Your gut may be leading you astray?

I also find that firefox crashes much more than chrome based browsers, but it is likely that chrome's superior stability is better handing of the other 90% of crashes.

If 50% of chrome crashes were due to bit flips, and bit flips effect the two browsers at basically the same rate, that would indicate that chrome experiences 1/5th the total crashes of firefox... even though the bit flip crashes happen at the same rate on both browsers.

It would have been better news for firefox if the number of crashes due to faulty hardware were actually much higher! These numbers indicate the vast majority of firefox crashes are actually from buggy software : (

I run Firefox Nightly, and occasionally a little Chromium stable. Both are running under Wayland, which I believe is still not considered stable in either. In the last year of Firefox, I had one full crash (the first in maybe three years), and about four tab crashes. Plus duplicates from deliberately reproducing issues. All but one (which I’m not certain about) were Nightly-only, fixed long before reaching stable. Were I running stable, I suspect I would not have had more than three crashes of any kind in the past five years.

I can’t say the same for Chromium. Despite barely using it, I had at least one tab or iframe crash last year, and there’s a moderate chance (I’ll suggest 15%) on any given day of leaving it open that it will just spontaneously die while I’m not paying attention to it (my wild guess, based on observations about Inkscape if it’s executing something CPU-bound for too long: it’s not responding in a timely fashion to the compositor, and is either getting killed or killing itself, not sure which that would be).

Frankly, from a crashing perspective, both are very reliable these days. Chromium is still far more prone to misrendering and other misbehaviour—they prefer to ship half-baked implementations and fix them later; Firefox, on the other hand, moves slower but has fewer issues in what they do ship.

10% of crashes does not imply 10% of your crashes.

Doesn't mean 10% of any crashes either; the OP narrowed it down to roughly 1 in 20, then pulled a factor of 2 out of, well, thin air to get 10%.

Are people getting so many FF crashes? Mine rarely does. I leave it running, opening and closing tabs, for weeks on end.

Same, been using it for over 20 years and probably only a handful of crashes in that time. But I mostly look at dead simple web stuff (like hn) and run aggressive ad blocking so I might not be representative of the average user

I run FF on Mac laptop, Windows/Linux laptop, and Windows desktop and can’t remember it crashing in years.

Naively, the more stable a piece of software is, the more likely that its failures can be attributed to hardware error.

Its pretty stable for me, except it has some memory leaks. Generally I gotta leave heavy pages open for days at a time to notice, but if I don't close it entirely for over a week or two it will start to chug and crash.

It really depends on what you're doing with your hardware. Overclocking, overheating, unstable power supply, and things like that increase the likelihood of memory bitflips.

Slack caused frequent FF crashes, until I realized Slack has (had?) a live leak. Added an extension which force-reloads the Slack page every 15 minutes and that stopped the crashing.

The only browser I’ve crashed in the last decade is mobile safari, and that’s probably because it runs out of memory

Months in my case. But I have ECC. Every five years I build a new development workstation and I always have ECC.

I can also go months and don't see crashes (though occasionally I'll hit a memory leak where closing tabs doesn't release it so I'll restart firefox then), but unless ThinkPads come with ECC I don't have it.

Does "Weeks on end" = 4? Or do you not take the latest update every 4 weeks?

I run Gentoo, and compile FF from source. I don't think the Gentoo repos update the FF version that frequently. And even if they do and I compile the latest one, I don't automatically quit the existing running version.

That's easy to ignore.

How many DRM-heavy websites do you use? Widevine is a buggy thing.

macOS crashes more than Firefox for me.

Yes

> Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect

RAM flips are common. This kind of thing is old and has likely gotten worse.

IBM had data on this. DEC had data on this. Amazon/Google/Microsoft almost certainly had data on this. Anybody who runs a fleet of computers gets data on this, and it is always eye opening how common it is.

ZFS is really good at spotting RAM flips.

I think they claim that if your computer has bad hardware, you're probably sending a lot of _additional_ crashes to their telemetry system. Your hardware might be working just fine, but the guy next to you might be sending 30% more crashes.

I haven't seen a single firefox or chrome crash in months now, you should really stress-test your hardware.

I can't recall a single Firefox crash in at least a decade. What are people doing? I run ublock origin, nothing else. I do sometimes have Firefox mobile misbehave where it stops loading new pages and I jave to restart it, but open pages work normally as do all other operations, so not a crash exactly. Happens maybe once a month

Edit: more context, I power cycle at least once a week on desktop and the version is typically a bit behind new. I also don't have more tabs open than will fit in the row. All these habits seem likely to decrease crashes.

We have 5 computers running Firefox. One computer has regular Firefox crashes. I've done some memory testing that didn't detect anything wrong.

I've tried all kinds of things software-wise but keep getting random crashes.

I wonder if I should do a longer memory test, maybe some CPU stress testing at the same time...

If you want to dig into it, you can post a bunch of that computer's crash reports (navigate to about:crashes) on bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Firefox&c...

Or you can view several of them and see if there's a common pattern in the "Signature" field. Firefox really should only be regularly crashing if: (1) there's a real bug and the thing that triggers it, (2) you're running out of memory, or (3) you have hardware.

I don't know what the odds of faulty hardware are for a randomly chosen user, but they're much higher for a randomly chosen user who is seeing regular crashes.

Yeah. Lately even if I OOM my system, firefox doesn't crash so easily, individual tabs do.

For me, OOM effectively crashes my system 90% of the time, usually caused by firefox (chromium too), if a website goes out of control (rarely it's caused by too many pages open, as tab discarding takes care of that).

And there's an app for that, aptly named stressapptest (originally developed by google). In the (now distant) past, I found it to be much more efficient (in terms of runtime until fault detected) and effective in finding memory related (RAM chips or memory controller) defects than memtest.

firefox crashes... decently often for me, but it's usually pretty clear what the cause is [having a bunch of other programs open]. every time i can recall my computer bluescreening [in the last year~, since that's how long ive had it] it was because of firefox tho.

this may have something to do with the fact that my laptop is from 2017, however.

firefox should not be able to cause a bluescreen, that is a bug somewhere in the kernel (drivers)

> Bold claim.

I agree. Good thing he doesn't back up his claim with any sort of evidence or reasoned argument, or you'd look like a huge moron!

To be fair, he doesn't really:

> And because it's a conservative heuristic we're underestimating the real number, it's probably going to be at least twice as much.

The actual measurement is 5%. The 10% figure is entirely made up, with zero evidence or reasoned argument except a hand-wavy "conservative".

Edit: actually, the claim is even less supported:

> out of these ~25000 crashes have been detected as having a potential bit-flip. That's one crash every twenty potentially caused by bad/flaky memory

"Potential" is a weasel word here. We don't see any of the actual methodology. For all we know, the real value could be 0.1% or 0.01%.

It depends on how the data are distributed.

I wouldn't be too surprised if that 5% all come from a few particular bad machine.

Chromium has better handling for bitflip errors. Mostly due to the Discardable buffers they make such extensive use of.

The hardware bugs are there. They're just handled.

By what?

With Discardables. When Blink's allocator detects a fault in a memory section it swaps it out for a new one, and taints the old so it is only reused when no more remains.

Live objects get swapped between Discardable buffers quite frequently. They're not expected to stay at the same position in memory.

I've had zero crashes in safari, ff or chrome in recent memory (except maybe OOMs). (Though I don't use Windows, so maybe that's part of the reason stuff just works?)

Perhaps you're part of the group driving hardware crashes up to 10% and need to fix your machine.

I think most of it is just bad hardware, not specifically the RAM. Been using non-ECC desktop and laptop hardware for decades and I can't remember the machine crashing for .. I don't know, but a LONG time.

There's a very good chance your system also does not have flaky memory. Most don't. You're not contradicting the post.

What do you mean "the same amount"? If your browser never crashes, 10% of zero is zero.

>> In other words up to 10% of all the crashes Firefox users see are not software bugs, they're caused by hardware defects!

> Bold claim. From my gut feeling this must be incorrect; I don't seem to get the same amount of crashes using chromium-based browsers such as thorium.

That's a misinterpretation. The finding refers to the composition of crashes, not the overall crash rate (which is not reported by the post). Brought to the extreme, there may have been 10 (reported) crashes in history of Firefox, and 1 due to faulty hardware, and the statement would still be correct.

He addresses this in the thread.

...normally browsers don't crash at all. Something's wrong with your computer.

I mean, I've had quite some number of crashes that I can't correlate to anything.

Hardware problems are just as good a potential explanation for those as anything else.

Maybe if Firefox tabs weren't such a memory hog it would be only 0.005% !

"Software engineer thinks everyone's hardware is broken, couldn't possibly be bugs in his code" sums it up about right.