Firefox is finally unusable, is it only me?

[fiwi]

Firefox began it's e10s project from version 48 several years ago, which enables multi-process. However for me, it crashes ~30% pages on default settings, and 80% with my personal settings.
It's true on all 5 of my computers, running different CPU (Intel/AMD), different OS (Windows/Linux/MacOSX), and even applies to several computers of my friends that I never accessed before.
The bug is haunting all version from 48 and up, including ESR. However, mobile versions are not affected because e10s are not exist on them.
All mess could be solved by disabling e10s in about:config, until ver 68. Now from version 68, e10s is hard coded as enabled, and they eventually killed Firefox for me.
I even tried a bug report, but fix never come.
I was suprised that I cannot find anyone mention it on the Internet, seriously, is it just me?

[Simon]

I have problems with chrome. At one point I used a different browser on each computer as what worked on one crashed on others. I am now using firefox.

[wilfred]

If you can't find similar hits on the Internet then it is likely just you. Unless you are the first to see the problem.

I'm sailing along fine with FF.

[Simon]

It's generally graphics that cause the problem which is why each machine can be different. Chrone started to have massive crashes, so I went to firefox, problem solved.

[Halcyon]

Opera is my browser of choice as it works with just about everything and isn't a memory hog like Chrome.

I only use Firefox as a fallback on sites which are poorly coded.

[chickenHeadKnob]

I use Firefox 68.02/ Linux  and haven't crashed in more than a year. I can't actually remember the last time I had a problem.

[RoGeorge]

Firefox 68 on Ubuntu, all working just fine.

The only issue is the hardware acceleration, which is not supported (and not enabled) by default.  That means Firefox can not play 4K YouTube videos in full screen on a 4K monitor.  For that kind of videos, I use Pale Moon, a browser forked long time ago from Firefox.

If I force hardware acceleration on Firefox (set hardware-video-decoding to true from about:config), it freezes the video in full screen, but it responds to 'ESC' key, so it doesn't crash.

I'll say it's something with your software or hardware setup (or maybe a plugin).  I don't recall any Firefox crash and I usually have about 50 windows with a total of 1000 tabs or so, on average.

[Whales]

Opera is my browser of choice as it works with just about everything and isn't a memory hog like Chrome.

I only use Firefox as a fallback on sites which are poorly coded.

Heads up: Opera is Chromium, unless you are using one of the classic releases.  Has been quite sad to see how far it has fallen.

I am not happy with any currently available browsers, as I wrote a lengthy semi-review on my blog about.  I used to be a Seamonkey user, but the extension ecosystem for it has been dissected by the upstream Firefox Quantum changes.

[xmetal]

I use Waterfox which is based on Firefox v56. It still allows you to use the legacy add-ons and is regularly updated. I gave up with Firefox since they messed about with it.

[StillTrying]

I sometimes have tabs open in Win7 FF 68.0.2(32-bit) for weeks, so lots of sleep/wakes and no crashes, but there are some oddities such as 50% of animated gifs just show as a black square, I've not tried the 64bit version.

[SiliconWizard]

Yeah, heavy Firefox (currently 69.0) user here, and it's pretty stable. Have been on the 64-bit version for a long while now.
Only thing is that it has just kept getting more and more bloated, despite Mozilla's claims.

And then there's the decision they made to spawn processes all over the place. It may have increased robustness and security a bit, but damn. In my current session, there are 11 firefox processes taking up an amount of ~4.5GB of RAM total.

[GregDunn]

Firefox is very stable here, and has been since they fixed many of the memory leak issues.  Chrome won't even launch without crashing (tried it multiple times on different app and OS versions).  Plus, Chrome = Google = no way.

[Stray Electron]

I gave up with Firefox since they messed about with it.

  Pretty much the same here. I love FF and I still use it for a few things but it became much too bloated and it just EATS my CPU.  I now use PaleMoon and it loads 3 time faster than FF and my CPU usage is about 5% vs 95% in FF.  PaleMoon is what FF was when it started out and before it became so bloated that it's now all but useless.

[janoc]

I gave up with Firefox since they messed about with it.

  Pretty much the same here. I love FF and I still use it for a few things but it became much too bloated and it just EATS my CPU.  I now use PaleMoon and it loads 3 time faster than FF and my CPU usage is about 5% vs 95% in FF.  PaleMoon is what FF was when it started out and before it became so bloated that it's now all but useless.

If you are having 95% continuous CPU utilization in FF that isn't normal. Try with a clean profile - you could have picked up some broken/malicious extension or a Javascript cryptominer somewhere, especially if you aren't using adblockers.

[StillTrying]

And then there's the decision they made to spawn processes all over the place. It may have increased robustness and security a bit, but damn. In my current session, there are 11 firefox processes taking up an amount of ~4.5GB of RAM total.

Since I've been watching my FF seems to use 9 to 11 processes, total RAM only about 0.7GB and not a lot of CPU.
It does slow down sometimes, about every 2 days I clear the cookies and 1GB cache which helps.

[nctnico]

I used to have problems when running the 32bit version of Firefox. After I changed to system to 64 bit Firefox works like charm.

[Ampera]

In my personal opinion this is just a sign that the www is ever shit, and is an upside down pyramid of poorly implemented ideas trundled ontop of one good one, a hyperlinked web of interactive documents.

I use chromium, it works fine on Linux, and I've never had a problem with it. It seems that everyone around me has continual browser problems, and I guess I should just be thankful that I'm an exception. That being said I am debating switching to Pale Moon, though I haven't tried it much, chromium's (apparent, no clue if that's still happening) dumping of ublock origin support (and similar adblockers) is something I'm not so fond of. It's also a bit of a security question for me, and when I eventually do a personal security audit, that's going to be one of the things on my mind.

[MrMobodies]

I still use an copy of Firefox 22 for my old gear. I have had no trouble excepting certain websites don't display too well from some years ago which is why I switched to Chrome but I discovered Pale Moon by some member here. I had problems with Palemoon last year where it would consume large amounts of memory doing nothing but that is fixed now and it works great.

When Firefox 23 came out I had some issues where it would hang at times even on a new profile and on others and I found by reverting and it worked fine. When the later versions came out whilst they didn't have that particular problem one of them had a flashplayer implemented in a way that it ran all the time and that would take up a lot of CPU time just displaying a blank page such as the Google homepage with no flash on it. Kill flash player in the task manager on a blank page not using flash and I got some message to say the page or tab has crashed and to restart the the tab even though it had nothing flash on it. Overzealous? And also due to some change with the SSL stuff I couldn't even make an exception for some old network stuff I use whether it would work with Chrome.

Oh yes and I remembered about that Alex Limi and his thing about "Check boxes that kill your product" that was trivial but it seemed to have gone downhill for me in many ways where was I installing extensions like I do now with Chrome and config settings to get the classic download manager and extensions to show the previous add-on manager in a separate window than it being oversized on a webpage layout.

[nctnico]

I'd strongly advise against using an old web browser. A web browser is your connection to the evil world outside. It needs to be secure!

[MrMobodies]

I don't use it for web browsing as it is too old and webpages won't display properly and that was over 3 or 4 years ago and now I use it for my old lan devices on old laptops.

I remembered many years ago when using Internet Explorer and especially with Java Runtime was asking for trouble and I'd get a lot of customers with malware that they don't even remember installing which I traced back to some advert or webpage through that content.ie5 folder and I found packages in Java runtime that was installed at the same time but now I see restrictions put in place regarding certificates to run java packages in the runtime and I do not see this happening often anymore.  Also I remember all the stuff I manually removed such as the Winfixer clones and the hidden rootkits that put them there.

[StillTrying]

I sometimes have tabs open in Win7 FF 68.0.2(32-bit) for weeks, so lots of sleep/wakes and no crashes

And of course 24 hours later I have to restart Windoze.
FF, 11 pdfs, Notepad and 'Resource Monitor' were all working fine and could be closed, but connectivity was almost none, and desktop wallpaper had turned black. A restart and it's all back to normal.

[Chris_Walch]

I switched from Firefox to Chrome a long time ago.
Then switched from Chrome to Opera which is based on Chromium.
Now i'm running Edge Beta (Chromium) and so far everything works fine.

[StillTrying]

And now my "quoting" is broken, if you've any ideas what I've done let me know!

EDIT:  Found it  "Show WYSIWYG editor on post page by default" was ticked.

Quote from: StillTrying on Yesterday at 12:23:15 pm>[url=https://www.eevblog.com/forum

[MrMobodies]

I was just searching and I think I found that condescending the message I was getting that covers the whole page up when I killed flash taking large amounts of cpu when not needed.

https://www.ghacks.net/2013/12/05/multi-process-firefox-go/

Multi-process Firefox is a go

 by Martin Brinkmann on December 05, 2013 in Firefox

    Tab crashed

    Well, this is embarrassing. We tried to display this Web page, but it is not responding.

    Try Again.

Rubbish


I think that was the other reason why I stopped using the later releases with all the meddling.

Actually I see now there is a way of turning it off but that was two years ago long before I gave up on it and I couldn't find much about it at the time or maybe I didn't look well enough.


Disable deliberate tab crashing and hiding of pages for trivial browser/webpage errors?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1159697

Firefox by setting the related prefs to false on the about:config page.

browser.tabs.remote.autostart = false
browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 = false

[Mr. Scram]

I'd strongly advise against using an old web browser. A web browser is your connection to the evil world outside. It needs to be secure!

Just like the OS it depends on.