Firefox crashing with many Tabs? There is an easy fix!

Category : Workflow

FFMPEG SECRETS
by Patrick Zadrobilek

Firefox is my office, I have hundreds of Tabs open!

If you’re a Firefox user and used to have a lot of tabs open, perhaps spreading over a few windows, then you might stumble over a problem. Read below!

There were times when firefox was just a browser. Reading informative webpages, get some movie infos from imdb.com or search something via Google.
Now we have Web 2.0 and there are many, many apps running on websites, like office, games and many other productivity apps. And with that extensive use came along a nice feature called tab, were you can have open many websites in onyl one window, which, I bet, you already knew 😉

Nowadays, with our high-end computers, we have lot’s memory in our desktops – at least 8GB RAM or more.

Recently Firefox got a bad attitude on my browsing behaviour and did not like it when I have open many tabs and – oh my god – two Firefox windows! The browser got bad symptoms like parts of the window gets black, blinks black when scrolling and crashes suddenly. I was curious and installed a Firefox Add-On called Memory Restart (not available anymore) which shows current memory usage in the browser window and displays red numbers if memory usage is higher than a specific user-set threshold. My warning level was about 3000 MegaByte (3 GB), because Firefox crashed if it’s memory usage got near this threshold.

The Cure: 64-bit

Now comes the trick: you surely guessed it already, if you have installed a 64-bit OS like Windows 7 64-bit, then you are lucky!

Beginning with version 41.0 (since early 2015), there is also a 64-bit version of Firefox available , but Mozilla secretly improved it and now it is working really wonderfull and the browser is greatly benefiting from a lot of RAM in your computer. Theoretically the browser can now use nearly all the RAM your computer has installed.

Just install the 64-bit version of Firefox and all the crashing, black windows, etc will be gone because Firefox is now able to use more than just 3 GB of RAM. There are some plugins (not Add-Ons) that are still only work with the 32-bit version of Firefox – namely the NPAPI Plugins, but all Add-Ons (Extensions) are working normal with the 64-bit version of Firefox.
If you want to use NPAPI Plugins, than you need to install the 64-bit versions of these plugins too (Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and the OpenH264 vide0 codec are preinstalled with Firefox 64-bit).

Download Firefox 64-bit below. The 64-bit version is available for Windows and Linux, but it is not clear if the Mac OS version 64-bit, nothing specifically is mentioned on Mozilla’s website.

DOWNLOAD FIREFOX 64-BIT