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Comment by animex | Hacker News Reader

I've never had Firefox crash. I guess they are reaching for those edge cases on power users who keep a billion tabs open. Maybe I'm missing some sort of productivity hack that involves leaving 100+ tabs open.

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I'm going to reply with a comment stolen from a different HN discussion:

The fact that people (myself included) have 100s of tabs open is a symptom of just how broken bookmarking is on the modern web. Bookmarks are a miserable way to create a placeholder for your thoughts. It's too static, must be maintained, and generally prone to link rot.

I'm a scientist. I open and read 10-20-100 links for a given topic depending on if I'm coding or if I'm writing my own papers. These pages are often very temporary for me, in the sense that maybe I'm browsing documentation and the exact place in the documentation that I'm visiting changes in time. Or maybe I initially believe a paper will be relevant to future work but I haven't read it and would like to get back to it in some time. I could spend the mental overhead of keeping an organized bookmark system that changes with these workflows day in and day out... or... I could just leave the tabs open. Guess which I choose? I have a laptop with 64Gb of ram for a reason. Although firefox is pretty fantastic these days in terms of resource usage.

Not going to expand on your point too much, but I've commented similarly in the past, and I heavily agree with you. There's so much room for innovation in browser UX, Bookmarks and tab archival never really evolved and it feels like we're just stuck in the past.

Part of the problem is that it's tricky for people to innovate on bookmarks in an accessible way, because I'm not going to do heavy browsing in a 3rd-party Chromium fork that doesn't have Firefox's privacy tools or support for Ublock Origin.

But more experimentation with bookmarking systems would be very welcome. In the meantime, here I sit with my 977 open tabs.

I respectfully disagree with both of you. A tab is a bookmark, the fact that tabs are allowed to run background processes and consume a crazy amount of system resources is the problem.

Why the hell is JavaScript allowed to run amok? I understand things like Spotify, but Facebook has no need to stream news feed updates if you aren’t even looking at the page. It really needs to be up to browsers to stop this behaviour because obviously JavaScript devs don’t self regulate.

I'm not sure I follow. Either that or I'm not sure you understand what I'm trying to say.

Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage. The UX isn't designed for that volume of separate pages, the tabs are cumbersome to navigate and still just don't really lend themselves well to large sessions that span multiple topics.

I'd believe the same thing even if Javascript had never been invented, tabs as they exist today aren't suitable for long-term content storage/references. Firefox doesn't even support tab grouping unless you set up another extension to try and hobble in tab tree support.

>Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage.

I'm fine with searching. I want to have searchable fulltext in those 900+ tabs.

Just for a back of the napkin calculation, I took the plain text from this comments page and saved it, and it came to 52kb.

My PC has 64Gb RAM. So even without any form of compression or indexing, I should be able to hold searchable fulltext of over a million tabs in RAM.

My PC also has Terabytes of slower storage.

Now please tell me, why should I ever have to close a tab?

Because Facebook needs continuous doomscrolling for its victims?

Well, that's a tradeoff that I wish wasn't forced on me, because I'd gladly force all those sites to be paginated if it was possible.

Again, I'm not sure what you're arguing about.

I just said "the UX here is due for a lot of innovation." And you replied "I want to have searchable fulltext in those 900+ tabs." Where is the conflict?

Yes, you could build a really interesting tab/bookmarking system in a browser that blurred the lines between tabs and bookmarks and archival. You could do really interesting things with browser history, you could do really interesting things with all of these features.

That is exactly what I just said, the area is ripe for innovation. Currently, you don't have full-text searchable tabs, the UX isn't optimized for your use case. Would be cool if you did though, that would be a feature that would be fun for browsers to play around with.

Just FYI, but Opera does search the full page contents of every tab when using the tab search located next to the minimize button. The browser seems to be one of the only ones innovating right now, at least for power users.

Edit: Now if only they'd fix their bookmark system!

Maybe I should check Opera out again, I used to use it back in the day and it had innovative features back then.

I forget what they called it but you could link one page to another, so I could have an index page open on one monitor and when you clicked on links in that, it would open those links in tabs in a window I had on another monitor.

I wouldn't say I was arguing, just ranting about my desires like most people here. And "again" implies that I've replied to you before, but that was my first reply to your comment. Perhaps you were confusing me with hsbauauvhabzb.

I even quoted the part of your comment that I was replying to.

I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but nvme drives are pretty rapidly approaching ram in terms of bandwidth, so it’s possibly sane to just offload tabs to ‘slow memory’ too.

I don't think you're missing anything. It's frustrating.

Tab management is a UX problem, same with grouping (I think there’s some plugins that manage tree views).

Tabs should be short lived bookmarks, long lived bookmarks could do with a UX update too.

I’m not saying I have all the answers, and we’re probably both half right. We’ve taken concepts which have been around since I can remember (IE5/6 days) and just run with them for 20 years without many substantial changes.

I use Total Suspender to shut down unused tabs and it works fairly well. Unfortunately, YouTube tabs take an overlong time to reload.

> Part of the problem is that it's tricky for people to innovate on bookmarks in an accessible way

Actually, I think it should be very simple. We already have Tree Style Tabs and it has Group-Tabs. Just mirror the Tab-Tree with a Bookmark-Tree, where Group-Tabs are folders, done. There is already a tab-tree-addon doing something similar (was it sideberry?), but it's still a bit fizzy and unstable and needs more polishing. I guess firefox itself needs more optimization in that area.

Similar could be done with Tab-Groups, when done good. There used to be a XUL-addon which added a tabbar for groups. Combined with tree style tabs on the side, this made a really awesome interface. I'm still sad that addons can't do this today anymore.

a tab, a bookmark, and a history entry

are you getting it?

a tab, a bookmark, and a history entry

Opera has a nice way to deal with this problem - contexts (similar to tabs groups in other browsers, but it completely removes unneeded stuff from tab bar) and recently they also introduced pinboards. I recently came back to Opera and I'm quite impressed of how this works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2FbCCCmV9U

Oh, and "Flow" which is something like personal chat app, you can send links and notes and have access to them from Opera on mobile too. It's achievable in other ways obviously, but the workflow here is smoother, because it's built in and sharing link to website is done with one click.

Same issue. Except multiple short-term projects with hundreds of reference tabs, in multiple windows, ranging from groups that would classify as "mood boards" to research.

I settled for Workona when it launched about 2+ years ago after trying many extensions else like OneTab, SessionBuddy, Toby and so on.

I might start looking for something else again as Workona is getting a bit more, commercialized, but it's fine for now.

Bookmarking, history and unloaded tabs are three disjoint systems that all solve the same problem for me, each inadequate for different reasons. The solution to this mess is to unify the three.

Also two of these three, history and bookmarks, are presently bitrotting badly in firefox. Firefox's 'Library' window that shows History and Bookmarks in separate tabs is abysmally neglected.

I'd love to talk to you! I'm making a browser which already has automated ML tagging and full text search of content (should you enable it) so you don't really need bookmarks to do smart search and recall. We also have a really cool and well indexed snippet tool built in for pieces of information you want to keep and share. Id love to learn more about your use cases, if you're interested reach out to parham@synth.app :)

My use case may qualify; I have anywhere from 100 to 1,000+ open tabs across three different devices and four browser instances (three Firefoxes, one Chrome) at the peak. But judging from your website it looks like a full browser (presumably built out of Chromium) and not an extension that can be used in any browser, so, ugh.

Fair enough. The browser is built because we think browsers should do a lot more than just tabs and bookmarks, so it wasn't enough to just add an extension (we have many more features that we wanted a well integrated experience around).

With that said, there are very few limitations to the browser at this point and it will be eventually open source so feel free to reach out as well!

If you want to be innovative, have a look at the browser history function. There was zero progress, but I don't see a reason why the history should not allow me to browse all currently cached images.

That and the fact bookmark may ends up in a removed page, orphan link. Essentially people leave tabs open meant to keep a cache of it, maybe subconsciously. Bookmark doesn't do that.

I don't mind maintaining it, so sometimes I use getpocket for that purpose but getpocket is not organized and frankly is not made for this purpose.

> That and the fact bookmark may ends up in a removed page, orphan link.

Except in the immediate short-term, keeping a tab open doesn't really fully help in that regard, though – even if the browser doesn't autonomously unloads tabs, sooner or later most people will eventually need to restart the browser and/or computer for updates, old pages are eventually evicted from the browser cache, and so tabs suffer from link rot just the same as bookmarks do.

For me the benefit of using tabs over bookmarks is that from the order of the tabs you can figure out what you were doing at the time. With tabs it's also quicker to go back later and close what you no longer need.

Bookmarking systems are completely outdated, but I'm not sure what they should be replaced with. What would help you in this case so you didn't have to worry about losing the tabs if you closed them?

Maybe a sufficiently good implementation of history search could replace the need for bookmarks entirely. Instead of just matching on page titles, match on content as well. Rank results according to relevance and time spent on the page.

Or alternately, maybe bookmarks could become an extension of existing tab management features. Something like Chrome's tab groups or the Tree Style Tabs[1] extension for Firefox, but with the ability to "archive" tabs or groups of tabs into a searchable repository for later reference.

Just some ideas...

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

History should do an automatic Save As, Complete for every page. History search should do a full-text search. Viewing a page from history should open the saved version, with reload or a button to load the original URL.

These are all obvious ideas for computers with lots of memory and disk space, but browsers are one-size fits all designed for 4 GiB laptops and old phones.

These are actually really good ideas, I had never thought of it like this but I like it. History is really all you need in the end. Bookmarks are just a starred version of history, which could easily be included in the matching algorithm you're talking about.

Safari's history search has been able to search content for a probably decade now.

How can they be outdated? I have a bookmark folder at work related to some internal systems that I need to access to do a specific job. Being able to open a bunch of specific URLs at once and then have access to what I need right away is really, really nice and I haven't found any other way to get close.

The same with youtube videos (I like to run hour long videos that create a soundscapes in the background), it is super easy to create a collection that you can open with just a few clicks.

This doesn't mean bookmarks are a substitute for lots of tabs, but I still think bookmarks have a place.

I'm not saying it would be better, but you could shell script your platform's equivalent of:

    start firefox http://example.com
    start firefox http://example.org
    start firefox http://example.net

and that would "open a bunch of specific URLs at once" with a single invocation. Or make a filesystem folder with URL links in it and select many of them and open all at once. Or make a HTML page with some javascript which 'clicks' multiple links at once.

The only thing that does not do is appear in the browser UI itself, and browsers go a long way to try and make sure bookmarks don't either :|

Bookmarks work, but I find them cumbersome. The outdated part for me is having to put them into folders manually, which doesn't have the best interfaces for this. I think that's why so many people load so many tabs at once, if you close the window getting them back is difficult unless you want to hand-sort hundreds of tabs in some cases.

I'd like to see them stored in a database where you can get the data out by running filters. Those filters should be able to search meta data about currently opened tabs, browser history, saved tabs or sets of tabs, and some data from the web pages themselves. It should be simple to search all my currently opened tabs for a list of terms (like sql, select, from, where, etc) and have them be moved from my current window to a new window. I should be able to save these as a set of tabs labeled "sql". If that set already exists, it should combine them, throwing out duplicates. Ideally, web browsers should have the ability to save keywords from pages you have visited in your own little web data store. If I ran across a reference to a particular subject in the past few days, I should be able to search my history and my store of keywords for pages that mention that subject, and load them all into a new window that can be saved as a set of tabs. I should be able to search for web pages in a set of sets of tabs that have been modified in the last hour. Or open all images I've seen on webpages in the last couple of days or that have a keyword in the image name.

Manually sorting bookmarks does work, but I'd like to see something a lot more robust. I can, for example, bring up the history sidebar and see if I can figure out which site I was on that mentioned a particular game or physics term or whatever, but it should be a lot easier to do these things. In Firefox I can search page titles for a specific page, but it won't search through the page contents.

On a related note, it seems to me that all browsers should be able to act as web spiders so that every page you come across through daily operation goes into your own search terms database and that searches should start there before going to one of the search providers. Maybe have them spider links on each page a level or two down so you can find related items easier even if you didn't actually go to the page in question. You would also be able to search the parts of walled gardens you've visited lately, which normal web search won't see.

Anyway, I'm just spit-balling here, but it seems like there is a lot of room for innovation in how we select, save, group, and access web pages.

> I'm not sure what they should be replaced with

Try Edge, the collection feature is a game changer.

I hear your qualms about bookmarks but to me having 100 open tabs does not save you from any of those issues at all, it just exposes you to things you never would have encountered otherwise. Macbooks I've owned randomly crash, always has always will. If I had 100s of tabs that would certainly be annoying to deal with opening that session again and watching my computer achieve liftoff with the fans when those 100 tabs open at once again.

Personally as a scientist I'm aghast you operate this way. If you were my student I would change everything about this system of yours. My word. Use folders for your bookmarks to keep things organized. Save important documentation as local pdfs so you can refer to it when you need to keep working and the site is down and you can't click to new pages (happened to me before). Use zotero for gods sakes to organize your literature. Just do it, promise me you will. You've given me a headache just imagining your workflow :)

People have different work flows and that's ok. No need to be so controlling...

Problem with that is that now I spend my whole life figuring out how to save stuff as an offline pdf or whatever, and the pages always break in some way when you try to save them.

Often when given the option either mucking around with that or just leaving the tab in the background, I end up choosing the latter.

Our tools should be better.

Why can't it be one click to save the whole page? At least the url/text/images... I have terabytes of storage but no easy way to save a webpage.

zotero can save a webpage snapshot in one click. other browser extensions too. bookmarking practically speaking is no different than having a pile of tabs open, you just aren't consuming as much of your system memory.

It sounds like you could just close these tabs once you switch to another one, or maybe have a timer on them so that they auto-close after N hours. There are probably extensions for that.

I use very few bookmarks now, the ones I have are just for websites that may be hard to find, or simply the ones that I visit enough to want a quick suggestion when I start typing the URL.

I almost never regret closing a tab, if I need it I can find it again. If not, it means it was not that relevant, and I might just as well start a new search from scratch to possibly find a better link instead.

> I use very few bookmarks now [...] if I need it I can find it again.

I have thousands of Org files that include hundreds of thousands of references to sources of information, and I'm confused by your workflow. How do you quickly relocate sources of the highest quality information that aren't among the top search results for relevant queries (which is the result of search engine rankings mostly being popularity contests whose participants are dummies)?

For example, I recently bought a new toilet after reading in-depth discussions about toilets at a small web forum for plumbers who were far more knowledgeable than people at related subreddits, etc. I don't remember the name of that forum, but it's in my toilets.org file, along with 452 other toilet-related links. Why would I want to relocate that web forum and the other 452 sources of information in toilets.org the next time I buy a toilet?

Maybe I should have written "web browser bookmarks"? I do use web links and put them in various places, just not in the browser where they lack context.

But still, maybe you end up with this unique link once in a while, and if it's that obscure, I find it worth exporting the page as pdf / html. My point is that in most cases, saving them (as bookmarks) is counter-productive.

> Why would I want to relocate that web forum and the other 452 sources of information in toilets.org the next time I buy a toilet?

Because they'll be outdated by then and you'll end up having to search again. If they're still relevant they'll resurface anyway. I find it hard to believe that your 452 sources all are and will remain better than the top 10 results of your search engine.

Auto discard + tree style tabs = no reason to actually close tabs.

The best solution I've got right now relies on these FF extensions:

Window Titler to have a topic name for each window

Multi-Account Containers to have an account for each window

Temporary Containers when I don't want to use a specific account for a tab

Total Suspender for shutting down all the obnoxious JS that runs in background tabs

In addition, I pin a large # of base sites.

This is all working fairly well, but would be much improved if FF had a Move Tab option that lets me select a specific existing window. DUH - such an obviously useful feature!

> This is all working fairly well, but would be much improved if FF had a Move Tab option that lets me select a specific existing window.

'Other Window'. Can't live without it.

have a look at sideberry

Thanks! That does look like a good solution for moving a tab to a specific window. Serious bummer that it Sidebery doesn't include a Window selector. It appears to want to use panels, but panels can't be named. Turning off the horizontal tab bar in FF is also a hack rather than a simple setting.

(edit) UG. The only way to create a new tab with Sidebery is to use a keyboard shortcut - this makes using Multi Account Containers a serious PITA as you can't just open a tab directly into a container. so frustrating!

The tabs are the bookmarks, we just need better management of tab contents (ephemeral, short term persist, long term persist, etc).

Bookmarks have limitations but I really think the issues most people have are not forming good habits.

It's more of a symptom, how bloated the modern web is.

5+ browser windows on 32mb of ram was never an issue back in the win95 time (so, whole os + browser and 5 pages). Now, we've got 8 gb of ram as pretty much minimum on mid range laptops, soon even on phones (flagships have it now), and browsers have become a biggest memory user (outside of newish games) on an average pc.

In 1995 there was no tabbing (I think?). I have 5+ browser windows with 100+ tabs open, so more like 500 browser windows, not 5.

A reference manager like zotero would help. You can add non-paper references easily also.

...or you could simply download what's necessary/interesting and ensure that you've got the data as it was. Because people seem to think that everything needs to be an app, having something open in a tab is no guarantee that it'll be there when you revisit the tab.

I can't speak for the person you're replying too, but I have somewhat similar use cases sometimes, and what you propose isn't really a fix. For instance, when programming, the documentation could be spread out amongst many webpages (like each chapter or each section in a chapter is a separate page). And that might not be the only reference I'm using. And then add in separate pages for examples, too. It's not always possible to anticipate all your reference/example needs at the beginning of the project, so downloading everything doesn't always work.

If the documentation site is worth its salt it will allow you to download a local html copy or even pdf. I personally haven't seen a documentation site that doesn't let you do this, since its important to store your documentation locally in the event the website goes down (happened to me so its not out of the question).

Oh, no doubt that (or just a single webpage view of all the documentation) _should_ be something that all documentation should provide, but I don't think it's any surprise that not everything has good/ideal documentation.

Often your browser can do this. It's especially easy if you can view the documentation on a single page. Pagination on mostly-text sites is a bizarre habit that's about as necessary as a screensaver.

It's especially baffling with the pagination when the source document the website is generated from is a single markdown document on github most of the time. Just give me that. It's a computer, I don't have to thumb through pages like a bound book, i can ctrl f for my topics.

The problem is it's not simple.

Checkout toby extension, unfortunately only for chrome.

Right-click on a tab.

Select all tabs.

Bookmark tabs...

There's a handful of horrible websites that use enormous amounts of CPU and memory. You don't need too many of those to drag a browser down. I am a thousands-of-tabs user (and yes it's an awesome productivity hack for a number of my workflows, but never mind that) and I don't normally have any problems. Unless I make the mistake of opening some trash website (Slack used to be like that, I've not used Slack in years so I don't know if it still is) and then it bogs down everything.

Slack is still trash.

I segregate browsers by using different Linux users for different tasks (slack, Facebook, general, etc) which works well with my similarly bespoke workflow. The problem with this arrangement is that When Firefox has pending system upgrades it requires all browsers be closed and reopened.

I’m curious about your productivity hack though, I use a grid keyboard layout with ~20 workspaces grouped to four windows for each task/project and one set to emails/fb/slack

I do electronics. I keep my BOM entries as tabs, with a tab for each major component, its distributor page, and often its manufacturer page where the documentation lives. Different projects have their parts chunked together as bunches of tabs, so I can search my tabs for a part number and get that and everything else in the same project is nearby in the tab list. I currently have >3000 tabs open.

Interesting, in your use case, would having like ‘multi page bookmarks’ work?

How many vendors are there? If there’s a small pool maybe scraping their datasets would work well also

Possibly, but bookmarks are trash UX and I hate managing them.

There are few vendors but they have millions of pages and the relevant data changes daily.

Firefox runs on systems with 512MB RAM. [1] Can you imagine keeping a Slack tab open on a system like that? Never mind 100 tabs.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/93.0/system-requiremen...

To be fair, I tried running it recently on a machine that I had artificially limited to one core and 512MB RAM; it was not actually usable, even for static pages. WebKit browsers didn't really do any better, though, which surprised me.

You can’t even boot the Ubuntu cli installer.

As someone who regularly has >300 tabs I can promise you that it is not because of any productivity gains (if anything the opposite lol)

How is that possible, I get FF crashes literally every time I load a moderately intensive website (eg. Google Keep). I still use FF because I can't abide Chrome. My PC is admittedly a bit older (only 6 gigs RAM) but still.

I routinely have hundreds of tabs open in Firefox at any given time without crashes on macOS and Linux. The tabs include everything from documentation, Jupyter notebooks, papers, Jira, Reddit, HN, Github, Gitlab, GMail, Google Keep, Todoist, etc. I can't even recall the last time Firefox crashed for me.

Many hundreds of tabs here in FF on Windows and pretty rock solid.

Agreed.

I've got 99 problems with Firefox, but a crash ain't one.

6GB is ample memory if you're not loading tons of tabs. I run Firefox on Raspberry Pi model 1s and while you have to limit yourself to a tab or two and have plenty of patience it does still work.

What doesn't work is trying to compile the browser on the Pi. The build process has some really gigantic source files that cause the compiler to choke.

Just throwing it out there - most software and OS's adapt to fit hardware constraints. I was running 32GB of RAM, and regularly hit 20-24GB of use in my web browser. When I switched to 128GB of RAM and reloaded my session, my web browser expanded its use to 40-44GB and performed a lot better. While Firefox may be working with 6GB, it may work a lot better with 16GB, for example.

The crashes could be some addon or other profile feature interfering with Firefox's stability. I had a profile that I migrated from FF 1.x, and I finally had to put that one to rest...

I don't know if I've experienced a crash in Firefox in years. I would really suggest taking a look at the crash logs and maybe do a checkup on your machine's health.

You should really check if you have bad memory. I've found firefox to be very sensitive to such an issue

Paste a few links from about:crashes here. If you click on them, you might find the associated bug (if it exists).

Firefox should literally never crash. If it does, that's a serious bug (but especially on Windows, not necessarily in Firefox itself).

Fwiw i left Keep a few years ago because they totally fucked the web client. Wouldn’t work for me on either ff or chrome. Had a few thousand notes. Not sure if it’s any better now but that may be a Keep specific thing

I've only got 4 gigs of RAM, and don't think I've seen Firefox crash in years. And I run Jupyter notebooks, browser games, image processing, all sorts of intensive things on it.

Hum... Firefox breaking on some Google site is surprising, but not extremely so.

Maybe corrupted firefox profile? Try running it with a new empty one.

It's the same productivity hack as the piles of stuff around my house I'm never going to use.

I'm using a screen reader and FF regularly crashes due to some broken memory management in the accessibility service. If this unloading cleans the memory before it gets critical, I'm all for it.

Do you have any crash report IDs in your Firefox's about:crashes page? I can check whether a Bugzilla bug report has already been filed for those crashes.

I think that the issue is known, but hard to track. It shows with NVDA and heavy web apps like Twitter and Messenger if they are running for some time. I'm posting here some of the crash ids, but it is likely that they are not representative. When the browser starts to clock up, it locks the screen reader as well and I'm not waiting for the crash, but kill the process with extreme prejudice. I'd be glad to help in any other way.

bp-cb27fd07-ad27-49bf-b6c2-9dbbb0211005

bp-96eef135-da51-45a8-a792-d28810211005

bp-184a8916-227c-42c4-8308-6e3c00211005

bp-ba6748d3-2d93-4d84-992e-8cf960211005

bp-8bdfb00f-0e30-4cd3-826c-efb910211005

Here is the Bugzilla ticket: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1572915

Unfortunately those crashes do not appear to be related to low memory scenarios. They seem to be genuine bugs in the screen reader. I think the right bug tracking them is this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1691928

As I said, usually I don't wait for a full crash so there is a survival bias in those ids.

The original ticket seems to indicate this is a leak in a Windows accessibility service and so far there was no luck in finding a way to avoid it. That sucks.

Well, if I'd like to have something rewritten in rust, this would be my first choice. :)

Firefox crashes completely at least once a week for me, and tabs crash at least once a day. I had a brand new tab crash the other day, just seconds after I had opened it and visited a text-only site (no JS, no images). I'm running Firefox 92 on up to date Debian on a machine with 64GB of memory; it's not running out of RAM.

I still use it because it's better than Chrome, and I wouldn't touch Brave with a 10 foot pole.

What add-ons do you have installed? I've never had a problem like this in Firefox, in the 10+ years it has been my primary browser (on Windows though). Have you done a memory test too? Something definitely sounds broken here.

I've ran into weird issues like that before. After so many updates, I'm guessing something gets broken somewhere, somehow.

Back up your extension settings and bookmarks, and do a fresh install of it. Bit of a nuisance but usually fixes any weird behaviour in my experience.

Paste a few links from about:crashes here. If you click on them, you might find the associated bug (if it exists).

Firefox should literally never crash. If it does, that's a serious bug (but especially on Windows, not necessarily in Firefox itself).

That doesn’t sound normal. Perhaps your profile is in some sort of inconsistent state after years of usage? Maybe give it a try with a new empty profile as well.

Recently switched to chrome as a many tab used, it’s less stable than Firefox for me.

You may want to try Opera. I found it more stable than Chrome, at least after spending an hour in the Settings and about:flags disabling all the extra features that I didn't need.

My peak is in the high 300s of tabs. It works fine, though I imagine if they were 300 instances of youtube or some webgl game or video calls there might have been more issue.

People on low memory machines, or people on big boxes that read some article about how swap makes your SSD die and tried to disable Windows swapping (or downloaded some "optimization" tool that does that). The last is explicitly hinted in the article. There's a surprising amount of people in that situation.

I've seen this on my 4GB RAM netbook. This is basically what Chromebooks do when you've got too many tabs open, and it's much better than the system trying to thrash itself to death, which is what it does now.

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