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?"
yeah (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes. (Score:1, Interesting)
You are the exception, not the rule. (Score:1, Interesting)
Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, with the full 1.0 I haven't had a single crash yet, and I've been using it a lot since the first day it was available.
Browing MapQuest... (Score:5, Interesting)
-Z
1.0 was a mis-step for me (Score:1, Interesting)
I went to the Firefox IRC channel to ask if there was a hidden configuration option to do something about these issues, got into a debate about the merits and weaknesses of the new search functionality, and got banned! was not impressed.
Talked to the admin who banned me, he said it was because I was going on too much; I said decency alone means you *say* something, you don't just ban someone outright. He said, and I quote, "when did decency and IRC ever have anything to do with each other?"
Not good to hear that from a channel admin.
--
Toby
Re:Probs before PR (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm currently using FireFox PR1.0, it's been open for about 5 days straight, running on Win2KPro. It's using 104MB of RAM. Why I don't know... I only have 4 tabs open at the moment and no flash or java running, and no third party plugins... but it's using 104MB or memory right now. It probably would have locked up if I didn't have a gig of RAM in this machine...
Went up to 108MB when I hit preview, and it's not going down...
=Smidge=
I notice the same thing as in 1.0 PR... (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe you're a victim of some bug that's caused by something else in your system. It sounds strange otherwise, since under normal circumstances, I don't really think 1.0 shouldn't crash "often".
Re:Probs before PR (Score:2, Interesting)
No, but I have noticed it uses CPU time randomly (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:solving the problem, slashdot style (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Are you proposing that Microsoft has a "black ops" department, whose sole purpose is to cause Windows to behave incorrectly when 3rd party software is run? Additionally, this department is exceptionally good at keeping a secret. So good, in fact, that the only way to detect their work is by running open source (patently bug-free) software on their OS, to uncover these flaws? Given that open source software is bug-free, wouldn't such a department fear discovery when performing such an act?
I'm not saying that there aren't reasons to dislike Microsoft, but goodness, this is
I'll tell you the single source of all of your Microsoft woes... the market. If the market will pump billions of dollars into a company, they have little right to complain about that company's software. There is competition. There was a lot more of it before all of you gave them all of your money. If you dislike Microsoft's product line, then download a Linux or BSD ISO, and install it. If you vote with your pocketbook, the company will listen. Hit companies that break the law with the law, and if you dislike the lack of competition, then purchase a competing product, or compete with them.
My experiance (Score:2, Interesting)
For the first few days I had the system completely freezing reminding me of the bad old days of win 95/98. However for some reason I had a message to run chkdsk and it seems to have fixed itself
The best Firefox so far for me has been 0.9 (if it was even called firefox back then) but any firefox has been better than allowing access to or even using MSIE
Re:/. is not tech support (Score:3, Interesting)
Me too! (Score:2, Interesting)
Hold on a blinking second Batman! (Score:0, Interesting)
I expect intelligent and thought provoking replies on this page....
Wait wait, did I miss it? When did they start the snowball fight in hell?
Are we talking about the same thing? Slashdot? This is slashdot we're talking about. Good grief man, you must be going to some other site and ended up here by accident!
Never, ever, ever expect mature posts on slashdot. Be pleasantly surprised when you actually see a post by someone that knows WTF they are talking about.
Firefox 1.0 (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:/. is not tech support (Score:3, Interesting)
I took a quick tour to re-acquaint myself with the Firefox alternatives, but so far all they're doing is reminding me of all the reasons I stopped using them. Back to Lynx, at least on Linux; the Windows version of Firefox has been very good until just recently, and is starting to occasionally crash, but still hasn't shown anywhere near the degree of instability I've seen under Linux.
One person's experience, your mileage may vary. I've been called an MS apologist plenty of times, and it won't kill me if that trend continues. But I'm damn thankful that Firefox under Windows is still performing okay for me, because I'd rather slice off my nuts with a rusty tuna can lid than touch Internet Explorer again.
Re:Mozilla-firefox crashes (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:solving the problem, slashdot style (Score:1, Interesting)
Look at the timing of this "anonymous" coward... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe this is just a poor attempt to generate some "bad" Firefox press.
I smell a rat. Or a troll. Or both.
[*] I don't get the NYT, and I won't accept their privacy policy (thphhht!) so I have no idea if it's already come out.
Re:Basic Human Nature (Score:2, Interesting)
But they are not valid HTML 3.2 attributes. Why slasdot is using a 3.2 DTD instead of a 4.01 DTD is beyond me. But even forcing the validator to use an HTML 4 DTD still produces a ton of errors. Slashdot's HTML just sucks, is invalid, and they know it. Hopefully it will finally be fixed [slashdot.org] soon.
Thanks for the responses! :) (Score:2, Interesting)
First off, I'd like to say that I was the poster of this message. I chose to stay anonymous for a couple of reasons... one of which is that it's more entertaining reading flaming responses here than in my email. :)
One thing I must note, this message wasn't a plea for help (as most of you assumed). If you read the last line, the one containing the question, carefully, you'll see that I wanted to hear about others' experiences. Looking through the responses, I definitely did get some good feedback. My main concern (which this thread validated) is that Firefox is pitched as a easy to use, leaner, more secure browser when compared to IE. However, when you upgrade the browser, things inevitably get screwed up (weird things in profile, plugins, extensions, etc...). The easy solution would be to uninstall previous instances of Firefox before installing the upgrade, something that is never recommended as you go through the upgrade process.
I find this whole thing especially frustrating because I convinced many people (non-tech people) to start using Firefox while it was still in pre release. Now, some of those people have upgraded to the final release (or have tried too) and are cursing the thing out. Was I wrong to get ordinary users to start using a pre-release version of a great browser??? possibly, but the guys releasing this thing should realize that they're targetting the masses now. And the masses are fairly dumb and quick to reject new things. I'd hate to see this huge launch campaign backfire because ordinary users aren't "sophisticated enough".
And I post this to slashdot instead of Mozillazine for another reason. These sorts of usability issues plague open source.... developers not understanding ordinary users and ordinary users running back to their M$ crap. Proprietary software has one huge advantage over open source, it's marketed and sold by dumb ordinary users.
Re:Probs before PR (Score:3, Interesting)
"Mem Usage" is the only one on by default, thus most likely to be read by someone who doesn't know anything. (Unless they use something other than Task Manager, which would surprise me.) It corresponds to the application's Working Set, aka how much physical memory it is actively using. (not necessarily exclusively, some of that is shared with other apps)
"VM Size" is also called Page File elsewhere, the amount of virtual memory that the application has allocated, but swapped out to disk.
Right now, I have Firefox 1.0PR (Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10.1) running with 9 tabs and it's got 130MB Mem Usage and 198MB VM Size. It's been running for about 2 weeks. I can close several tabs and it won't go down by that much. (If you wait a bit, it drops by a about a few hundred k for each.)
Why, I don't know. I haven't been bothered enough to investigate. Still, I'm a bit impressed that it can manage to keep 130MB in its working set and still stay below 2% CPU on a 600MHz machine. Maybe it's locking stuff unnecessarily or something...
Backup your profile... (Score:3, Interesting)
On Windows machines you can use a utility to backup your profile called, MozBackup [jasnapaka.com]. Test it out a few times and then try upgrading.
Saves your backup to another file and can import that backup into another installation. Let's you take your passwords and all that with you.
Stability, GLibc and the road back to Mozilla (Score:3, Interesting)
Improvements:
- Auto-update
- Improved search
- Skin
- Download manager
Side-effects:
- Firefox is very unstable compared to Phoenix
- The development team has started linking Firefox against glibc 2.3
The improvements are of little to no benefit IMHO:
- Auto-update is too unreliable and impractical when you're not root. It's actually quicker to do it the old-fashioned way
- Being a slightly conservative bastard who can't appreciate eye candy if it isn't female, I've never used skins.
- The improved search is an exception. The colours are handy if you're visually scanning a large document and it eliminates the window blocking your view. It's actually a bit like vim's search.
- The download manager is not very practical. It gives clueless lusers a harder time infecting their PC's, but it's "hidden" into the browser and the actions surrounding a download take more time now than ever before.
The decay which has been accompanying all this development is quite severe:
- The stability issues cause two crashes on an average day for me. Some sites actually cause crashes whenever viewed. In most cases the sites contain buggy html and javacrypt, but that should not crash the browser. Notable examples include WebCT and requested popups.
- Although most modern distros use glibc 2.3, I'm not going to switch for a while.
I've tried setting up a chroot for it, but the latest version of gcc appears to be unable to compile [gnu.org]the latest glibc.
According to the gcc maintainers this is a bug [gnu.org] in glibc.
According to the glibc maintainers this is a bug in gcc.
blah rant rave curse slap stab blam, etc
Even though there's a hack to get it working, I'm staying with glibc 2.2 until both groups have stopped trying to break eachother's code.
But there's always PLAN B. And after three hours of compiling firefox 1.0, it turns out that the degradation curve since 0.8 has not changed course.
Some common sense inhibitor snaps in my skull and I ditch firefox. Alternatives:
Konqueror toy
Dillo incomplete
Links rules my console, but it has some
inherent disabilities
etcetcetc.
But there's always the "dead" Mozilla. It turns out that Mozilla is not as dead as commonly thought.
Mozilla has become much lighter nowadays. The e-mail, news and chat is seperated from the browser package now and doesn't swallow memory anymore and it's noticeably faster than before.
It can also use extensions, block popups and evil javascript code, and some other features we've started to like about Firefox. Among the differences are a more intuitive download manager and unfortunately the old text search. But the most important differences are its much greater stability and the fact that it is backwards compatible with glibc 2.2 and possibly even older versions.
So, contrary to the mainstream momentum, I've switched back to Mozilla. Getting it working took a few mouseclicks instead of a full compile and minutes instead of hours. I live happily ever after.
If you're having nervous breakdowns with firefox, consider this move.
Steven.