressed a issue related to cookies in Firefox. Affected Firefox versions would set the last used date of cookies thousands of years in the future, which had the result that users were logged out of web services.

Firefox Memory Leak

Mozilla confirmed the memory leak on Firefox 112.0.1's release notes page. There, the organization provided the following information about the issue: "Under rare circumstances, animated Firefox themes can use excessive memory."

According to Mozilla, the issue may be experienced only when users have installed specific animated themes, such Dark Space, in Firefox and use it actively. Additionally, Firefox would leak memory only a browser window was either minimized or occluded.

All of these conditions had to be met for the memory leak to occur. Mozilla recommends that Firefox users switch to another theme until it is releasing a patch for the issue: "If you encounter this problem, please change your theme to one that does not use animations to work around it. We are in the process of shipping a fix".

Mozilla is working on a fix, and progress can be monitored on Bugzilla. There, users are informed that the issue is affecting Firefox 112, 113 and 114, but not Firefox ESR.

The issue was reported to Mozilla 6 days ago and engineers have worked on the fix ever since. Beta and Nightly versions of Firefox have updates already that should address the issue.

How to manage themes in Firefox



Firefox users may manage themes in the following way in the web browser. It is recommended to have one window open only and keep it in the foreground to avoid the memory leak issue.

1. Select Menu > Add-ons and Themes, or load about:addons directly in the Firefox address bar.
   
2. Select Themes from the sidebar on the left. Firefox displays the active theme at the top and all other themes that are available below it.
   
3. Scroll down to another, preferably one that is not dynamic, e.g. Light or Dark, two of the default Firefox themes, and activate the Enable button next to one of the themes to make it the active theme in the web browser.
   

The change is immediate. Provided that it is not a dynamic theme as well, Firefox should no longer leak memory when a browser window is minimized or occluded.

Now You: do you use default or custom themes in your browser?
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