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Firefox stability is funny ... I was at Mozilla for 10+ years and used Nightly as my daily driver on my work Mac. I don't think I got more than one or two dozen

by st3fan 4y ago

Firefox stability is funny ... I was at Mozilla for 10+ years and used Nightly as my daily driver on my work Mac. I don't think I got more than one or two dozen crashes in total. A crash was a special occasion and I would walk to someone's desk to show an explore. It barely every happened. On Nightly. So much love for all the stability work that is happening.

mmis1000 4y ago
Even for Firefox nightly, it is probably already much more stable and less buggy than tons of games nowadays. We are now in an age that think software bug is a norm. It's respectable that mozilla still keep the standard as high as the past days.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Comparing to games isn't particularly great since games are ultimately low stakes and companies have learnt that gamers will tolerate pretty much any bug that doesn't literally stop the game from working. See: Bethesda games.
capableweb 4y ago
Personal experiences are funny :) I've been using Firefox on Windows, Linux and Mac for as long as I can remember (first version was maybe Firefox 3 I think? The version that introduced being able to resume downloads I think), and it's the Mac version has always been the most unstable and worst performing one for me, while Linux one being the most stable and performant. I can't even remember the last time the Linux version crashed, while I had the Mac version crash last week. Windows one seems stable, but not as performant as the Linux version.
- julianlam 4y ago
  Says you! My FF on Linux crashes all the bloody time! It says it needs to RESTART in order to apply updates. Hmph! The audacity. But in all seriousness, I can't recall the last time FF crashed on me. My OS hard locks more often than FF crashes.
  - kbrosnan 4y ago
    The restart message is due to the interaction of Linux package updaters and Firefox's process spawning. You can avoid it by using Mozilla's tar.gz, the Snap or Flatpack builds.
    - ric2b 4y ago
      With snap you get a notification to close FF to update instead.
Kuinox 4y ago
I still remember a few years ago, I had a buggy network driver, that on rare occasion, entered in a rapid memorky leak, eating all my ram, most programs crashed, except firefox, GG.
LoganDark 4y ago
macOS has awesome memory compression and overcommit -- it's no wonder Firefox never crashed for you. I can't speak for my own experience because I rarely ever used Firefox on my Mac, but the TL;DR is that even if an application has a pretty egregious memory leak, you will probably never even notice, unless that memory actually gets filled up with data.
rstuart4133 4y ago
In personal use Chrome and Firefox are both pretty stable for me. But I also write and maintain intranet web sites, and the fleet of devices that use them. In that fleet without a doubt Chrome's auto updates have broken more things more regularly than Firefox. Actually, I can't recall Mozilla releasing a version of Firefox stable with a bug that effected us. Chrome has had many buggy releases that has sent us scrambling. I've also never seen the memory issues described here. But then I don't leave a lot of tabs open: it's rare my tabs don't fit in the title bar. I think that pattern is true for most people: almost all our fleet had very few tabs open. So perhaps the fix, while welcome, doesn't effect most people.

by st3fan 4y ago

mmis1000 4y ago

Even for Firefox nightly, it is probably already much more stable and less buggy than tons of games nowadays. We are now in an age that think software bug is a norm. It's respectable that mozilla still keep the standard as high as the past days.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
Comparing to games isn't particularly great since games are ultimately low stakes and companies have learnt that gamers will tolerate pretty much any bug that doesn't literally stop the game from working. See: Bethesda games.

capableweb 4y ago

Personal experiences are funny :) I've been using Firefox on Windows, Linux and Mac for as long as I can remember (first version was maybe Firefox 3 I think? The version that introduced being able to resume downloads I think), and it's the Mac version has always been the most unstable and worst performing one for me, while Linux one being the most stable and performant. I can't even remember the last time the Linux version crashed, while I had the Mac version crash last week. Windows one seems stable, but not as performant as the Linux version.

julianlam 4y ago
Says you! My FF on Linux crashes all the bloody time! It says it needs to RESTART in order to apply updates. Hmph! The audacity. But in all seriousness, I can't recall the last time FF crashed on me. My OS hard locks more often than FF crashes.
- kbrosnan 4y ago
  The restart message is due to the interaction of Linux package updaters and Firefox's process spawning. You can avoid it by using Mozilla's tar.gz, the Snap or Flatpack builds.
  - ric2b 4y ago
    With snap you get a notification to close FF to update instead.

Kuinox 4y ago

I still remember a few years ago, I had a buggy network driver, that on rare occasion, entered in a rapid memorky leak, eating all my ram, most programs crashed, except firefox, GG.

LoganDark 4y ago

macOS has awesome memory compression and overcommit -- it's no wonder Firefox never crashed for you. I can't speak for my own experience because I rarely ever used Firefox on my Mac, but the TL;DR is that even if an application has a pretty egregious memory leak, you will probably never even notice, unless that memory actually gets filled up with data.

rstuart4133 4y ago

In personal use Chrome and Firefox are both pretty stable for me. But I also write and maintain intranet web sites, and the fleet of devices that use them. In that fleet without a doubt Chrome's auto updates have broken more things more regularly than Firefox. Actually, I can't recall Mozilla releasing a version of Firefox stable with a bug that effected us. Chrome has had many buggy releases that has sent us scrambling. I've also never seen the memory issues described here. But then I don't leave a lot of tabs open: it's rare my tabs don't fit in the title bar. I think that pattern is true for most people: almost all our fleet had very few tabs open. So perhaps the fix, while welcome, doesn't effect most people.