YouTube web bug spikes RAM above 7GB

YouTube has a browser problem — and it looks like a YouTube problem more than a browser problem. Over the last few days, desktop users on Firefox, Brave, and Edge have been reporting the same pattern: videos start stuttering, the tab gets sluggish, memory use keeps climbing, and eventually the whole thing can lock up. Some people are seeing a single YouTube tab chew through more than 7GB of RAM. The interesting part is that the reports line up across different browsers, which points back to YouTube’s own web interface rather than one bad browser update. ### What’s actually breaking? The failure seems to sit in the strip of buttons below the video player — the like, dislike, share, and related controls. Developers digging through a Mozilla Bugzilla thread say the culprit is YouTube’s `ytd-menu-renderer`, a flexible menu that tries to show only the buttons that fit in the available width. That sounds harmless, but turns out the menu can get trapped in a feedback loop. ### Why does that spike RAM? Here’s the basic loop: if the buttons don’t fit, YouTube hides one. But hiding a button changes the measured width of the container. Now the code thinks there’s room again, so it adds the button back. Then the bar overflows again, so it hides the button again. Repeat that fast enough and the browser output thrashing” can also drive memory use way up because the page never settles down. ### Which browsers are getting hit? Firefox users were some of the first to surface the issue, but the pattern has spread well beyond Firefox. Brave and Microsoft Edge users have posted similar complaints, with the same mix of lag, frame drops, and runaway memory usage. That cross-browser pattern is the big clue here — different engines, same page, same symptoms. ### Is this the same as an ad-blocker fight? Probably not. A lot of people initially assumed YouTube was breaking things again as part of its long-running anti-ad-blocker push, or that a recent browser update was to blame. But the current theory coming out of the debugging work is much more boring and much more plausible: a front-end single page pays the price. ### Why do livestreams seem worse? Long sessions give the bug more time to pile up damage. If you leave a lo-fi stream, a podcast, or a long live broadcast running for hours, the tab stays alive while the interface keeps doing work it shouldn’t be doing. That means more chances for memory growth, more heat, and more odds that the tab or browser becomes unusable. ### Is there an official fix yet? As of May 4, 2026, there doesn’t seem to be a public YouTube known-issues post or official fix note tied to this specific bug. YouTube’s help pages still point users to general playback troubleshooting — update the browser, clear cache, try another supported browser, and send feedback — which may help around the edges but won’t really solve a bad frontend loop if that’s the root cause. ### What can you do right now? The practical move is simple — don’t leave a broken tab running for hours. Reload the page if memory starts climbing, close and reopen the tab instead of hopping video to video forever, and try another browser just to see whether your setup is less affected there. If you want to help the fix happen faster, YouTube’s own support flow says to send feedback and debug details. ### Bottom line This looks like a classic tiny-UI-bug, huge-side-effects story. One unstable toolbar under the player may be enough to push desktop YouTube into a constant redraw loop — and until Google patches that code, long browser sessions are the ones most likely to suffer.