Firefox is finally unusable, is it only me? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: fiwi
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 06:56:19 am
content: 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?

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 07:02:57 am
content: 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.

author: wilfred
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 07:03:58 am
content: 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.

author: Simon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 07:10:59 am
content: 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.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 07:23:32 am
content: 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.

author: chickenHeadKnob
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 08:00:29 am
content: 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.

author: RoGeorge
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 08:18:06 am
content: 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.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 08:55:15 am
content: Quote from: Halcyon on September 06, 2019, 07:23:32 amHeads 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 wrotea 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.

author: xmetal
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 09:29:10 am
content: 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.

author: StillTrying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 09:59:52 am
content: 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.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 02:47:10 pm
content: 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.

author: GregDunn
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 05:30:58 pm
content: 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.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 06:49:11 pm
content: Quote from: xmetal on September 06, 2019, 09:29:10 amPretty 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.

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 08:57:37 pm
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on September 06, 2019, 06:49:11 pmIf 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.

author: StillTrying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 09:06:25 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on September 06, 2019, 02:47:10 pmSince 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.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 09:15:51 pm
content: I used to have problems when running the 32bit version of Firefox. After I changed to system to 64 bit Firefox works like charm.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 06, 2019, 11:07:52 pm
content: 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.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2019, 01:13:33 am
content: 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.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2019, 01:41:22 am
content: 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!

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2019, 02:03:01 am
content: 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.

author: StillTrying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2019, 11:23:15 am
content: Quote from: StillTrying on September 06, 2019, 09:59:52 amAnd of course 24 hours later Ihave torestart 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.

author: Chris_Walch
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2019, 12:21:27 pm
content: 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.

author: StillTrying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2019, 10:47:15 am
content: 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 onYesterdayat 12:23:15 pm>[url=https://www.eevblog.com/forum

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2019, 06:51:50 pm
content: 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/QuoteRubbishI 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/1159697Quote

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2019, 06:56:03 pm
content: Quote from: nctnico on September 07, 2019, 01:41:22 amJust like the OS it depends on.

author: bingo600
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2019, 07:03:26 pm
content: I'm using FF on Linux mint 19 , works like a charm/Bingo

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 09, 2019, 09:26:30 am
content: Quote from: MrMobodies on September 08, 2019, 06:51:50 pmThat is a terrible advice. Now if something causes the browser to crash, it will kill the entire browser (i.e. all tabs) instead of just the offending one. The reason for multi-process Firefox was to to be able to isolate the plugins (like Flash or Java - both stability and mainly security issue) and to increase performance.Also, this kludgy advice (it only sweeps a bug in an old browser version under the rug but doesn't fix anything) is over two years old. The original GHacks article you were quoting is from 2013, i.e. 6 years ago - which would correspond to the ancient version 22 you said you are using. A lot had changed since then!If your Firefox is crashing with this option enabled and you are running acurrentversion (i.e. 69.0 as of today), then report a bug to Mozilla, so that it can get fixed. If you have this problem on an old unsupported release then this is completely irrelevant and you will only make people degrade the performance of their browsers for no good reason.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 14, 2019, 12:16:48 am
content: Quote from: janoc on September 09, 2019, 09:26:30 amThat "terrible" advice is exactly what I wanted. The thing is it WORKS for me, For my purposes for what I use it for I find it terrible for the whole tab to be hidden over some trivial error like manually killing flash player when it is causing problems and nothing flash on there. Back then I could do that with Firefox 22 without a problem when it stays open and that didn't cause many problems most of the time or sometimes when idle it will take up quite of memory but no cpu usage unlike that built in one in that particular release I was experimenting on.I want to see the page even that has hanged and can't do anything with it. I wouldn't mind if they can show the whole page and just freeze it and it put something over it that it has a hanged rather than cover it up.I'd rather there be a timeout and a dialogue "Do you want to continuing running this script" like with Firefox 22 and before rather than hiding the whole tab.QuoteI wouldn't call it advice for everybody but depends what I want it for but I just don't want it hiding pages on some small trivial error.QuoteAfter my experience with Firefox I moved over to Chrome I think in 2015. I prefer Firefox 22 for my OLD lan devices, I have no problems with it, Google Chrome for the newer stuff and I exploring Palemoon.

author: StillTrying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 27, 2019, 10:56:28 pm
content: I accidentally updated to FF 70, - I wouldn't recommend it.Seems to need GBs to open 1 blank tab.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 28, 2019, 12:38:16 am
content: Well, I'm on the latest Firefox. It's rock stable. Sure it's heavily bloated as I said before, and eats RAM like crazy. I have tons of open tabs, and it sure uses several GB and 14 processes. Not very optimal, but it's still the browser that works best for my needs. It's 100% usable. Now of course on a small machine with low RAM, I might look elsewhere. Not bothered on my main workstation which has 64GB, and not either on my laptop which has 16GB.For privacy reasons, I wouldn't touch Chrome with a stick, so I'm OK with Firefox. I've tried alternatives occasionally, but they rarely come close (again for my needs), so I've never switched so far.

author: StillTrying
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 28, 2019, 08:22:59 am
content: FF70 is a bit better since I turned the real time AV off and the HDD quiet mode off.Of course the address bar and row of tabs are now in the wrong order with no easy way to reverse them.

author: Electro Detective
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 29, 2019, 09:11:14 pm
content: Quote from: xmetal on September 06, 2019, 09:29:10 amThanks for the Waterfox tipI installed, ticked/unticked the usual preferences/options,surfed EEVblog and Ebay = works fineNo earth shaking issues with Firefox yet as reported by other users,but it's handy to have a pre-tested backup browser just in case

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 29, 2019, 10:31:35 pm
content: I moved from Firefox to Palemoon a while back, about the time of the australiasis interface change. It's been pretty good but have become more and more annoyed by it pausing while loading or scrolling pages, probably because of ads or trackers (even though I always use an ad blocker).Brave is an interesting alternative. It has some shortcomings but feels astonishingly fast because it doesn't stutter and stop all the time. It's even faster on gmail, where it fixes a few problems even chrome does badly.

author: Electro Detective
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2019, 08:54:35 am
content: My current 'look for'is finding an honest browser that still works ok with Windows XP and 2000Just basic browsing, banking and viewing Youtube etc, even if it's at 360pi.e. not fussed, just need it to work on cash strapped people's computers that won't be doing Win 7, 8, 8.1 andno way10 anytime soonIt was enough of a drama to shift them from Win 98 and ME..

author: digsys
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 30, 2019, 09:56:46 am
content: Quote from: Electro DetectiveLet me know when you find something :-) , I'm in the same boat !

author: artag
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 30, 2019, 11:17:50 am
content: As far as I'm aware all the private browsers run fine under linux and if you've got legacy applications that still need windows, you can run them under emulation.Of course, there are plenty of people with good reasons not to do that but they tend to cluster around 'I don't want to learn a new thing' or 'I want to run some game / legacy app that only works on windows'.The only downside is that recent windows-only applications may not run well .. but you only want XP compatibiity so that's not a problem for you.And you don't even have to 'learn' linux - you're just using it in point-and-click desktop mode to run a browser and keeping your existing XP world in a box. There's literally nothing you have to learn.

author: LeonR
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 01, 2019, 03:41:01 pm
content: No issues here (70.0.1 32-bit, Windows).I've been using Firefox since the pre-1.0 release and AFAIK there's been only one or two hiccups that affected me, but those also affected a large portion of users and Mozilla issued hotfixes a couple days later for them.