Is Firefox 1.0 Less Stable than Firefox PR1.0? 758
An anonymous reader wonders: "I had Firefox 1.0PR running smoothly on three different machines and it hardly ever crashed. After upgrading to 1.0, I seem to have at least one annoying crash a day. On one of the machines, using the 'self update' feature caused Firefox to crash in middle of the upgrade and left it in a completely unusable state. Eventually, I had to uninstall it and resort to using IE to download the full installer, again. Is it just me, or are other heavy Firefox users noticing this sort of behavior?"
/. is not tech support (Score:5, Informative)
Probs before PR (Score:2, Informative)
Running smoothly (Score:2, Informative)
Under linux also, there are no issues, exept maybe with the mplayer-embedded plugin, but that is the plugins fault actually, experiencing the same problem with epiphany, konqueror and opera. So no, from my point of view firefox is as good as it gets!
Nein (Score:3, Informative)
Uninstall first! (Score:5, Informative)
CNN will crash it (Score:5, Informative)
This is:
Linux 2.6, GNOME, 32-bit ppc, libswf installed,
multiple windows open, Debian-unstable, the tab
preferences extension installed so I can go back
to the old pre-tab Mozilla ways...
This really, really, sucks. I was one of those
people that would keep a browser running for
several weeks at a time. I'd let it sit on one
virtual desktop with two dozen windows open.
Re:Probs before PR (Score:5, Informative)
Where you should go with these problems... (Score:2, Informative)
If you believe you have found a bug, you should search if anyone has reported that bug, and if not report it here [mozilla.org].
Sorry, but its almost offensive to see this at slashdot.
Re:mod story -1 off-topic (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Stability Issues...? (Score:2, Informative)
Also, something you might want to do is to create a new agent. Just make sure you save your bookmarks.
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Really? (Score:2, Informative)
FireFox and Java (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Probs before PR (Score:5, Informative)
What this comes down to is: the figure you generally see for memory use of an app is not physical RAM use. It might not even reflect the actual amount of physical+disk memory in use! Finally, memory usage might be overstated due to transient external allocations (e.g. win32 API dialog boxes) that deceivingly appear as memory used by an application.
What you have to look for is how that memory usage figure changes over time. In most cases, it grows until it hits a ceiling - even at that point, it is way overstated (a conservative measure, so to speak). What is bad is if it regularly grows by 50 MB per day, without limit. Then there is a leak
Re:Cheesey Creezey!! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:CNN will crash it (Score:5, Informative)
I have an idea on why your browser is crashing.
You're trying to open flashMX movies in a flash3 library that was abandoned over 5 years ago.
Try removing libswf and I bet CNN won't crash at all.
Re:solving the problem, slashdot style (Score:1, Informative)
Then I installed v1.0 - the "find-as-you-type" bug is gone - yeah!
Unfortunately, about once a day I manage to crash firefox - something which almost never happened with 1.0pre.
So, yes, 1.0 is less stable. However, it didn't occur to me to whine somewhere about it, because that is not going to help.
Tels
Re:Stability Issues...? (Score:4, Informative)
I've done several upgrades of Phoenix, Firebird and now Firefox on different machines, and I have grown accustomed to letting the new version create a new profile and then copy the stuff you still want back into it. I normally delete "C:\Docs and Settings\MYNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox", then copy the old bookmarks.html into my profile again.
Did so with PR1 -> 1.0, and have had no issues on several machines.
Re:Probs before PR (Score:5, Informative)
Even worse, there's this System Idle process that's taking up 99% of my CPU time!
Sheesh. It's called memory caching. That's why TOP differentiates between RSIZE, VSIZE and RSHRD.
RSIZE is the amount of ram being actively used by a process. I doubt RSIZE is 104megs.
firefox not suitable for slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
For some reason many times the page is not rendered in a way I can read. the columns in slashdot often overlap, and are really weird. in IE all is fine
yes I do see the irony
Re:Mac OS X version crashes frequently (Score:2, Informative)
I had opposite results (Score:5, Informative)
Some things to consider:
1. How did you install 1.0? Did you do an overwrite? If so, do a clean install.
2. What extensions are you using? Have you disabled the extension version check?
>On one of the machines, using the 'self update' feature caused Firefox to crash in middle of the upgrade
When was this? Do you have DNS/network/firewall issues which could be causing this?
Lastly, to get some real answers from the experts people should asking here. [mozillazine.org]
Re:Stability Issues...? (Score:2, Informative)
Example: I installed an extension during the PR release. I found that I didn't really like it, so I uninstalled it and carried on without a problem. 1.0 is released, downloaded it, installed... FF now crashes every 30 minutes or so.
Skip over a large chunk of trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and I found some leftover files and preferences (prefs.js) from the aforementioned extension in my profile folder. Deleted those and everything was back to being peachy.
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.hardgrok.org/blog/item/slashfix-firefo
Isn't open source great?!
maybe this explains your frame loss... (Score:5, Informative)
if that bothers you, you can always use the task manager to set the process's priority to either "below normal" or "low".
however, games are memory intensive. so as a browser, which uses memory caching to be fast. when real memory is used up, "thrashing" occurs (to swap some memory pages to the disk). even adjusting task priority won't help here, since thrashing is inherently slow. whenever a web page that you leave in the background refreshes itself, the OS has to swap out a few pages of game memory and swap in memory pages for the browser. as the game continues, it needs the memory back, and the OS has to juggle around memory pages again.
if you see a periodic frame loss, then self-refreshing web pages are definitely the culprit.
Re:Probs before PR (Score:5, Informative)
I'm going to guess that over the five days, you have opened and closed a whole bunch of tabs (probably dozens). It's a known issue in Firefox that when you close tabs, it doesnt release the memory.
See the bugzilla: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131456
I've had FF running for a week straight and using upwards of 200MB and only one tab open :). The only remedy is to restart FF. This has been an issue for over two years now. Dont expect it change anytime soon though, if it was a simple fix, I supppose it would have been done by now.
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:3, Informative)
I think all computers should have at least two nipples
There are two keyboard nipples. That's what the little bumps on the "F" and "J" keys are. They are there so you can position your fingers on the keyboard for typing without looking. I think the grandparent poster was referring to a trackpoint [wikipedia.org] mistakenly as a keyboard nipple.
Suggestion anyway (Score:5, Informative)
A few suggestions (Score:2, Informative)
Seems that they expected IE, and bollixed Firefox trying to do their dirty deeds.
Lessons learned:
1) Only accept plugins from known safe sources. (https://update.mozilla.org/extension)
2) Firefox is a great browser, but it ain't idiot proof! (And Even I can be an idiot if I don't think first!) };-)
3) The number of people that'll yell at you when you ask an honest question, instead of offering help, is discouragingly high.
Re:/. is not tech support (Score:5, Informative)
It's ok to tell him that his experience doesn't match yours, but at least give him a FAQ item that might help him work around or report the crashes [squarefree.com] rather than attacking him.
Re:solving the problem, slashdot style (Score:3, Informative)
It's not just any OS updates. Mozilla and Firefox lockup quite regularly on my Linux system starting very recently. I doubt this particular problem is an M$ conspiracy since I don't do M$ updates to my linux box.
That said, I think the problem lies with the flash plugin more than Firefox. I updated today and the same links that locked Mozilla (and Firefox) before don't do it anymore. Of course, you may have a different problem...
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:5, Informative)
Some of the errors are:
Line 8, column 14: there is no attribute "TYPE"
Line 38, column 11: there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN"
Line 38, column 26: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN"
Line 39, column 13: there is no attribute "MARGINWIDTH"
Line 39, column 30: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT"
Line 43, column 8: there is no attribute "BGCOLOR"
It goes on...
Back up bookmarks, then delete preferences (Score:2, Informative)
My experience... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My experiance (Score:4, Informative)
i heard about this other great browser... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:5, Informative)
A really really good implementation of a raw-mode synaptics driver is available for MacOS as SideTrack [ragingmenace.com]. It used to be free while it was in beta. Now it is $15 and a heck of a good deal. It fixes the powerbooks' problem of lacking a right mousebutton and scroll wheel while giving all sorts of extra enhancements that really make that one button mouse a lot more usable.
Re:Probs before PR (Score:3, Informative)
VSIZE (also displayed as "virt" and "VSZ") is the virtual size of the process. File mappings, video mappings, disk cache, swapped-to-disk ram is all included in this. For example, under Linux, X11 has a very large vsize because all of your videoram is included in this VSIZE.
RSIZE (aka "res" and "RSS") is the amount of physical ram your process, and your process alone, is using. This is the best indicator of ram usage.
RSHRD (aka "SHR") is the amount of shared ram your process is using. This is the space taken up by any shared libraries your process uses. This isn't necessarily in physical ram either.
Let's look at an example:
My firefox has been running for 5 days, it has a VSIZE of 165megs, RSIZE of 61 megs, and RSHRD of 35 megs.
VSIZE is what WinXP would report, 165 megs of ram used, never mind that more than half of that ram is stuff like disk cache allocated by the OS.
firefox-bin is using 65 megs of physical ram (that's still quite a lot).
RSHRD is the memory taken up by GTK, and libX11.so, and all the other shared libraries that are used by firefox. Closing firefox won't free this ram because it's *shared*, other apps running use that same libX11.so, etc.
Hope this helps. I don't know how to display this detail under XP, but I'm sure there are 3rd party tools to do it if system profiler can't.
1.0 working better for me...except... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Browing MapQuest... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:3, Informative)
I've never understood why the bumps on the F and J are referred to as nipples. They're so much smaller.
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:3, Informative)
Most likely FF is hanging on pageloads or something - are you actually waiting for the page to finish loading? Are you loading tabs in the background? Because my site already documents the limitations to the fix (it runs only when the pageload event is triggered, namely when a page finishes loading, and tabs loaded in the background never trigger a pageload). I am of course perfectly open to suggestions or enhancements. If the limitations annoy you, feel free to work around them, it's perfectly possible, just takes some effort and toiling with the Firefox extension API stuff. Maybe you should get off your butt and help instead of whining?