Firefox 24 is a crashy heap of crap

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Ever since I upgraded Firefox to the latest version (a few days ago) it has been completely insufferable.... it is basically now only barely functional, at best.
It crashes constantly, and it is driving me demented.
It often will even crash while simply loading up the page where it's saying how embarrassing it was that it's just crashed... before any other pages are even restored !

I reset the poxy thing, so now it has no add-ons... which means it is also an insufferable heap of gaudy advertising, annoying pop-ups, shitey highlighted spam links, and constant spam windows opening whenever I click anything.
Holy cow, the horrible spammy rubbish advert at the top of the page feels like it's about to give me an epileptic fit with all of the flashing it's doing... but fortunately I haven't got epilepsy.

I have also tried opening it in 'Firefox safe mode'... and it's still a heap of crashy crap, even when run in safe mode with no add-ons or extensions.

Does anybody know of any way to salvage this heap of bollocks web browser, because generally speaking I quite like Firefox.
It's not been too bad up until this latest update. I haven't used another browser for a while now.

Or, which other browser would you recommend I use instead ?
I reckon probably something like Opera, Safari or Chrome ?
I wouldn't touch iExplorer with a bargepole, personally.

Well, I'll finish here because this hideous Firefox is probably about to crash.... and without the add-on for recovering text, that would be a pain in the backside as all of this text will be lost.

dear sweet mother of f*ck..... it's done exactly that TWICE in the 3 minutes since writing that post.
This is ridiculous.

And now it has a giant garish ugly shite flashing advert on the left claiming I "can win an iphone 5" (yeah right, and pigs can fly) ... and a spam shite advert flashing at the top of the page as well, insisting that I have to download some no doubt sh***y malware to fix the alleged windows problems which are giving my PC poor performance.
Frankly, the only thing wrong with my copy of windows is that it has Firefox installed instead of a browser that actually works.

Last edited by Ladywoofwoof on 18 Oct 2013, 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

.. and again while writing that last post, too.
F*ckadoodledandy.
At this rate, I might have to use iExplorer (shudder) to download Opera, or something.

<--- Doesn't have a bargepole but has been using IE for years and it worked fine. Current version: IE10 (with Windows Eight).

I have no problems with Firefox v24.0 ... maybe it's your settings or one of the add-ons ... ?

Try either Chromium (IE Chrome w/o all the google extras, or Opera 12.16? Don't use the current version of Opera.

It has far too many security holes for my liking.




As I have already said, I reset Firefox so it has vanilla settings.
It has no add-ons or extensions installed because of this.
And, it won't even run in Firefox safe mode.

Lots of people are complaining about the same problem.
You just got lucky.



Thanks, I'll give Chromium a try.

Spyware, or viruses, in your computer maybe?

What Operating system are you using? I have Firefox running in Mac OS X 10.8.5 as well as Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Service Pack 1.

Also, where did you download Firefox from? If it came from someplace other than mozilla.org or its mirrors, then you'll get all the garbage you're seeing. I got burned the same way.

If you're running Windows, have you tried uninstalling Firefox via the control panel, then reinstalling from a fresh download of Firefox? IIRC you should be able to run FTP from the command line. For example

c:\Windows>FTP releases.mozilla.org
Name: (enter anonymous)
Password: (enter ftp)
ftp> cd pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/win32/en-US
ftp>get "Firefox Setup 24.0.exe" <--GET THIS FILE, AS IT IS THE FULL INSTALL FILE AND NOT THE STUB INSTALLER!
ftp>quit


Before you attempt to reinstall, you might want to run a registry cleaner to clean the junk out of the system registry. You also might run a full scan with a GOOD antivirus and malware package, like avast antivirus and Spybot Search and destroy (the only two security packages i trust for Windows)

if you're running Mac OS X open the {HOME}/Library/Preferences folder and trash the org.mozilla.firefox.plist file. Restart Firefox and see if it takes care of the issue. If not, trash the Firefox.app file, trash the new org.mozilla.firefox.plist file, then redownload and reinstall Firefox.

If you're running Firefox on Linux or FreeBSD or Solaris, good luck! I have little experience troubleshooting those OS'es

Normally, I'd mock you here, but having recently tried IE 9 and 10, I was surprised to find that it's actually pretty good now.

I use a nightly build of WebKit, and I never experience any problems.

No problems with Waterfox (basically FF optimized for 64 bit) here, though I do have an adblocker installed. Sometimes it'll fail to load a page as if I'm not connected to the internet, but not problems aside from that.

If you're on Windows, I probably wouldn't use Chromium as you have to compile it (I think...), update it manually and there's no guarantee that it will be stable. If you're on Linux I'd use it though, because whatever distro's repos will likely have a well-tested stable version. I would reinstall if I were you, maybe delete user profiles and stuff in appdata and if you still have problems, I would go with Google Chrome. Also make sure it's set to block pop-ups and install an adblocker.

Firefox tester reporting in...

I use Firefox betas, with tons of extensions enabled by force, and I barely ever get crashes. When I do, things ordinarily get resolved within a few hours. What you have to remember about the Mozilla foundation is that crashes actually help them debug new versions. You're right that the competition usually has more security flaws, and this is why. No matter how unstable a given version of Firefox seems on your OS, Mozilla bug reporting is most likely the most reliable, and the foundation is motivated to fix individual users' problems as a result.

23 crashed a lot on me, 24 seems pretty stable except when i get near my memory capacity, about 3 GB (virtual mem is disabled). 22 and below seemed to crash only right at mem capacity if it were the process to reach it. developers seemed to have added something to reduce mem usage when getting close to capacity, which seems to be buggy. less buggy in 24 than 23. all in all it's my fav browser. i also use sea monkey and ie when i have to. chrome isn't installed and i would rather avoid apple products if i can.

Firefox 24 crashed every single time for me until I updated one plugin. I haven't experienced any problems since then. At least, mozilla doesn't force updates on you so it's possible to run older version until your problem is fixed.

Can't blame you for confusing apple with google. Or did you mean safari?

WebKit underpins Safari, Chrome & Android's browser. It originated at Apple.

Edit: I just moved to 25 beta, smooth sailing thus far.

I'm using Windows 8.




Well, I thought it was Mozilla ... but I don't really remember, and so now I'm not so sure.

None of the crap was showing up to begin with because I was running NoScript... but it's been hellish ever since Firefox insisted on resetting - and thus shut off all of the extensions. NoScript must have been worked half to death from blocking all of that junk !




Peretologic Regcure reckons that it found all manner of issues with the registry when I ran it, but fixing things up seems to have made not a lot of difference.
Chromium seems to be a bit less crashy than Firefox 24 was, but it's basically been doing the same thing... although thankfully, a bit less often.

I've been using AVG.
It seems to be pretty good.
Is there a reason I might want to be changing to use Avast Antivirus, instead ?



I would disagree with this, purely because the Mozilla crash report software has been failing to run when Firefox crashes on my system.
Without that functioning properly, they won't be receiving any information about when and why the browser is crashing... and consequently will probably be making no endeavours to remedy whatever my individual problem is.
So basically, Firefox 24 is so uselessly unstable on my PC that as a result, the Mozilla bug reporting software is hopelessly unreliable.


On the upside, it looks as though Chromium automatically recalls text put into posts such as this one, and reloads the text when restarting after a crash (no extension required). which was good to find out.

I might give Firefox 25 beta a go next, hopefully this will work a bit better.