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The Internet Firefox Mozilla

Newest Firefox Browser Bashes Crashes (cnet.com) 134

Posted by msmash from the bashing-crashes dept.
Nobody likes it when a web browser bombs instead of opening up a website. Mozilla is addressing that in the newly released v53 of its Firefox browser, which it claims crashes 10 percent fewer times. CNET adds: The improvement comes through the first big debut of a part of Project Quantum, an effort launched in 2016 to beef up and speed up Firefox. To improve stability, Firefox 53 on Windows machines isolates software called a compositor that's in charge of painting elements of a website onto your screen. That isolation into a separate computing process cuts down on trouble spots that can occur when Firefox employs computers' graphics chips, Mozilla said.
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Newest Firefox Browser Bashes Crashes More

Newest Firefox Browser Bashes Crashes

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  • So, now they've put the renderer in a separate process with reduced privileges? Like, for example, every other web browser (including Edge and Safari) did for security last 5 or so years ago? Uh, yay?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by higuita ( 129722 )

      yes, but firefox was build as monolitic, separate each layer required lot of changes as every layer calls were all over the code. That was one of the reasons google started with chrome, trying to break firefox modules would be slower than rebuild... the problem with rebuild is instability, breaks with existent code and requires a huge amount of resources (just look to the netscape 4.x to mozilla migration)

      mozilla have done that slowly and they started with plugins and then pick the next problematic layer (j

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Nice try, but every time I've upgraded your browser it broke or removed features I use, and added useless junk on top.

    I used to upgrade to the latest software as soon as it came out, but it feels like the likes of Microsoft and Mozilla are intentionally trying to train me to treat every software update with utmost suspicion and as a measure of last resort.

    • Re:Nice try EnsilZah. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Nobody cares about your experiences with Firefox when all you have to say is the same thing people generally say about basically every software upgrade ever: "I don't like change".

      • Change for the sake of change is dumb. Software people can't understand the fact that something might have a design end. Has the shape of a hammer changed in the past hundred years? No. Are these changes beneficial to anyone? Has an interface study been done on the results? I switched to Chrome after Firefox picked the "australis" look and became Chrome Junior.

        • 100 years might be a bit of an understatement; claw hammers may have been first invented by the Romans shortly before the common era (I cannot find any hard sources, unfortunately), and can be seen in artwork no less than 500 years old. One can be fairly plainly seen at the left-middle of this engraving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by darkain ( 749283 )

      This is exactly how I feel about Adobe as well. Every new version of Photoshop since one of the patches to CS6 all the way through the various CC releases has constantly added new bugs and instabilities to the application. It seems like every company going on these very short release cycles dont give two fucks about stability and literally takes YEARS to fix bugs now instead of months.

  • Chrome crashes on me less than once a month (I typically have to reboot for security patches before Chrome chrashes). Firefox must be crashing a *lot* if a 10% reduction is significant.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It doesn't. It's nothing like Chrome. I use Firefox exclusively, on several different platforms and I tend to keep the programme open for many weeks. I haven't had a crash in years.

      • No browser crashes... (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Firefox does not crash for me under linux, hundred tabs open, many windows.

        What usually crashes is the plugin container.
        Some dammed java or flash locks up.
        Fortunately I can kill the browser or browser window from a terminal.

        Never crashes the system.

      • That is my experience too, on several computers and operating systems.

    • Firefox must be crashing a *lot* if a 10% reduction is significant.

      It's crashing on me a lot. The combination of Fb and G+ punches it right where it counts.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tgv ( 254536 )

        As I posted above, I haven't had a crash in a long time, but indeed, I don't use fb nor g+.

    • As a standalone statistic, 10% isn't very useful, because it's not 10% across the board for everyone. In some ways, it's less impressive than that, and in others, it's much more impressive.

      The situation being addressed here is that certain graphics card drivers are notoriously buggy, such that processes that use normal accelerated graphics APIs will randomly crash for certain OS/driver/chipset combinations. Historically, Firefox has had to play whack-a-mole by finding patterns in reported crash data that sa

  • Great, but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I haven't had a crash in Firefox in years.

  • crashes, what crashes? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I use Firefox on several desktops and laptops at work (Windows and Linux) and I can't remember the last time I had a crash. I usually only have 2 or 3 extensions loaded and maybe up to 20 or so tabs. Memory usage seems to be a bit lower since v52 came out, but that might have to do with dropping support for most plugins.

  • Firefox 57 sneak peak (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We at Moz://a are pleased to announce that Firefox 57 will be the Chromium source code with all the icons changed to the Firefox logo. Now we don't have to actually work on our browser we can make fun of extension developers and see all the hard work they done wasted while we roll in the Yahoo sponsorship money.

  • I track browser crashes using splunk (Score:3)

    by Skuld-Chan ( 302449 ) on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @04:30PM (#54265717)

    On 6200 Windows clients and 1900 Mac's. Firefox is above and beyond the most crash prone browser - it even tops IE 11 (Fwiw Chrome > IE 11 > Firefox are the most used browsers in my organization according to software metering).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Other browsers "don't crash" because they're broken into multiple processes. When one goes down it doesn't register as a crash.

      • If a process (like a Chrome.exe tab) crashes - windows/mac logs it. In our environment that log is forwarded on every client and index'd on site.

        Even though we have less Firefox usage - it still crashes more than IE 11 or Chrome (they both crash too, but far less - even though there's more usage).

  • Firefox crashing implies you're using it right. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Presence Eternal ( 56763 ) on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @04:34PM (#54265737)

    I use Firefox as my main browser, and I understand the problems some people have with it. Thing is, I tend to see Firefox's flaws as emerging from using it with lots of addons as intended. Adblock + noscript + various EFF tools are bound to bork it from time to time. I'm kind of impressed it's as stable as it is. Not to mention I'm the kind of crazy person who has 300 tabs open right now.

    I used to use Opera as my secondary, back before they dropped Presto and abandoned their very functional email/rss components. Now it's Chrome with adblock.

    It might be ironic that my favorite mobile browser was Safari with adblock. Never had a single problem with it. Plus Apple for all their faults has been willing to tell bloatware peddlers to go hang themselves.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The problem, as it has been from the very start with Firefox, is that it's fairly monolithic. On Chrome you have an those extensions, but the browser is built in such a way that parts of it crashing doesn't bring the whole thing down.

      Mozilla are trying to fix this, but people hate them for it because it will end up breaking most of the old extensions. Combined with breaking the UI they are kind of struggling now.

  • Bashes Crashes? (Score:3)

    by zifn4b ( 1040588 ) on Wednesday April 19, 2017 @04:47PM (#54265819)
    Marketing genius! </sarcasm> Is it tough on crashes? Does it stamp the crashes out? Does it get the crashes before they get you? I could keep doing this all day. If you'd like I can hire my marketing skills out on a very affordable rate.

  • When Firefox added extra security. They added a huge bug. I now find that I often get a black screen, after which no pages will load properly. I've largely been unable to use Firefox for the past few weeks.

  • Check my post history, I've been posting about that browser for a decade. I was THE diehard, I loathed Chrome.
    I fought tooth and nail to keep Firefox, I hate many things Chrome does, which FF does better. It looks better, the plugins (I use) are much better, it's a great browser with a little work.

    EXCEPT IT IS IMMENSELY SLOW.
    and I don't mean "oh golly, that's not snappy" I mean it's SLOW, frequently delays, lag, lockups, freezes, script errors (slow, then error), more slow, lag, it's just atrocious, it's a

  • Firefox crashes once a day here since version 52 and even with 53. With 51 it was stable. Possibly Quantum is more the problem than the solution?

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