I used it for years and just recently switched to Firefox. I was just comfortable using it, and knew how to use the dev tools. I had my extensions set up how I liked. I’m still missing a few things on Firefox but fuck chrome.
While there might not be an addon that perfectly emulates every feature of Toby on Firefox, I am fully confident you can achieve all of its features with settings, config/userchrome edits, or some of the addons that are available. Personally I use Tab Session Manager and Tab Center Reborn (heavily edited though), so you might look into those and see if they have features you like.
I use duckduckgo and they have bangs. Put !yt at the start of your search and it'll automatically search youtube, !g for google, !a for Amazon, etc... Loads of bangs for basically every service out there.
I had an extension called Toby that opened a new tab and had an awesome page to organize bookmarks and open tabs. I can’t remember what I’m using on Firefox right now as I’m not at the computer, but it’s probably the most popular bookmark organizer. IMO Toby is just way ahead of anything I’ve found on Firefox.
It’s really easy to forget that back in the day (by which I mean what, 2010? Idk) chrome was super speedy and very cool with cool fast looking angular tabs and Google was a nice new cool internet company who’s moto was don’t be evil and the alternative was fucking internet explorer which was a cinder block in a blue shirt or Firefox which had a cool logo but was rather slow and the joke was that internet explorer’s whole purpose was to download chrome and I guess what I’m saying is that Google has lived long enough to see itself become the villain, or at least Comcast which is pretty much the same thing and tbh the only other time I can think of that something like this has actually happened is in 1998, when The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table
I use chrome for work because it's installed on every computer we have and the machines are locked down so I can't install firefox if I wanted to. I move around between stations all the time so logging in and having all my bookmarks, passwords, history, etc... synced is convenient. I use firefox at home but most people just stick with what's familiar to them. It's a solid browser feature-wise and that's what most people care about.
The last time I tried Firefox on a touch device the pitch to zoom function was basically useless. It was nothing but an equivalent to [Ctrl] + [+]. This was some years ago, so it could be better now.
Unless it's a RAM filling issue, because you would have too little RAM, and even then, the entire OS crashing and not just Firefox would be very unlikely, I don't see any reason for it to crash your entire OS. Regardless, there are Firefox forks that use much much less RAM.
You're using Windows, Mac or Linux first?
Try to uninstall, clean everything and reinstall with a new profile, it may work, who knows. If not, then it has to be your OS.
I don't think it's a RAM issue, unless Firefox eats 16GB of RAM. I mainly use Pop!_OS, a *nix distro, so maybe I messed up some package install that conflicts with Firefox in some way, but I haven't figured out which one.
Pop!OS is a pretty stable distro, so there shouldn't be any dependencies problem: you usually have that on arch or arch based distros, even if it's quite rare.
Have you ever uninstalled Firefox and reinstalled it but without some of its dependencies? Or ignored a package it asked you to install with it afterwards?
If not, maybe it's just an update that went wrong, like the PC shut down during an update or something. So update your system, uninstall firefox and reinstall.
Your data stored in your home directory (in .mozilla, a hidden folder) like your history, extensions, opened tabs, should be conserved, even if you use apt purge.