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Comment by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd | Hacker News Reader

Session restore in Firefox has been lazy for a long time now (the tab only loads when you activate it). It doesn't take longer than loading a single page.

How often do tabs crash for you? That's the real issue if you ask me. I'm on Nightly (with Electrolysis!) and the last crash was over 2 months ago.

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I have a crash probably every day. Usual culprit is Flash.

That's weird, since Flash runs on its own process (plugin-container). Is it actually crashing the whole browser?

It shouldn't. At least on Windows I've gotten used to killing the plugin container about once ever 2 days. Firefox itself crashes once per month, maybe less.

Firefox = rock solid. Flash = porous rock, at best :)

I find when Flash (plugin-container) goes down, it takes both Firefox and Chrome down with it. Running Windows 7 at work.

It locks up the entire browser so I have to force kill it. I'm on Windows 7.

You should go to about:support and use Refresh Firefox which will probably fix most of your crashes (outside of Flash-related ones which should only be affecting the plugin and not the browser).

Counter-anecdote: I use Firefox all day every day and usually have 100s of tabs open. I haven't had a legitimate full-browser crash in years. I've had a hang that resulted in me having to kill the process probably 3 times in the last year. I usually don't enable Flash, but when I do, it usually doesn't crash, and when it does, it just takes out all instances of Flash currently running; doesn't bring down the whole browser. I'm on Linux.

If you're getting a lot of Flash-induced crashing, you may want to check into alternate implementations of Flash, like Gnash, Lightspark, or even Mozilla's Shumway.

>It doesn't take longer than loading a single page.

Yeah, because it only loads a single page. It doesn't actually restore anything. Sometimes the pages it restores aren't even the live version but a cached one, I have no idea when or why it does that. It's absolutely infuriating.

Infuriating? It's one of the main reasons I've switched back to FF (that, and tab groups)! I didn't like have every single tab reload on restore as I don't need 90% of them until much later.

Right-click any tab -> Reload All Tabs. If you want a permanent solution, go to about:config and double-click browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand.

No need to use about:config, it's on the first page of options.

Oh! You know I was staring at that... Yeah, just click "Options" and then uncheck "Don't load tabs until selected". Thanks!

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