First of all, and as you know, my working system is XP, and with "only" 2 giga of memory; I acknowledge that in/for 2015, this is decidedly sub-standard.

But then, as you know, too, there have been several threads here in this forum, and many more elsewhere, which treat the incredible sub-standardness of FireFox, re its inexistent memory management.

As said, I'm not into defamation, so I have to admit that in part, my probs could come from Avira free (formerly, I had used Avast free, even more intruding than Avast free), and also, I have to admit that my probs started with the very latest Adobe Flash update (16), which they offered in order to overcome (again, and, felt, for the 1,000th time) "security" probs.

I had installed that Flash 16, and then, after opening just SOME tabs in FF, I quickly not only ran out of memory, but had my system stalled for good, up to killing FF "process" by Win Task Manager, and by thus losing any tab = all the work I previously had put into searching for url's, links, etc. - it should be obvious for any reader that by opening some 12 or 15 tabs from search and links in previous "hits", you've got some "work done", which is quite awful to lose then.

I've always said, "you get what you pay for", and I've always acknowledged there are just SOME exception to that rule, but then, ALL of my experience backs this up, to 99.5 (= not: 99,9) p.c. of all cases, this rule applies perfectly, and FireFox seems to be the perfect example of TOTAL CRAP, delivered by some "volunteers", who like the idea that they are "giving out something valid for free", when in fact, they tell us, hey, dude, I know I cannot sell my shit, but ain't you willing to swallow it for free? Of course, I'm opening this thread not in order to defame FF, but in order to get new ideas about how to do things better, this whole forum being about that, right?

Thus, my very first reaction to FF being stalled* by that infamous Flash update was to deactivate Flash, and to observe things coming from that, for some week or so. Here I've got news for you: Flash, except for YT, is totally unnecessary, AND it's omnipresent (= "ubiquitous"), i.e. almost ANY web site, as poor-in-content or modest in scope it might be, there's virtually ALWAYS that line above my FF content window, "Do you allow FF to activate Flash for this site?" (or something like that, DC NOT doing this shit).

*= Of course, I've got plenty of room for "virtual memory M" by Windows, on c: (since my data, as said, is on some external hdd), and "virtual memory is managed by the system") - but notwithstanding, even if I allow a quarter of an hour (!!!) for any command to become effective, I always end up by killing the FF "process", after HOURS of waiting. At the same time, all other applications functions "quite normally", i.e. they respond to commands, but with that little delay you'd expect by my system's having replaced working memory by multiple hdd accesses, considering FF has eaten all the working memory. It's just FF that doesn't respond any at all.

And fact is, in more than a week, I NEVER had to tell FF to activate Flash, in order to get ANY useful info, from any of those several hundred pages all begging for Flash. (It's understood that for JavaScript, the situation is totally different: If you don't allow for JS, almost any web page of today will not work anymore, in any acceptable way. But again, don't mix up JS and Flash; JS having become a literally unavoidable "standard", whilst Flash is a simple nuisance, except for YT, and then, for rare cases in which you want to see some embedded "film" - IS propaganda? No thanks, and all the rest, no thank you either; let alone for indecently idiotic porn.)

Back to FF: My getting rid of Flash did NOT solve my probs. It's invariably "CPU 100 p.c." over hours, with Flash de-activated though, and as soon as I've got opened more than just 10 or 12 FF tabs; I assume these are JS scripts running, but then, even after MANY minutes, FF never tells me, "that JS is running, should we stop it?".

I have to say that I know about the existence of "NoScript for FF", but then, it's not obvious how to run that NS in some smooth way, just in order to intercept too-demanding scripts whenever they dare run, but leaving alone any menu "scripting" anywhere; do you

I wish to confirm again that I'm NOT speaking of porn or other crap sites, but that I'm just "surfing" among the most innocuous web sites you could imagine.

As for Flash, before deactivating Flash for good, I had tried Chrome, and I had the very unpleasant experience that with Chrome, and that incredible shit of Flash 16, all was as incredible awful as with FF and that incredible shit of Flash 16 (sic), if not worse (!), so it's obvious that Flash 16 is even worse than FF 36 (or was it 35? it's the current version all the same), but then, Chrome will allow your killing ONE tab running, whilst in FF, it's "all or nothing", i.e. if you decide to kill the FF "process", you will lose all your "search" work, too (since FF stalls your FF process (i.e. not your system as a whole, so it's obvious it's all a matter of FF's memory management), so it's not even possible to switch from one tab to another one in order to retrieve the respective url's, even manually).

Btw., WITH that incredible Flash 16, simple Flash sites (which in fact would not have even needed Flash to begin with, see above) brought FF to 1200 meg, then 1,500, then 2,000, 3,500 meg... in fact, Flash's memory demands are simply unlimited, and that's confirmed not currently (I admit), but from Flash users' experience back in August, 2014, i.e. some few Flash versions ago, and who say Flash of summer 2014 asked for unlimited memory, 6 giga, 8 gia, 10 giga... they were on systems of 8 or 16 giga of working memory, and they thought it was unbearable...

The only reason I cling to FF is the fact that "YouTube Video and Audio Downloader" is available for FF only (i.e. not Chrome), and that it's the ONLY YT downloader of my knowledge which lets you select best AUDIO quality, too (and not only best video quality, as its competitors do, at best) - but in the end, you can perfectly use FF for this YT downloading, whilst using Chrome for anything else, so that's "no reason".

Hence :

- Except for very limited usage (YT), Flash is totally useless and, short of viruses, the utmost nuisance on pc (or Mac) (and as usual, Jobs was first to identify this problem, AND to resolve it, for much of the systems he's been marketing)
- ( Similar things could be said about the really ridiculous and useless Adobe pdf viewer, but that's another story. )
- FF is to be considered liquid, stinking, green, morbid shit: If not even in iteration 36, software meets most basic standards, it will probably not meet them in iteration 100 either
- Chrome is "free", too, but we all know you pay with all your data... BUT: At least there, you KNOW WHAT price you pay for their "free" service, whilst FF "do it all benevolently", and obviously serve you perfect crap (whatever the reasons of FF being totally stuck, with 2 giga of work memory, and plenty of "virtual memory", your only alternative is to kill FF throughout if ever you want to get rid of some "CPU 100 p.c." over many, many minutes, with no end, instead of killing JUST SOME tabs going bonkers, is kindergarten)
- And yes, Avira free could be "in it" to some degree, too (= I had less problems, even with FF, when I "surfed" without any "protection") (but Avast free was really "unbearable", by their pop-ups (i.e. at least, I thought so, before my current problems with FF)... but perhaps, function-wise, they would always be preferable to Avira free, which is less intruding re pop-ups, but doesn't work as well with FF, then?)
- Any insight into NoScript for FF? Is there a chance to get it to stop JS scripts running amok but letting go of any "regular" JS script anywhere?

Your opinion/advice/experience is highly welcome.

EDIT:

Sorry, my mistake above, I just read:

"Allow www.donationcoder.com to run "Adobe Flash"?" - Should we not enter some overdue discussion re "Are site developers trying to do Flash even in pure-text pages utterly nuts?", right now?

Very interesting insight and speaking from experience, thank you so much again!

As said, Paragon never let me down, but then, my 3 pc's are XP (cf. MilesAhead's post immediately preceding). EaseUS "let me down", but that was a hardware problem (see below). (And yes, I was speaking of home systems (without clarifying), but particularly appreciate the insight into some more elaborate scenarios.)

Above, the "I suggest always backing up two images from two different programs." (Steven Avery) - I think that's a tremendously worthwile idea, and which is absolutely to be followed. (The idea to use two different backup hdd's is quite widespread, for both variants, concurrently and alternatively, but to use several programs for it, on top of that, is as original as it seems to be a real step further.)

My main system got unusable some months ago, and I spent about 60 hours (! I more or less counted them) in order to re-install it all, together with all the settings and all that, so better backup strategies do interest me now.

I lost my (EaseUS) back-up (thus needing this complete re-install) due to a defective (and quite new) external hdd, and/or to many defective sectors over there, right within the backup (which by this went unusable IN FULL, whilst file-by-file backups, on the same hdd, were mostly fine (and the rest of them was fine on my internal hdd).

Why? Well, notebooks lack up usb jacks, so in those times (= would never do that again) I connected the external hdd to a usb hub; can't say/remember if I had been crazy enough to do the last backup that way, the hdd connected to the hub, and even the previous backup, some months (!) before, on the same hdd (! ("!" standing for "don't this this!)) was as unusable - I think for backups, I had connected the hdd "directly", not via hub, but why not imagine those sectors had been damaged at other occasions, "over" the hub?

I'm positive about hubs being able to damage external data: The same hub (quite expensive, 30-dollar-range, not 5 bucks) had also damaged a usb stick, with other data, to the point of me being forced to try almost 20 different data recovery tools

HDD Recovery Pro did NOT do it, for example. Little, free/cheap tools like Recuva et al. (Puran, Pandora, Glary, EaseUS, NTFS Undelete and many more) do NOT it, they are just handy for retrieving (not-yet-overwritten) files that ain't any more in your paper basket. TestDisk is pure hype, as far as I'm concerned: It's free, it's much "advertized", so I spent about 10 hours with it, but it did nothing for me, and there is a "forum", with no help when it comes to real problems. Stellar Phoenix (preposterous name if there is one) did nothing for me (not even Prof. for 99$), but I have to admit that at least, those trial versions show you BEFORE buying they're not able to do it - it's just that for 100 bucks, I would think they DID it. (Recuva is free, after all, so where's the price difference to be found again in delivery?)

Now for that data on my usb stick, how did I get the data back? (I had my data on that usb stick, and, most of it broken, on that backup hdd (in file-by-file synch backup), so I HAD to get to that stick data!)

- Ontrack Easy Recovery (as said above in another context, very successful image transfer: prof. data recovery service, and hence totally overpriced (it's just for a year!) do-it-yourself recovery sw... but which (very probably, I could of course not really try without buying, just saw it rebuilding the directories) delivers

- RecoverMyFiles (as the tool before, this tool as well showed it would do it, and the price is absolutely acceptable, NB: RMF is not UndeleteMyFiles which did not do it)

- Get Data Back (similar to RecoverMyFiles) - I finally did it with GDB (which did an image of the "broken" stick to my hdd (no, not the broken one), so that I kept the broken stick (which is always broken; GDB could very probably have repaired it, but:) in order to test any other data recovery tool, in similar/identical conditions.

So for similar situations, I highly recommend Get Data Back, and also RecoverMyFiles (whilst the Ontrack tool is simply not necessary and will possibly fail whenever the two other tools fail? Of course it may have some hidden capabilities not needed in my particular case?)

After this diversion, back to usb hubs: So my ("active") hub obviously did damage the usb stick (the web is "full" of similar experiences) and very probably my hdd, too, and of course, NO backup whatsoever should be made via a hub. (Well, there are hubs in the 300 dollar range, but I had thought that spending 30 Euro on a hub would get me "quality"... and to say it all, it even was my second such 30 Euro hub, the first losing connection again and again, by this not damaging the sticks and hdds, but the data to be written (but in those situations, I had been notified at least...).

From the above, you can deduct some other advice:

- Don't assume your data is safe if you have a usb stick as working repository and a (single) hdd as backup: If you're unlucky, the stick gets "broken" (and there is no guarantee the next stick "broken" in that way will be able to read from by the above-mentioned three programs), and then your backup (be it file-by-file or in just-one-big-file form: from which many of the above-mentioned backup programs, in their respective paid versions, can derive single files indeed) IS BROKEN, TOO.

- Whenever such a situation arises, working file broken, backup medium/file broken, too, you will be happy to have got a second backup, but which for most people (= for the very few people who have GOT such a second backup, to begin with) will be a more or less ANCIENT version, i.e. in regular backup scenarios, it's very difficult to assure you will have got TWO RECENT file backups; bear in mind, in this respect, that even better synch tools that do "versioning", will normally put less recent versions into neighboring folders of the "most recent version", which means, if the hardware in question "breaks", you will have to be "happy" with a quite old version somewhere else, if there is any. In other words, it's necessary to do file (= not: c: system) backups CONCURRENTLY and on TWO different DEVICES: I'll have a look if

- The problem here is, you would not really want to have hdd's running all day (which also will put them into any danger the pc itself is possibly exposed to), just for 80 sec. of backup in the evening, and to turn them on just for 80 sec. will wear them out in a similar way as if they had been running all day); this would indicate to do your "multiple daily" file backups on two different sticks, and have two concurrent weekly backups, at (almost) the same time, onto two different hdd's you connect just for this.

- If there is a space problem, well, it just occurs to me that you will want, in case, VERY RECENT backup files, but not necessarily within all their file system sub-structures: You could rebuilt that from your weekly, "fully-comparative" file backup. What you really need is a daily replication of all NEW and CHANGED files, and why not into some "DUMP" folder, considering that in 9 years out of 10, you will never need those dumped files again?

At this very moment, I have got my work files on another external hdd (c: being for system files / applications), and I do a weekly backup onto another external hdd, but a daily backup is blatantly absent in my current workflow: Why not "synch new files, and files changed today, to a stick (with automatic rename in case of two eponymous files)"? That should be perfectly possible to automate (since it's not done otherwise) with Syncovery (with which I'm happy indeed: as explained, it was my wrong strategy that caused desaster), and even a quite approximative daily backup that you will really do is so much better than a more elaborate scenario but that is not regularly done, right?

- I've also got to admit that in thunderbolts, IF the lightning was not just over me, I had a tendency to not cut off my pc, and over many years, this did not cause my any problem, but who knows? It's unanimously discouraged to do so, and I consider myself a fool to have taken those risks, since after all, that careless behavior could have been the culprit, too, or then, perhaps the stick was damaged by the hub, and the hdd by it being connected to the pc in a situation where not even the pc should have been running anymore?! (If you call this idiotic, you're right.)