topic Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable in Discussions

Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

johp — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 09:49:53 GMT

Since a few days, Firefox has become competely unusable: tabs are crashing randomly and usually while doing something important in a web form where it is super annoying having to start from scratch (since "restore tab" does not actually get you back to exactly the same state as before).

This is super annoying and I will have to switch to Chrome or some other browser fro now, because it makes it impossible for me to work properly.

Sadly I have not found a way how to report this bug or otherwise give feedback. Do others experience the same problem?

I am running Firefox 148.0 on Ubuntu 24.04 (tar installed version since Snap is an abomination).

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

alexcoitus — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:29:13 GMT

same here, but this was before an update,
disabling hardware accelaration in firefox seems to fix the problem,
but needs lot of cpu and videos dont play so well

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

siffemcon — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:09:25 GMT

Support requests aren't allowed here. Please post your question with full details at
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/new/firefox.

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

johp — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:17:26 GMT

That link leads to a terrible page of non-fitting blabla.
Also I did not ask a support question, but I was asking others if they see the same problem, in order to figure out if this is indeed a Firefox problem or my specific configuration.

Firefox support is now as bad as that of some commercial products, hiding behind endless screens of useless "help" pages and non-applicable forms.

I once not only was a fan of Firefox, but I contributed in the development of its predecessor, Mozilla.
It is a tragedy how terrible Firefox has become over the years, especially with regard to how users and their interests are treated.

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

theregulus — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:20:54 GMT

Similar problem. Frequent freezes and crashes after update to 148.0. It not usable right now. I'm on Win 11.

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

noviceinanunery — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 03:19:42 GMT

I had similar problems since the update with abnormally high RAM-usage, but the browser recovered after a few seconds or minutes so i could close the tab.

Now my computer freezes for >10 minutes and i have to crash-start it. It happens immediately and reproducibly every time i go on marketwatch.com. i blacklisted the site on my adblocker so i don't accidentally visit it. but i doubt it's site-specific and will probably happen on other sites as well.

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

johp — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:27:57 GMT

It seems the version has been updated to 148.0.2 but nothing at all has changed about those crashes. I have used Firefox since the very first version, but if this is not getting fixed soon I will sadly be forced to switch to a chrome based browser. I just cannot understand how that version ever got through QA?
Previous version almost never crashed (they had a memory leak though) so whatever they changed, why can't they at least roll it back until they fix those crashes?

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

alexcoitus — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:24:17 GMT

make sure the cpu (in my case an i9) is working at 40c-50c, i figured out that this was the problem

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

johp — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:35:08 GMT

Thanks but this is definitely not the CPU: no other programs crash, CPU is well within the normal range, and the crashes are specific to the most recent Firefox version and do not occur in the previous version.

This is definitely a Firefox issue and a problem with bad quality assurance before publishing the most recent release.

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

StevieB — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 06:41:50 GMT

I don't know about the issue you are having with the Tabs crashing, but, a few days ago I posted this > https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/memory-usage/td-p/119509

Nobody has replied.

And a long time ago I posted this question too > https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/ff-slow-loading-images-and-videos/m-p/34378#M12537

Nobody replied to that question either, except me that is . . Twice?

I did like FF, but I am finding it can bring your PC to its knees with just one web page open, and NO browser should ever do that.

I have long had my thoughts about a memory leak! Or is it un-checked sloppy scripting?

Either way this needs investigating properly.

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

sunilkumarrs123 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:44:31 GMT

Thank you for this information

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

johp — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:29:57 GMT

I have now installed an older version (141.0.3 instead of the current 148.x) and prevented auto-updating and have not seen a single tab crash or Firefox crash since. Another hint that Firefox developers messed up and published a broken version without proper testing and quality assurance.

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

johp — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:12:39 GMT

I am sorry to say that I was wrong to blame Firefox: it turns out that my RAM had problems: some small address ranges within my 32G did show errors when running a memory test.

The reason why only Firefox every crashed and none of my other programs is probably because it is the only one which usually requires huge amounts of memory so those address ranges where hit by the process of some tabs. Also Firefox is probably faster to react to memory disruption by crashing than some other apps.

Why the older version did not see those crashes I cannot really explain that was definitely misleading.

I replaced the memory and the constant crashes are gone.

So I take it all back, Firefox is actually usable just fine on a machine if the RAM is not broken!

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

HD1 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:23:00 GMT

Thanks for reporting @johp but I have two issues with this situation:
- How come older firefox versions do not display such problems?

- It only happens if I let Firefox idle, I never had a freeze when actively using the browser, only tab crashes. Freeze since a week or two are almost guaranteed if I let the computer idle for a few minutes.

I have the exact same problems only happening with Firefox 148.0.x (not sure of the minor where it started though), yet my RAM can run several rounds of Memtest86+ without any issues, so I'm not fully convinced of the RAM explanation.

Re: Firefox 148.0 has constantly crashing tabs and is basically unusable

johp — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 07:36:52 GMT

Something like freezes or crashes can unfortunately have many different causes. Very often, it is caused by bad implementations or programming errors, but in rare cases like mine it can be caused by something no program can guard against, like damaged RAM or other hardware problems.

So in your case it must be something else going on, especially since freezes are entirely different from crashes.

Maybe open another thread for this problem? It may be useful to know the exact OS, window manager, whether it is a remote session etc.