3 ms·

Mozilla dev here! Sorry to hear you're having so many problems! A few things to consider: 1. Many of Firefox's stability issues are due to 3rd party components

Mozilla dev here! Sorry to hear you're having so many problems! A few things to consider: 1. Many of Firefox's stability issues are due to 3rd party components (plugins and addons). I recommend disabling all of them, restarting the browser, and seeing if the issues persist. You can then selectively enable (or click-to-play, for plugins) them to improve your experience while maintaining stability. 2. You could also try a profile reset [0], which tends to magically fix some problems (especially if you've had the profile for a while). [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-problems https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...

aaronem 12y ago
I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my concerns, but honesty compels of me the admission that I'd appreciate it more if you could offer something more substantive than the browser equivalent of "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Of course I have, and if it'd solved my problems, I wouldn't still be complaining about them on Hacker News, where the response is certain to include an overwhelming preponderance of "works just fine for me!" On the other hand, per a decision made a couple of years ago, I also stick with the ESR release track rather than keeping up with the mainstream releases, because I got tired of having to restart for updates even more frequently than for performance reasons, and also of having the user-interface tablecloth yanked out from under me every time the major version changed -- on that latter point, incidentally, if I want Google Chrome's UI, I know where to find it. It's possible that running Firefox 24 ESR means I've missed out on some recent stability and performance updates, although I had the impression that both sorts of fixes were generally backported to the ESR branch; given my prior experience, I'd be astonished (and delighted) to see those missed updates make a major difference, but who knows? Perhaps in June, when Firefox 31 ESR drops, I'll find myself astonished and delighted.
- mccr8 12y ago
  If you look in about:memory, you can try to diagnose a bit where the memory is going. This may or may not result in anything that will be useful for you. I appreciate that it is frustrating when your browser is misbehaving, but your generic complaint "my browser leaks like a sieve!" cannot possibly garner anything other than generic suggestions. Memory issues can be caused by buggy websites, websites that use some feature that Firefox implements poorly, addons, plugins, buggy graphics drivers, and so on. Issues that come up after days of heavy browsing can be particular hard to diagnose. > although I had the impression that both sorts of fixes were generally backported to the ESR branch ESR mostly just receives security updates, plus the occasional crash fix.

aaronem 12y ago

I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my concerns, but honesty compels of me the admission that I'd appreciate it more if you could offer something more substantive than the browser equivalent of "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Of course I have, and if it'd solved my problems, I wouldn't still be complaining about them on Hacker News, where the response is certain to include an overwhelming preponderance of "works just fine for me!" On the other hand, per a decision made a couple of years ago, I also stick with the ESR release track rather than keeping up with the mainstream releases, because I got tired of having to restart for updates even more frequently than for performance reasons, and also of having the user-interface tablecloth yanked out from under me every time the major version changed -- on that latter point, incidentally, if I want Google Chrome's UI, I know where to find it. It's possible that running Firefox 24 ESR means I've missed out on some recent stability and performance updates, although I had the impression that both sorts of fixes were generally backported to the ESR branch; given my prior experience, I'd be astonished (and delighted) to see those missed updates make a major difference, but who knows? Perhaps in June, when Firefox 31 ESR drops, I'll find myself astonished and delighted.

mccr8 12y ago
If you look in about:memory, you can try to diagnose a bit where the memory is going. This may or may not result in anything that will be useful for you. I appreciate that it is frustrating when your browser is misbehaving, but your generic complaint "my browser leaks like a sieve!" cannot possibly garner anything other than generic suggestions. Memory issues can be caused by buggy websites, websites that use some feature that Firefox implements poorly, addons, plugins, buggy graphics drivers, and so on. Issues that come up after days of heavy browsing can be particular hard to diagnose. > although I had the impression that both sorts of fixes were generally backported to the ESR branch ESR mostly just receives security updates, plus the occasional crash fix.