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Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

I've liked FF, but yesterday I officially switched to Chrome. I don't think it's going to be a perfectly smooth switch, but I felt I had no choice.

The stability of FF has been dismal lately. This is largely a memory issue: my system starts to bog down if I leave FF running too long, so I have to restart it at least once a day. But more recently, it hasn't been able to survive more than a couple of hours. It will randomly "tear off" a tab, and then freeze itself using 100% of one CPU core, and must be killed. I assume this is a badly-behaved extension, since I haven't heard the world screaming about it, but I haven't been able to determine which one it is.

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It must be an extension, especially given the recent release of Firefox 7 and its vastly improved long-term memory usage situation.

Anecdotally, I routinely have around 100 tabs open and Firefox runs for days on end, if not weeks. It only gets closed for OS updates requiring a restart.

Oddly, I also recently switched to chrome. Firefox started randomly freezing up. Sadly, it looks like some corner-cases have slipped through the FF quality control now that they are releasing faster.

I notice that Firefox 7 has gone to 7.01 today. What's changed? It doesn't seem to have helped me.

7.0.1 was just a small change to fix an issue where Add-ons would disappear from the Add-on list after an update: http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/09/28/issue-discovered-w...

It must be your extensions. Disable all extensions and try FF.

I use FF all the time with 10s of tabs open, and I don't have any issues with stability. My FF window is open for days and some time for weeks.

Agreed.. I restart FF maybe once a week and most of the time it's sitting open with 10-15 tabs. If you're having stability issues with FF it's a plugin IMO.

I'm sure it is an extension. The thing is, I can't easily figure out which one. Since it takes a couple of hours for the problem to occur, it's too much of a big deal to try a binary search of all extensions to figure it out.

Compare to Chrome, which has its own task manager, which shows CPU and RAM usage of each extension.

I remember reading that FF now has something similar. It might be in the nightly or a plugin or something though. Unfortunately I can't find it now :( Sorry

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