Multiple sessions of Firefox

With my desktop pc with XP and Firefox .... when I check the active programs (as shown in the bar to the left of the time icon) I often see that I have 6 or7 sessions of Firefox running. Is that normal?

Am I wastefully using CPU resources for each of the 6 or 7 sessions? Could this be the reason I frequently get sluggish response and erratic behavior, requiring me to Restart?

As I surf the internet, when I see a link of interest in a URL and I click it ... does that action open a new FF? I didn’t think it did; am I wrong? Why else do I see so many FF’s open?

Confused, obviously. Would appreciate an explanation. ... wdc

You can have multiple sessions of Firefox, depending on how you open the links. If you use "tab tearing", you can split each page into its own FF process.

Are you using tabs in a single window or not? I'm guessing not if you have so many sessions.

There is probably more overhead when you create multiple sessions, but it might not be more than if you had them all as tabs in a single session. It depends on the content of each page. If there is a lot of Flash content, then that page would probably consume more resources.

Moved to Internet forum