Youtube has a feature that gives you a menu on the right hand side so you can select a video, and then the next one, etc. If I do that, Firefox and the tab start out at about 1/2 my ram ~4gb, after selecting videos it will eventually consume all 8gb. Granted I flip through videos like changing channels on a tv but Firefox doesn't have to use any more ram for the last one than the first one.
Here's a typical site with the menu, and there's quite a few to go through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRbvPu_YzrU&list=PLDlykLh1oq0GdMtEY4UDGXxoY992EC78h&index=128
The workaround: Copy the url, open a new tab, close the old tab, paste the url in to the new one. Without closing Firefox, this deallocates all the excess memory.
