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Comment by sockaddr | Hacker News Reader

Recently switched to Linux and only installed Firefox. When you force yourself to use it, it's doable. I think only once in the last 6 months did a website not work (my dumb HOA website). Other than that, it's more than sufficient.

It crashes sometimes but if that's the price for not having coercive software controlling my life, so be it.

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Not claiming, that your experience isn't true, but: Firefox hasn't crashed for me in years! And I am a real tab hoarder. 400 tabs and more are not so uncommon for me. Then again I don't allow arbitrary websites to run all sorts of shit scripts. It might or might not be your hardware, or it might be the websites you visit.

Another tab hoarder and for me the only times Firefox has crashed is when I have upgraded Firefox but not yet restarted it.

Yeah, I think there are measures I could take to help the situation but it's a little low on my priority queue at the moment. The crashes are rare and not really a big issue for me.

Not the OP, but I consider it a soft crash every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox. Annoying behavior they've included a couple years back.

If I understand what you're reporting correctly, then that's something your OS "included a couple of years back".

If you install Firefox from Mozilla's site, it won't have these update problems. What's happening is that your package manager is swapping Firefox's bits out from under it while it's running. Firefox's built-in update system doesn't do that.

Which is not to say that I think you shouldn't be using a packaged version of Firefox. Personally I'm running Nightly so I don't have the option anyway. Generally speaking, I vastly prefer sticking to my package manager's stuff.

I just wish the package managers would fix their Firefox updates. (I don't know what the right fix would be, and I imagine it could be hard.)

Then someone at Redhat was probably bribed by some Googler, cause it only happens with Firefox updates /s

Joke aside, Firefox is aware that it's been updated and the new tab states that I have to restart my browser. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Firefox, I just expect it to have everything it needs to function, in working memory. I've been using Fedora for close to 14 years now, Firefox always installed from system packages, and the updates always replaced the existing files on disk without it affecting my application experience. No other desktop app I use has this behavior after updates while they where running.

A big fuss? No, got used to it already. But I still consider it a soft crash state that I encounter with Firefox.

You just probably use the web browser much more often to catch it after an update. And afaik, the reason for this is that they can only maintain a known good state this way, as well as making freshly patched security patches available as soon as possible.

Strictly, Fedora doesn't support doing updates while the system is running (or at least they don't recommend it).

An alternative that might be smoother in this regard: use a flatpak version of Firefox instead. (Firefox is in Fedora's flatpak repo, and on Flathub.) GNOME Software updates flatpak apps in the background, and you just get the new version the next time you open the app.

Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.

Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).

GNOME is not my cup of tea. And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing), I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.

I use Fedora because it has newer software, pretty stable in my experience, and my knowledge is transferable to RedHat/Enterprise Linux. But I stopped buying into most of Redhat's desktop innovations a while ago.

> Not sure from which perspective your comment comes from. dnf update or dnfdragora updates (if you prefer a GUI) are all done while the system is running.

Fedora doesn't recommend doing updates that way :) See https://fedoramagazine.org/offline-updates-and-fedora-35/

> Sure, distribution upgrades nowadays are just like Windows update requiring a system reboot and a black screen with a useless progress bar to stare at (that's also a pretty annoying relatively recent addition).

Silverblue doesn't have a black screen with a progress bar — it just boots straight into the updated version. I assume Kinoite (like Silverblue but with Plasma instead of GNOME) is the same.

> And until flatpak delivers tangible finegrained software sandboxing (at least Android level sandboxing)

Flatseal may provide what you want here: https://github.com/tchx84/Flatseal

> I'm not really interested in using it for software that's already packaged in the dnf repositories.

Fair enough. I mentioned it because it removes this problem:

> every time I update Firefox in my OS, and it won't allow me to spawn new tabs until I restart Firefox.

It's cool, I get it. You find these adequate solutions to existing problems. But they are replacements of some issues for new issues. That's why I'm not onboard with Redhat vision for a Linux desktop, that's why I stay away from GNOME, Flatpak, rpm-ostree distro flavours. They are almost an 80% of something, then a coin toss away of being deprecated/ignored.

Those tools are not teaching me how to fish, but how to carve out and build a fish rod, fish anatomy, and anything in between. When all I want is the proverbial fish.

Things got dicier in the server space since the IBM acquisition, e.g. RedHat 8 experience was anything but good, and their entry into the container space with UBIs. A pile of things breaking, when switching the Dockerfile from CentOS to RedHat. Even more ridiculous things, like RedHat 8 offering a license that allows X install for free, but then the ISO wasn't even distributed by torrent file and the download speed for me in EU was under 100KBps.

But anyway, here I am ranting about RedHat, when I didn't want to. My main complaint is still with Firefox, it wants me to restart the browser but I can use the existing tabs just fine for any web browsing. Nothing is bricked by the update, just Firefox deciding when I should restart my browser, just like the very vague Windows experience I left so long ago.

Er... just yesterday I had the crappy update experience that everyone is talking about. And that's using Firefox Nightly, with a downloaded build. So I'd need to look more into this to understand what the actual situation is.

Hm... though now I wonder... I also had a cron job that ran me out of disk space. I wonder if that contributed to make it more like the external file replacement situation?

I don't think the package managers are at fault here and this would be much more easily fixed in Firefox itself by not touching the filesystem after Firefox starts - resources are already bundled so you only need to keep a handle open (package managers don't change file contents but replace what the filename points to) and only fork instead of executing new processes (keep a pristine process running to fork from if you want).

Don't forget to disable all prefetching, landing pages visiting previous sites, studies and pings on each start and shutdown to improve privacy.

Hmm, interesting, because I don't force myself to use Firefox. I use it because it's just plain better than Chrome, in that I can configure it just the way I want.

I'm curious what OS you're running. For me, on macOS Firefox performs the best out of all browsers I've tried, but on Linux it feels a bit sluggish.

I use it almost exclusively on Linux. It was much worse just 9 months ago. I do close and reopen it every week or so, it reopens all my tabs per my config, and it never gets sluggish on me if I do that. I agree with commenter above. I prefer it, with its flaws, because of configurability. It's been 6 months since I ahve been forced to open a site in Chromium. It tends to be some bloated highly commercial (F500) site that requires that.

I'm on Arch Linux.

My experience is the opposite :)

I have to use macOS at work, and it makes Firefox much more janky than it is on this 10-year-old Linux laptop.

(Though I rarely use other browsers on macOS, so maybe they're even worse.)

Damning by faint praise shows how bad it is right now for FF. Back in the golden age of Firefox (arguably, before the versions started incrementing like Chrome), it was a pure pleasure to use, even if certain things like ActiveX refused to work. Now, if we "force ourselves" to use it, it's "maybe OK".

I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.

"Soft" crashes where websites simply don't load or function properly in FF, but do in Chrome, are far more common.

I'd say that's usually a problem with websites and not the browser.

Many websites are just designed with the 80% of most frequent configurations. And when autoplay is disabled, the browser window is too narrow, a special font isn't loaded or a cookie is blocked all bets are off.

I never had Firefox crashes until Ubuntu 21.10 which I think made Firefox a snap, now I get crashes when it tries to load fonts. And I get that colour scheme thing now too.

You can still run firefox as normal app, and it's rock solid.

My data point, FF has worked fine for me on MacOS and Windows for years.

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