Recent glitches with Firefox - is it the notorious snap?

Support & Help Requests
#1

While preparing to install Ubuntu I was watching some videos on Youtube and generally read about many complaints with snap, that it reduces the speed of pages loaded to Firefox etc. But upon fresh installation of Mate I used Firefox for a couple of months normally and the page loading speed in Firefox wasn't important for me a lot.
Earlier, if I may rarely get Firefox crash such that I would need to stop the application via terminal or reboot, it was when there where dozens of tabs opened and similar high load. However recently I've got several frequent Firefox crashes with just a few tabs opened. I checked this by using the Brave browser, which works normally. And my initial Mate Welcome screen (with send or not to send telemetry options) also have gotten slower, but it is not important a lot.

One crash with moderate amount of open tabs happened probably due to an active DarkReader addon. It stopped when I disabled the addon. But after some time the crashes with few tabs opened continued.

Can I somehow assure the stable function of Firefox?
As I am temporarily working with Wordpress website builder and would like to make sure Firefox is optimal for web dev, tests etc.

I know there's a way to uninstall the Firefox with snap, and install Firefox without snap on Ubuntu, but don't have time for this so far.

#2

I use Brave, Firefox and Chromium. All are installed as snaps and I don't have any problems with them.

There are no other reports of Firefox failing with a few tabs open on this forum. That leads me to the conclusion that there is something unusual about your situation.

Have you tried deleting Firefox and reinstalling? You can do this through the software boutique.

Have you tried a fresh installation?

Just suggestions to get you started.

2 Likes
#3

There are other PPA's and .deb packages to get Firefox other than a snap. You can also install firefox as a tarball. Personally I use Waterfox, but a tarball makes it independent of dependencies of the OS. I have also used the Ubuntuzilla release of Firefox for over 10 years with no problems, though it does update a day or two later than the official release.

https://sourceforge.net/p/ubuntuzilla/wiki/Main_Page/#installation

The also offer Firefox ESR, Seamonkey and Thunderbird.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/firefox/download
but this you will have to download and reinstall yourself each new release.

1 Like
#4

Nope. I can't tell exactly how many tabs were open. WIth the DarkReader addon crashing the Firefox there definitely were a few tabs, though the addon wasn't active then.

#5

I have too many bookmarks (hundreds, if not thousands), so will need to ensure they are exported/imported correctly.

#6

You can try the general tar file binaries of firefoy extracted inside any folder just to see if snap os the culprit