Don't know if any one else has had the experience, but this week Firefox, which is now removed, decided to update. Wonderful, wiped out everything including itself & could not recover. Audacity: It then wants one to sell their soul, to get the new version on, so that you can start a rebuild.

Fortunately I have more than one browser set up (as backup) & the data from one is imported into the others. I had noted before on other computers before they stopped support for their OS, that it was getting somewhat unstable, as it progressed to the ultimate in instability: The crash.

NEVER had a problem with Firefox. I have it on machines running XP, Vista, Win7, Win10 and Ubuntu.

At work we test our web-based controllers with all browsers on all platforms. From time to time there are some compatibility issues but Firefox is always the least likely to be affected.

That's my experience anyway. Sometimes it depends on what other stuff you have on your OS.

Modern OSs and browsers are so complex that it never ceases to amaze me they are as reliable as they are.

The problem is not only browsers themselves (they all have issues and none are perfect) but the complexity of the Web these days. I used to develop websites (including this one) but I haven't built a site from scratch for about six years now. It's just too hard keeping up and unless one does it for a living, it's not worth the bother.

Things were much simpler in the Internet Explorer/Netscape days, though at the same time there was no Google, no Youtube, no forums, no social networks, no interaction with government, etc. Websites provided information and that was about it. AltaVista was about the only search engine worth its salt too.

Running Firefox 65.0 here with no more problems than usual. It works perfectly fine on this forum, but the usual issues are still there - leaks memory, can't download big files from mega (runs out of ram), doesn't list all files on mega, corrupts itself on the atariage forum.

One can only hope it gets fixed one day.

I have solved its problems and actually speed problems by removing the Fox: Lot of Fox removal goes on here, being a Farm, they have decimated the Curlew Sandpipers around here & lots of other Fauna: None left. As yet I have not been ruthless & audited the registry. Its amazing at times, what you can find in there to weed out.

As noted the computer seems to be faster without it. It & Malwarebyte' s seemed to consistently be at war, & there seemed to be an uneasy truce between it & the Russian "Kaspersky". A while back it & the forum were not getting along & like Robbbert, stability under certain circumstances seems to be constantly compromised. This unit has a round 4Gb of Ram I think, but one should be able to get it to cache to HDD. Never had that issue on this computer, others yes.

there seemed to be an uneasy truce between it & the Russian "Kaspersky"

It's not clear to me what you mean by "it". If you are running two types of virus checker simultaneously, then it's not uncommon for there to be all sorts of problems, including false positives, memory hogging and CPU hogging.

As for Firefox, I have only had one serious issue with it in relation to V-R and that was a long while back when FF made a fundamental change that affected XP users (which I was at the time), and a side effect of that FF change was that I could no longer log intro V-R. I had to roll back a version to avoid that.

The Malware bytes & Kaspersky are not running together. However, I did actually do a trial with them both running & its seems that its only The fox & the big Backup drive that slow things. I also note issues with the display driver that may involve a fox? Frequently the display driver would crash if it stayed on screen saver. So far that has not happened with the Fox missing and the computer is definitely faster without it.

This sort of issue has always been with us. I always found in the early days anything one did with Microsoft Word & such, could be done faster, better & with a whole lot less resources, by WordPerfect.

I have an old notebook where I would have liked to try it on it but under the heading of "forced obsolescence" its OS is no longer supported.

a whole lot less resources, by WordPerfect

The phenomenon known as bloatware -- successive versions of a product being loaded up with more and more "features" that are neither needed, nor wanted, by the great majority of users but deemed necessary by the marketing people that run large software companies so that they can flog the next version.

I recall reading a long time ago that by version 7 of a popular software product, it's usually terminally obese.

Planned obsolescence is another bugbear.

A number of people I know have moved to Linux or other flavour of Unix to avoid much of this nonsense.

Microsoft sorted the issue with WordPerfect out by buying out Corel and discontinuing most of their product line. For a while, Corel even had a flavour of Linux in their stable, though there were arguably better distros.

Overall I've never had big issues with reliability with Microsoft products. They usually work as intended. My biggest beef is how they stuffed Outlook by removing the combined mail boxes. Outlook was so easy to use when there was just one inbox, one outbox and one sent box. Now, unless one messes about with the rules, we are forced to have a separate set of boxes for each e-mail address. Apart from that bone of contention, I've had good use of Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, Publisher and Access.

Yes, for many, bloatware is probably an issue as far as value for money goes - when you are buying something with things you don't need and will never use it can at times be hard to justify. It's like buying a fast car. You can still only drive it at 110km/h in most states and territories.

As for browsers, for webdev purposes I have all the common browsers installed however I stick with Edge for my own browsing. It is as good as any for general use and updates to it are packaged with Windows updates.