Firefox The Most Unstable Browser?

[rayzoredge 2]

Clicky

It was interesting to read. We all know about the heavy memory usage that FF takes up, but over 2 YEARS no one has made an attempt to fix it. Someone points out too that the bug isn't limited to RAM, but the bug even bogs down the CPU. I suppose that this would be a real issue for people with slower computers, but with high usage rates of the CPU just for browsing multiple tabs, the life of the hardware is at stake.

The reason why it's being stated as the most unstable browser is that apparently with the high CPU usage Windows can't cope and crashes FF. I have never personally experience FF crashing because of this (sometimes I have TWO windows open with 4-8 tabs each), but I HAVE experienced crashing at one site: TorrentFinder. What happens is that there seems to be an ad or something on a randomized timer that causes FF to bug out and shut it down unexpectantly... the whole program goes kaput without any warning or any dialogs asking you if you're sure that you want to close multiple tabs. On restart, it treats it like a crash.

Anyone else experience this crash or frequent crashing of FF?

[stoun 0]

Me, I have never to meet bugs since I do not open more than 2 windows or mitres, then I am always fan of FFThank you,

[Saint_Michael 3]

back when I was using FF 1.5 it would crash a lot, however, I think the date and the post is a bit outdated in the sense that the only way to crash the current version of firefox is to overload it with add-ons and what not. Firefox does freeze on me sometimes but thats due to using most of my RAM and running several programs at once. I would say that fpost is coming from 2005 because of hte fact firefox first came out in 2003 and so I would say that topic is no longer relevant 2-4 years later when firefox 1.5 first came out.

[shadowx 0]

Ive never had this type of crash either and ive had over 1O tabs open at one time in the past when searching the net for info and pages, the only thing that does it cause it to hang is some JAVA and other multimedia items such as PDFs but it usually catches up again and runs normally but sometimes goes non-responsive in a small number of cases.

[rayzoredge 2]

No one has come up with an actual fix for the memory and CPU usage, though.

 

There is the memory leak trick with about:config, but it only takes effect when you minimize the browser.

 

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For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about when I mention the memory leak tweak:

 

1.) Type in about:config into your address bar and press Enter.

2.) Right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Boolean.

3.) Enter config.trim_on_minimize and press OK.

4.) Set the value to True and press OK.

You can also set how much RAM you allocate to FF:

 

1.) Type in about:config into your address bar and press Enter.

2.) Right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer.

3.) Enter browser.cache.memory.capacity and press OK.

4.) Set the value to whatever you want and press OK. Make sure that the number is a power of 2 - like 16MB would be 16384 - and that you don't set too high of a value, or there's no point in doing this. Too low of a value will probably have FF crawl.

[arnz 0]

Hadnt had any problems with Firefox thus far, I've heard little about the crash, but never really got it on any of the computers I've used with Firefox. So as the OP may have said, it could have been a issue with the older computers which are slower, with less mb of ram (for example, a old P3 866mhz with 128mb of ram). Apart from that, as for memry guzzling, would be interesting to have a look at it as personally I hadnt really checked how much RAM/Memory/Cache it uses yet.

[DeM0nFiRe 0]

Personally I've noticed that both FF and IE7 are RAM hogs with their tabbed browsing, so I just stick with IE6 for now. It works fine for me.

[csp4.0 1]

I have done a comparison, on my computer opening 2 FF browsers has the same CPU usage and RAM usage as 1 IE browser. I personally prefer FF

[chaosdesign 0]

I shifted from IE to FireFox about a year ago, FireFox is a great browser with less issues than IEThe RAM & CPU hogging issues are minor in comparison to the benefits. Considering Microsoft took a backwards step with IE7 is no surprise, I find that each time a new game comes out, that you need more resources than the one before. So why would browsers be any different????If you are worried about how much resources a Bowser takes up, than my suggestion would be to update your hardware to cope.Just another thought, how much RAM does your PC got, If yyou are running XP and only have 256MB Ram then i would advise another 256MB Ram, XP Requires a minimum of 256MB to run, 512MB Ram is my Minimum for a PC running XP

[rayzoredge 2]

If you are worried about how much resources a Bowser takes up, than my suggestion would be to update your hardware to cope.
Just another thought, how much RAM does your PC got, If yyou are running XP and only have 256MB Ram then i would advise another 256MB Ram, XP Requires a minimum of 256MB to run, 512MB Ram is my Minimum for a PC running XP

It's hard (and sad now) to believe that people are running XP with less than 512MB of RAM. I'm so glad I upgraded from 1GB to 2GB.

Nowadays, I would think that 2GB would be typically great for most users, with 4GB on the gaming horizon.

But a BROWSER shouldn't be taking up, let's say, 100MB of RAM for 9 tabs (FF). Or 34MB just with one window (IE).

[Saint_Michael 3]

I like to make one correction on that post razor, what browser do you know takes up 100MB of RAM, right now firefox is taking about 2MB of RAM right now on my laptop, and in order to pull that off you would have to add almost every ff add on to get it that like that.As for your earlier post razor about the about:config I tried that before (made a post about it) didn't see much of an improvement, and you have to remember not every computer user is a programmer and have like a ton of software on there computer. Of course I like to know a person who bought a computer brand new with on 512MB of RAM, and I doubt you will get one person saying no less then 1GB of RAM.I would have to agree that most people are running 1-2Gb of RAM, while the small group is at the 4-8Gb range in RAM, and the rare computer users using more then 16GB (New Mac computers).