7 ms·

I'd like to see better stability. My biggest issue with Firefox on Windows right now is that it hangs if I leave it open for several days. Mozilla does have a s

• TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  I haven’t had it hang yet but it does slow down and become laggy after a week or so for me. You can use “Open previous Windows and tabs” to keep your tabs between restarts. It only works on the last window you have closed though.
  • simcop2387 3y ago
    It will work on all open windows if you close them at the same time. File->Quit, ctrl+q or cmd+q are all ways to do that.
  • magicalhippo 3y ago
    Same for me. I discovered it was Slack that had some live leak, one time it had eaten 33GB of RAM. An auto-reload extesion did the trick to prevent it from going too far, but I'd really wish Firefox would handle it more gracefully. Unless I say so, a normal web page shouldn't eat gigs of RAM or tons of CPU.
    • galangalalgol 3y ago
      So wouldn't chrome have the same issue?
      • plorkyeran 3y ago
        I do have similar problems with chrome and have to restart it every few days.
        • kefabean 3y ago
          And Safari on MacOS. It occasionally gets into a state where it becomes unresponsive to clicking on links.
    • Zardoz84 3y ago
      I noticed a similar problem with Twitch client.
    • dwattttt 3y ago
      Given how well web pages are coded, I'm curious whether a Firefox that's browsed to 50 static pages fares. At some point the pages themselves should get some blame (and yes, they can be offloaded, but we're back to balancing responsiveness & long term resource usage, and people are complaining about the pages being reloaded after exit as a delay)
      • cpeterso 3y ago
        Chrome recently added a setting so you can display a tab’s memory usage when you mouse over the tab. In Firefox, you can check the memory usage of each tab in Firefox’s Task Manager (about:processes). https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/task-manager-tabs-or-extensions-are-slowing-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/task-manager-tabs-or-ex...
        • magicalhippo 3y ago
          Or use the much more detailed about:memory, that's how I discovered the live leak.
  • inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Yeah it does the same for me (macos) after a few days. Open previous windows and tabs should restore all windows though (at least it does for me).
  • the8472 3y ago
    > It only works on the last window you have closed though. Alt+F, Q exits all windows at once and also restores them the next time you launch firefox.
    • mixmastamyk 3y ago
      Ctrl+Q or Cmd+Q for Mac.
    • tempestn 3y ago
      Or Exit under the hamburger menu, if you don't want to remember the keyboard shortcut.
• tux3 3y ago
  Do you have any weird plugins or addons by any chance (maybe even antimalware or other malware that you might not have installed explicitly)? It's strange that it wouldn't report this as a crash. They're normally pretty good at telemetry (sometimes to a fault..)
  • jetrink 3y ago
    I only have Bitwarden, uBlock Origin, RES and Vue Devtools installed right now.
• blueagle7 3y ago
  Have you tried using a session manager extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...
  • jetrink 3y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion, that looks like a good workaround.
    • mixmastamyk 3y ago
      Don’t need it, check “open previous windows and tabs" aka save-session on the first page of prefs.
• MrJohz 3y ago
  You can get Firefox to open all the tabs you last had open when it starts up, this way you can close and open Firefox whenever you want, and you'll always be right back where you started. This doesn't save the page state, so if you were filling in a form, you'll lose that information, but it does mean that wherever you reopen Firefox, you end up pretty much exactly where you were when you closed it. I guess you'd still need to regularly close and reopen the browser as a whole (I do that at end of the day anyway when I turn my machine off), but it may be more convenient than losing state.
  • SilasX 3y ago
    "Where you were", except for waiting for every page to reload.
    • abhinavk 3y ago
      It only loads the page when you switch to it.
      • josefx 3y ago
        You know that this makes it only worse unless you go through all tabs manually after starting to make sure they are actually loaded when you need them? Having to wait half a minute on every tab switch to wait for that gigantic mess of enterprise grade websites served from an ancient box on the other side of the solar system to load is not conductive towards concentrated work.
    • unloco 3y ago
      are you on dial-up?
      • eek2121 3y ago
        I have a 10gb connection and I still see that. Browsers, despite being excellently threaded, are also poorly threaded. Who knew?
      • 3y ago
• SkyMarshal 3y ago
  Session manager plugins solve this in my experience. It's a little annoying that FF doesn't already have this and you have to use a plugin for it, but only a little.
  • mixmastamyk 3y ago
    It does have it.
  • davidgerard 3y ago
    Go to Settings. The very first thing I see is: General Startup [X] Open previous windows and tabs
    • addandsubtract 3y ago
      Also, you can go to History > Restore last open tabs
    • SkyMarshal 3y ago
      Yes but OP is saying that built-in ability doesn't work for him for whatever reason. In my case I like to be able startup the browser without opening all the prior tabs, but then be able to selectively reopen the prior tabs by window or by individual tab. That's what session managers do.
    • squeaky-clean 3y ago
      From their comment: > They also suggest using their session restore feature after a hang, but with this type of crash, Firefox is never able to restore your tabs. It also doesn't record the crash report in about:crashes Also the setting you suggested doesn't work if you have multiple windows that close. It only saves one window session.
      • davidgerard 3y ago
        > Also the setting you suggested doesn't work if you have multiple windows that close. It only saves one window session. ?? It does? I have like 20 windows on the go with multiple tabs each and it brings them all back. There's people in this thread repeating claims that are literally not true.
• andrepd 3y ago
  For what's worth, I have my Firefox open since June.
  • addandsubtract 3y ago
    Don't you need to restart Firefox for it to update? Did you not update since June?
    • andrepd 3y ago
      Yeah, pretty much
• JadeNB 3y ago
  > So I can choose between closing all of my open tabs at the end of each workday or randomly losing them during the workday. Since having my tabs open when I start work helps me jump back in, I've settled on randomly losing my tabs. I know it's just paper over the real problem, but couldn't you restart at the end of the day rather than at the beginning?
• cptskippy 3y ago
  How many tabs do you have open? I use a Windows VM hosted on my server and Firefox sits open on it for weeks at a time with 20+ tabs open. It only ever lasts 3-4 weeks because Windows has to reboot for patches at least once a month.
• whynotmaybe 3y ago
  Leaving it open for several days? I feel like I'm from another planet when I've been raised with the concept of "a reboot a day keeps the blue screen away".
  • SanjayMehta 3y ago
    I now routinely reboot my Mac once in a while after I discovered a “helper” daemon from Zoom desperately pinging its mothership one year after uninstallation.
    • lamontcg 3y ago
      You should be doing that for security updates.
  • 2143 3y ago
    I shut down my work machine at the end of the day if it has written to the swap space; else I just close the lid. I always shut it down on Friday evenings though.
• josephcsible 3y ago
  This might be a Windows issue rather than a Firefox issue. I have a lot of tabs open in Firefox on Linux, for days to weeks on end, with no issues. The only time I restart it is to upgrade to a new version of Firefox or after installing a system update that requires a reboot to fully take effect.
  • Animats 3y ago
    It hangs on Linux, too. It's seriously annoying. Plus, there's a delay of up to 2 minutes at launch, when Firefox reads something from disk for minutes, with minimal compute. Bug reports on this result in denial.
    • capitainenemo 3y ago
      It could be you are using different apps from them so they never noticed. I've noticed some web "apps" have leaks that over time can bloat out memory usage leading to swap thrashes. gmail.com for example. It was quite visible in top or about:memory or about:processes
      • Animats 3y ago
        It's not computing or swapping. Plenty of memory and CPU time available. It's just Firefox doing its own disk I/O. I cleared history, and that didn't help.
        • capitainenemo 3y ago
          Ah.. No idea then. Windows debugging not my thing. I do know from a discussion w/ a Windows user that loading the same app (Microsoft Teams) took over a minute to load on his windows machine on an HD (and locked up most of the machine while doing so) - I did exact same comparison on my Linux machine and MS Teams loaded with all caches flushed in < 10 seconds, almost instantly with caching. I've encountered similar with Hedgewars and Minecraft. So maybe there's a real issue but us linux users simply aren't noticing it.. Another thought. Perhaps it is the sqlite db? Maybe a large one that somehow isn't getting vacuumed on shutdown? Maybe try testing in a clean profile...
• RamRodification 3y ago
  I'd be surprised if this is not caused by an extension. Have you tried disabling all of them, or one at a time until you've ruled them all out?
• IAmGraydon 3y ago
  I can't remember ever having a Firefox crash in the last few years. Running it on one machine with Win 10 and another with Win 11. Only extension is uBlock Origin. I often will leave it open for many days.
• lostmsu 3y ago
  Good chances are Firefox is not at fault here as many people run it without issues for months in a row. Maybe you should check it for suspicious DLLs using Process Exporer or outright attach a debugger and see what the UI thread is blocked on when it stops responding.
• redder23 3y ago
  Why would you need to have your PC you browse the web on for days? Why would you be bothered with restarting a browsers at least once every 24 hours. I also call this dubious at best, I NEVER had any stability issues with FX and I pretty much used it since day 1. You probably one of those people who confuse tabs with bookmarks and think you should have 500 tabs open with only 4 gigs ram and having not shutting your PC or Browser down for weeks. It that causes issues I think Mozilla should have that on low priority. I use Brave on Linux mainly because I cant justify testing my webdev stuff not con Chromium and I tend to use the same Browser for everything, its also faster. Mozilla like so brag about speed but I think the lost objectively measured to Blink a looooong time ago. Servo was given to the Linux Foundation and is far from ready. When its ready it will probably be pretty fast.
• cobalt60 3y ago
  I rarely reboot my workstation; it's often in hibernation for days or even weeks until a security update is waiting for a cycle. Despite this, my Firefox on both Windows/macOS consistently maintains my tabs, each running smoothly in their own containers without any issues.
• ksec 3y ago
  As someone who used to have hundreds if not thousands of Tabs, Firefox is the only browser that is stable enough and has the best Tab Session restore. So my guess is that something went wrong if you have to constantly restart Firefox. Firefox has a sessionrestore.js and also a sessionrestore.bak. ( And also sesstionrestore.bak2 if I remember correctly )[1] It is the only browser that took session restore seriously because around ~16 years ago an idiot constantly went on Mozillazine and Bugzilla to file crash report of lost sessions that could have thousands of tabs. If your sesstionrestore crashed or get wiped, i.e you restart your browser and those tabs were not there, you could also copy and past the .bak files and rename it as .js. It wont be everything you had since the bak file may have been a few hours old. But at least you got something back. As to crashing. In the old days it was some tabs in the background doing JS with memory leakage. But if I remember correctly Firefox now pause Tabs that is unused for long period of time. If it isn't background Tabs that is causing problem. I would suggest similar to what I wrote to Animats, make a new Firefox profile and migrate all your History, Cookies etc to the new profile and see if it improve things. This used to be a manual process but I believe recent Firefox has made this easier with Firefox Retune or Refresh ( Sorry all of this are on top of my head you will have to do some Google search for the actual name) If I were to rate Browser stability, it would be Firefox > Chrome > Safari. On both MacOS and Windows. The same ranking for session restore function where I have lost multiple sessions on Safari over the years. And in case anyone wondering why Safari is not stable and that may not be their experience, it is that something on MacOS ( the OS itself ) sometimes triggers Safari to reload all the Tabs even if they were originally sitting idle. This create huge I/O spike and generally leads to crashing or halt for a long period of time. Other than that it is pretty much on par with others. [1] Those file and extensions names were something on top of my head so you have to google it to double check
• jakubmazanec 3y ago
  I must add a data point to the contrary: I'm a longtime Firefox user, and ever since they switched to the new Quantum core [1], issues like hanging or crashing (especially with a lot of tabs open) have practically disappeared. Over the last few years, I've consistently had hundreds of tabs open (with up to 100 active) with no problems whatsoever (three different laptops, all running Windows). [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-firefox-quantum/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-firefox-quan...