Mozilla Firefox

[jeffjohn2]

Are others finding FF unstable these days? I'm using LUbuntu 15. Switched now to Google Chrome.

[Bucky Ball]

Thread moved to The Cafe.

Not support.

[yoshii]

It used to be unstable on my system, but lately it's been stable. In my case, I disabled unneeded addons and it got more stable. I think maybe some of them were buggy especially during startup when they check for updates. You might have some luck configuring that.

[pqwoerituytrueiwoq]

stable here
i5-4690k/GTX 650 TI Boost
Linux 3.19.0-39-generic/Nvidia 355.06-0ubuntu0~xedgers14.04.1

[vasa1]

Always stable for me

[Bucky Ball]

Stable enough for me, but always crashes when I open the lid from suspend. On the odd occasion it crashes shortly after I've opened the lid from suspend. Tried numerous times and never been able to fix it. Thank the heavens above for 'Session Manager'. I do a lot of research and sometimes have a few dozen pertinent tabs open. Losing them would be a total nightmare and lost hours of work which I can't spare.

[brian-mccumber]

Firefox crashed alot while I was using it until I installed Firefox Developers Edition. I ended up installing Chromium and I use it 95% of the time. There are quite a few browsers available in the software center. Opera is another fairly able browser that doesn't crash alot.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/all/



sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/firefox-aurora
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox

[buzzingrobot]

Are others finding FF unstable these days? I'm using LUbuntu 15. Switched now to Google Chrome.


Boringly stable here.

Got extensions/plugins? Turn them off and see if things change.

[rg4w]

Firefox has been super stable for me. I'd use it exclusively if I could run Netflix with it.

[ChuangTzu]

Firefox has always been stable for me. Usually when people have problems it is a bad addon, too many addons, not enough memory etc... Is your browser cache full/clogged? Did you try running it with addons disabled to see if anything changes? Another option would be to download the Seamonkey binary (http://www.seamonkey-project.org/) which is a much lighter version of Firefox, actually just the continuation of the old Mozilla Suite.

[coldraven]

Been stable for a few years, currently version 42.0.

[Sweet_Baby_Jamie]

+1 for Seamonkey! Formerly Netscape (Navigator & Communicator), which my parents loved. Seamonkey is the default internet suite on the distro I installed on their computer and they were like, "It's just like Netscape!" Except it's a Mozilla project now. Very Firefoxy and Thunderbirdish but alot faster on my old computer.

[night_sky2]

Firefox was crashing on Youtube sometimes but they fixed that in version 42. It's still a very stable, rock solid browser.

[ChuangTzu]

:) Seamonkey Council claims to make it a little more secure as well. I like how it gives the user more control as well with built in features instead of everything being an addon. I think Ubuntu should add it to the repos like they do with Firefox instead of Debians Iceweasel.

[linuxyogi]

I am a big fan of Noscript so I use Firefox most of the time.

[mikodo]

I can't remember the last time that has happened. Years ago, if I had > 20 tabs/pages open it would happen occasionally. Now it doesn't seem to matter how many pages I have open, it keeps on ticking. Same computer, newer M.FF version, less demanding extensions and I have followed advice I have seen here and have done a lot to lighten the load on its' use.

Actually, if someone started a thread on how to speed up M.FF, I think it would be beneficial for us all. I don't feel I am qualified to do that with advice. Though, I do have some things done that others have suggested that I would contribute in that vein.

[Sweet_Baby_Jamie]

Actually, if someone started a thread on how to speed up M.FF, I think it would be beneficial for us all. I don't feel I am qualified to do that with advice. Though, I do have some things done that others have suggested that I would contribute in that vein.

This (https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/firefox) should help!

[Swagman]

When I go to our local newspapers site FF slows to a crawl and often "Grey Screens" . I end up having to close & restart FF

Does the site do that for anyone else ?

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/

[mikodo]

This (https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/firefox) should help!

Thank you!

I'll see what works for me.

[Bucky Ball]

When I go to our local newspapers site FF slows to a crawl and often "Grey Screens" . I end up having to close & restart FF

Does the site do that for anyone else ?

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/

Works fine for me, but if you want technical help with this, please post a new thread as this is a discussion thread in a non-support area. Thanks. :)

[night_sky2]

When I go to our local newspapers site FF slows to a crawl and often "Grey Screens" . I end up having to close & restart FF

Does the site do that for anyone else ?

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/
No but I can see there are lots of ads & trackers on this site, whose loading probably contribute in ''freezing'' the page.

Use Firefox Tracking Protection and you will no longer have to deal with this issue.

http://lifehacker.com/turn-on-tracking-protection-in-firefox-to-make-pages-lo-1706946166

[Bucky Ball]

That's a thought. I have AdBlock Plus and noscipt installed so the site popped straight up. :)

[Swagman]

Just did that....

Wow what a difference. Thankyou for that tip.

[Bucky Ball]

Good news! Take care when things are missing that you think should be there, though. Noscript takes a bit of tweaking and can sometimes stick it's nose in where it's not wanted. Easy enough to train it. :)

[vasa1]

...
Use Firefox Tracking Protection and you will no longer have to deal with this issue.

http://lifehacker.com/turn-on-tracking-protection-in-firefox-to-make-pages-lo-1706946166

Thanks for the link. It provides a link to the research behind tracking protection: http://ieee-security.org/TC/SPW2015/W2SP/papers/W2SP_2015_submission_32.pdf. Worth a read.

Also worth reading is https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/11/12/quantifying-the-effects-of-firefoxs-tracking-protection/

[vasa1]

Just did that....

Wow what a difference. Thankyou for that tip.

What does "that" refer to? Activating Tracking Protection or using the combination of ABP+NoScript?

[vasa1]

Also of interest is this bit from the comments section of Nethercote's blog (https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/11/12/quantifying-the-effects-of-firefoxs-tracking-protection/):


mayank | November 12, 2014 at 7:03 pm |

How does this interact with the tracking protection lists available in AdblockPlus ?

Do those lists+ ABP make this feature redundant?

Nicholas Nethercote | November 12, 2014 at 7:46 pm |

I know that you can run AdBlock Plus and Tracking Protection in tandem. I don’t know anything about AdBlock Plus’s tracking protection lists.
Monica | November 13, 2014 at 9:07 am |

ABP and similar generally use nsIContentPolicy.shouldLoad to stop resources from loading. These content policy checks happen before the network channel is created, and before tracking protection checks. If you run ABP and tracking protection, it just means that ABP will most likely prevent many resources from loading before tracking protection sees them.

[Swagman]

Activating Tracking protection.

I used to use NoScript many moons ago but it got tiresome having to allow this or not allow that

[Frogs Hair]

Update on 12-15 disabled Unity integration/web apps. I gather updates are coming ?

[night_sky2]

Just did that....

Wow what a difference. Thankyou for that tip.
Nice that it works for you.

I also use BluHell Firewall, which is a very lightweight adblocker:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bluhell-firewall/?src=hp-dl-featured

[Welly Wu]

I found that the latest Mozilla Firefox version has bad memory leaks especially with regard to the plugin-container. It's become so slow that it crawls in a best case scenario. I really liked Mozilla Firefox, but I installed Google Chrome and it has been remarkably fast, simple, and pretty secure.

[rewyllys]

Vivaldi released a new beta (https://vivaldi.com/) of its browser within the past two weeks.

I've been using it and am very favorably impressed by its appearance and speed. It's so good that I've set it as my default browser.

[mrroberthadley]

I must be lucky, I haven't experienced any of these issues...

[night_sky2]

Vivaldi released a new beta (https://vivaldi.com/) of its browser within the past two weeks.

I've been using it and am very favorably impressed by its appearance and speed. It's so good that I've set it as my default browser.
I tried Beta 2 of Vivaldi but found the browser to be sluggish, compared to Firefox or Chrome. I think it has potential but it's just not there yet.

[yoshii]

i havent had any issues with Firefox since I upgraded my addons and got rid of the buggy ones.
Also I disabled unneeded extensions.

[Welly Wu]

I have deleted most of my add-ons, extensions, and plug-ins for Mozilla Firefox to no avail. What is weird is that my desktop PC exhibits severe memory leak issues with both the Mozilla Firefox web browser and especially the plugin container while my notebook PC does not. While I like the mostly open source design and philosophy of Firefox, the fact of the matter is that Google Chrome or Chromium are now one of the leading web browsers that are used by many people worldwide. When Google decided to update Chrome and improve it to be more memory efficient, that made it a viable choice for me to switch from Firefox to Chrome. Chrome is a pretty good web browser and since I only need a few key extensions that are available to both web browsers the switch has been relatively easy and smooth for me. One of the key advantages of Chrome is that it is a supported web browser for many websites and services so companies like Netflix, Hulu, Tidal HiFi, Amazon Prime, etc. support it. There is a lot less of a need to add third party Ubuntu PPAs and do some extensive hacking in order to get Google Chrome to support specific extensions and plug-ins since most of the popular ones are already included. I have also found that Chrome is a generally faster web browser and the performance is excellent. Firefox's performance degrades sharply once a specific user has installed the extra add-ons, extensions, plugins, and services that they require in order to add features and capabilities to it and memory leak issues become a major problem that slow it down quickly over time. The same is somewhat true for Google Chrome or virtually any web browser currently on the market, but Google Chrome handles it better than Firefox because the Chrome web store is smaller and it has a more limited selection of extensions and plug-ins compared to Firefox.

I expect Canonical and most other GNU/Linux distributions to continue to support Firefox for the foreseeable future because Mozilla champions open source philosophies and integrates them into the design of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. However, Firefox's popularity goes up and down with each passing month and Chrome has overtaken it at this point. Firefox is an excellent second web browser to be used as a backup choice if another web browser has technical issues though.

[RichardET]

you could always try lynx.

[betachild2]

From my experience, FF is more stable than Opera. and consume less than chrome.

[yoshii]

If there really is a memory bug, Mozilla will probably fix it eventually. You could report it to them and maybe they will repair it that much faster if you document it well enough.
Personally, I am somewhat skeptical because I think a lot of users would be reporting it in mass although maybe you are right and it's dependent upon your particular configuration.