Specific website tabs repeatedly crashing

User Help for Mozilla Firefox
Post Reply
Beadmaster
Posts: 94
Joined: June 9th, 2004, 3:58 am

Specific website tabs repeatedly crashing

Post by Beadmaster »

As a regular Firefox user I used to get a "tab crashed" error message occasionally. It was no big deal. A "restore" choice on the page would restore it immediately and everything was fine.

As of about 12 hours ago, I've seen repeated crashes from two different sites. One of them is a page I use regularly, the other is a site I visit regularly.

My guess is this has to do with ads. In the case of one of them, I went over to a completely different browser (Edge) and it forced me to watch an ad before I could access the choices on the page.
Here's that page. If you scroll down you can see a box where the crossword puzzles normally appear:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/crossword-puzzles
The exact wording of the message I get is:
"Gah. Your tab just crashed.
We can help!
Choose Restore This Tab or Restore All Crashed Tabs to reload the page/pages."

I've repeatedly chosen only to restore the one tab and all it does is crash repeatedly. It won't load for more than a second or three, no matter what.

I did some digging before reporting this. I use Ublock Origin to block ads, so figured surely it must be the culprit.

Unfortunately, once I disabled the ad blocker, the Daily Beast main page tab crashed before I could even choose the crossword puzzle page option.

I had to turn Ublock Origin back on for the Daily Beast home page in order to do anything to get to the crashing puzzle page. (The DB home page is still loaded and functioning properly, with no crash and with Ublock Origin on.) And disabling it didn't fix the crashing tab on the crossword page at all.

The problem seems not to be with Ublock Origin.

When I went to the Edge browser, that box in the middle of the page where puzzle choices should appear instead has a black center square with a video play button and the message, "Click to play ad and access all puzzles" so I'm guessing it has to do with this.

Ironically, there's an unrelated site that uses the same exact company for its crossword puzzles and since there's still no ad there (and hopefully never will be), it works just fine in Firefox. It's only the Daily Beast crossword that is a problem. Once I play an intrusive ad in Edge, I can access the crosswords.

The other site where I've had trouble is Gizmodo. I read an article on that site a couple of days ago with no problem, but I just attempted to read a newer article and the tab kept crashing repeatedly. I had to go to Edge and let it run annoying ads all over the page in order to read the referenced article. (It seems to be related to newer articles. Older ones - to which I've returned as a test - do not crash. They also don't have the intrusive video ads.)

This is one of the newer articles that repeatedly crashes.
https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-influencer-a ... 1846596562
and here's another:
https://earther.gizmodo.com/mike-rowe-s ... 1846585716

The ads on the Gizmodo pages are video ads, all with some kind of motion. I'm assuming the Daily Beast page has a video ad that attempts to autoplay in Firefox, whereas on Edge it doesn't start running, but offers a play button.

I hope this issue can be resolved. I love Firefox. Edge leaves a lot to be desired.

I have the latest Firefox (it updates automatically and is at 87.0, 64 bit, which it says is "up to date") and am using Windows 10, 64 bit.

Thank you in advance for any insight.
User avatar
therube
Posts: 21703
Joined: March 10th, 2004, 9:59 pm
Location: Maryland USA

Re: Specific website tabs repeatedly crashing

Post by therube »

Restart FF in Safe Mode & see if the page/puzzle loads (& plays) without crashing?
Fire 750, bring back 250.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.19) Gecko/20110420 SeaMonkey/2.0.14 Pinball CopyURL+ FetchTextURL FlashGot NoScript
Beadmaster
Posts: 94
Joined: June 9th, 2004, 3:58 am

Re: Specific website tabs repeatedly crashing

Post by Beadmaster »

Thanks! Good news, I had just tried both pages expecting them to fail and they work now. Not complaining...no idea why, but glad I don't have to go back to Edge! As far as I'm concerned Edge has only one use - to download a real browser on a new Windows machine.
Post Reply