Hacker News Reader

Comment by grepular | Hacker News Reader

Your opinion is out of date.

It's funny you should say that, because outside cross-browser functionality testing, Firefox has been my default browser since back when it was still called Phoenix. The reason I complain about Firefox's memory leaks and general flakiness is not because I hate the browser and want it to die, but because I like it and I'm sick of having to kick it over and restart it every day so that I can use it without the UI freezing for ten seconds out of every thirty.

Naturally, I've grown quite accustomed, in those rare cases when I muster the temerity to express this opinion, to being shouted down for it. I am surprised to see that happen on Hacker News, though; on 4chan it'd be de rigeur, of course, but I expected better here. I don't know why, though; after all, it's precisely the same attitude which characterizes Mozilla's approach to bug reports.

You must be unlucky then, because I've been using Firefox for years, on various versions of OSX, Linux and Windows and have never suffered issues as severe as you describe. And over the past year or so, things have just got better and better. From what I've seen, most people don't have the problems you describe with recent versions of Firefox.

I been using Firefox since v2. I have all the problems the parent does. I love the browser, send off my crash dumps (about 3 a week) I want the browser to be better and they are getting there.

The memory issues are bad, but only apparent with you have lots of tabs open for long periods of time. I can at times have over 50 pages open and it is around this time things start to crash. Why 50 pages at one time? Well that is how i use my browser. Also the fact that firefox still does not have its tabs on their own threads is frustrating for these crashes as it takes out all tabs, where as sometimes when chrome crashes you don't always lose everything.

Anyway FireFox is a great browser just wish they stopped following the chrome team around like lost puppies.

I don't have these issues (often)[1], and I usually keep 100 - 400 tabs open on a 6 year old Dell Inspiron 1525. I'm not sure what you mean by losing all of the tabs because my session is restored on restart and I don't lose anything.

[1] I probably restart or crash once or twice a month.

I have hundreds of tabs open all the time and Firefox runs for weeks; Windows or something else gives out first and requires a reboot.

But my main point is, with hundreds of millions of users, what are our anecdotal experiences worth?

> ...with hundreds of millions of users, what are our anecdotal experiences worth?

To Mozilla, any user's experience means little enough at best. On the other hand, any user's "anecdotal" experience of how well Firefox works, or doesn't work, means a hell of a lot to her.

I would much much rather be using Firefox, but I use Chrome because of the issues being mentioned. Firefox becomes unresponsive for me left running for more than a few days.

Mozilla dev here! Sorry to hear you're having so many problems! A few things to consider:

1. Many of Firefox's stability issues are due to 3rd party components (plugins and addons). I recommend disabling all of them, restarting the browser, and seeing if the issues persist. You can then selectively enable (or click-to-play, for plugins) them to improve your experience while maintaining stability. 2. You could also try a profile reset [0], which tends to magically fix some problems (especially if you've had the profile for a while).

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...

I appreciate your taking the time to respond to my concerns, but honesty compels of me the admission that I'd appreciate it more if you could offer something more substantive than the browser equivalent of "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" Of course I have, and if it'd solved my problems, I wouldn't still be complaining about them on Hacker News, where the response is certain to include an overwhelming preponderance of "works just fine for me!"

On the other hand, per a decision made a couple of years ago, I also stick with the ESR release track rather than keeping up with the mainstream releases, because I got tired of having to restart for updates even more frequently than for performance reasons, and also of having the user-interface tablecloth yanked out from under me every time the major version changed -- on that latter point, incidentally, if I want Google Chrome's UI, I know where to find it.

It's possible that running Firefox 24 ESR means I've missed out on some recent stability and performance updates, although I had the impression that both sorts of fixes were generally backported to the ESR branch; given my prior experience, I'd be astonished (and delighted) to see those missed updates make a major difference, but who knows? Perhaps in June, when Firefox 31 ESR drops, I'll find myself astonished and delighted.

If you look in about:memory, you can try to diagnose a bit where the memory is going. This may or may not result in anything that will be useful for you.

I appreciate that it is frustrating when your browser is misbehaving, but your generic complaint "my browser leaks like a sieve!" cannot possibly garner anything other than generic suggestions. Memory issues can be caused by buggy websites, websites that use some feature that Firefox implements poorly, addons, plugins, buggy graphics drivers, and so on. Issues that come up after days of heavy browsing can be particular hard to diagnose.

> although I had the impression that both sorts of fixes were generally backported to the ESR branch

ESR mostly just receives security updates, plus the occasional crash fix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com