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I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed and I've used it daily on Windows since ... the beginning. Are most issues related to stability more common to L

I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed and I've used it daily on Windows since ... the beginning. Are most issues related to stability more common to Linux/MacOS?

skrowl 4y ago
I'm in the same boat. Who are these people who are running out of memory? What on earth are you doing and how old is your machine?
- julienreszka 4y ago
  they probably have thousands of tabs open
  - wkdneidbwf 4y ago
    and extensions to hell and back
- pdntspa 4y ago
  Firefox has been solid for me since the dawn of time, and I have or currently run it on Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD. For a while it used to be kind of slow on Mac and Linux, but I think that was slow graphics calls, which points to a possible issue with the graphics driver I was using. But the last time I checked (many months ago), it was much better.
  - com2kid 4y ago
    I've seen plenty of webgl content that will hard crash FF 100% of the time. Perhaps not FFs fault, could be an underlying driver issue, but ideally web content is sandboxed enough that it can't bring down everything. I once saw a unity web game with a bug that crashed all major browsers across multiple OSes. Go go web tech!
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      Even the crashes are cross-platform!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Unlike Opera 12 that could handle up to a thousand of tabs, Firefox (until 105 ??) already starts slowing down around 100. I was pretty much forced to install the Auto Tab Discard extension, which I'm guessing was built-in in Opera 12 ??
  - zargon 4y ago
    I use Firefox with 1200+ tabs for the last, I don't know, 60 or 80 versions.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      The tabs have all been visited since you last restarted firefox?
      - zargon 4y ago
        It of course depends. I typically open dozens to several hundred new tabs per session.
- Etherlord87 4y ago
  You don't need a lot to eventually get a crash on Firefox. All you really need is to hibernate/sleep instead of restarting, and so never restart your Firefox, and have some Twitch stream opened - the memory leaks will eventually use up all your memory, in my experience at least.
- com2kid 4y ago
  For the longest time, maybe it still happens, leaving an Ars Technica story open in a Firefox tab would gradually leak memory until RAM was exhausted. So, you know, anyone who opens a story on Ars Technica to read later and then forgets about the tab. I've seen YT do similar things in the past as well.
- gsvelto 4y ago
  Here's the thing: they're not! The reason those users where crashing was because something, somewhere (possibly in the graphics stack) was reserving ton of space without using it. We had crashes on file with 20+ GiB of free physical memory which was the reason why I started looking into why a machine with so much free memory could suffer a crash. I hope I described how this whole things work because Windows memory management is not well known and some things about it are counter-intuitive; especially if you're coming from Linux.
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    I can confirm this is the case. Firefox reserves tens of gigabytes and then only actually uses a few. But since those tens of unused gigabytes are still committed, nothing else on the system can use it, and Firefox (+ tons of other apps) will OOM when the total committed memory (of all applications) reaches the total amount of RAM installed. I have 17 crashes on file (in about:crashes) that are OOMs caused by Firefox committing too much memory and not using it. My solution is to restart the browser when committed memory reaches 38GB or so, but that clears all private windows which annoys me. I shouldn't have to restart the browser so often.
    - gsvelto 4y ago
      Could you open a bug on our tracker, and point to those crash reports? I'm very interested in analyzing real-world scenarios where this happens to figure out where those committed areas are coming from. Our best guess is that they come from the graphics stack because we account all the memory we commit in Firefox and there's nothing missing, so wherever this is coming from it's outside of our direct control.
      - LoganDark 4y ago
        I actually did open up about:memory a few hours ago and now, and it looks like some growth is coming from "heap-unclassified" in the main process. As for opening a bug on your tracker, meh but I can give you a list of report IDs: bp-e6392a4b-44e8-4013-a80e-1027b0221109 bp-dae0a056-3c6a-43ea-ad3f-5fe1a0221006 bp-0be1e0f7-0eca-4744-a05c-ce2030220927 bp-65c63eea-fb45-419d-a58a-82ef20220915 bp-061b6131-5ae3-4de1-a7ba-0c4950220830 bp-32f879a0-f76f-4a5b-bef9-f013f0220820
- Karunamon 4y ago
  I recall a particularly strange Firefox bug on Windows where the browser would die with an out of memory error even though there were upwards of 16 GB free to use. As it turns out something was consuming large amounts of swap on the system, and this was where the out of memory condition was happening.
- anonymousab 4y ago
  For me, Firefox slows down dramatically as it uses more memory (e.g. more tabs and windows opened), and reaches a less-than-usable state well before it has exhausted the available memory. Tab discarding - automatic or by literally closing the tabs - does seem to recover the memory used, but does not recover much of the performance (if any). My AMD 5800 and tens of gigs of memory runs into the same crushing performance blockers as my old 8GB FX-8300 machine, with virtually the same "workload" and usage profile. Kinda the opposite of what I'd want; I usually have over 16GB more that Firefox could use if it needed, and that's once it has reached critical mass with maybe hundreds of tabs. Its memory measurements usually look sane, so I feel like there's some data structure or algorithm that is doing something insane in the background - which is already confirmed to be the case with the History menu, particularly if you select and delete thousands of items at a time.
advisedwang 4y ago
This article is about a Windows stability improvement specifically.
behnamoh 4y ago
I had to switch from FF to Brave on macOS because FF constantly kept over utilizing the CPU, leading to bad battery life and warmer MBP. This happened on Intel and M1 chips.
- com2kid 4y ago
  Over the last year FF has gotten a lot better about not keeping my MacBook awake because of content on some random background tab that the browser thinks is multimedia content. Circa 2021 if I wanted my MacBook to go to sleep I had 5o shut down FF first. FWIW wasn't any better on windows.
throw7 4y ago
My current instability isn't crashes but with firefox is that it will just randomly "lock up". It will still respond to a click, but will take 10's to 20's seconds to respond. I have to kill and restart firefox to get it working again, but on startup it will usually take on the order of a minute or two to start actually working. Also, more sites just don't care about having their stuff work in firefox. I use chromium for roll20, because there is just a lot of things that are just broken on firefox.
- Shared404 4y ago
  > I use chromium for roll20, because there is just a lot of things that are just broken on firefox. Same here. I will pay for an alternative to Roll20 that works on FF. Bonus points for open source with a hosted version.
  - teach 4y ago
    https://foundryvtt.com/ https://foundryvtt.com/ might fit the bill. Disclaimer: I've basically never used roll20 because it's way too heavyweight for my games; I use Owlbear Rodeo instead. But I have tech-savvy DM friends who use and like Foundry
    - Shared404 4y ago
      Both of those look quite interesting for my usecases (In person/occasional hybrid games with a vtt/online only - depends on my groups current location and schedule) Thanks for the pointers!
    - tga_d 4y ago
      I use Foundry VTT regularly (and develop a plugin for it). While I've never had functionality problems with Firefox, in practice, it's the main thing I keep a Chromium install around for, since on heavy scenes even Chromium barely holds up the frame rate on my laptop, and Firefox is notably worse. This is running on integrated graphics though, it's possible Firefox is fine with a more gaming-friendly setup.
- 4y ago
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I use it on a mac. The only time I restart the browser are to install a browser update (I'm no the Beta channel) or when my laptop restarts. Crashes are very rare for me.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
I never had it crash on Linux. The only issue is some sites redirect you to a page saying “you must use chrome to proceed,” which is ridiculously lazy of them
rightbyte 4y ago
In my experience the crashing happens on bloated JS heavy sites. If you don't visit those I guess it never crashes. Happens to me like 2 times a year.

I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed and I've used it daily on Windows since ... the beginning. Are most issues related to stability more common to Linux/MacOS?

skrowl 4y ago

I'm in the same boat. Who are these people who are running out of memory? What on earth are you doing and how old is your machine?

julienreszka 4y ago
they probably have thousands of tabs open
- wkdneidbwf 4y ago
  and extensions to hell and back
pdntspa 4y ago
Firefox has been solid for me since the dawn of time, and I have or currently run it on Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD. For a while it used to be kind of slow on Mac and Linux, but I think that was slow graphics calls, which points to a possible issue with the graphics driver I was using. But the last time I checked (many months ago), it was much better.
- com2kid 4y ago
  I've seen plenty of webgl content that will hard crash FF 100% of the time. Perhaps not FFs fault, could be an underlying driver issue, but ideally web content is sandboxed enough that it can't bring down everything. I once saw a unity web game with a bug that crashed all major browsers across multiple OSes. Go go web tech!
  - LoganDark 4y ago
    Even the crashes are cross-platform!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Unlike Opera 12 that could handle up to a thousand of tabs, Firefox (until 105 ??) already starts slowing down around 100. I was pretty much forced to install the Auto Tab Discard extension, which I'm guessing was built-in in Opera 12 ??
- zargon 4y ago
  I use Firefox with 1200+ tabs for the last, I don't know, 60 or 80 versions.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    The tabs have all been visited since you last restarted firefox?
    - zargon 4y ago
      It of course depends. I typically open dozens to several hundred new tabs per session.
Etherlord87 4y ago
You don't need a lot to eventually get a crash on Firefox. All you really need is to hibernate/sleep instead of restarting, and so never restart your Firefox, and have some Twitch stream opened - the memory leaks will eventually use up all your memory, in my experience at least.
com2kid 4y ago
For the longest time, maybe it still happens, leaving an Ars Technica story open in a Firefox tab would gradually leak memory until RAM was exhausted. So, you know, anyone who opens a story on Ars Technica to read later and then forgets about the tab. I've seen YT do similar things in the past as well.
gsvelto 4y ago
Here's the thing: they're not! The reason those users where crashing was because something, somewhere (possibly in the graphics stack) was reserving ton of space without using it. We had crashes on file with 20+ GiB of free physical memory which was the reason why I started looking into why a machine with so much free memory could suffer a crash. I hope I described how this whole things work because Windows memory management is not well known and some things about it are counter-intuitive; especially if you're coming from Linux.
- LoganDark 4y ago
  I can confirm this is the case. Firefox reserves tens of gigabytes and then only actually uses a few. But since those tens of unused gigabytes are still committed, nothing else on the system can use it, and Firefox (+ tons of other apps) will OOM when the total committed memory (of all applications) reaches the total amount of RAM installed. I have 17 crashes on file (in about:crashes) that are OOMs caused by Firefox committing too much memory and not using it. My solution is to restart the browser when committed memory reaches 38GB or so, but that clears all private windows which annoys me. I shouldn't have to restart the browser so often.
  - gsvelto 4y ago
    Could you open a bug on our tracker, and point to those crash reports? I'm very interested in analyzing real-world scenarios where this happens to figure out where those committed areas are coming from. Our best guess is that they come from the graphics stack because we account all the memory we commit in Firefox and there's nothing missing, so wherever this is coming from it's outside of our direct control.
    - LoganDark 4y ago
      I actually did open up about:memory a few hours ago and now, and it looks like some growth is coming from "heap-unclassified" in the main process. As for opening a bug on your tracker, meh but I can give you a list of report IDs: bp-e6392a4b-44e8-4013-a80e-1027b0221109 bp-dae0a056-3c6a-43ea-ad3f-5fe1a0221006 bp-0be1e0f7-0eca-4744-a05c-ce2030220927 bp-65c63eea-fb45-419d-a58a-82ef20220915 bp-061b6131-5ae3-4de1-a7ba-0c4950220830 bp-32f879a0-f76f-4a5b-bef9-f013f0220820
Karunamon 4y ago
I recall a particularly strange Firefox bug on Windows where the browser would die with an out of memory error even though there were upwards of 16 GB free to use. As it turns out something was consuming large amounts of swap on the system, and this was where the out of memory condition was happening.
anonymousab 4y ago
For me, Firefox slows down dramatically as it uses more memory (e.g. more tabs and windows opened), and reaches a less-than-usable state well before it has exhausted the available memory. Tab discarding - automatic or by literally closing the tabs - does seem to recover the memory used, but does not recover much of the performance (if any). My AMD 5800 and tens of gigs of memory runs into the same crushing performance blockers as my old 8GB FX-8300 machine, with virtually the same "workload" and usage profile. Kinda the opposite of what I'd want; I usually have over 16GB more that Firefox could use if it needed, and that's once it has reached critical mass with maybe hundreds of tabs. Its memory measurements usually look sane, so I feel like there's some data structure or algorithm that is doing something insane in the background - which is already confirmed to be the case with the History menu, particularly if you select and delete thousands of items at a time.

advisedwang 4y ago

This article is about a Windows stability improvement specifically.

behnamoh 4y ago

I had to switch from FF to Brave on macOS because FF constantly kept over utilizing the CPU, leading to bad battery life and warmer MBP. This happened on Intel and M1 chips.

com2kid 4y ago
Over the last year FF has gotten a lot better about not keeping my MacBook awake because of content on some random background tab that the browser thinks is multimedia content. Circa 2021 if I wanted my MacBook to go to sleep I had 5o shut down FF first. FWIW wasn't any better on windows.

throw7 4y ago

My current instability isn't crashes but with firefox is that it will just randomly "lock up". It will still respond to a click, but will take 10's to 20's seconds to respond. I have to kill and restart firefox to get it working again, but on startup it will usually take on the order of a minute or two to start actually working. Also, more sites just don't care about having their stuff work in firefox. I use chromium for roll20, because there is just a lot of things that are just broken on firefox.

Shared404 4y ago
> I use chromium for roll20, because there is just a lot of things that are just broken on firefox. Same here. I will pay for an alternative to Roll20 that works on FF. Bonus points for open source with a hosted version.
- teach 4y ago
  https://foundryvtt.com/ https://foundryvtt.com/ might fit the bill. Disclaimer: I've basically never used roll20 because it's way too heavyweight for my games; I use Owlbear Rodeo instead. But I have tech-savvy DM friends who use and like Foundry
  - Shared404 4y ago
    Both of those look quite interesting for my usecases (In person/occasional hybrid games with a vtt/online only - depends on my groups current location and schedule) Thanks for the pointers!
  - tga_d 4y ago
    I use Foundry VTT regularly (and develop a plugin for it). While I've never had functionality problems with Firefox, in practice, it's the main thing I keep a Chromium install around for, since on heavy scenes even Chromium barely holds up the frame rate on my laptop, and Firefox is notably worse. This is running on integrated graphics though, it's possible Firefox is fine with a more gaming-friendly setup.
4y ago

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I use it on a mac. The only time I restart the browser are to install a browser update (I'm no the Beta channel) or when my laptop restarts. Crashes are very rare for me.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

I never had it crash on Linux. The only issue is some sites redirect you to a page saying “you must use chrome to proceed,” which is ridiculously lazy of them

rightbyte 4y ago

In my experience the crashing happens on bloated JS heavy sites. If you don't visit those I guess it never crashes. Happens to me like 2 times a year.