If you're still running Lynx or Links on your DOS or text-based Linux machines, and want to experience the full web, complete with graphics and even some of that modern CSS thing, I suggest you try Arachne. I mean, I can't promise that Youtube works great - or at all - but at least you get a graphical browser without the overhead of running X or Windows.

Fox can be a resource hog but I still prefer it over Chrome.

The reason why your Firefox is almost certainly _because_ you use AdBlock Plus, which also is why you're getting it blacking out over time. AdBlock Plus served many folks, myself included for many many years, but over time it has bit-rotted and become an untamed beast that wastes CPU and RAM resources, leaking RAM out the wazoo. Eventually it leaks enough memory that you run out of memory and the browser can no longer allocate more so you get the black content area.

Firefox itself is quite optimized as is shown clearly by industry benchmarks etc. People regularly load it down with addons however and those addons run within Firefox and become part of the browser, so when they slow the browser down or bloat it up with poor quality code that is unoptimized it is Firefox that takes the heat for it. AdBlock Plus is probably the most egregious example of this. I highly recommend switching to the 64bit version of Firefox if you haven't already, and replacing AdBlock Plus with uBlock Origin instead. uBlock Origin is compatible with the same filter lists that AdBlock Plus uses, so it blocks the same ads, but it was designed purposefully to be highly optimized and not a bloated pig like AdBlock Plus. Just make sure that if you do try to switch over, that you actually get "uBlock Origin" and not just "uBlock" as they are not the same - uBlock Origin is the current supported release while the other one is the old one that is no longer supported. I mention that because often when I recommend it to people they get the wrong version for some reason.

Anyway, Firefox is not bloated like some people claim it to be, and if anyone thinks it is, I challenge them to go into about:memory and use other debugging resources to prove that it is not their addons or the content they're viewing which is causing the resource consumption. In every case so far that I've seen it is addons and content that result in memory and CPU consumption with Firefox and not the browser itself. Chrome is difficult to measure up because its resource consumption is spread across multiple processes which make it hard to collectively see exactly how much resources it is using and that gives people a false impression that it is somehow using less resources.

At the end of the day though, it is the actual web page content on the web pages people are viewing which are responsible for the majority of actual RAM and CPU that the browser uses, and second to that it is the extensions they are using. The browsers themselves don't really use much more than a couple of hundred megs of RAM.

In general, anyone having resource problems - create a brand new Firefox profile without any addons installed in it whatsoever. Try to reproduce the "resource hog" issue. Chances are that unless you open 1000 web pages with rich content you wont be able to except perhaps due to advertising which is a resource hog. Throwing uBlock Origin in just to block ads should prevent that with minimal resource usage however, which will illustrate more or less what I've said above. Once again - about:memory in Firefox gives a complete breakdown of where the memory is being used, and you'll find it is on page content and addons...

</just saying>



Firefox All Downloads Page:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/

Firefox 64bit edition for Windows:
https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-45.0.1-SSL&amp;os=win64&amp;lang=en-US

uBlock Origin for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

Thanks! I upgraded to Firefox 64-bit, and replaced ABP with uBlock Origin. Performance is a lot better now, and I have not had the problem with FF blacking out yet. Performance is pretty much evenly matched with Pale Moon now.It's definitely well within usable standards, and I'll most likely stay with Firefox for my go-to browser now :)

I used Pale Moon for a day, and performance was quite good, but no native support for RES was disappointing. I found some "easy" fixes for doing some fancy JavaScript-coding to make it Pale Moon-compatible, but I'm no programmer :P I might try Vivaldi too. It looked interesting, and I gotta show my support for the Norwegians :)

Yeah, the blackout problem drove me nuts for quite a while, but I knew it was due to running out of memory. I knew something was leaking RAM but not what, but then I did a rather in depth debugathon and confirmed it online. I knew that a 64bit Firefox wouldn't completely solve the problem but it would make it next to impossible to occur since I have 32GB of RAM so instead of the 32bit browser crapping out at approx 3GB due to AdBlock Plus, it'd be able to gobble RAM for a lot longer and let me choose when to restart it rather than getting the black content area of death followed by a crash. :) That eliminated the crashes, but of course the RAM consumption slowly crept up due to ABP bugginess. For whatever reasons it seemed to peak at around 7-8GB which didn't bother me as I have tonnes of RAM to waste. But then someone put me on to uBlock Origin and after a week of testing it out with great results, I kissed ABP goodbye forever. The memory leaks are a thing of the past now, the browser has more RAM to flex its elbows within, and it runs slightly faster in 64bit mode as well.

The downside? I can't run the RealPlayer or QuickTime plugins anymore! Ok, just kidding, I didn't use those anyway. :)

Anyhow, I'm glad you're happy with the results and hope it works out well for ya. :)

The strange thing is though, memory usage was never very high when the window blacked out. When I checked task manager, it would usually be at 350-400 megs of RAM usage. I've read that it could be a issue with hardware-acceleration as well. But, I have not seen any black boxes yet after the 64-bit upgrade. No problems of any kind so far :)

Depends on how much RAM is in the machine and how much VM there is. If there is a very large amount of RAM the maximum upper limit would be approximately 3GB (varies slightly from one system to another) for a 32bit process before it runs out of memory, however if there is only say 4GB or less RAM in the machine and other programs are using a fair bit of that too, and VM is static and nearing full, the system can run out of memory from a runaway memleaking program at any point. If it's swapping pages out, the amount of VM the process has might peak while the amount of resident memory usage is lower also.

Video acceleration issues can also cause graphic glitches like that, but they're more of a rarity to have the exact same symptoms. Acceleration can be disabled for testing either in firefox itself under about:config (I forget the key), or at the system level in the control panel however that would not be my first assumption. Normally, once that blackout problem hits for the out of memory condition, continuing to try to use the browser to open new pages and scroll them will lead to a crash rather rapidly. Video acceleration issues would be more likely to just cause corruption without a crash specifically, so that's another thing to potentially test if someone experiences that.

Nowadays though, I'd just recommend Firefox 64 to everyone running a 64bit version of Windows, the benefits are worth it. Ditto with uBlock Origin. :) Then don't look back. :)

After reading this post I uninstalled ABP and installed uBlock Origin and the 'blackout' crashes I've been suffering for weeks have completely disappeared. I thought they were being caused by something else entirely.

You're my favourite person at the moment, thank you very much!

Coming late to the threads, but wanted to chime in. Adblock Plus is a resource hog and the cause of weird issues pretty often. Ublock Origin is a lot better.

This thread is actually pretty helpful, I've installed uBlock now instead of Adblock+.
Like most other Firefox addons it's compatible with PaleMoon.

Glad I could help. :)

This pretty much.
It's still in beta though and I've seen a couple of bugs and missing features but it's still one of the best if not the best right now.

Using Firefox and did the same. Thanks from me too guys, for mentioning this.

Installed it yesterday, on par with uBlock for me. If not better given the usability.