Why does firefox keep eating my memory on Ubuntu 17.10?

Yes, I've got a lot of tabs open. But after firefox opens it only loads the frontmost tabs in the window.

So why does it keep gobbling memory. I've got 8GB but it slowly keeps allocating memory as I browse until it gets into the swapfile and beyond. And then my system goes unresponsive.

I sure wish I could get firefox to put a cap on how much memory it uses. Or a menu option to flush all of its buffers or something.

I just have to watch it closely with system-monitor and when it gets too big just close it and reopen it. Often when it makes a huge swapfile, when you close firefox it tells you that it crashed, probably because it took too long to shut itself down.

As much time as I've wasted I think I'll be boosting up my memory.