I have an older Dell inspiron laptop that I mainly use for light surfing and email while at home. It is running XP SP3 with 2GB RAM

in the last couple of weeks Firefox (21) has been crashing more and more until I can hardly go 5 minutes without it crashing. I have tried various fixes to no avail.
I thought maybe it was Flash causing the problem and disabled the flash add-on. That worked for a day or two and then it started again. I've run malwarebytes and other utilities and nothing was found.

I decided to try Chrome but it suffers from the same thing only more frequently.

I am starting to get pi$$ed off

Any Ideas?

Thanks in advance

I had the same problem. I tried and tried to figure out what was wrong but in the end I just went with Chrome. It's faster and less bloated.

Thanks, I would go with Chrome in a heartbeat but it crashes also. I get the "aw snap" screen every time for example in FT, I try and change pages on a thread.

I would check the Event Viewer in Windows to see what is being logged. It could be anything from a bad sector on the harddisk, to some trojan causing trouble for you.

False. Its far more bloated (after all it is a Google product), and not as fast as FF. But if you don't mind sharing all your info with Google, the UX is pretty nice...

Bollocks. Generalizations like this are useless without data points and/or context to back them up.

Here are a couple of recent 3rd-party reviews comparing the most popular Windows-compatible browsers. In both Chrome ranks higher than Firefox in speed, startup time, and compatibility with technology like HTML5, V8, and Sunspider etc.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2365692,00.asp

http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/the...fox-vs-safari/

It's no accident that Chrome usage has increased steadily amongst Windows OS for several consecutive years, while IE and Firefox usage has declined during the same period.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-w...-200807-201306

Given that it's happening with both Firefox AND Chrome, my usual "try this" for Firefox won't apply, but for anyone else: when debugging Firefox problems, first try disabling add-ons, and if that doesn't fix it, back up your profile directory and try running clean. Almost every Firefox-specific crash I've seen has involved either (A) a bad add-on, or (B) something else corrupted in the profile.

Since it's happening in both Chrome and newer versions Firefox, it could be a matter of GPU acceleration being bad, or a bad video drivers... you can try starting Chrome with the command line option " --disable-accelerated-compositing" or try some of these instructions:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/36918...heres-the-fix/
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/922995

I am definitely interested in hearing about any resolutions the OP might find that actually fixes the problem.

Since the error happens in multiple software, I would test the CPU and memory to rule out hardware problems. To test the CPU, I would use Prime95 and run each of the 3 torture tests for an hour each. To test the RAM, you can use MemTest86+ or Window's built in memory diagnostics. If either CPU or memory fails the test, contact the computer maker for warranty service.

WRT browser, I switched to Chrome beta from FireFox when Google announced that each tab runs in its process to prevent one page crashing the whole browser. That was in 2008. Microsoft implemented the same idea and released IE8 in 2009. Firefox promised and worked on multi process browser for the longest time before finally cancelling the project in 2011. That's when Firefox is done for me. I only use FireFox to verify sites will show up right, not for development.

Chrome seems more bloated and is more memory intensive due to the muti process architecture, but it is not uncommon to see one FireFox process consume hundreds of MB of RAM.

It is possible to control how much information Google collects when using Chrome: 1. Change the Google settings in Dashboard, 2. Sign out of Google account in Chrome, and 3. Use Incognito mode.

The best of multiple choices:

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-install...ersa-579083466

Maybe you are running a fever.

http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/

Happening to me as well (on 2 PCs with FF21), pretty sure the culprit is flash.

Wouldn't move to Chrome due to some add-ons I only have in FF.

Thanks to all for the suggestions, I have seemed to find a short term solution. I removed Chrome and FF and am using IE. So far (three days) not a single crash. I really liked FF so I am gonna do some experimentation with it.
Again thanks all

how retro!

Try comdo dragon or opera. I was getting the same problem few days ago on chrome so then I switched to comodo dragon it is same as chrome and also very good.