Crashes with Firefox Quantum

Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.

You'd probably do better in the Firefox newsgroup (you have to get it
from the Mozilla server, but that's free).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

_____
___ |[]|_n_n_I_c
|___||__|###|____)
O-O--O-O+++--O-O

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.

Yup, it says FF 52 is the last version for Windows XP, so am I missing
something? :-) Speaking of which, the older versions still work fine, at
least over here. I'm hoping we don't get to a point where that doesn't
happen anymore, but I may be too optimistic.

In message , Bill in Co
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.

Yup, it says FF 52 is the last version for Windows XP, so am I missing
something? :-) Speaking of which, the older versions still work fine, at
least over here. I'm hoping we don't get to a point where that doesn't
happen anymore, but I may be too optimistic.


(I was really wondering why Andy was asking here - as have others.) If
you've got an old version that is working, it will continue to do so;
the only reason for that to appear not to be the case will be if web
page designers start to include features that only work with the newer
versions. So far, most companies that do this, I've found an
alternative, so all they've done is lose my custom; however, there may
come a time when all the alternatives are using the new "feature" as
well.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I am entitled to my own opinion."
"Yes, but it's your constant assumption that everyone else is also that's so
annoying." - Vila & Avon

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Bill in Co
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.

Yup, it says FF 52 is the last version for Windows XP, so am I missing
something? :-) Speaking of which, the older versions still work fine,
at least over here. I'm hoping we don't get to a point where that doesn't
happen anymore, but I may be too optimistic.


(I was really wondering why Andy was asking here - as have others.) If
you've got an old version that is working, it will continue to do so;
the only reason for that to appear not to be the case will be if web
page designers start to include features that only work with the newer
versions. So far, most companies that do this, I've found an
alternative, so all they've done is lose my custom; however, there may
come a time when all the alternatives are using the new "feature" as
well.

OR are just compiled with a newer compiler that uses some revised DLLs that
are not compatible with the Windows XP OS. IOW, it's not just the added
features of the browser, but the actual code still being compatible with the
Windows XP OS as I understand it. You can see that happening when you try
to install some other newer programs, and you get those cryptic DLL error
messages, and it won't install..

In message , Bill in Co
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Bill in Co
writes:
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.

Yup, it says FF 52 is the last version for Windows XP, so am I missing
something? :-) Speaking of which, the older versions still work fine,
at least over here. I'm hoping we don't get to a point where that doesn't
happen anymore, but I may be too optimistic.


(I was really wondering why Andy was asking here - as have others.) If
you've got an old version that is working, it will continue to do so;
the only reason for that to appear not to be the case will be if web
page designers start to include features that only work with the newer
versions. So far, most companies that do this, I've found an
alternative, so all they've done is lose my custom; however, there may
come a time when all the alternatives are using the new "feature" as
well.

OR are just compiled with a newer compiler that uses some revised DLLs that
are not compatible with the Windows XP OS. IOW, it's not just the added
features of the browser, but the actual code still being compatible with the

The actual code of what? If you mean the browser, then up to 52 it _was_
compiled (so I understand; I'm still on 26) and runs under XP. And will
continue to do so, for ever. The only thing that will make that appear
not to work will be if web page creators use features not supported in
52, rather than not supported in XP - i. e. it's the version of browser
that's the limiting factor, not XP. Of course, in practice the effect is
similar, unless those features _are_ supported by some other browser
that runs under XP.

Windows XP OS as I understand it. You can see that happening when you try
to install some other newer programs, and you get those cryptic DLL error
messages, and it won't install..

I don't _think_ web pages will call DLLs.

--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

once described by Eccentrica Golumbits as the best bang since the big one ...
(first series, fit the second)

On Sat, 2 Dec 2017 12:43:48 -0700, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.

Yup, it says FF 52 is the last version for Windows XP, so am I missing
something? :-) Speaking of which, the older versions still work fine, at
least over here. I'm hoping we don't get to a point where that doesn't
happen anymore, but I may be too optimistic.

I regressed to version 41, which is much more stable and doersn't
crash nearly as often as later versions. Later versions are more
bloated. It was after they introduced "Pockets" that "Not Responding"
became the normal response.

I've also been trying the Maxthon browser, also recommended by someone
here, which seems to work well for some things.


--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com

Steve Hayes wrote:
On Sat, 2 Dec 2017 12:43:48 -0700, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.

Yup, it says FF 52 is the last version for Windows XP, so am I missing
something? :-) Speaking of which, the older versions still work fine,
at least over here. I'm hoping we don't get to a point where that doesn't
happen anymore, but I may be too optimistic.

I regressed to version 41, which is much more stable and doersn't
crash nearly as often as later versions. Later versions are more
bloated. It was after they introduced "Pockets" that "Not Responding"
became the normal response.

I've also been trying the Maxthon browser, also recommended by someone
here, which seems to work well for some things.

I'm still using version 36, as it was around the last version (give or take
a few) that didn't have some add on warning issues or some add on
compatibility issues.

Steve Hayes wrote:
On Sat, 2 Dec 2017 12:43:48 -0700, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.
Yup, it says FF 52 is the last version for Windows XP, so am I missing
something? :-) Speaking of which, the older versions still work fine, at
least over here. I'm hoping we don't get to a point where that doesn't
happen anymore, but I may be too optimistic.

I regressed to version 41, which is much more stable and doersn't
crash nearly as often as later versions. Later versions are more
bloated. It was after they introduced "Pockets" that "Not Responding"
became the normal response.

I've also been trying the Maxthon browser, also recommended by someone
here, which seems to work well for some things.

When is the last time you ran Memtest on your machine ?

http://www.memtest.org/

*******

Firefox crashes can be avoided by disabling hardware
acceleration. And Adobe Flash also has such a setting.
This helps if your GPU and driver are too crusty for
the new approaches.

Paul

On Sat, 2 Dec 2017 12:43:48 -0700, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Andy
writes:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?

I didn't think Quantum (alias Firefox 57, I think) runs under XP; I
thought 52 was the last that would.

Yup, it says FF 52 is the last version for Windows XP, so am I missing
something? :-) Speaking of which, the older versions still work fine, at
least over here. I'm hoping we don't get to a point where that doesn't
happen anymore, but I may be too optimistic.


I'm looking to downgrade FF. I currently run FF version 47.x. I am
running this on an older laptop (Lenovo T43) with XP Pro Sp3. This
version of FF does work, but poorly. It runs slow, and it seems that
after it's in use for awhile, it seems to become saturated, or
overloaded, which makes it run even slower, until it becomes unusable.
So, every couple hours, I have to close FF, clear the cache, and re-open
it, to make it useful again. I think FF just uses up all the resources
on this low powered computer, until it overloads.

Prior to this, I was running FF 18.x. I never had those problems with
that version, but some websites would bitch about the "old version" and
some pages would not load correctly.

I know that websites in general are switching over to some newer HTML
code (I think it's version 5). And now we have all the secured sites
which are also slowing things down and causing more problems for the end
user.

Anyhow, I need to downgrade to some version of FF between 18 and 47. I'm
not sure what version is the best, which will eliminate the extreme
drain on resources, and still run most current websites. Any
suggestions?

In message ,
writes:
[]
I'm looking to downgrade FF. I currently run FF version 47.x. I am
running this on an older laptop (Lenovo T43) with XP Pro Sp3. This
version of FF does work, but poorly. It runs slow, and it seems that
after it's in use for awhile, it seems to become saturated, or
overloaded, which makes it run even slower, until it becomes unusable.
So, every couple hours, I have to close FF, clear the cache, and re-open
it, to make it useful again. I think FF just uses up all the resources
on this low powered computer, until it overloads.

Prior to this, I was running FF 18.x. I never had those problems with
that version, but some websites would bitch about the "old version" and
some pages would not load correctly.
[]
Anyhow, I need to downgrade to some version of FF between 18 and 47. I'm
not sure what version is the best, which will eliminate the extreme
drain on resources, and still run most current websites. Any
suggestions?

Hmm. I run version 26; this still has difficulty with _some_ sites
(though that _could_ be some of the settings and add-ons I have). With
thirty-odd tabs open, I find it still does the slowdown (though I'd say
after rather more than two hours), but I find closing and reopening it
usually speeds it up again - I don't clear the cache (if I ever knew how
to, I've forgotten). If I think things are a bit slow, I have a look in
Task Manager and sort by memory usage - if Firefox is hogging a lot,
then it's time to restart it.

This could give you a mid-point in your researches. (26 or 27 is the
last before one of the major changes in user interface - Atlantis,
Australis, something like that.) I'd not run XP-with-Firefox with less
than 1.5G RAM these days.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

She's showing her age a little bit. I always say she doesn't have teething
troubles, she has denture troubles! - Timothy West (on their narrowboat!), RT
2014-March

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message ,
writes:
[]
I'm looking to downgrade FF. I currently run FF version 47.x. I am
running this on an older laptop (Lenovo T43) with XP Pro Sp3. This
version of FF does work, but poorly. It runs slow, and it seems that
after it's in use for awhile, it seems to become saturated, or
overloaded, which makes it run even slower, until it becomes unusable.
So, every couple hours, I have to close FF, clear the cache, and re-open
it, to make it useful again. I think FF just uses up all the resources
on this low powered computer, until it overloads.

Prior to this, I was running FF 18.x. I never had those problems with
that version, but some websites would bitch about the "old version" and
some pages would not load correctly.
[]
Anyhow, I need to downgrade to some version of FF between 18 and 47. I'm
not sure what version is the best, which will eliminate the extreme
drain on resources, and still run most current websites. Any
suggestions?

Hmm. I run version 26; this still has difficulty with _some_ sites
(though that _could_ be some of the settings and add-ons I have). With
thirty-odd tabs open, I find it still does the slowdown (though I'd say
after rather more than two hours), but I find closing and reopening it
usually speeds it up again - I don't clear the cache (if I ever knew how
to, I've forgotten). If I think things are a bit slow, I have a look in
Task Manager and sort by memory usage - if Firefox is hogging a lot,
then it's time to restart it.

This could give you a mid-point in your researches. (26 or 27 is the
last before one of the major changes in user interface - Atlantis,
Australis, something like that.) I'd not run XP-with-Firefox with less
than 1.5G RAM these days.

You can get every version you could ever want.
They're all available.

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

Just remember that your personal profile folder,
isn't guaranteed to "go backwards" on version. At least
export your bookmarks file for safe keeping.

The build environment has a neat trick, where if you
do "./mach run" it creates a temporary profile folder
for your freshly compiled version, to use for testing.
So that your "regular" profile folder doesn't get messed
up. Apparently it is possible to run two different versions
at the same time, just with separately maintained bookmarks
and so on. That means, at least for some range of versions
of Firefox, you can pass a pointer to the profile
folder, so your old profile folder doesn't get messed up.

I'm only pasting this here, to show how the "-profile"
can be used to prevent messing up the main profile.
You have to CD to the private Firefox home, so you
can run the second version of Firefox. Finding someone
who packages "Portable Firefox" versions, would
give you the materials needed to try this.

$ cd C:\mozilla-central
$ ./mach run
dist\bin\firefox.exe -no-remote -profile c:\mozilla-central\obj-x86_64-pc-mingw32\tmp\scratch_user

As for the performance issues, they're just as likely to be
OS related, as Firefox related (lots of Firefox memory garbage
collection, causing WinXP resources to become fragmented).
There's no guarantee that running Firefox version 1.0a
is going to make for "sooper-fast" browsing.

While I have plenty of "let's hack it..." ideas,
I don't really think *anything* is going to help. Trying
to wiggle out of the situation, just isn't going to happen.

If you use a really old version, which is light on resources,
you lose https support, modern SHA2 certificate support,
or whatever. Every plus has two minuses. Who wants a browser
that only opens 5% of sites ? I don't. This is why going
backwards on version, is a pipe dream.

*******

If you want an idea to experiment with, try this.
The "about:memory" panel has some memory cleanup
buttons you can press. Hold your mouse over the
"GC" and "CC" buttons. You can experiment with the
buttons, when your browser is "slow". [44KB image]

https://s18.postimg.org/ioqava849/ab...collection.gif

And if you think, for some reason that the problem is
disk speed, use an SSD. While it's hard to find good
IDE SSDs, there are still some for sale.

Paul

On Mon, 4 Dec 2017 04:21:05 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

Anyhow, I need to downgrade to some version of FF between 18 and 47. I'm
not sure what version is the best, which will eliminate the extreme
drain on resources, and still run most current websites. Any
suggestions?

Hmm. I run version 26; this still has difficulty with _some_ sites
(though that _could_ be some of the settings and add-ons I have). With
thirty-odd tabs open, I find it still does the slowdown (though I'd say
after rather more than two hours), but I find closing and reopening it
usually speeds it up again - I don't clear the cache (if I ever knew how
to, I've forgotten). If I think things are a bit slow, I have a look in
Task Manager and sort by memory usage - if Firefox is hogging a lot,
then it's time to restart it.

This could give you a mid-point in your researches. (26 or 27 is the
last before one of the major changes in user interface - Atlantis,
Australis, something like that.) I'd not run XP-with-Firefox with less
than 1.5G RAM these days.
--

Some sites are just plain lousy. I think some of the people who create
webpages have no clue what they are doing. When I go on sites that cause
problems, I usually just pass and move on to another site. There are
plenty sites, why fuss with bad ones...

I'll check on ver 26 or 27. That sounds like a compromise.

To clear the cache, on the older versions go to TOOLS, and there's a
button "Clear Recent History". On the newer versions (such as 47), go to
HISTORY and look for the same....
You can select if you want to clear the Cache, clear cookies, and a
bunch of other stuff. The "cache" is the main thing to clear. Not only
does it slow stuff down on FF, but it uses a lot of drive space. When I
only had a 40gb drive and was low on drive space, clearing the cache
gained me over 1gb.

If I recall, ver 18 still had the cache clearing in the TOOLS.

On Sun, 03 Dec 2017 19:23:02 -0600, wrote:

Anyhow, I need to downgrade to some version of FF between 18 and 47. I'm
not sure what version is the best, which will eliminate the extreme
drain on resources, and still run most current websites. Any
suggestions?

I've been using version 41, and find it far more stable than 50+





--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com

Andy wrote:
Is anyone else getting frequent crashes with Firefox Quantum ?


Actual "Quantum" doesn't install on WinXP. And ?

In the five minutes of tests I've done on Win7
and Win10, it worked.

Paul