If you had seen my series of earlier posts on browser choices, you’d have seen that at one stage I was recommending Chrome over Firefox. Then later, I changed to recommending Firefox. Stability in Firefox for me has been in two areas:
1. Crashes of individual tabs
2. Websites failing to load completely or being very slow to load.
Mozilla seems to have trouble making a release of Firefox that doesn’t have either of these problems. A new release will come out and every tab will start crashing on just about every website. Then another new release will come out and tab crashes stop, but now it keeps freezing when loading websites. This is hard to understand because I have tested the non-developer edition of Firefox with literally hundreds of tabs open, and it never missed a beat. Yet the current edition of Firefox Developer, which is supposed to be better (which in a lot of cases it is) than the regular edition of Firefox, struggles at times with only a dozen tabs, and that’s when you know it’s time to restart the browser.
When I adopted Firefox Developer as my core browser it was so I could run it across multiple PCs, some of which are resource constrained, and know there would be a reasonable user experience on the slower computers. Like a lot of people I am finding Chrome is a huge resource hog (and this is written on my gruntiest PC running Xubuntu with 24 Gigs of RAM). There have been a couple of times when I have wanted to switch back to Chrome because of the variable experience Firefox has offered. At the moment it is just hanging in there. Best thing at the moment is on this PC it can update (being the version from Ubuntu Make). Worst thing is not being able to install it on anything else running Linux at the moment and get an updateable version, because Ubuntu Make people haven’t bothered updating their software for months.
UPDATE 01/2019: Firefox Quantum has become a lot more stable and is now my main browser. If I install it into my home directory, there is no problem with permissions for updating itself, the best part is I don’t need to reinstall each time I reinstall Linux. On mainpc I’m using it with multiple user profiles.