Just to hop on what other people are saying, your Firefox/computer must be the problem because in my experience Firefox is very stable and doesn’t tend to crash.

I’m not reading this whole thread. Use ctrl shift t to bring back the last closed. Use multi account containers plugin. Actually set your own home page, Firefox is showing you ads on its default homepage, not yours. Set up doh/dot. Set up a socks web proxy.

You also likely have something fucked up about your computer or network.

E: I made myself a liar and read the thread. OP is using a bunch of not the greatest extensions some of which are without a doubt causing the problems they are having.

I’ve never had any of these problems even on stock Firefox.

Try Librewolf. It’s a Firefox fork with sensible defaults (ad blocker preinstalled, telemetry disabled, some privacy settings enabled by default, no AI bullshit).

Some of the things you describe are definitely bugs you should be reporting to Mozilla. The crashes, memory usage, slowness, etc. I don’t experience them and they sound unusual to me.

“Restore previous session” feature doesn’t work half the time so restarting the browser is absolutely terrifying

I’m gonna be honest—it sounds like you’re using the feature for things it’s not intended for. If you want to save pages to go back to, you should use bookmarks. I only use “restore previous session” upon crashes or when I restart my browser due to an update, and it works fine for those use cases.

If you weren’t already using some type of local or remote blocking with chrome… You should with any browser. You can use DNS or a firewall to prevent any browser (and extensions therein) from phoning home and/or serving you bullshit.

If you want minimal disruption from your existing workflow then use https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium. They are currently maintaining manifest v2 functionality.

Valid tbh. I just installed Firefox on a friend’s pc and they were immediately blasted with ads and ai bullshit. I turned it all off but that would leave a gross taste in my mouth if I was new to it myself.

I will say (alongside everyone else it seems) that once you turn it off you forget about these things because in my experience they’re pretty good with respecting me leaving them off.

You gotta use librewolf

Are there any alternatives? Is Brave any good?

No (well, sort of, but not really). Brave Software suffers from the same problem as Mozilla in terms of flailing desperately for monetization strategies, but Brave is downstream of Chrome (via Chromium), and ultimately bound for a similar fate unless they magically find the resources to fork and develop their own independent browser engine. They likely can hold on to Manifest 2.0 for some time, but at the cost of accumulating technical debt. There is also LibreWolf (my personal recommendation), which is downstream of Firefox, removing most of the weird shit Mozilla does to try to create an alternate revenue streams to the noose Google provides in the form of default search sponsorship. The only other alternatives worth consideration are Safari (Apple exclusive, no ad blocking, boo), and downstream browsers based on WebKit. These are getting pretty obscure though. Most have transitioned to Blink (Chromium) via QtWebEngine or their own means. Only a handful of noteworthy examples (like qutebrowser and Gnome Web) remain.

It eats up a ludicrous amounts of RAM, which I wasn’t expecting since it’s one of the main things people make fun of chrome for

Modern websites get more and more bloated, both computationally, and in terms of assets. Assets like images, scripts, stylesheets, audio / video, etc. need to be stored somewhere. These can either go in memory (fast, but consumes memory), onto your disk (at least an order of magnitude slower than memory), or be re-downloaded every single time they’re needed (“dogshit” slow, and will destroy your quota on metered connections like mobile carriers).

Using RAM isn’t inherently bad. It is the best place to cache data if the space is not needed for other purposes, and this cache can be purged very quickly. RAM that isn’t being used does nothing for you, and caching things on the disk (HDD or SSD) causes wear over time, while caching things in DRAM does not. If it is not causing performance issues for other applications on the machine, it is not a problem.

The setting isn’t exposed directly, but can be manipulated in about:config. Specifically browser.cache.memory.capacity. There are other settings under browser.cache.* regarding disk usage. By default (-1), they are set dynamically according to the amount of RAM and disk resources available on the system.

The whole point of caching though is to increase speed. Grabbing something directly from RAM instead of getting it over the wire is supposed to be fast. If it is caching an absurd amount of data and still going slow, something is wrong.

It crashes constantly

There has got to be something else fundamentally screwy going on with this computer. I don’t mean to come across as a fanboy (because I am actually quite pessimistic about the direction the web is taking, and Mozilla’s ‘stewardship’ of the only viable alternative to Google), but Firefox has always been among the most stable applications I have ever used. Occasionally, some websites don’t work correctly, but things like crashes have been incredibly rare in my experience.

Web browsers are among the most valuable targets for zero-day exploits and malware. By necessity, they are among the most field-tested and hardened pieces of software around. This is one part of the reason why there are so few alternatives available. If your browser is regularly crashing, this is A: very atypical, and B: a cause for concern, as crashes often indicate a potentially exploitable programming / configuration error.

I’ve been using Firefox for years, and I’ve never noticed ai being forced into it.

If you want another suggestion, LibreWolf is also pretty decent. Chuds hate it and I’ve been using it for a long while, to my satisfaction.

The RAM thing (and it getting slow over time) is due to the default way it handles inactive tabs. Mozilla decided that users would probably prefer to have tabs be fast when switching between them, so they are kept “active” in RAM for basically ever. This was not the case back when RAM was considered a scarce resource.

I installed an extension to automatically unload tabs after a certain period of inactivity and RAM usage is no longer a problem. As of the most recent update you can also unload tabs manually natively.

As for the ads, AI, etc, all of that can be turned off, and generally only has to be turned off once. Though you may want to look into a fork that does this for you, like LibreWolf.

Is Brave any good?

Brave is run by a chud who was kicked out of Mozilla for donating to some pro-Proposition 8 organization (anti-same sex marriage in case you don’t remember) and the company pushes cryptocurrency hard. It’s also another Chromium browser, so not an alternative in the same way as Firefox.

“Restore previous session” feature doesn’t work half the time so restarting the browser is absolutely terrifying

I’ve used that feature dozens of times for thousands of tabs, and never had a problem. Did it just not restore any tabs when you click the button?

Your entire post sounds like something one of my developers would type out after spending a half hour trying to figure out how to install a new piece of technology. As I tell them, your issues are probably due to a misconfiguration issue.

I use Firefox personally day to day and have very little issues with it. I’m going to point by point rebuttal:

Slow, don’t know what you mean, I use it every day. Do you perhaps have other add-ons or something running in it that’s causing it to slow down or maybe sites that don’t work appropriately?

Firefox uses less RAM on average than Chrome, but a lot of your any of the Blink browsers. It is true that it uses less RAM, but there are other builds that are even leaner. I use it to maximize the amount of RAM I have access to on my system so I can run virtual machines in my professional career.

What AI bullshit are they pushing on you? I didn’t even know Firefox had AI features. That’s how little it bothers me and how little it actually comes up.

If it’s crashing constantly, there seems to be a problem with your setup and not necessarily the technology itself.

Yes, their ad model is annoying, and the fact that they have ads to support themselves suck, but they have to make money somehow, and nobody else is paying for it

I don’t relaunch my Firefox and use it to the tune of 50 plus tabs for 30 plus days straight with little issue. The new integrated sidebar tabs make this really nice.

I’ve literally never had the restore previous feature never not work for me, but you could also just install a session manager extension of which there are many if that’s not good enough.

I will fully admit, profile management is a total wreck on this browser, so I won’t actually complain about that point.

I’m not sure you should use any alternatives. I’m not entirely sure you can handle a browser correctly. However, I think Vivaldi would probably fit many of your pain points along the company embracing anti-AI.

Careful though, I think they have ads somewhere on their site too to support their browser.

Link to blog:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/

Are we living in parallel timelines or something? I haven’t had many issues with Firefox for years now, only the very occasional crash.

Anyway whatever slight shortcomings Firefox has compared to Chrome it’s worth it for not essentially being spyware.