The ui for about:memory is bad and not very useful in tracking down where the memory is going or leaking. That's something the ui engineers can do to help Firefox with this.

Sorry to say that, but about:memory is useless to me. When memory runs low and system starts swapping (slowing down to a crawl) my first priority is to get computer running again, so I have to close firefox. That helps, but about:memory no longer has the data that would lead to the culprit.

Even if I could look at histotic data, the UI of about:memory is just plain awful. Charts anyone? My main question is how the consumption of memory for each tab is changing through time and I haven't found a nice way to see that yet.

Also, browser should protect me from pages which use too many resources. Why should some random page be able to stop my computer from working? I am seriously considering running firefox inside docker container just so I can limit its resources.

Note that I am a huge fan of ff and use it everywhere, but this has been a sore point for me for ages.

I agree that it's a tough problem and they have smart engineers working on it. The about:memory anonymizer makes the output useless to the engineers looking at the bug. A better way would be to anonymize it but still keep it identifiable if you have the key. Say make each page a uuid or something so that the engineer can say, "search for this uuid in your in anonymous report and that's leaking memory"

It seems that the tools to diagnose what has been the most criticized series of bugs in Firefox are still lacking. Ideally it should list the plugins used and the memory of each along with a way to identify the heavy pages etc.