Firefox crashes 3-8 times daily

[tomcloyd]

I admit to using Firefox heavily, and having recently returned to it from Chrome I like it so much you couldn't pay me to go back, but...

I really am having too many crashes. I can't see a pattern. I can always relaunch and get all my open windows back, but this problem seems odd and is a nuisance.

This only happens when I have a lot of windows open - say 50+, which doesn't seem excessive to me.

I don't see anyone else reporting this issue. Am I the only one?

[Qqmike]

Hi Tom. Just curious about this, googled Firefox crashing with many tabs open?
and got many responses that look right on but I didn't study them.
https://www.google.com/search?client...utf-8&oe=utf-8
There might be something there; it certainly looks like you are not alone!

[whatthefunk]

50 plus windows? Thats a bit excessive to me... Do you mean tabs, or seperate windows? What kind of hardware are you running? Windows and tabs eat up resources.

[GreyGeek]

I'm running FireFox 32.0.3 without any problems, but I rarely have more than a dozen to two dozen tabs open at a time.

[SteveRiley]

This only happens when I have a lot of windows open - say 50+, which doesn't seem excessive to me.

Try this... open 50 windows or tabs, then drop to a command prompt and check how much free memory you have left. Maybe Firefox just doesn't gracefully handle an out-of-memory condition?

[jlittle]

I can always relaunch and get all my open windows back, but this problem seems odd and is a nuisance.

This only happens when I have a lot of windows open - say 50+, which doesn't seem excessive to me.

One or more of those tabs is badly upsetting firefox, and I would expect flash to be involved. I suggest resetting your firefox by renaming your .mozilla directory.

I used to have a severe memory usage issue using google groups in firefox, where each tab would use ~350 MiB initially, before settling down to ~160-200 MiB per tab (often to display one screen of text, kiB needed not hundreds of MiB). I installed more RAM to avoid the problem, but have noticed since then the ridiculous memory usage has been sharply lessened. Just tested with 20 tabs and about 900 MiB was used; Steve's suggestion would apply if you don't have any swap.

[whatthefunk]

It could also be addons. Which ones are you using? Have you tried running Firefox in safe-mode?

[tomcloyd]

Update: FF still crashes several times a day, depending upon how heavily I use it. But I routinely run 2-3 windows (sorry about the confusion about this in original post), with a total of 30-75 tabs. I've started offloading tabs into the OneTab addon (very nice!), and that seems to help, but the crashes continue. Can't see the pattern. I'm not having a swap problem that I can see. Right now I have 2 windows and 35 tabs, with 17% of 6000 MiB swap used.

I don't see anyone else complaining (did a search of the forum). Addon problem? Maybe. I'm running 17 addons, with 7 more loaded but disabled. I could run without them for a while (safe mode), but then it's not the browser I need to get work done. So....I just crash and relaunch several times a day. An imperfect world.....

[Snowhog]

I'm going to suggest that you are experiencing memory creep, which FF is known to suffer. That you are using it with 'many' addons and with HUGE numbers of Tabs open, I'm not surprised you are getting crashes.

[dtr]

Personally I haven't had any troubles with Firefox crashing in a long time. The last time I did, I was was able to narrow it down to one add-on/extension. I find changing the Flash plugin to click to activate improves performance too. You could also check/manage the memory in a new tab about:memory or you can see the health report about:healthreport or if you know what to look for in the crash reports sent to Mozilla you can check the report for yourself about:crashes You could as a last resort, re-install and start fresh by removing your local firefox profile folder found in /home/your_name/.mozilla/ or check this out https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...ips-and-tricks

[tomcloyd]

I'm going to suggest that you are experiencing memory creep, which FF is known to suffer. That you are using it with 'many' addons and with HUGE numbers of Tabs open, I'm not surprised you are getting crashes.

You well may be right, as I clearly have what appears to be a memory leak going. I have to reboot once a day, and sometimes more often, to free things up again. I've taken to saving open tabs I want to return to, into OneTab, and that does seem to help. As for "huge" numbers of tabs, 50-80 tabs doesn't seem huge to me, but then I don't have much of a context for comparison, frankly.

So, no real fix on the horizon.

[tomcloyd]

Personally I haven't had any troubles with Firefox crashing in a long time. The last time I did, I was was able to narrow it down to one add-on/extension. I find changing the Flash plugin to click to activate improves performance too. You could also check/manage the memory in a new tab about:memory or you can see the health report about:healthreport or if you know what to look for in the crash reports sent to Mozilla you can check the report for yourself about:crashes You could as a last resort, re-install and start fresh by removing your local firefox profile folder found in /home/your_name/.mozilla/ or check this out https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...ips-and-tricks

Thanks! Lots of things to pursue, and I will. Much appreciated!

[GreyGeek]

My last post on this topic was five months ago. Since then I have notice an increase in FF's stability. Also, it seems to just freeze for long periods, or just hangs. I switched to Chromium but it lacks features that FF has which I miss. Someone in this thread mentioned Chrome and gave a link. From that link I installed the 64 bit deb package.

Chrome is not even similar to Chromium, which amazed me. It is now my browser of choice. I even use it on this iPhone 6+, instead of Safari, which is an abominable copy of Konqueror.

[SecretCode]

Chrome is not even similar to Chromium, which amazed me.

I have both and they're identical in appearance - except for colour accents! Chromium uses slightly more memory with one blank tab. ... And with three busy tabs. The UI including menus are almost identical.

Actually they're different versions so this may not be representative:
Chrome Version 40.0.2214.94 (64-bit)
Chromium Version 37.0.2062.120 Ubuntu 12.04 (281580) (64-bit)

I'd still call them "similar" though. Wouldn't you?

[SecretCode]

By the way I have somewhere around 360 tabs in 9 tab groups in my currently running Firefox, and it's using less memory than Chromium, a touch more than Chrome.