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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

macOS crashes more than Firefox for me.

Yes

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.

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.

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%.

By what?

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.