We're sorry to hear that Firefox is crashing. In order to assist you better, please follow the steps below to provide us crash IDs to help us learn more about your crash.

1. Enter about:crashes in the Firefox address bar and press Enter. A Submitted Crash Reports list will appear, similar to the one shown below.
2. Copy the 5 most recent Report IDs that start with bp- and then go back to your forum question and paste that into the "Post a Reply" box. (Please don't take a screenshot of your crashes, just copy and paste the ID's. The below image is just an example of what your Firefox screen should look like)

Thank you for your help!

More information and further troubleshooting steps can be found in the Troubleshoot Firefox crashes (closing or quitting unexpectedly) article.

I understand and respect your position. Thank you for stating it so intelligently and calmly. I'm not a fan of the rapid release model myself.

Unfortunately you didn't install the Troubleshooter addon via this support forum so I can't see what addons you have installed.

Can you type about:support into your url bar and press enter? Then press the copy to clipboard button and paste your info here.

I imagine you might say you don't have any addons installed or the ones you have aren't a problem. I'd still like to see them.

I'd also disable hardware acceleration if I were you. I've long found it to be a problem and the causes for weird graphics and painting issues. It might help you in your case. Look in the Options > Advanced > General section and uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available".

If you have antivirus software that inserts its hooks into Firefox, this could very well be another problem. There's tons of software doing this now like Norton, McAfee, AVG, Zonealarm and so on. I believe those extra security addons they insert into the browser can cause unexpected crashing and slowness/performance problems.

But let's assume you don't have any of this stuff, we could still look at your crash reports found in about:crashes and see if we can give you any insight based on that.

Although I've been down the rabbit hole myself with unfixable crashes. :/

It looks like you've missed out on 32.0.1 and 32.0.2 which fixed some crashes. And 32.0.3 which has the latest security patch for big NSS exploit that affects a lot of websites.

See: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/32.0.1/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/32.0.2/releasenotes/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/32.0.3/releasenotes/

So try 32.0.3 at the very least and let me know if you see or notice any improvement at all: https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-32.0.3&os=win&lang=en-US

Also I'm a volunteer here, not an employee.

Thank you philipp and Noah_SUMO for your responses.

My post was made out of frustration over my years of submitting crash reports which seemingly go unnoticed while the underlying causes go unfixed. I really didn't expect a group of dedicated volunteers to look too closely at my machine's specific issues. Instead, I was really hoping that someone with influence at Mozilla might take a long hard look at why they continually introduce new versions of a product which fails miserably at such basic functionality as browsing the web. I suspect that this was not the proper forum for frustration, but I couldn't quickly find anywhere else to vent.

I used to work in corporate IT. I know how difficult it can be to produce a quality bug-free product, especially with numerous programmers doing their best to satisfy (often conflicting) ideas on what's needed/required/wanted. I also know that if I, or anyone in our organization had failed to address a problem with a constantly crashing application, it would have cost us the trust and respect of our user community, if not our jobs.

New "improved" features are worthless if the basic product is so unstable that it frequently crashes.

Here are the most recent crash report ids for my Windows-7 machine (Dell Inspiron 3847, Windows-7 Home Premium 64-bit w/SP1):

   bp-d8308d68-ee01-459e-a795-4f0302141002
   bp-3c9a73e0-9135-4ff7-9a24-d4d5a2141002
   bp-39905161-1f91-4951-bd7b-138522141002
   bp-33071b62-f252-4b80-b1bf-7b16f2141001
   bp-bc2e5fc7-32dc-43b5-9d43-e62402141001
   bp-588f377e-496d-4290-9e4c-61ed42141001

As you can see, I am running FF 32.0.3, with a "small boatload" of extensions installed.

I forgot to disable hardware acceleration when I initially installed FF on this machine. I have now. It made no difference with crashing when done on the old Vista-64 machine.

While I appreciate your willingness to explore my specific situation, I wouldn't waste too much time on it unless it leads to an overall long term fix of the core stability problem.

I come from a generation which expects products to work for their intended purpose - in this case, routine web browsing and related. If I add plugins (in my case adobe flash player) and extensions to improve my experience, I still expect the core functionality to work.

I would hope that this would be the goal of the Mozilla team. If I were in a position to influence policy, I'd suspend Firefox new product development and put all teams to work finding and fixing bugs which prevent the core product from performing basic functions without crashing.

If, as suspected, there are major problems with Firefox memory management, fix them. If there are problems with some plugins or extensions, fix Firefox so that they cannot cause a crash. Even if the problem is customer stupidity (for example adding two dozen memory hogging extensions to Firefox, and running 40 concurrent memory intensive applications on a machine with 2GB of RAM), fix Firefox so that it doesn't crash no matter how unreasonable the demands placed on it.

All the customer sees is the repeated crashes. They don't know (or care) what caused the crashes, only that Firefox crashed and continues to crash. Eventually they lose trust and confidence in the product and move on.

Fix the core and provide a solid platform for future development and growth.

I also prevented my antivirus (AVG) and numerous other applications from installing their "junk" into my browser.

Five of those crashes are related to OOM - Out Of Memory. The 6th is Flash.

Try disabling Firebug when aren't using it [known to cause "memory" issues] or use the built-in developer feature instead. See if that helps.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Tools_Toolbox

Hey MN-Guy, another place where you can get your feedback heard is: https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/feedback

As basic as it looks, it will allow you submit up to 10,000 characters of feedback. And I checked, your 1st post easily fits within that limit. Once submitted, the Input team managing that will include that in a report I believe and that may be seen by developers.

Btw would you mind sharing your list of addons from about:support? I'd just like to look them over. I could even install them all just to see how Firefox performed for me with those.

Also I don't mean to be an apologist for Firefox. I've always said: If it ain't working, it simply ain't working. But after seeing all the evils I've seen over the years of troubleshooting computers and fixing them for a living, I know that all the blame can't be on one product. Especially one as complex as Firefox.

You said it perfectly regarding how difficult it can be to produce a quality bug-free product. And I definitely can't excuse a constantly crashing Firefox. I've seen that many times over the years. Where simply Firefox can not stop crashing on someone's unlucky pc no matter what they have tried. It's best in those situations to switch to another browser and see if you can get better stability out of that. Even to see if that browser can withstand what you put it thru.

I agree with Ed's point about Firebug. It can be a real memory hog. Even when you haven't loaded it yet. I personally saw a huge performance problem with Adblock Plus. Out of all addons to have a problem, this one? B/c it actually *blocks* ads, so naturally it should be saving me memory right? Anyway it added a couple 100 extra MB to Firefox's memory usage and drove up the CPU a bit. I decided to disable it and surf *with* ads for the 1st time in 10 years! :P It was quite a shock to see ads again but my Firefox performance was better! Except for when I hit one of those heavy ad/javascript filled sites. :/

More info here: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-pluss-effect-on-firefoxs-memory-usage/

There is such a thing as bad addons: So I see you have quite a bit of addons. And I'm not sure if you've tried this but once you try it, you might end up loving it. Make a vanilla Firefox install. No addons. If Firefox crashes while in that vanilla state, leave it and don't look back. Maybe you can revisit Firefox in a year or two and see if it has improved.

That's what I do now. Just a vanilla Firefox with one addon. You could add a few small ones and still have better stability.

But since I'm security conscious, I'd say at very least just have NoScript installed (saw it in your crash report "extensions" tab). Browse the web for a week like that, I'd be interested to know if you crash just as much.

I've learned to distrust addons now. Things like Ghostery and the like are bloat and performance suckers even though they claim to protect me. I surf lightly now and keep my setup reasonable.

My memory never goes above 300,000 kb and I rarely crash (once every 3 months maybe). I don't have more than 5 tabs either.

"All the customer sees is the repeated crashes. They don't know (or care) what caused the crashes, only that Firefox crashed and continues to crash. Eventually they lose trust and confidence in the product and move on." ^ I especially agree with that. Crash fatigue will drive people away. But one has to be sure that nothing is interfering with Firefox and that it has zero to minimal addons. Because with so many factors, Firefox can't be perfect in all those scenarios. Imagine if Mozilla killed addon support in order to be more stable? I fear that day is soon coming.

Lastly, I didn't say all that to convince you to stay with Firefox. From a very curious tech standpoint, I'd really like to know if trying a no addon/1 addon setup gives you a new browsing experience. :)

Thanks for the responses.

Yes. I'm aware that recent crashes have shown an Out of Memory (OOM) issue. I'm also aware that this occurs even when I'm not really stressing my machine (I typically have 4GB of free memory on my 8GB machine).

Noah_SUMO, here is the list of addons:

   Adblock Plus - 2.6.4
   Copy Urls Expert - 2.2.1
   Download Status Bar - 11.0.0
   DownloadHelper - 4.9.24
   DownThemAll! - 2.0.17
   Firebug - 2.0.4 
   Flashblock - 1.5.17
   NoScript - 2.6.8.42
   SQLite Manager - 0.8.1
   Status-4-Evar - 2014.07.06.05
   Tab Counter	- 1.9.9
   The Addon Bar (restored) - 3.2
   Toggle animated GIFs - 1.2.1
   Web Developer - 1.2.5

One of the great things about Firefox is that it supports some really useful addons. Over the years, I've tried a bunch of them, some of which were real resource hogs which greatly slowed Firefox. I know that all software is not of equal quality.

I haven't noticed any real issues with Firebug. I like having it available. By default, I keep all panels disabled. When I need it I enable the panels and start exploring (disabling them when done). Years ago, I did note that Firebug seriously degraded Firefox performance when the panels were activated. I haven't seen this recently. I'll have to research this further - the quick look I just made came up with reports from 2007 indicating a memory problem. I'll have to see if this is still being reported as a problem.

I actually use IE, Opera, and Firefox Portable fairly regularly. I've also downloaded a portable version of Chrome, but haven't tried it as yet (a few years back, I installed Chrome, only to quickly uninstall it). Each serves a purpose. For example, when Firefox can't print a web page, I use a browser which will (don't get me started on lazy web developers who design only for a specific "preferred" browser). No one solution is perfect.

I know that supporting applications (such as Firefox) which can be easily "modified" with 3rd party software (such as addons) can be a royal pain.

Mozilla could further accelerate the decline of Firefox by no longer supporting addons. They could tell users that crashes are their fault because they installed an addon (or two, or fifty) from the Mozilla addons site. They could tell users that crashes are their fault because they opened too many windows and tabs (be it one, two, fifty, five hundred, or three thousand). They could tell users that crashes are their fault because they visit web sites with too much javascript or flash objects. All such arguments may - or may not - be valid.

I believe that Mozilla's dramatic decline is a direct result of its rapid release program accompanied by its lack of stability - both in user interface and program crashes. Casual users will switch browsers when the user interface they're enjoyed for years suddenly changes without warning. Add in a few frustrating crashes, and they move on.

Those of us who know what Firefox has been, and what it still could be, don't really want to move on. We want to see it fixed so that it runs predictably, without abrupt changes in the user interface and without crashing on a regular basis.

If Firefox is to remain a viable option, the memory management issues must be fixed and the code hardened to protect it from poorly written web sites, plugins, addons, new features, or gross user abuse.