Firefox dev says Intel Raptor Lake crashes are increasing with rising temperatures in record European heat wave — Mozilla staff's tracking overwhelmed by Intel crash reports, team disables the function

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The saga continues.

Intel Raptor Lake processors for desktops
(Image credit: Intel)

Mozilla has reportedly been swamped with crash reports for its Firefox browser, the majority of which are coming from Raptor Lake Intel CPUs that are known to suffer from instability that is further exacerbated by heat. Senior Staff Engineer Gabriele Svelto said on Mastodon that a mass of browser crash reports are coming from Intel Raptor Lake-powered systems located in areas that are suffering from heat waves.

“If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you’re in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat,” says Svelto. “I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems.” The engineer even added that it has gotten so bad that the team disabled the bot, which filed these crash reports automatically, especially since these events almost exclusively happened to Intel Raptor Lake PCs — specifically, the Intel Core i7-14700K model.

The instability issue exploded around the second and third quarters of last year, and it took several months for the company to find its root cause. Since this was a physical degradation problem, no amount of patches can reverse the instability — Intel’s microcode updates only mitigated it and prevent the conditions that triggered the instability from occurring. Just last month, Intel released microcode update 0x12F to address the Vmin shift that’s happening to Raptor Lake CPUs that have been running for several days in a row. However, Svelto says that this version also caused the bugs to “come back in full force”.

Thankfully, Intel extended the warranty for all the affected chips from three to five years. So, if you’re one of the millions of users affected by this issue, and you have a dead Raptor Lake CPU, you can RMA it and get a replacement.

These CPU instability issues have caused Intel to lose ground to AMD in the desktop PC market share, and its Arrow Lake chips performed poorly in sales, exacerbating the company’s financial problems. In comparison, AMD has been releasing excellent gaming processors, especially the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D chip, which eclipses even Intel’s latest offerings in several gaming benchmarks.

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Jowi Morales
Jowi Morales
Contributing Writer

Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

37 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Amdlova
    My intel CPU working fine at 36 - 40C ambient
    It's way easier to say Firefox is a crap
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    Amdlova said:
    My intel CPU working fine at 36 - 40C ambient
    It's way easier to say Firefox is a crap
    Eh, with so many mobos having absolutely destructive settings as default, and users having no idea, it's not hard to believe.
    Reply
  • dalek1234
    My Firefox isn't crashing, but I'm on AMD so that probably explains it.
    Reply
  • rluker5
    My Firefox isn't crashing either, but I have stable power to the wall.
    If you follow the thread and go up to that ones source thread the coworkers were talking about <15 total crashes a week. Which dropped to none. Also the guy responsible thinks these Intel chips may be hitting 100c browsing Firefox.
    So this guy isn't rational.

    Edit: here is the source: https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/114814117276254003 and he links the bugzilla page with the dozen or so weekly crashes worldwide: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1950764 Note BugBot's comments.
    Reply
  • joeer77
    My i5 13500 CPU gets up to 96C without crashing. I'm using the stock cooler. Maybe the stock cooler is not so great in these hot countries in Europe? Time for them to upgrade the cooler if they don't have air conditioning.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    joeer77 said:
    My i5 13500 CPU gets up to 96C without crashing. I'm using the stock cooler. Maybe the stock cooler is not so great in these hot countries in Europe? Time for them to upgrade the cooler if they don't have air conditioning.
    They are not crashing because of the temps, intel CPUs can work at 105° with no issues (even up to 115) .
    The problem is mobo auto overclocks that are instable, the high temps are just a symptom of that and not the cause.
    Reply
  • m3city
    Thats True, its not because of temps, its because this series is crap. You may reach out to tech details, mobo makers faults, but long story short - cpu shall not be done so close to the edge. It should work under max load, period. And then have some slack for overclock or unstable crappy mobo. It doesnt bc Intel had to do it to reach AMD performance. While extended guarantee history is a mere makeup on pimple, that had to be done and its good Intel has capacity to do that.
    Reply
  • schwaggins
    It's possible ambient temps are affecting vendor specific motherboard tolerances just enough to trigger unnoticeable CPU micro crashes,
    Firefox crash reports don't include motherboard details only CPU type
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    Amdlova said:
    My intel CPU working fine at 36 - 40C ambient
    It's way easier to say Firefox is a crap
    ahh yes your 1 point of data vs their likely thousands to millions of data points...
    "i played russian roulette once and survived so idk how people die from it"

    rluker5 said:
    Also the guy responsible thinks these Intel chips may be hitting 100c browsing Firefox.
    its 2025. Many people run multiple monitors, have browser open while they render/game, etc.

    its not unreasonable for a browser crash to happen when you are using an application that WILL be running the cpu hot along side the browser.
    Reply
  • jg.millirem
    I still use a 2018 Coffeelake - Intel really knew how to make 14nm! - that not infrequently hits 100 and doesn’t crash. Their newer CPUs and ecosystem hacks are crap. I’m assembling my first AMD machine now.
    Reply