6 ms·

> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! Bold claim. From my gut feeling this

> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect; I don't seem to get the same amount of crashes using chromium-based browsers such as thorium.

phyzome 7mo ago
...normally browsers don't crash at all. Something's wrong with your computer.
LM358 7mo ago
10% of crashes does not imply 10% of your crashes.
- michaelcampbell 7mo ago
  Doesn't mean 10% of any crashes either; the OP narrowed it down to roughly 1 in 20, then pulled a factor of 2 out of, well, thin air to get 10%.
WhatsTheBigIdea 7mo ago
Your gut may be leading you astray? I also find that firefox crashes much more than chrome based browsers, but it is likely that chrome's superior stability is better handing of the other 90% of crashes. If 50% of chrome crashes were due to bit flips, and bit flips effect the two browsers at basically the same rate, that would indicate that chrome experiences 1/5th the total crashes of firefox... even though the bit flip crashes happen at the same rate on both browsers. It would have been better news for firefox if the number of crashes due to faulty hardware were actually much higher! These numbers indicate the vast majority of firefox crashes are actually from buggy software : (
- chrismorgan 7mo ago
  I run Firefox Nightly, and occasionally a little Chromium stable. Both are running under Wayland, which I believe is still not considered stable in either. In the last year of Firefox, I had one full crash (the first in maybe three years), and about four tab crashes. Plus duplicates from deliberately reproducing issues. All but one (which I’m not certain about) were Nightly-only, fixed long before reaching stable. Were I running stable, I suspect I would not have had more than three crashes of any kind in the past five years. I can’t say the same for Chromium. Despite barely using it, I had at least one tab or iframe crash last year, and there’s a moderate chance (I’ll suggest 15%) on any given day of leaving it open that it will just spontaneously die while I’m not paying attention to it (my wild guess, based on observations about Inkscape if it’s executing something CPU-bound for too long: it’s not responding in a timely fashion to the compositor, and is either getting killed or killing itself, not sure which that would be). Frankly, from a crashing perspective, both are very reliable these days. Chromium is still far more prone to misrendering and other misbehaviour—they prefer to ship half-baked implementations and fix them later; Firefox, on the other hand, moves slower but has fewer issues in what they do ship.
estimator7292 7mo ago
He addresses this in the thread.
cellular 7mo ago
Maybe if Firefox tabs weren't such a memory hog it would be only 0.005% !
bsder 7mo ago
> Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect RAM flips are common. This kind of thing is old and has likely gotten worse. IBM had data on this. DEC had data on this. Amazon/Google/Microsoft almost certainly had data on this. Anybody who runs a fleet of computers gets data on this, and it is always eye opening how common it is. ZFS is really good at spotting RAM flips.
BeetleB 7mo ago
Are people getting so many FF crashes? Mine rarely does. I leave it running, opening and closing tabs, for weeks on end.
- intrasight 7mo ago
  Months in my case. But I have ECC. Every five years I build a new development workstation and I always have ECC.
  - Izkata 7mo ago
    I can also go months and don't see crashes (though occasionally I'll hit a memory leak where closing tabs doesn't release it so I'll restart firefox then), but unless ThinkPads come with ECC I don't have it.
- fooker 7mo ago
  Yes
- tbossanova 7mo ago
  Same, been using it for over 20 years and probably only a handful of crashes in that time. But I mostly look at dead simple web stuff (like hn) and run aggressive ad blocking so I might not be representative of the average user
- zuminator 7mo ago
  Naively, the more stable a piece of software is, the more likely that its failures can be attributed to hardware error.
- AngryData 7mo ago
  Its pretty stable for me, except it has some memory leaks. Generally I gotta leave heavy pages open for days at a time to notice, but if I don't close it entirely for over a week or two it will start to chug and crash.
- Macha 7mo ago
  The only browser I’ve crashed in the last decade is mobile safari, and that’s probably because it runs out of memory
maxerickson 7mo ago
I mean, I've had quite some number of crashes that I can't correlate to anything. Hardware problems are just as good a potential explanation for those as anything else.
nimih 7mo ago
> Bold claim. I agree. Good thing he doesn't back up his claim with any sort of evidence or reasoned argument, or you'd look like a huge moron!
- crazygringo 7mo ago
  To be fair, he doesn't really: > And because it's a conservative heuristic we're underestimating the real number, it's probably going to be at least twice as much. The actual measurement is 5%. The 10% figure is entirely made up, with zero evidence or reasoned argument except a hand-wavy "conservative". Edit: actually, the claim is even less supported: > out of these ~25000 crashes have been detected as having a potential bit-flip. That's one crash every twenty potentially caused by bad/flaky memory "Potential" is a weasel word here. We don't see any of the actual methodology. For all we know, the real value could be 0.1% or 0.01%.
  - j16sdiz 7mo ago
    It depends on how the data are distributed. I wouldn't be too surprised if that 5% all come from a few particular bad machine.
bichiliad 7mo ago
I think they claim that if your computer has bad hardware, you're probably sending a lot of _additional_ crashes to their telemetry system. Your hardware might be working just fine, but the guy next to you might be sending 30% more crashes.
pizza234 7mo ago
>> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! > Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect; I don't seem to get the same amount of crashes using chromium-based browsers such as thorium. That's a misinterpretation. The finding refers to the composition of crashes, not the overall crash rate (which is not reported by the post). Brought to the extreme, there may have been 10 (reported) crashes in history of Firefox, and 1 due to faulty hardware, and the statement would still be correct.
saati 7mo ago
I haven't seen a single firefox or chrome crash in months now, you should really stress-test your hardware.
- galangalalgol 7mo ago
  I can't recall a single Firefox crash in at least a decade. What are people doing? I run ublock origin, nothing else. I do sometimes have Firefox mobile misbehave where it stops loading new pages and I jave to restart it, but open pages work normally as do all other operations, so not a crash exactly. Happens maybe once a month Edit: more context, I power cycle at least once a week on desktop and the version is typically a bit behind new. I also don't have more tabs open than will fit in the row. All these habits seem likely to decrease crashes.
  - ordu 7mo ago
    Yeah. Lately even if I OOM my system, firefox doesn't crash so easily, individual tabs do.
    - silon42 7mo ago
      For me, OOM effectively crashes my system 90% of the time, usually caused by firefox (chromium too), if a website goes out of control (rarely it's caused by too many pages open, as tab discarding takes care of that).
  - BenjiWiebe 7mo ago
    We have 5 computers running Firefox. One computer has regular Firefox crashes. I've done some memory testing that didn't detect anything wrong. I've tried all kinds of things software-wise but keep getting random crashes. I wonder if I should do a longer memory test, maybe some CPU stress testing at the same time...
    - sfink 7mo ago
      If you want to dig into it, you can post a bunch of that computer's crash reports (navigate to about:crashes) on bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=General https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c... Or you can view several of them and see if there's a common pattern in the "Signature" field. Firefox really should only be regularly crashing if: (1) there's a real bug and the thing that triggers it, (2) you're running out of memory, or (3) you have hardware. I don't know what the odds of faulty hardware are for a randomly chosen user, but they're much higher for a randomly chosen user who is seeing regular crashes.
shakna 7mo ago
Chromium has better handling for bitflip errors. Mostly due to the Discardable buffers they make such extensive use of. The hardware bugs are there. They're just handled.
- saagarjha 7mo ago
  By what?
  - shakna 7mo ago
    With Discardables. When Blink's allocator detects a fault in a memory section it swaps it out for a new one, and taints the old so it is only reused when no more remains. Live objects get swapped between Discardable buffers quite frequently. They're not expected to stay at the same position in memory.
Zambyte 7mo ago
What do you mean "the same amount"? If your browser never crashes, 10% of zero is zero.
hedora 7mo ago
I've had zero crashes in safari, ff or chrome in recent memory (except maybe OOMs). (Though I don't use Windows, so maybe that's part of the reason stuff just works?) Perhaps you're part of the group driving hardware crashes up to 10% and need to fix your machine.
- sgt 7mo ago
  I think most of it is just bad hardware, not specifically the RAM. Been using non-ECC desktop and laptop hardware for decades and I can't remember the machine crashing for .. I don't know, but a LONG time.
KennyBlanken 7mo ago
"Software engineer thinks everyone's hardware is broken, couldn't possibly be bugs in his code" sums it up about right.
sfink 7mo ago
There's a very good chance your system also does not have flaky memory. Most don't. You're not contradicting the post.

phyzome 7mo ago

...normally browsers don't crash at all. Something's wrong with your computer.

LM358 7mo ago

10% of crashes does not imply 10% of your crashes.

michaelcampbell 7mo ago
Doesn't mean 10% of any crashes either; the OP narrowed it down to roughly 1 in 20, then pulled a factor of 2 out of, well, thin air to get 10%.

WhatsTheBigIdea 7mo ago

Your gut may be leading you astray? I also find that firefox crashes much more than chrome based browsers, but it is likely that chrome's superior stability is better handing of the other 90% of crashes. If 50% of chrome crashes were due to bit flips, and bit flips effect the two browsers at basically the same rate, that would indicate that chrome experiences 1/5th the total crashes of firefox... even though the bit flip crashes happen at the same rate on both browsers. It would have been better news for firefox if the number of crashes due to faulty hardware were actually much higher! These numbers indicate the vast majority of firefox crashes are actually from buggy software : (

chrismorgan 7mo ago
I run Firefox Nightly, and occasionally a little Chromium stable. Both are running under Wayland, which I believe is still not considered stable in either. In the last year of Firefox, I had one full crash (the first in maybe three years), and about four tab crashes. Plus duplicates from deliberately reproducing issues. All but one (which I’m not certain about) were Nightly-only, fixed long before reaching stable. Were I running stable, I suspect I would not have had more than three crashes of any kind in the past five years. I can’t say the same for Chromium. Despite barely using it, I had at least one tab or iframe crash last year, and there’s a moderate chance (I’ll suggest 15%) on any given day of leaving it open that it will just spontaneously die while I’m not paying attention to it (my wild guess, based on observations about Inkscape if it’s executing something CPU-bound for too long: it’s not responding in a timely fashion to the compositor, and is either getting killed or killing itself, not sure which that would be). Frankly, from a crashing perspective, both are very reliable these days. Chromium is still far more prone to misrendering and other misbehaviour—they prefer to ship half-baked implementations and fix them later; Firefox, on the other hand, moves slower but has fewer issues in what they do ship.

estimator7292 7mo ago

He addresses this in the thread.

cellular 7mo ago

Maybe if Firefox tabs weren't such a memory hog it would be only 0.005% !

bsder 7mo ago

> Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect RAM flips are common. This kind of thing is old and has likely gotten worse. IBM had data on this. DEC had data on this. Amazon/Google/Microsoft almost certainly had data on this. Anybody who runs a fleet of computers gets data on this, and it is always eye opening how common it is. ZFS is really good at spotting RAM flips.

BeetleB 7mo ago

Are people getting so many FF crashes? Mine rarely does. I leave it running, opening and closing tabs, for weeks on end.

intrasight 7mo ago
Months in my case. But I have ECC. Every five years I build a new development workstation and I always have ECC.
- Izkata 7mo ago
  I can also go months and don't see crashes (though occasionally I'll hit a memory leak where closing tabs doesn't release it so I'll restart firefox then), but unless ThinkPads come with ECC I don't have it.
fooker 7mo ago
Yes
tbossanova 7mo ago
Same, been using it for over 20 years and probably only a handful of crashes in that time. But I mostly look at dead simple web stuff (like hn) and run aggressive ad blocking so I might not be representative of the average user
zuminator 7mo ago
Naively, the more stable a piece of software is, the more likely that its failures can be attributed to hardware error.
AngryData 7mo ago
Its pretty stable for me, except it has some memory leaks. Generally I gotta leave heavy pages open for days at a time to notice, but if I don't close it entirely for over a week or two it will start to chug and crash.
Macha 7mo ago
The only browser I’ve crashed in the last decade is mobile safari, and that’s probably because it runs out of memory

maxerickson 7mo ago

I mean, I've had quite some number of crashes that I can't correlate to anything. Hardware problems are just as good a potential explanation for those as anything else.

nimih 7mo ago

> Bold claim. I agree. Good thing he doesn't back up his claim with any sort of evidence or reasoned argument, or you'd look like a huge moron!

crazygringo 7mo ago
To be fair, he doesn't really: > And because it's a conservative heuristic we're underestimating the real number, it's probably going to be at least twice as much. The actual measurement is 5%. The 10% figure is entirely made up, with zero evidence or reasoned argument except a hand-wavy "conservative". Edit: actually, the claim is even less supported: > out of these ~25000 crashes have been detected as having a potential bit-flip. That's one crash every twenty potentially caused by bad/flaky memory "Potential" is a weasel word here. We don't see any of the actual methodology. For all we know, the real value could be 0.1% or 0.01%.
- j16sdiz 7mo ago
  It depends on how the data are distributed. I wouldn't be too surprised if that 5% all come from a few particular bad machine.

bichiliad 7mo ago

I think they claim that if your computer has bad hardware, you're probably sending a lot of _additional_ crashes to their telemetry system. Your hardware might be working just fine, but the guy next to you might be sending 30% more crashes.

pizza234 7mo ago

>> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects! > Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect; I don't seem to get the same amount of crashes using chromium-based browsers such as thorium. That's a misinterpretation. The finding refers to the composition of crashes, not the overall crash rate (which is not reported by the post). Brought to the extreme, there may have been 10 (reported) crashes in history of Firefox, and 1 due to faulty hardware, and the statement would still be correct.

saati 7mo ago

I haven't seen a single firefox or chrome crash in months now, you should really stress-test your hardware.

galangalalgol 7mo ago
I can't recall a single Firefox crash in at least a decade. What are people doing? I run ublock origin, nothing else. I do sometimes have Firefox mobile misbehave where it stops loading new pages and I jave to restart it, but open pages work normally as do all other operations, so not a crash exactly. Happens maybe once a month Edit: more context, I power cycle at least once a week on desktop and the version is typically a bit behind new. I also don't have more tabs open than will fit in the row. All these habits seem likely to decrease crashes.
- ordu 7mo ago
  Yeah. Lately even if I OOM my system, firefox doesn't crash so easily, individual tabs do.
  - silon42 7mo ago
    For me, OOM effectively crashes my system 90% of the time, usually caused by firefox (chromium too), if a website goes out of control (rarely it's caused by too many pages open, as tab discarding takes care of that).
- BenjiWiebe 7mo ago
  We have 5 computers running Firefox. One computer has regular Firefox crashes. I've done some memory testing that didn't detect anything wrong. I've tried all kinds of things software-wise but keep getting random crashes. I wonder if I should do a longer memory test, maybe some CPU stress testing at the same time...
  - sfink 7mo ago
    If you want to dig into it, you can post a bunch of that computer's crash reports (navigate to about:crashes) on bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&component=General https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c... Or you can view several of them and see if there's a common pattern in the "Signature" field. Firefox really should only be regularly crashing if: (1) there's a real bug and the thing that triggers it, (2) you're running out of memory, or (3) you have hardware. I don't know what the odds of faulty hardware are for a randomly chosen user, but they're much higher for a randomly chosen user who is seeing regular crashes.

shakna 7mo ago

Chromium has better handling for bitflip errors. Mostly due to the Discardable buffers they make such extensive use of. The hardware bugs are there. They're just handled.

saagarjha 7mo ago
By what?
- shakna 7mo ago
  With Discardables. When Blink's allocator detects a fault in a memory section it swaps it out for a new one, and taints the old so it is only reused when no more remains. Live objects get swapped between Discardable buffers quite frequently. They're not expected to stay at the same position in memory.

Zambyte 7mo ago

What do you mean "the same amount"? If your browser never crashes, 10% of zero is zero.

hedora 7mo ago

I've had zero crashes in safari, ff or chrome in recent memory (except maybe OOMs). (Though I don't use Windows, so maybe that's part of the reason stuff just works?) Perhaps you're part of the group driving hardware crashes up to 10% and need to fix your machine.

sgt 7mo ago
I think most of it is just bad hardware, not specifically the RAM. Been using non-ECC desktop and laptop hardware for decades and I can't remember the machine crashing for .. I don't know, but a LONG time.

KennyBlanken 7mo ago

"Software engineer thinks everyone's hardware is broken, couldn't possibly be bugs in his code" sums it up about right.

sfink 7mo ago

There's a very good chance your system also does not have flaky memory. Most don't. You're not contradicting the post.