16.04 crashes and Firefox is slow

[russkyca]

I don't know if the recommended step or procedure is to upgrade 16.04 but I am starting to find it unusable and it's the reason I have another partition with 17.04 - although it crashes as well. Maybe it's an 'Ubuntu thing.' But, at least Firefox is not incredibly slow on it. On 16.04, Firefox 55 just takes forever to start up and to load a page. It's not my internet as I said, if I boot up 17.04 and use FF, Chrome etc., (any browser), it's normal (speed). Speed tests of my ISP (speed) are at the normal stats as well.

Is it time to move on from 16.04 because if I'm going to have issues, I might as well have a more recent OS!

However, 17.04 has crashes as well - including browser crashes....but, it's always the same type....everything freezes including the mouse. I have to hit reset/on/off on the computer (hard reset). It's annoying.

[ajgreeny]

These sort of problems are most likely caused by some hardware incompatibility with the OS, or a bad driver for something such as your graphic card.

What hardware do you have?
Show us the output of
inxi -Fzx which you may need to install first.

Please use Code-Tags for terminal output. See my signature below for a How-to

[lammert-nijhof]

I expect you have a HW problem or maybe a video driver problem, you can do the following things yourself.

Make sure your PC is not full of dust, resulting in high temps, CPU throttling and random power-offs to protect e.g. the CPU. For the same temp reason check whether all fans are spinning.
I would first check the SMART statistics of your drive. You can find those in the Disks utility at the main menu and look for warnings with respect to read or seek errors or bad sectors. It also gives the HDD temperature, which should be below 50°C/122°F. Once I had crashes and a very slow PC, when the HDD got too warm, due to insufficient cooling in the case.
Secondly run the memory test program from the boot menu for at least an hour.
Thirdly run the disk benchmark of the same Disks utility for your OS partitions. If easier switch off the write part, because we are mainly interested in the read throughput and access times. If you select the partition; the benchmark is in the menu below it. Anything clearly below 70MB/s is too slow. Access times should be faster then 30 msec. Modern disks run over 100MB/s, older 80GB disks still run at 75-80MB/s.
Fourth, check the "Additional Drivers" app and try whether changing the driver of your video card helps.
If nothing helps, give us more details about your hardware as requested by ajgreeny.