Accessing Chat while also having forum pages open in other tabs, crashes Firefox on Windows, both v.40.0.2 and v40.0.3, and regardless of plugins/ add-ons installed and in use.

a dedicated thread to the issue, and [url=https://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_chat_crashing_firefox/post86]here's GOG Support' reply to the OP.

If any webdevs read this, please look into it, as it's been going on for several days now, and affecting more than one user.

I somehow missed Crewdroog's post quoting support's reply. Thanks for linking to it.

I think there might be a typo in the last line of GOG's message. Shouldn't it be:
"If this doesn't help, please try using a different digital store altogether"?

I believe that this is the closing line of scripted reply #3, the one you get after they can't but admit that the issue is at their end, but can't give you an ETA on when it might be addressed.

I can't seem to reproduce the issue (running FF 40.0.3).

PS: Though the site is terribly unresponsive on FF compared to Chrome.

It does not happen all the time. I have had this problem for two weeks now. Sometimes there are days without the chat crashing and other days it crashes every few minutes.

Here's the thing, it does not happen for every Firefox user (I've yet to experience it, I'm on the latest EME-free Firefox with a good chunk of add-ons), and as moonshineshadow said, it doesn't happen every single time for those experiencing this issue.

Perhaps it happens only on certain versions/ editions of Windows with a certain Firefox edition installed, perhaps it has to do with certain Windows/ Firefox settings, perhaps it's a combo. What's interesting is that it apparently doesn't happen when using Galaxy to chat.

As for the site's responsiveness lagging on Firefox compared to Chrome - it's no secret that GOG's webdevs have trouble coding for Gecko based browsers; IIRC, they all use Chrome, and are apparently better at optimising the site for it.

That's not too uncommon - sites feeling sluggish in FF, I mean. I don't know what's the matter, but FF is also eating RAM like crazy. I use mostly FF for web-development, since I really love FireBug. And if a page performs well in FF I can be almost certain it works outstanding in Chrome. Let's not talk about IE though... especially regarding things touch-related.

How do you define "eating RAM like crazy"?

must be something like this

Another fetish of yours? (^‿◕)

thats how i enhance myself cybernetically. it works fine ... um, well mostly. i got a bunch of bugs since i ate that damn ms vista dvd last year. a wise advice: don't enhance yourself with microsoft products!

I have Chrome open with about 40 tabs. Each tabs eats between 10 and 200k of memory (depending on the site).
FF eats 350 k of RAM with a single tab (GOG front page), but I have seen it go up to 4 GB with less than 10 tabs open.

( I have 16 GB physical RAM btw.)

Firefox is a known memory hog, but I never had such an experience (perhaps me not allowing every single site to run all sorts of javascripts has something to do with it), and I must say that the latest few versions of it behave quite nicely.

And I've had SWare Iron (Chrome fork) eat up more memory than Firefox with the exact same tabs open. So, perhaps Chrome is more responsive, but not lighter, at least not for me.

Not, unless you use Adblock Plus. Which will be fixed memory wise in the future version. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2015/07/01/firefox-41-will-use-less-memory-when-running-adblock-plus/

This is a common misunderstanding. Firefox is not a memory hog at all. The browser itself doesn't use much memory however modern web pages contain dozens if not hundreds of megabytes worth of content data, especially the graphics. The modern web is loaded with graphics and while a lot of that is heavily compressed JPGs that appear to be small file sizes on-disk, they have to be decompressed into memory for display on the video card, and they expand tremendously and consume much more memory than they do on disk. That's true of any browser or application that displays graphics. A very very long time ago back before Firefox 4.0 the browser had some memory leak problems and some other memory issues but those were stomped out a very long time ago now and the entire memory subsystem in the browser rewritten to be much more optimized.

The biggest issue with memory consumption outside of that is via plugins and extensions of which can allocate more or less as much memory as the author chooses too, and they can leak memory also. AdBlock Plus is the number one most common browser extension used in Firefox by millions of people, and it is known to leak a lot of memory also. Other extensions leak memory or use way more memory than they really need to, however all of these extensions once loaded are part of the Firefox process and so as they leak memory or use it, that memory shows up in the task manager as being Firefox memory steadily increasing. Firefox then gets blamed for being "bloated" which is nonsense.

Uninstall Adobe Flash, uninstall all extensions completely and reproduce any "bloated" issue with the base browser. It probably wont happen, because they took care of such issues in the core browser 5+ years ago.

When you are experiencing memory related issues with Firefox, go to "about:memory" in a spare browser tab, then click on the verbose setting and you'll get a highly detailed breakdown of all of the memory in use in the entire web browser. The majority of memory will be used by extensions/addons and by web page content, in particular javascript. The modern web has tonnes of poorly written javascript and it will abuse the memory of the browser whimsically knowing that the browser will get the blame for it instead of the crappy web developer.

For those experiencing problems due to memory leaking of AdBlock Plus, search for a new ad blocker that uses the same filter lists which is called "uBlock Origin". It is optimized to use a fraction of the memory and CPU resources compared to AdBlock Plus and I'd recommend that to anyone as an alternative. If you use any AdBlock Plus addons such as Element Hiding Helper or Popup Blocker though you'll lose them as similar replacements aren't available for uBlock Origin that I'm aware of. Memory use will go way down though as AdBlock Plus is a memory leaking hog.

I suspect that even these issues will be greatly reduced when Mozilla switches to the Electrolysis based Firefox over the next 18 months and support for XPCOM/XUL extensions is phased out, removing some of the freedom existing extension authors have to write shitty code and not care.