I've always wondered why Firefox don't grab hold of the "renegade" space they already occupy, with confidence through their existing users, an alternative and genuinely independent browser down to the engine. They are the market leaders of non-webkit, a huge strength among chromium copycat popup shops with identical wins and failures... or do I have to write the TV ad as well?
I feel confident to assume the majority of dedicated Firefox users will read and think of this feature release, et al most new features as of late, as trivial. The true benefit of using Firefox in itself isn't "ease of planning camping trips" but something much more.
This is absolutely brilliant. I've been toying with the codebase and thought this would work really well similar to the 'Macintosh' style animated screensaver present in macOS's more recent updates.
Try running two instances of Firefox in parallel with different profiles, then do a normal quit / close operation on one after any use. Demons exist here.
Long hangs / never closes, crash report screen triggers often. macOS. This occurs for me when launching instances from the about:profiles page and using each instance for what I'd describe as normal use
It seems more likely to happen when the profile has been running for a long time (a couple weeks?) and/or using a large amount of RAM.
There's a 60-secish timeout before it gives up and pops that crash report window.
I don't think it's a crash per se, just an unresolved file lock or similar. I haven't noticed whether there's any relationship to running multiple profiles. I am almost always running several at a time, and the issue only occurs sometimes. It has no (other) negative side effects, as far as I can tell, but it was unsettling at first.
I'm on macOS also, and I launch from the command line (effectively, I actually have separate launchers for each profile, but they just run a shell script with different arguments).
Same, also on macOS. My "personal" firefox profile on my work Macbook Pro, which I use for occasional gmail, HN, wikipedia, and pretty much nothing else, has crashed twice in the last 6 weeks - both times when shutting down to update the OS.
Honestly, I've been blaming MacOS for it since other apps also crashed at the same time (the first time it was Microsoft Intune, the second time it was Slack - I doubt either uses Firefox internally). I don't recall seeing a Firefox crash on my personal laptop running Linux at any point in the past few years.
I don't think "crash" is the right word for the Firefox behaviour. Yes it does pop a window that calls itself a "crash reporter", but in my observation it's a shutdown timer timeout that expires after ~60secs.
My guess is that it's trying to obtain or release a filesystem lock, possibly one that it's lost track of in some trivial way.
I've never seen any damage or inconsistencies in the resulting environment. So I don't think it's a dramatic event, just a safety timer that isn't resolved correctly.
Yes, you're right - the tabs restored fine afterwards and the restart was only delayed for a minute or so, so it was barely even a minor inconvenience.
Contrast that with the dreadful corporate-supplied Edge AI browser I have to use for one client, which seems to randomly close windows without being asked, and never seems to be able to restore them.
Reassuring to hear I'm not the only one, and would consider this a normal use case for the browser, in fact one of the main reasons I use Firefox over chrome as it's simpler to manage than the latter.
I was hinting in my original comment if these cases are contributing to crash reports in any capacity there is a small chance they could be misattributed towards the claims in the post, especially if memory is not freed correctly on shutdown. Even more so if any memory allocation is shared between processes / helpers.
If I quit normally, don't wait for the "timeout" and force quit I still get the crash report UI immediately which suggests to me something funky going on.
10% is a crazy high percentage to claim for bitflips.
Indeed. "Our server got hacked" sounds awfully more dramatic in a self-proclaimed crisis, laying the ambiguous notion of responsibility toward the "service" while maintaining the guise of ownership. Hey ho.
Interesting on stripe's response to this matter. 'Debug environment spew leads to unauthorised api usage' - unfortunate and well worn. Like a good pair of slacks, it was simply your turn to wear them this time
Adding the thing that complains is a one-time cost. It may work on Firefox now, but making sure that it continues working on Firefox is a continuous resource investment.
And not adding it and not testing for Firefox would cost nothing, and currently improve the user experience - because it actually just works, as a lot of things just do.
But then what if a bug in their code that only affects FF goes unnoticed due to testing, and causes significant problems for a big client, or a journalist reviewing it, or...
Personally I feel a "We don't officially support this browser, it probably works but we only test for full compatibility in <these browsers>" is a better option if you're going to go in that direction.
But I can understand why even that is a bit of a risk as if a user decides to ignore that warning and then some time later encounters a bug that, let's say, causes them to lose half a day of work, they're likely to walk away blaming the company (and maybe go round telling people they know what a shit thing it is) even if the bug wouldn't have happened had they been using one of the browsers that is fully supported and gets tested.
It seems more like the devs at MS know their code works on Firefox but have been asked by exec to push chromium(-esque) because edge is now webkit.
sidenote: this is a multi-billion $ company, no excuse to ignore any platform with their capacity, front face it looks like they can't build a good app anymore, especially if it works anyway with a simple string change in the browser - heck, web devs had to factor in ie7-8 polyfills built by the community only a few years ago. no excuse.
I recall that the advice given to web developers for a long time was to query browser capabilities instead of relying on a user agent string. If this site is indeed relying on the user agent string, I don’t get why larger companies which probably have better capable teams resort to this.
I feel confident to assume the majority of dedicated Firefox users will read and think of this feature release, et al most new features as of late, as trivial. The true benefit of using Firefox in itself isn't "ease of planning camping trips" but something much more.