23 ms·

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of product

by animex 5y ago

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

grogenaut 5y ago
It's the same productivity hack as the piles of stuff around my house I'm never going to use.
moreira 5y ago
Firefox runs on systems with 512MB RAM. [1] Can you imagine keeping a Slack tab open on a system like that? Never mind 100 tabs. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0/system-requirements/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0/system-requiremen...
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  To be fair, I tried running it recently on a machine that I had artificially limited to one core and 512MB RAM; it was not actually usable, even for static pages. WebKit browsers didn't really do any better, though, which surprised me.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    You can’t even boot the Ubuntu cli installer.
earthscienceman 5y ago
I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending on if I'm coding or if I'm writing my own papers. These pages are often very temporary for me, in the sense that maybe I'm browsing documentation and the exact place in the documentation that I'm visiting changes in time. Or maybe I initially believe a paper will be relevant to future work but I haven't read it and would like to get back to it in some time. I could spend the mental overhead of keeping an organized bookmark system that changes with these workflows day in and day out... or... I could just leave the tabs open. Guess which I choose? I have a laptop with 64Gb of ram for a reason. Although firefox is pretty fantastic these days in terms of resource usage.
- speedybird 5y ago
  Bookmarking, history and unloaded tabs are three disjoint systems that all solve the same problem for me, each inadequate for different reasons. The solution to this mess is to unify the three. Also two of these three, history and bookmarks, are presently bitrotting badly in firefox. Firefox's 'Library' window that shows History and Bookmarks in separate tabs is abysmally neglected.
- asadkn 5y ago
  Same issue. Except multiple short-term projects with hundreds of reference tabs, in multiple windows, ranging from groups that would classify as "mood boards" to research. I settled for Workona when it launched about 2+ years ago after trying many extensions else like OneTab, SessionBuddy, Toby and so on. I might start looking for something else again as Workona is getting a bit more, commercialized, but it's fine for now.
- parhamn 5y ago
  I'd love to talk to you! I'm making a browser which already has automated ML tagging and full text search of content (should you enable it) so you don't really need bookmarks to do smart search and recall. We also have a really cool and well indexed snippet tool built in for pieces of information you want to keep and share. Id love to learn more about your use cases, if you're interested reach out to parham@synth.app :)
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    My use case may qualify; I have anywhere from 100 to 1,000+ open tabs across three different devices and four browser instances (three Firefoxes, one Chrome) at the peak. But judging from your website it looks like a full browser (presumably built out of Chromium) and not an extension that can be used in any browser, so, ugh.
    - parhamn 5y ago
      Fair enough. The browser is built because we think browsers should do a lot more than just tabs and bookmarks, so it wasn't enough to just add an extension (we have many more features that we wanted a well integrated experience around). With that said, there are very few limitations to the browser at this point and it will be eventually open source so feel free to reach out as well!
gostsamo 5y ago
I'm using a screen reader and FF regularly crashes due to some broken memory management in the accessibility service. If this unloading cleans the memory before it gets critical, I'm all for it.
- cpeterso 5y ago
  Do you have any crash report IDs in your Firefox's about:crashes page? I can check whether a Bugzilla bug report has already been filed for those crashes.
  - gostsamo 5y ago
    I think that the issue is known, but hard to track. It shows with NVDA and heavy web apps like Twitter and Messenger if they are running for some time. I'm posting here some of the crash ids, but it is likely that they are not representative. When the browser starts to clock up, it locks the screen reader as well and I'm not waiting for the crash, but kill the process with extreme prejudice. I'd be glad to help in any other way. bp-cb27fd07-ad27-49bf-b6c2-9dbbb0211005 bp-96eef135-da51-45a8-a792-d28810211005 bp-184a8916-227c-42c4-8308-6e3c00211005 bp-ba6748d3-2d93-4d84-992e-8cf960211005 bp-8bdfb00f-0e30-4cd3-826c-efb910211005 Here is the Bugzilla ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572915 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572915
    - gsvelto 5y ago
      Unfortunately those crashes do not appear to be related to low memory scenarios. They seem to be genuine bugs in the screen reader. I think the right bug tracking them is this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691928
      - gostsamo 5y ago
        As I said, usually I don't wait for a full crash so there is a survival bias in those ids.
Kliment 5y ago
There's a handful of horrible websites that use enormous amounts of CPU and memory. You don't need too many of those to drag a browser down. I am a thousands-of-tabs user (and yes it's an awesome productivity hack for a number of my workflows, but never mind that) and I don't normally have any problems. Unless I make the mistake of opening some trash website (Slack used to be like that, I've not used Slack in years so I don't know if it still is) and then it bogs down everything.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Slack is still trash. I segregate browsers by using different Linux users for different tasks (slack, Facebook, general, etc) which works well with my similarly bespoke workflow. The problem with this arrangement is that When Firefox has pending system upgrades it requires all browsers be closed and reopened. I’m curious about your productivity hack though, I use a grid keyboard layout with ~20 workspaces grouped to four windows for each task/project and one set to emails/fb/slack
  - Kliment 5y ago
    I do electronics. I keep my BOM entries as tabs, with a tab for each major component, its distributor page, and often its manufacturer page where the documentation lives. Different projects have their parts chunked together as bunches of tabs, so I can search my tabs for a part number and get that and everything else in the same project is nearby in the tab list. I currently have >3000 tabs open.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
      Interesting, in your use case, would having like ‘multi page bookmarks’ work? How many vendors are there? If there’s a small pool maybe scraping their datasets would work well also
      - Kliment 5y ago
        Possibly, but bookmarks are trash UX and I hate managing them. There are few vendors but they have millions of pages and the relevant data changes daily.
throwaway123x2 5y ago
How is that possible, I get FF crashes literally every time I load a moderately intensive website (eg. Google Keep). I still use FF because I can't abide Chrome. My PC is admittedly a bit older (only 6 gigs RAM) but still.
- techwizrd 5y ago
  I routinely have hundreds of tabs open in Firefox at any given time without crashes on macOS and Linux. The tabs include everything from documentation, Jupyter notebooks, papers, Jira, Reddit, HN, Github, Gitlab, GMail, Google Keep, Todoist, etc. I can't even recall the last time Firefox crashed for me.
  - sundarurfriend 5y ago
    Agreed. I've got 99 problems with Firefox, but a crash ain't one.
  - brokenmachine 5y ago
    Many hundreds of tabs here in FF on Windows and pretty rock solid.
- loufe 5y ago
  I don't know if I've experienced a crash in Firefox in years. I would really suggest taking a look at the crash logs and maybe do a checkup on your machine's health.
- jandrese 5y ago
  6GB is ample memory if you're not loading tons of tabs. I run Firefox on Raspberry Pi model 1s and while you have to limit yourself to a tab or two and have plenty of patience it does still work. What doesn't work is trying to compile the browser on the Pi. The build process has some really gigantic source files that cause the compiler to choke.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Hum... Firefox breaking on some Google site is surprising, but not extremely so.
sbysb 5y ago
As someone who regularly has >300 tabs I can promise you that it is not because of any productivity gains (if anything the opposite lol)
Macha 5y ago
My peak is in the high 300s of tabs. It works fine, though I imagine if they were 300 instances of youtube or some webgl game or video calls there might have been more issue.
floren 5y ago
Firefox crashes completely at least once a week for me, and tabs crash at least once a day. I had a brand new tab crash the other day, just seconds after I had opened it and visited a text-only site (no JS, no images). I'm running Firefox 92 on up to date Debian on a machine with 64GB of memory; it's not running out of RAM. I still use it because it's better than Chrome, and I wouldn't touch Brave with a 10 foot pole.
- trog 5y ago
  What add-ons do you have installed? I've never had a problem like this in Firefox, in the 10+ years it has been my primary browser (on Windows though). Have you done a memory test too? Something definitely sounds broken here.
- kaba0 5y ago
  That doesn’t sound normal. Perhaps your profile is in some sort of inconsistent state after years of usage? Maybe give it a try with a new empty profile as well.
- Vindicis 5y ago
  I've ran into weird issues like that before. After so many updates, I'm guessing something gets broken somewhere, somehow. Back up your extension settings and bookmarks, and do a fresh install of it. Bit of a nuisance but usually fixes any weird behaviour in my experience.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  Recently switched to chrome as a many tab used, it’s less stable than Firefox for me.
  - BikeHelmet 5y ago
    You may want to try Opera. I found it more stable than Chrome, at least after spending an hour in the Settings and about:flags disabling all the extra features that I didn't need.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
davidgerard 5y ago
I've seen this on my 4GB RAM netbook. This is basically what Chromebooks do when you've got too many tabs open, and it's much better than the system trying to thrash itself to death, which is what it does now.
gcp 5y ago
People on low memory machines, or people on big boxes that read some article about how swap makes your SSD die and tried to disable Windows swapping (or downloaded some "optimization" tool that does that). The last is explicitly hinted in the article. There's a surprising amount of people in that situation.

by animex 5y ago

grogenaut 5y ago

It's the same productivity hack as the piles of stuff around my house I'm never going to use.

moreira 5y ago

Firefox runs on systems with 512MB RAM. [1] Can you imagine keeping a Slack tab open on a system like that? Never mind 100 tabs. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0/system-requirements/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0/system-requiremen...

NoGravitas 5y ago
To be fair, I tried running it recently on a machine that I had artificially limited to one core and 512MB RAM; it was not actually usable, even for static pages. WebKit browsers didn't really do any better, though, which surprised me.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
  You can’t even boot the Ubuntu cli installer.

earthscienceman 5y ago

I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion: The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot. I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending on if I'm coding or if I'm writing my own papers. These pages are often very temporary for me, in the sense that maybe I'm browsing documentation and the exact place in the documentation that I'm visiting changes in time. Or maybe I initially believe a paper will be relevant to future work but I haven't read it and would like to get back to it in some time. I could spend the mental overhead of keeping an organized bookmark system that changes with these workflows day in and day out... or... I could just leave the tabs open. Guess which I choose? I have a laptop with 64Gb of ram for a reason. Although firefox is pretty fantastic these days in terms of resource usage.

speedybird 5y ago
Bookmarking, history and unloaded tabs are three disjoint systems that all solve the same problem for me, each inadequate for different reasons. The solution to this mess is to unify the three. Also two of these three, history and bookmarks, are presently bitrotting badly in firefox. Firefox's 'Library' window that shows History and Bookmarks in separate tabs is abysmally neglected.
asadkn 5y ago
Same issue. Except multiple short-term projects with hundreds of reference tabs, in multiple windows, ranging from groups that would classify as "mood boards" to research. I settled for Workona when it launched about 2+ years ago after trying many extensions else like OneTab, SessionBuddy, Toby and so on. I might start looking for something else again as Workona is getting a bit more, commercialized, but it's fine for now.
parhamn 5y ago
I'd love to talk to you! I'm making a browser which already has automated ML tagging and full text search of content (should you enable it) so you don't really need bookmarks to do smart search and recall. We also have a really cool and well indexed snippet tool built in for pieces of information you want to keep and share. Id love to learn more about your use cases, if you're interested reach out to parham@synth.app :)
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  My use case may qualify; I have anywhere from 100 to 1,000+ open tabs across three different devices and four browser instances (three Firefoxes, one Chrome) at the peak. But judging from your website it looks like a full browser (presumably built out of Chromium) and not an extension that can be used in any browser, so, ugh.
  - parhamn 5y ago
    Fair enough. The browser is built because we think browsers should do a lot more than just tabs and bookmarks, so it wasn't enough to just add an extension (we have many more features that we wanted a well integrated experience around). With that said, there are very few limitations to the browser at this point and it will be eventually open source so feel free to reach out as well!

gostsamo 5y ago

I'm using a screen reader and FF regularly crashes due to some broken memory management in the accessibility service. If this unloading cleans the memory before it gets critical, I'm all for it.

cpeterso 5y ago
Do you have any crash report IDs in your Firefox's about:crashes page? I can check whether a Bugzilla bug report has already been filed for those crashes.
- gostsamo 5y ago
  I think that the issue is known, but hard to track. It shows with NVDA and heavy web apps like Twitter and Messenger if they are running for some time. I'm posting here some of the crash ids, but it is likely that they are not representative. When the browser starts to clock up, it locks the screen reader as well and I'm not waiting for the crash, but kill the process with extreme prejudice. I'd be glad to help in any other way. bp-cb27fd07-ad27-49bf-b6c2-9dbbb0211005 bp-96eef135-da51-45a8-a792-d28810211005 bp-184a8916-227c-42c4-8308-6e3c00211005 bp-ba6748d3-2d93-4d84-992e-8cf960211005 bp-8bdfb00f-0e30-4cd3-826c-efb910211005 Here is the Bugzilla ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572915 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572915
  - gsvelto 5y ago
    Unfortunately those crashes do not appear to be related to low memory scenarios. They seem to be genuine bugs in the screen reader. I think the right bug tracking them is this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691928 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691928
    - gostsamo 5y ago
      As I said, usually I don't wait for a full crash so there is a survival bias in those ids.

Kliment 5y ago

There's a handful of horrible websites that use enormous amounts of CPU and memory. You don't need too many of those to drag a browser down. I am a thousands-of-tabs user (and yes it's an awesome productivity hack for a number of my workflows, but never mind that) and I don't normally have any problems. Unless I make the mistake of opening some trash website (Slack used to be like that, I've not used Slack in years so I don't know if it still is) and then it bogs down everything.

hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
Slack is still trash. I segregate browsers by using different Linux users for different tasks (slack, Facebook, general, etc) which works well with my similarly bespoke workflow. The problem with this arrangement is that When Firefox has pending system upgrades it requires all browsers be closed and reopened. I’m curious about your productivity hack though, I use a grid keyboard layout with ~20 workspaces grouped to four windows for each task/project and one set to emails/fb/slack
- Kliment 5y ago
  I do electronics. I keep my BOM entries as tabs, with a tab for each major component, its distributor page, and often its manufacturer page where the documentation lives. Different projects have their parts chunked together as bunches of tabs, so I can search my tabs for a part number and get that and everything else in the same project is nearby in the tab list. I currently have >3000 tabs open.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    Interesting, in your use case, would having like ‘multi page bookmarks’ work? How many vendors are there? If there’s a small pool maybe scraping their datasets would work well also
    - Kliment 5y ago
      Possibly, but bookmarks are trash UX and I hate managing them. There are few vendors but they have millions of pages and the relevant data changes daily.

throwaway123x2 5y ago

How is that possible, I get FF crashes literally every time I load a moderately intensive website (eg. Google Keep). I still use FF because I can't abide Chrome. My PC is admittedly a bit older (only 6 gigs RAM) but still.

techwizrd 5y ago
I routinely have hundreds of tabs open in Firefox at any given time without crashes on macOS and Linux. The tabs include everything from documentation, Jupyter notebooks, papers, Jira, Reddit, HN, Github, Gitlab, GMail, Google Keep, Todoist, etc. I can't even recall the last time Firefox crashed for me.
- sundarurfriend 5y ago
  Agreed. I've got 99 problems with Firefox, but a crash ain't one.
- brokenmachine 5y ago
  Many hundreds of tabs here in FF on Windows and pretty rock solid.
loufe 5y ago
I don't know if I've experienced a crash in Firefox in years. I would really suggest taking a look at the crash logs and maybe do a checkup on your machine's health.
jandrese 5y ago
6GB is ample memory if you're not loading tons of tabs. I run Firefox on Raspberry Pi model 1s and while you have to limit yourself to a tab or two and have plenty of patience it does still work. What doesn't work is trying to compile the browser on the Pi. The build process has some really gigantic source files that cause the compiler to choke.
marcosdumay 5y ago
Hum... Firefox breaking on some Google site is surprising, but not extremely so.

sbysb 5y ago

As someone who regularly has >300 tabs I can promise you that it is not because of any productivity gains (if anything the opposite lol)

Macha 5y ago

My peak is in the high 300s of tabs. It works fine, though I imagine if they were 300 instances of youtube or some webgl game or video calls there might have been more issue.

floren 5y ago

Firefox crashes completely at least once a week for me, and tabs crash at least once a day. I had a brand new tab crash the other day, just seconds after I had opened it and visited a text-only site (no JS, no images). I'm running Firefox 92 on up to date Debian on a machine with 64GB of memory; it's not running out of RAM. I still use it because it's better than Chrome, and I wouldn't touch Brave with a 10 foot pole.

trog 5y ago
What add-ons do you have installed? I've never had a problem like this in Firefox, in the 10+ years it has been my primary browser (on Windows though). Have you done a memory test too? Something definitely sounds broken here.
kaba0 5y ago
That doesn’t sound normal. Perhaps your profile is in some sort of inconsistent state after years of usage? Maybe give it a try with a new empty profile as well.
Vindicis 5y ago
I've ran into weird issues like that before. After so many updates, I'm guessing something gets broken somewhere, somehow. Back up your extension settings and bookmarks, and do a fresh install of it. Bit of a nuisance but usually fixes any weird behaviour in my experience.
hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
Recently switched to chrome as a many tab used, it’s less stable than Firefox for me.
- BikeHelmet 5y ago
  You may want to try Opera. I found it more stable than Chrome, at least after spending an hour in the Settings and about:flags disabling all the extra features that I didn't need.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

davidgerard 5y ago

I've seen this on my 4GB RAM netbook. This is basically what Chromebooks do when you've got too many tabs open, and it's much better than the system trying to thrash itself to death, which is what it does now.

gcp 5y ago

People on low memory machines, or people on big boxes that read some article about how swap makes your SSD die and tried to disable Windows swapping (or downloaded some "optimization" tool that does that). The last is explicitly hinted in the article. There's a surprising amount of people in that situation.