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Newest Firefox Browser Bashes Crashes (cnet.com)
Nobody likes it when a web browser bombs instead of opening up a website. Mozilla is addressing that in the newly released v53 of its Firefox browser, which it claims crashes 10 percent fewer times. CNET adds: The improvement comes through the first big debut of a part of Project Quantum, an effort launched in 2016 to beef up and speed up Firefox. To improve stability, Firefox 53 on Windows machines isolates software called a compositor that's in charge of painting elements of a website onto your screen. That isolation into a separate computing process cuts down on trouble spots that can occur when Firefox employs computers' graphics chips, Mozilla said.
It used to be that open source software was recommended for reviving older hardware, but Firefox is dropping support for pre-Pentium 4 processors on Linux, 32 bit Macs and XP and Vista in this release. With the millions of Yahoo search dollars, they can afford to look after their legacy users, but they rather be chrome drones. Hopefully someone forks Firefox like there is a fork for PowerPC macs.
So, now they've put the renderer in a separate process with reduced privileges? Like, for example, every other web browser (including Edge and Safari) did for security last 5 or so years ago? Uh, yay?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Maybe this means I'll make it a full 24 hours without a crash!
Seriously, Mozilla needs to reign in their garbage development cycle. They pump out new versions so rapidly it's a miracle that the browser runs at all...
The only reason I haven't dumped it completely yet is because there are some useful add-ons that aren't available for Chrome...
Seriously Mozilla, get your shit together. Firefox has gone from being my favorite browser simply to being the one I tolerate because it has some useful features. Chrome still stomps you in the speed department.
Run an ad/script blocker. But, like the other AC said, this is all the OS's fault.
I wanted the firefox that crashes bashes you insensitive clods!!
Good people go to bed earlier.
Maybe in 10 or 15 years Firefox will be production ready. So instead of crashing several times daily, it might only crash several times weekly.
Are you sure you're using the same Firefox as me? It crashes less than once a year, and that's on Debian unstable, with 33 extensions and hardly ever below 100 tabs. Firefox does have its flaws, such as dropping sound support, massive memory use and using lots of CPU even when idle, but crashiness isn't one of them.
If you experience crashes "several times daily", you'd better check your hardware. Or perhaps you're running some bogus DRM scheme.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
NT.
Nice try, but every time I've upgraded your browser it broke or removed features I use, and added useless junk on top.
I used to upgrade to the latest software as soon as it came out, but it feels like the likes of Microsoft and Mozilla are intentionally trying to train me to treat every software update with utmost suspicion and as a measure of last resort.
Firefox has been bashing and crashing since 51.0.
Before that it would just hang up, show a gray/white overlay, and then go back to normal.
But since 51 it has been crashing like a motherfucker.
Sadly i can't move from this pile of garbage because i love my addons, customization, and ability to open up videos via external application (player) too much.
But most importantly i love my Session Manager that actually works on 100 tabs thanks to tab lazy loading,
a feature which for some reason can't work at all on Chromium-based shit with the respective thread on Chrome ending
up with the devs admitting that their implementation is worthless because Chromium base doesn't allow it.
If anyone likes vertical tabs however and uses Firefox as an excuse for this only, i suggest to you to look up Vivaldi because their vertical tabs is good shit.
I can't see how the Firefox 57 release could possibly go down in a good way.
These changes have the potential to be the most disruptive ones to date, probably even worse than the Australis UI changes that drove away so many of Firefox's users earlier.
We aren't just talking about highly annoying UI changes here. We're talking about the risk for broken functionality, and in ways that aren't easily fixed. This is stuff that users can't just ignore or learn to work around.
If Firefox 57 does turn out to be the disaster that it could very easily become, I'm not certain that Firefox could survive it.
Firefox is already down to only about 5% to 6% of the browser market. It has almost no (0.03%) mobile presence.
Firefox really can't afford to lose any more users.
What's really bad about this situation is that it will likely be addon authors who are the most affected. These are the users that Firefox really, really can't afford to lose.
I mean, if I have to write my addons in a way that's compatible with Chrome, why would I even bother using Firefox at that point? Firefox is slower and more bloated that Chrome, in my experience. Firefox can also send a lot of info to Mozilla and others, so it's not like it's really any better when it comes to privacy.
If I'm going to get a Chrome-like UI experience from Firefox, and if I'm going to get a Chrome-like addon development experience from Firefox, and I'm going to get a Chrome-like privacy experience from Firefox, but Firefox's will feel slower than Chrome, then I might as well just use Chrome (or Chromium) directly.
I really don't like making this prediction, but I think that by this time next year we could see Firefox down around 1% or 2% of the browser market. At that point I think we'd have to consider it a lost cause. It's already close enough to being a lost cause as it is, while it's still around 5%.
Once Firefox gets below 5%, it just won't matter to web developers. They won't bother testing their sites in a browser that has so few users. The Firefox web experience will just end up getting worse and worse, until most of its users end up using Chrome.
We've seen this happen with Netscape Navigator, and it's looking like it's happening to Firefox now, too.
Nobody cares about your experiences with Firefox when all you have to say is the same thing people generally say about basically every software upgrade ever: "I don't like change".
Unfortunately there are bugs in Firefox that make us recommend using another browser to our users. Here is an example:
In some situations Indexeddb in Firefox gets broken beyond repair. As a consequence, people who encounter this error will not be able to visit pages that used Indexeddb anymore. Not only once of for some days, but never again. The error is permanent and cannot be fixed by a normal user. Users only have the option to switch to another browser or delete the storage folder in the used profile (which requires a bit of technical knowledge). This is a total show stopper and I have the feeling that Firefox developers are not really aware how severe this is. Here is the bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
Hell, we would even donate money to get this bug fixed. But all we can do is cast a single vote, sit on the sidelines, hope and pray.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Chrome crashes on me less than once a month (I typically have to reboot for security patches before Chrome chrashes). Firefox must be crashing a *lot* if a 10% reduction is significant.
I haven't had a crash in Firefox in years.
Well, THAT makes sense. Linux doesn't have GPU drivers. Software render all the way!
I like firefox as it is...or at least i like the way i have it set up with all my addons still functioning and the 'old firefox' looking UI. I'll see you all when 59 ESR is released.
Also for those who don't know, firefox has an extended support release which has just security updates for a year instead of their usual instance on removing/changing/breaking something with every new version number. Mad props to whoever it was who first alerted me to it.
Firefox does not crash for me under linux, hundred tabs open, many windows.
What usually crashes is the plugin container.
Some dammed java or flash locks up.
Fortunately I can kill the browser or browser window from a terminal.
Never crashes the system.
Nope. Some FireFox changes that enough people did not like have resulted in forks of the project
Change for the sake of change is dumb. Software people can't understand the fact that something might have a design end. Has the shape of a hammer changed in the past hundred years? No. Are these changes beneficial to anyone? Has an interface study been done on the results? I switched to Chrome after Firefox picked the "australis" look and became Chrome Junior.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
What other browser do you recommend? I haven't yet found one that is worse. Firefox may not be perfect, but it is still much better than the alternatives.
Witness BitZtream getting pwned!
I use Firefox on several desktops and laptops at work (Windows and Linux) and I can't remember the last time I had a crash. I usually only have 2 or 3 extensions loaded and maybe up to 20 or so tabs. Memory usage seems to be a bit lower since v52 came out, but that might have to do with dropping support for most plugins.
So instead of crashing several times daily, it might only crash several times weekly. Not that you'd want to run it that long without restarting the app since it'll be using all of your memory by the end of the day.
Is there a different Firefox than the one I'm using? The machine I do the majority of my browsing on is a Win 7 box with 16GB of RAM. I haven't seen a crash in at least a year, probably more. I have had 15 separate windows open with 10 to 30 tabs open in each for the last 2 or 3 months. I just rebooted today for updates. I will shutdown and restore my Firefox session when the memory usage creeps up and bogs it down. But the most I've seen it get up to is a little over 8GB of RAM usage. Which is ridiculous, but not as bad as you seem to be exaggerating it to be.
My one big sticking point to switching browsers is the Tree-Style-Tabs add-on. I can't find a single other browser that does this well. Opera is the only other that comes close, but I can't stand that it has no way to hide the tabs across the top of the browser. I could live with the vertical tabs not being nested if I cold just find a way to hide the horizontal ones.
We at Moz://a are pleased to announce that Firefox 57 will be the Chromium source code with all the icons changed to the Firefox logo. Now we don't have to actually work on our browser we can make fun of extension developers and see all the hard work they done wasted while we roll in the Yahoo sponsorship money.
Really? On my computer it crashes maybe a few times a year, max, and I typically have a at least a few dozen tabs open at a time. A more common restart trigger for me is updates! All I can think is that maybe the various adblockers, anti-trackers etc I have installed are blocking some dodgy scripts that are giving you grief?
On 6200 Windows clients and 1900 Mac's. Firefox is above and beyond the most crash prone browser - it even tops IE 11 (Fwiw Chrome > IE 11 > Firefox are the most used browsers in my organization according to software metering).
That's been my experience too on Windows 7. It's terrible at handling facebook and video streaming. I'm assuming that the crashes are because of a plugin issue and that a fresh install would fix it, but I haven't tried and can't say for sure.
I use Firefox as my main browser, and I understand the problems some people have with it. Thing is, I tend to see Firefox's flaws as emerging from using it with lots of addons as intended. Adblock + noscript + various EFF tools are bound to bork it from time to time. I'm kind of impressed it's as stable as it is. Not to mention I'm the kind of crazy person who has 300 tabs open right now.
I used to use Opera as my secondary, back before they dropped Presto and abandoned their very functional email/rss components. Now it's Chrome with adblock.
It might be ironic that my favorite mobile browser was Safari with adblock. Never had a single problem with it. Plus Apple for all their faults has been willing to tell bloatware peddlers to go hang themselves.
Marketing genius! Is it tough on crashes? Does it stamp the crashes out? Does it get the crashes before they get you? I could keep doing this all day. If you'd like I can hire my marketing skills out on a very affordable rate.
We'll make great pets
In "about:config" change "fayout.frame_rate" from -1 to 60 (or whatever your monitor runs at). For some stupid reason, Firefox renders as fast as your CPU can handle 100% of the time. Even at 60 FPS, it uses ~1% CPU when idle so I'm guessing it was going like 6000FPS when unrestrained.
Mind the frickin' laser...
100 years might be a bit of an understatement; claw hammers may have been first invented by the Romans shortly before the common era (I cannot find any hard sources, unfortunately), and can be seen in artwork no less than 500 years old. One can be fairly plainly seen at the left-middle of this engraving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
They are going to write the browser to handle multiple advertisements at once. ( over 30 per refresh). So hold on, those ads will be flying in your face from now on.
Well maybe thats due to Linux.
My FF52 has been crashing about 4 times a day in the last few weeks.
It's still my daily driver, because it is the only browser that properly support side tabs via the treetab plugin.
46137
Is this due to the extensions you're using, perhaps? I'm fairly certain that Firefox hasn't been shut down or restarted since the last time it was updated. The only think that ever bothers me is its complete unresponsiveness when it's loading a large PDF. I'm pretty sure that my trouble started when I started using the decentraleyes extension, so I choose to live with and wait out Firefox's pauses.
I'm actually questioning what Firefox you are using. Sure the GP sounds like something else is the cause. Multiple times daily is not what I would associated with Firefox. But once a week, easily. Hell one update completely fubared the thing which is when the straw broke my back and I switched away. If I was going to start with a new profile there was no reason not to try an alternative.
I've had the same results using firefox ESR, it never crashes.
massive memory use
Chrom* uses much more memory than firefox thanks to 1 process x tab model and yet a single tab crash can still bring the entire browser down.
I use FF, FF Portable and Chrome.
They all work fine and so close to equally fast you may as well say they are equally fast.
In "about:config" change "layout.frame_rate" from -1 to 60 (or whatever your monitor runs at). [...]
Thanks for that. I have my video card fans setup on a temperature monitor and it made no sense they would increase with FF.
How is Windows to blame for shorty graphics drivers?! At least on windows, graphics acceleration works at all.
da funk? My CPU load in FF just dropped to below 104%
How much do you get paid to shill this garbage?
system load just dropped by 0.8
Why the fuck is this not the default?
dafuq, mozilla...
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
AMEN brother!
I don't understand why the entire rest of the planet feels that tabs across the top are proper in a browser. Sure, if you have only a few it's fine. I, however, have more horizontal display space than most any website needs, and that extra horizontal space is perfect for a vertical list of treed tabs. I have 10 Firefox 'profiles' that I select when launching from the shortcut: Home, Work, Shopping, UNIX, Gaming Misc, Fallout, EVE, Porn, Cams, and Temp. Most have 50 tabs or so. I typically have 5 of those profiles launched all the time. It partitions the memory usage and limits the damage due to any (rare) crash.
Fuckin' Chome needs to get in line with the tree-style tabs in the sidebar if it wants to ever be a power-user's browser
Yo!
Either implement proper tree-style tabs down the left in a collapsible sidebar, or die.
Chrome is SHIT with tabs across the top in a toolbar. It can handle, what, a dozen, or so, before getting cramped?
Tree-style. Tabs. Sidebar.
Evolve or die. Your browser is not capable of satisfying a heavy user.
I have 300 tabs, with 700 on reserve in other instances of firefox
And yes, Within a week I'll visit them all.
Grow up.
Seriously? The vast majority of websites work just fine in the firefox, opera, chrome or whatever. Performance may vary and very, very occasionally you'll run across an exception where you might need to start up a different browser but most of the time why the fsck would you bother? It's not 1995 anymore. You don't need to sift through a dozen rubbish programs just to find the one that works: most have either reached the point where they are usable or faded into obscurity.
title read it
The autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating Slashdot troll!
(and it looks like I'm not the only one that noticed bitztream being a fucking troll!)
Maybe you should close your browser more often? I am a heavy browser user and when the memory leaks slow the browser down too much I restart it (thank God for session restoration). The majority of the time it crashes when attempting to close... For some reason memory usage seems to spike while closing and if you're already near the max it can't handle the spike. I would expect memory usage to decrease when closing. Is it holding state files in memory instead of streaming them to disk or something?
I have noticed that when you're in the thousands of tabs range, the tens of seconds Firefox is frozen when you open a new tab doesn't occur when you open the same link in the current tab. I'd swear they have a 2^N algorithm in tab creation somewhere. I've set a minimum session store dump time so it shouldn't be re-writing the entire browser state. The browser freezes again when it changes the tab title, seemingly pointing again to an issue when trying to index into tab data.
I'd actually look at the source if I hadn't kept hearing Firefox is a clusterfuck to build. I always get problems when trying to build trivial SW which is supposed to have a 1-click build system. Those always fail for me. Trying to build something which is already a clusterfuck would take too many weeks to figure out.
No, it just dresses in black, puts on a mask, stars in hair fetish porn and goes hunting for 100 Nazi scalps only to go down to a punch to the face.
I set FF to just download PDFs, that way I can open them in something that can render PDFs properly.
Don't get me wrong, pdf.js (what FF uses to render in browser) is incredibly useful. Unfortunately it can be slow, and some issues with embedded fonts still seem to exist.
Personally I use Evince on Linux to read PDFs.
I've found that some (most?) Linux distro's recompile FF to their release packages, instead of simply using the Mozilla provided binaries.
This creates a much more stable browser.
I use Funtoo Linux, and always go the compile route when updating FF. The one time I decided waiting for it to compile would be too long (was in a time crunch) it was a terrible experience. When I later "upgraded" to the self-compiled version it stablized.
I guess a lot of it depends on what your system has for native libs, and compatible versions. If you're using a huge binary blob from Mozilla you're missing out on utilizing shared libraries, and possibly using out-dated, bundled in versions of those libraries.
Ha ha. Ha ha ha. HA ha ha ha HA HA HA! HA!
Look, I'm not saying Firefox is the worst browser out there, but anyone who relies on a single browser to check websites these days is either an octogenarian running windows 95 (who can't tell the difference because ALL the sites are broken) or a moron who doesn't care. All of the browsers suck and they all suck equally. Firefox just sucks in its own, slow, incompatible way
I leave firefox running all the time at work and use it almost exclusively for my job. I only restart it monthly or so to for updates. I don't have any browser freeze ups or excessive memory usage or anything like that, but I do sometimes wonder if I wasn't running ublock if I would see those issues.
I agree though, that you still need a copy of chrome or chromium for those occasional sites that use chrome exclusive javascript (or whatever the deal is) like my banking site where I can't actually pay my credit card bill with firefox.
While Firefox is not exactly super crash-prone, I noticed over the last 2-3 years that it has a nasty habit of gobbling up memory. When I run my machine non-stop over the weekend, it is totally normal for it to eventually reach about 1.5 GB of memory usage (no matter how many tabs I have open at that point) and then strange things happen - like graphics not loading correctly, GUI elements not showing up anymore, web pages freezing etc. So I can totally understand it if people who use Firefox more than me, e.g. at work, have problems at least once a day. It is simply not stable under heavy usage.
But all we can do is cast a single vote, sit on the sidelines, hope and pray.
Or you could be proactive and fix it yourselves. Firefox is open source after all.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
A fresh install of Firefox on a fresh install of Fedora Linux is as crazy-unstable as the worst software I've seen.
Open a few websites in tabs (news, tech info, etc NOT porn/pirated movies/etc) and the things slows even a quad core CPU to a crawl consuming 100%+ of CPU and memory while caching gigabytes on the hard drive, which it HAMMERS relentlessly. IF you can get Firefox to shut down, it can take 10 minues and leaves its "Web Content" task running and hammering the drives, so shutting down the Linux box can tak half an hour (unless you go root and kill the Web Content task). The EXACT same setup, when running anything other than Firefox has no such problems, and even running Firefox has no such problems browsing simple web pages on a local LAN. My suspicion is on Firefox and a developer team that might not be testiing all their exciting new code on enough platforms and with enough common web sites, and probably related to the pre-caching of web content (which probably includes pre-caching TONS of ad content, tracking scripts, etc). I have repeated this experiment on multiple PCs. I run my business on Linux and have a bunch of PCs, most of which are dual or quad cores not the newest CPUs, but that should not be an issue unless crappy lazy coding and testing is now the norm at mozilla - not everybody runs hardware thats less than 6 months old.
Very funny.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
I had this problem I while back. Firefox crashed all the time.
Turned out everything that needed a lot of ram crashed. Because one of my DIMMs was bad.
missing out on utilizing
I think I just spotted the PHB. Shouldn't you be off talking about synergy at some retreat ?
Nope, just practical.
The browser should render by default at vsync with the -1 setting. Perhaps the detection fails on some platforms?
Indeed. I can say a lot of bad things about Firefox, but it never crashes on me. Ever.
I did switch to Pale Moon about 2 years ago, because it's just as stable but way faster. I use Firefox mostly for "broken" web sites that are designed only to work with popular, name-brand browsers.
I think the stability issue is limited to windows?
My colleagues also complain a lot about firefox stability, but i never have problems with it on Linux (ok, not never, but very very few) while they use windows.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
What kind of workflow requires 15 separate windows with 10-30 tabs?
When Firefox added extra security. They added a huge bug. I now find that I often get a black screen, after which no pages will load properly. I've largely been unable to use Firefox for the past few weeks.
Check my post history, I've been posting about that browser for a decade. I was THE diehard, I loathed Chrome.
I fought tooth and nail to keep Firefox, I hate many things Chrome does, which FF does better. It looks better, the plugins (I use) are much better, it's a great browser with a little work.
EXCEPT IT IS IMMENSELY SLOW.
and I don't mean "oh golly, that's not snappy" I mean it's SLOW, frequently delays, lag, lockups, freezes, script errors (slow, then error), more slow, lag, it's just atrocious, it's awful. They should stop coding for a YEAR and just optomise it.
I really feel horrible even posting this from Chrome, the thought breaks my heart, but guess what? IT'S NOT INCREDIBLY OMG HOLY ....... god damn slow,.....
Sorry Mozilla, it's over - I had my say on the reddit firefox site and that's it, I'm out - no more. I can not endure that performance any longer - it's been 2 years and I tried every god damn thing.
So long. Sorry.
Spotted the guy who has no idea how huge software projects like a web browser works.
In "about:config" change "fayout.frame_rate" from -1 to 60 (or whatever your monitor runs at). For some stupid reason, Firefox renders as fast as your CPU can handle 100% of the time.
fayout.frame_rate = -1 means "refresh at device rate", not "infinite refresh rate" (that's what = 0 does). So setting it to 60 should have no effect on a typical system. See developer comment here.
about:performance is your best friend.
Firefox crashes once a day here since version 52 and even with 53. With 51 it was stable. Possibly Quantum is more the problem than the solution?
... crashing several times daily..
Maybe you forgot to remove the Adobe Flash plugin.