I’m doing my best to continue using Firefox, but it’s becoming incredibly annoying, and I’m seriously at my wit’s end and just about to give up on it permanently.
I’ve noticed during video calls it causes my computer to completely freeze up and require a reboot sometimes.
And on my phone, sometimes when I’m reading, it will just make my screen completely stop responding to me and I have to force reboot my phone in order to fix it.
I know that Gecko is the only other web engine option to fight Chromium’s Blink, but I’m seriously just about fed up enough with Firefox to say fuck it.
Servo or ladybird may be the only real hope left.
Try deleting your Firefox profile (back up your bookmarks, passwords, hell your whole profile first) and doing a clean reinstall. Firefox support has the deets on how to.
I haven’t had that experience at all, and I use it macOS at work, Linux at home, and my Pixel 8 everywhere else. I did have a few issues on my old phone when lots of tabs were open, and I attributed it to running out of RAM.
Could you perhaps be low on RAM? If Firefox is your main, Chromium could work better in a one-off situation if it only has one or two tabs open.
Try restarting Firefox the next time it happens and see if it recurs when fresh. If it works fine after a restart, you’re probably running out of RAM.
I generally only keep one tab open at a time at max 2. I’m not one of those people who has a million different tabs open. Because I hate clutter.
Hmm, I tend to have 100+ on desktop and 10+ on my phone, and I haven’t seen anything similar to what you mentioned.
Do you have a million addons or something?
Nope, ublock origin on both and tor snowflake on desktop
If everyone else says it works fine and it’s just you, well, I wonder what’s wrong with your system. Firefox is just a symptom. It could just be Firefox. It could be any number of other things wrong. For me a great example is when webgl fails I blamed Firefox. Turns out I have Nvidia drivers broken and it failed to enable hardware acceleration. A system locking up because of a rogue all? I smell something else wrong.
Chromium works fine on the same system
I’ve never encountered any of these issues with Firefox on Android and Windows.
Android is the one that’s freezing up my screen entirely and Linux is the one that I’m having video call issues with.
What phone do you have? And are you running anything like an anti virus?
Oneplus nord n200 5g, and no. I do use a private DNS system wide from control D that blocks out known ads and malware, but nothing else on the device is affected.
Okay, that’s the problem. 4GB of RAM isn’t enough for modern Android. I know because it’s what I have on my tablet and it’s bullshit, if I use certain apps, others in the background are force closed, etc. All I can say is that with some of the changes taking place with the switch to Jetpack Compose, Firefox is getting better in terms of a smaller memory footprint, but that’s little consolation for you now and your urgent/present needs.
BTW, well done for using a private DNS for stopping the problem at the root.
I’m running Lineage OS and everything else runs fine. My RAM usage doesn’t seem to be the problem, or at least not that I can tell. I’ve looked under the system monitor and developer options and seen no problems.
As I said, I have a low memory device so I’m talking from experience.
In fact Google itself says that devices with less than 6GB of RAM should be running Android Go rather than Android 16.
Honestly, devices designed to be obsolete are a pain for everyone. We need devices that are designed to be usable in a few years, that means shipping them with decent processors, memory and storage. By Android 17, the minimum memory requirement is likely to be 8GB and there’s going to be a bunch of people wondering why some apps, the more complex ones like browsers, don’t run smoother.
Maybe a solution is that Firefox starts serving older devices an ESR.
What’s your system and phone and what are they operating on? This sounds less like a Firefox issue and more like a system issue.
Desktop is Linux Mint Debian and phone is Android 15. I know for a fact chromium works and does not freeze up my system on LMDE.
What is your desktop CPU and RAM and your phones SoC?
Desktop is intel, phone is snapdragon. Firefox is the only issue on both.
You need to be more specific. “Intel” can mean anything from a 90s chip to something released recently.
I can’t remember the exact model number. I can tell you that it’s from like 2010, but I can’t get more specific than that because I can’t remember the model right off hand. What I can say for sure is that with chromium it does not freeze and my fans also don’t run as hard.
Librewolf
First of all, isn’t that just a Firefox fork? I would think it would have the same problems. Although it may be better. For second, isn’t it only on desktop? It wouldn’t solve my phone problem.
Ah, yes, phone. I believe at their website, they have recommendations for phone.
It’s not “just” a Firefox fork. They’ve completely broken with Firefox, afaik, over privacy and monetization. But you can still donate, if you have the means and are inclined. They’re wholly deserving, imo.
Orion uses WebKit and allows Firefox and Chrome extensions.
The only issue I’ve come across is with the Android version. When I’m typing in the address bar, Firefox Suggest shows the page I’ve previously visited, but as I continue typing it disappears, then I keep typing, it comes back again, etc. So if I stop typing on the wrong letter to click the link, it’s no longer there.
I feel you. I have similar issues.
I’ve ALWAYS been a loyal Firefox user pretty much since it released but it’s just unusable for some things now. I never used Chrome and I’d like to avoid it but it’s getting difficult.
I luckily have Graphene on my phone so I use Vanadium, which I’m trusting is as solid as people say, but on my Linux desktop I’m kinda shit out of luck. I still mostly use Librewolf but issues persist. I ended up mostly using Chromium but people said that wasn’t good so I have started using Brave since I was told that was better but I’m not particularly happy with it and I’m not convinced it’s much safer than Chromium, which I never considered particularly safe anyway. No real options, I guess.
Funny thing, I had switched off from firefox to zen for like… 7 months and it was the best browsing experience, but then I accidentally broke a thing when messing around with the zen mods, and had to reinstall, and when I did it turns out I had an old version, and the new one was so shit I came back crawling to firefox
Anyhow :3… im also kinda on a hunt for a browser that fits my needs that isn’t chromium based, but nothing I found particularly had the stuff I’d want over firefox, so im just using it cause it’s my “fine enough” fallback option
