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Comment by jetrink | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see better stability. My biggest issue with Firefox on Windows right now is that it hangs if I leave it open for several days. Mozilla does have a suggestion on their support site: don't do that[1]:

> Firefox hangs after using it for a long time

> Firefox may hang if left open for long periods of time. To fix the issue, restart Firefox.

So I can choose between closing all of my open tabs at the end of each workday or randomly losing them during the workday. Since having my tabs open when I start work helps me jump back in, I've settled on randomly losing my tabs.

They also suggest using their session restore feature after a hang, but with this type of crash, Firefox is never able to restore your tabs. It also doesn't record the crash report in about:crashes. Overall, not great and it has me thinking of trying Brave.

1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hangs-or-not-re...

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You can get Firefox to open all the tabs you last had open when it starts up, this way you can close and open Firefox whenever you want, and you'll always be right back where you started.

This doesn't save the page state, so if you were filling in a form, you'll lose that information, but it does mean that wherever you reopen Firefox, you end up pretty much exactly where you were when you closed it.

I guess you'd still need to regularly close and reopen the browser as a whole (I do that at end of the day anyway when I turn my machine off), but it may be more convenient than losing state.

"Where you were", except for waiting for every page to reload.

It only loads the page when you switch to it.

You know that this makes it only worse unless you go through all tabs manually after starting to make sure they are actually loaded when you need them?

Having to wait half a minute on every tab switch to wait for that gigantic mess of enterprise grade websites served from an ancient box on the other side of the solar system to load is not conductive towards concentrated work.

are you on dial-up?

I have a 10gb connection and I still see that. Browsers, despite being excellently threaded, are also poorly threaded. Who knew?

Jira takes 10s for certain pages to load for me on a gigabit connection with an M1 Mac. I doubt a dial-up connection could even load a Jira backlog page in under an hour.

Same, but I'm not sure if that's because there's too much data or just because Jira is slower than a dead snail.

Funny you mention Jira, so you're saying there is no information after a day that requires you to reload?

Jira updates without needing to refresh.

Modern websites are simply enormous and slow.

> except for waiting for every page to reload.

When I lose firefox (usually when power outage) I just cycle through all the tabs with ctrl+tab, by the time I get back to the first one it has reloaded (and the others do so in the background). It's not a big deal.

Right click on a single tab > Select all tabs > Reload tabs.

Thanks for the advice - hopefully it helps others. For me, it happens infrequently enough that I am unlikely to remember anything specific for the situation. I never select multiple tabs otherwise.

Firefox has had this feature for over a decade, and it has never worked reliably. It's slightly better now, but still one time in five or ten, it starts up in a blank session or with an error page prompting you to press a button to restore state.

I lived through the days where force closing Firefox was the only way to preserve sessions. Things honestly aren't that much better. I'd take a zero percent chance of success over 80. At least then failure is known and predictable instead of just reliable enough to get you to trust it.

Curious. I've used Firefox for many years and never experienced this problem, not on macOS at least.

I have literally never had it fail, in years.

Works for me, but i ended up disabling it because of an extremely annoying issue, not sure where it comes from:

Opening a second window with CMD+N (mac user just like the sibling) often brings up some random page from my history. This has been so annoying that I disabled the restore feature. Since then I think it hasn't happened again.

Do you use an extension to manage your tabs? I haven't experienced this on stock Firefox, but a few years ago I had Tree Style Tab installed and it would occasionally do this.

(I now use Sidebery.)

No, but thinking a bit about it, it might be I am misremembering and it was on Xubuntu before I switched to mac. Or just fixed.

Currently, the problem might be gone, I will try that out. Thanks for your answer!

Edit: I also don't have these stability issues, but I did have issues with my suspend mode on that laptop, no matter the os (win/ubuntu)

The only time it was happening for me (on Windows) was before the release of Firefox 4.

Very weird to hear this. I've used Firefox as my primary browser for the last 8 or so years and it has never once failed to restore my tabs on Linux, MacOS, or Windows. I'm usually cruising with about a dozen tabs on Windows and Linux, and shamefully had up to 2,400 on MacOS last year. Works great every time. Reboots, Firefox updates, OS updates, you name it.

As someone who used to have hundreds if not thousands of Tabs, Firefox is the only browser that is stable enough and has the best Tab Session restore. So my guess is that something went wrong if you have to constantly restart Firefox.

Firefox has a sessionrestore.js and also a sessionrestore.bak. ( And also sesstionrestore.bak2 if I remember correctly )[1] It is the only browser that took session restore seriously because around ~16 years ago an idiot constantly went on Mozillazine and Bugzilla to file crash report of lost sessions that could have thousands of tabs.

If your sesstionrestore crashed or get wiped, i.e you restart your browser and those tabs were not there, you could also copy and past the .bak files and rename it as .js. It wont be everything you had since the bak file may have been a few hours old. But at least you got something back.

As to crashing. In the old days it was some tabs in the background doing JS with memory leakage. But if I remember correctly Firefox now pause Tabs that is unused for long period of time. If it isn't background Tabs that is causing problem. I would suggest similar to what I wrote to Animats, make a new Firefox profile and migrate all your History, Cookies etc to the new profile and see if it improve things. This used to be a manual process but I believe recent Firefox has made this easier with Firefox Retune or Refresh ( Sorry all of this are on top of my head you will have to do some Google search for the actual name)

If I were to rate Browser stability, it would be Firefox > Chrome > Safari. On both MacOS and Windows. The same ranking for session restore function where I have lost multiple sessions on Safari over the years. And in case anyone wondering why Safari is not stable and that may not be their experience, it is that something on MacOS ( the OS itself ) sometimes triggers Safari to reload all the Tabs even if they were originally sitting idle. This create huge I/O spike and generally leads to crashing or halt for a long period of time. Other than that it is pretty much on par with others.

[1] Those file and extensions names were something on top of my head so you have to google it to double check

This might be a Windows issue rather than a Firefox issue. I have a lot of tabs open in Firefox on Linux, for days to weeks on end, with no issues. The only time I restart it is to upgrade to a new version of Firefox or after installing a system update that requires a reboot to fully take effect.

It hangs on Linux, too. It's seriously annoying.

Plus, there's a delay of up to 2 minutes at launch, when Firefox reads something from disk for minutes, with minimal compute.

Bug reports on this result in denial.

It could be you are using different apps from them so they never noticed. I've noticed some web "apps" have leaks that over time can bloat out memory usage leading to swap thrashes. gmail.com for example.

It was quite visible in top or about:memory or about:processes

It's not computing or swapping. Plenty of memory and CPU time available. It's just Firefox doing its own disk I/O. I cleared history, and that didn't help.

Ah.. No idea then. Windows debugging not my thing. I do know from a discussion w/ a Windows user that loading the same app (Microsoft Teams) took over a minute to load on his windows machine on an HD (and locked up most of the machine while doing so) - I did exact same comparison on my Linux machine and MS Teams loaded with all caches flushed in < 10 seconds, almost instantly with caching. I've encountered similar with Hedgewars and Minecraft.

So maybe there's a real issue but us linux users simply aren't noticing it..

Another thought. Perhaps it is the sqlite db? Maybe a large one that somehow isn't getting vacuumed on shutdown?

Maybe try testing in a clean profile...

Do you happen to have a profile that is 10+ years old? Have you try starting with a new profile? ( Read my other reply )

Have a blast and deploy https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profile-sync-daemon , or something similar to it, if you're not using systemd.

Edding for something more neutral: https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon

> This might be a Windows issue rather than a Firefox issue

I leave multiple tabs open for weeks+ on Windows (and android), I have never experienced any issue (except when windows decides to update - but firefox always restores itself without issue, or I can press ctrl+shift+t to reopen previous tab/session). There must be something specific to the other commenter's setup, whether it be specific addons or specific pages that are causing the crash.

Have you tried using a session manager extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

Thanks for the suggestion, that looks like a good workaround.

Don’t need it, check “open previous windows and tabs" aka save-session on the first page of prefs.

Leaving it open for several days?

I feel like I'm from another planet when I've been raised with the concept of "a reboot a day keeps the blue screen away".

I now routinely reboot my Mac once in a while after I discovered a “helper” daemon from Zoom desperately pinging its mothership one year after uninstallation.

You should be doing that for security updates.

I shut down my work machine at the end of the day if it has written to the swap space; else I just close the lid.

I always shut it down on Friday evenings though.

I haven’t had it hang yet but it does slow down and become laggy after a week or so for me.

You can use “Open previous Windows and tabs” to keep your tabs between restarts. It only works on the last window you have closed though.

It will work on all open windows if you close them at the same time. File->Quit, ctrl+q or cmd+q are all ways to do that.

Same for me. I discovered it was Slack that had some live leak, one time it had eaten 33GB of RAM. An auto-reload extesion did the trick to prevent it from going too far, but I'd really wish Firefox would handle it more gracefully.

Unless I say so, a normal web page shouldn't eat gigs of RAM or tons of CPU.

So wouldn't chrome have the same issue?

I do have similar problems with chrome and have to restart it every few days.

And Safari on MacOS. It occasionally gets into a state where it becomes unresponsive to clicking on links.

I noticed a similar problem with Twitch client.

Given how well web pages are coded, I'm curious whether a Firefox that's browsed to 50 static pages fares. At some point the pages themselves should get some blame (and yes, they can be offloaded, but we're back to balancing responsiveness & long term resource usage, and people are complaining about the pages being reloaded after exit as a delay)

Chrome recently added a setting so you can display a tab’s memory usage when you mouse over the tab. In Firefox, you can check the memory usage of each tab in Firefox’s Task Manager (about:processes).

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/task-manager-tabs-or-ex...

Or use the much more detailed about:memory, that's how I discovered the live leak.

Yeah it does the same for me (macos) after a few days. Open previous windows and tabs should restore all windows though (at least it does for me).

> It only works on the last window you have closed though.

Alt+F, Q exits all windows at once and also restores them the next time you launch firefox.

Ctrl+Q or Cmd+Q for Mac.

Or Exit under the hamburger menu, if you don't want to remember the keyboard shortcut.

I can't remember ever having a Firefox crash in the last few years. Running it on one machine with Win 10 and another with Win 11. Only extension is uBlock Origin. I often will leave it open for many days.

> So I can choose between closing all of my open tabs at the end of each workday or randomly losing them during the workday. Since having my tabs open when I start work helps me jump back in, I've settled on randomly losing my tabs.

I know it's just paper over the real problem, but couldn't you restart at the end of the day rather than at the beginning?

I must add a data point to the contrary: I'm a longtime Firefox user, and ever since they switched to the new Quantum core [1], issues like hanging or crashing (especially with a lot of tabs open) have practically disappeared. Over the last few years, I've consistently had hundreds of tabs open (with up to 100 active) with no problems whatsoever (three different laptops, all running Windows).

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/introducing-firefox-quan...

How many tabs do you have open? I use a Windows VM hosted on my server and Firefox sits open on it for weeks at a time with 20+ tabs open.

It only ever lasts 3-4 weeks because Windows has to reboot for patches at least once a month.

I rarely reboot my workstation; it's often in hibernation for days or even weeks until a security update is waiting for a cycle. Despite this, my Firefox on both Windows/macOS consistently maintains my tabs, each running smoothly in their own containers without any issues.

Do you have any weird plugins or addons by any chance (maybe even antimalware or other malware that you might not have installed explicitly)?

It's strange that it wouldn't report this as a crash. They're normally pretty good at telemetry (sometimes to a fault..)

I only have Bitwarden, uBlock Origin, RES and Vue Devtools installed right now.

Good chances are Firefox is not at fault here as many people run it without issues for months in a row.

Maybe you should check it for suspicious DLLs using Process Exporer or outright attach a debugger and see what the UI thread is blocked on when it stops responding.

Session manager plugins solve this in my experience. It's a little annoying that FF doesn't already have this and you have to use a plugin for it, but only a little.

It does have it.

Go to Settings. The very first thing I see is:

General

Startup

[X] Open previous windows and tabs

Also, you can go to History > Restore last open tabs

Yes but OP is saying that built-in ability doesn't work for him for whatever reason.

In my case I like to be able startup the browser without opening all the prior tabs, but then be able to selectively reopen the prior tabs by window or by individual tab. That's what session managers do.

From their comment:

> They also suggest using their session restore feature after a hang, but with this type of crash, Firefox is never able to restore your tabs. It also doesn't record the crash report in about:crashes

Also the setting you suggested doesn't work if you have multiple windows that close. It only saves one window session.

> Also the setting you suggested doesn't work if you have multiple windows that close. It only saves one window session.

?? It does? I have like 20 windows on the go with multiple tabs each and it brings them all back.

There's people in this thread repeating claims that are literally not true.

What OS? I just tried it against right now on Windows 10 and it only saves 1 window.

I'd be surprised if this is not caused by an extension. Have you tried disabling all of them, or one at a time until you've ruled them all out?

For what's worth, I have my Firefox open since June.

Don't you need to restart Firefox for it to update? Did you not update since June?

Yeah, pretty much

Why would you need to have your PC you browse the web on for days? Why would you be bothered with restarting a browsers at least once every 24 hours. I also call this dubious at best, I NEVER had any stability issues with FX and I pretty much used it since day 1.

You probably one of those people who confuse tabs with bookmarks and think you should have 500 tabs open with only 4 gigs ram and having not shutting your PC or Browser down for weeks. It that causes issues I think Mozilla should have that on low priority.

I use Brave on Linux mainly because I cant justify testing my webdev stuff not con Chromium and I tend to use the same Browser for everything, its also faster.

Mozilla like so brag about speed but I think the lost objectively measured to Blink a looooong time ago. Servo was given to the Linux Foundation and is far from ready. When its ready it will probably be pretty fast.

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