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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, Firefox isn't quite keeping up.

One issue is that for me at least, Firefox crashes too often, and when it does, the entire browser goes away, not just the tab. That's annoying.

Another issue is that something seems to be lacking performance-wise. I messed around a bit with Invoke AI, and the canvas is painfully slow even on modern, high end hardware. I thought it was just the code sucked. Nope, it's silky smooth in Chromium.

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YMMV. Firefox hasn’t crashed in years for me.

Same. I vaguely remember a time where this happened from time to time, but that is years and years ago.

I use Firefox daily as my default, have roughly about 250 tabs open at this stage. I've not closed my browser in the last 6 or 7 months.. It's not crashed yet.

Is it possible that it's some specific website your visiting?

Is your browser or system unpatched since then?

.... Let's not talk about that ;) But yes.

There appear to be two specific issues for me.

One is that I use Bluetooth headphones, and with my coming and going sometimes something gets into some weird state. Youtube freezes, and sometimes Firefox locks up and crashes as well. This is probably Pipewire's/Fedora's fault primarily, but Firefox gets caught in it.

I also notice that a network drive getting stuck gets Firefox killed. Like if a NFS drive (which I'm not using right now, mind you) just isn't mounting because the VM that provides is down, and I open a file dialog, Firefox will get stuck then get killed after a few seconds.

I guess you could say that neither is exactly Firefox's fault, but I'd say it needs better error handling.

These issues aren't present in Chromium browsers?

Chromium at the very least doesn't crash entirely. Yeah, it gets stuck for a while on hung network drives, but then it keeps going.

I’ve not seen a single application yet, which handles audio system failures properly when it happens during runtime, and most of them fails even when it happens before starting them. And it’s quite frequent unfortunately with my gazillion different Bluetooth and wired headsets across multiple laptops. It’s definitely not Firefox specific. It’s basically standard.

There's probably something to blame in pipewire/fedora's configuration.

I know that at least Pulseaudio has a "null" output driver, so if the audio hardware suddenly disappears, at least under PA it's possible to have applications happily deliver audio into the void without noticing a thing, and then switch back to hardware when it comes back.

I'm not sure if Pipewire deals with this worse or just isn't configured right.

Had to install an auto-reload extension to reload the Slack page every 15min, as it would live-leak some js or DOM stuff causing Firefox to run out of memory eventually (ie 10s of GB).

Haven't checked recently if it's been fixed, I just leave it on.

interesting. I can't remember a time where a browser crashed on me during the last 15 years or so. and I do heavy dev work with them, and also browse with tens of open tabs multiple hours pretty much every day.

Yesterday, Firefox crashed on my girlfriend's PC. I can't remember seeing this happen before at all. It was such a rare thing that I'm investigating what happened now so I can send logs and/or create a bug report.

> thought it was just the code sucked. Nope, it's silky smooth in Chromium.

Is that a Firefox problem, or did they maybe code it Chrome-first and use some of Google's forced web "standards"?

I've used solely Firefox for years and I can't think of time where it has ever crashed. What triggered yours?

The "silky smooth on chromium" is because people code specifically for chromium, the way we used to for IE. Usually its a small change, but no one bothers, and we pretend like a browser engine mono-culture is fine and dandy.

I use Firefox, Edge and Vivaldi on a 8 year old mac book pro. I do not notice any difference in performance with any of them.

Same installation, just different browsers:

https://daleglass.eu-central-1.linodeobjects.com/videos/fire...

https://daleglass.eu-central-1.linodeobjects.com/videos/chro...

As opposed to the other comentors here, my Firefox has crashed, but only because I've ran out of ram due to having loads of electron based vscode windows open eating up all my ram. Although Firefox wasn't the only app that crashed and this wasn't a Firefox specific issue.

Definitely not RAM. I've gone for way overkill and put 128 GB into my desktop because launching 32 GB VMs is a thing I do.

The vast majority of time that leaves an insane safety margin.

Too small RAM should never be an issue (except in very extreme cases, like a given data cannot fit in RAM at all, or there is no swap), especially not when another app uses it. It should just slow things down, because data transfer between swap and memory.

I had Firefox crash regularly when my GPU started failing, don't know why. But before that and after getting a new GPU zero crashes in years with 100+ tabs open regularly.

that is plain false info. firefox is running each tab on a different process. also invoke AI works fine.

either your ff configuration is f'up (which kinda is the browser's fault) or you are doing something wrong.

Interesting. If you go to the canvas and try to paint something there, how does your brush move?

For me it's very noticeably slow, for the entire UI. Zooming, moving, drawing, is all slow.

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