Firefox has Accessibility Service Memory Leak, you should disable it

A post on BugZilla exposes a bug in the Firefox browser that may affect its performance in a bad way. A memory leak in accessibility services causes the slowdowns, noticeable on web sites like Facebook.

Until the bug addressed, it is good idea to disable the Accessibility Service in Firefox. However, we don't recommend you to disable it right now. First of all, ensure that you are affected. There is a great chance that the service is already disabled for you, so you don't need to do anything.

Only do it if you have spotted a huge memory consumption by the browser. If so, then try to disable the services. But it keep in mind any browser extension and/or external software that rely on Firefox's assistive solutions will stop working.

Disabling the Accessibility Service in Firefox is a bit tricky. For a few recent versions, Firefox no longer includes a GUI option to turn it off. You need to dive into the about:config advanced options to turn it off.

Disable Accessibility Service in Mozilla Firefox

1. Open a new tab in Mozilla Firefox.
2. Type about:config in the address bar.
3. Click Accept the risk to continue.
4. In the search box, enter accessibility.force_disabled.
5. Change the value of the accessibility.force_disabled option from 0 to 1 to disable the Accessibility Service.
6. Restart Firefox.

You may be curios how to check if you have the Accessibility Service disabled. Well, the browser reports this information on the "Troubleshoot information" internal page.

Check the status of the Accessibility Service

Click on the menu button (or press Alt + F), then select Help > More troubleshooting information from the menu.

On the page that opens (about:support), scroll down to the Accessibility section. You will see the feature status. If you did everything right, it will report false for the Activated row.

You can track the bug status on this Bugzilla page.