Tuesday, March 10, 2009

What happened to Firefox?!

I used to love Firefox. I was one of its big boosters. There are still some great features to it, but man, version 3 blows. I can't use it for more than 15-20 minutes without the CPU usage spiking and hanging the browser for about 20-30 seconds. Another problem is that it takes about 2-5 minutes for the browser (depending on my machine) to become usable. That may not sound like much. You're probably thinking I need to have some scotch and relax. Not a bad idea, regardless, it's really annoying when you are typing a blog (for instance) or you want to quickly check what time the Thai place closes and the browser freezes up or takes it's time booting up.

I've tried all the troubleshooting tips at Mozilla and out on the web to no avail. It happens on both machines I am running. So I've concluded that this great browser has been killed by some dumb engineer at Mozilla who probably left out a semi-colon somewhere in the code causing some kind of memory leak. Stupid monkey.

I'm too tied at this point to change. I love my extensions too much: Twitterfox, 1-click weather, grab and drag. Google's chrome is cool looking but, like Opera, it doesn't have the extensions (something I'm sure they will remedy). I don't think I can go back to IE. So, I'm just venting.

11 comments:

asadotzler@gmail.com said...

I'm gonna guess that one of your extensions is the problem. Try disabling them in the Add-ons manager and restarting to see if the problem goes away. Then you can selectively re-enable until the problem returns and you'll have identified the culprit.

Shawn Klein said...

Yeah, that's what I figured, but I've tried that several times. And it happens on a clean install without any add-ons. It happens in safe-mode as well.

Unknown said...

I agree, FF3 is a crime. That's why I still use FF2.

Patrick Stephens said...

Have you tried IE 8? It's got some nice features and seems pretty quick. I'm still using firefox, but am having many of the same memory problems that you report and will likely switch to Chrome or IE in the next couple of weeks....

Anonymous said...

I'm guessing that you've already troubleshot the rest of your system... defrag, erasing cookies (esp tracking cookies) trying other webpages, checking for interference with your wireless connection (yeah, that can be a particularly nasty problem to bypass)-- I'm sure you've tried using mozilla on another computer, right? Did you change Antivirus programs recently? There are a lot of things that interact with web browsers.. have you made sure that the other browsers are unaffected performance-wise?

Hope that some of this is helpful...

-Matt

Deirdre Bunny said...

I'm really relate to this point. For me, the disappointment began with 2.0. I still keep it on my system for cross browser compatibility checks, but I am sort of in the process of switching to Mozilla SeaMonkey - which is admittedly not at the top of its game yet, but to me seems to handle more like early FF did.

A. B. Clemons said...

Maybe it's time to move to Linux. I have no problems w/ FF3 or any addons I have installed...

Check out Ubuntu here You can try a live cd version without making any changes to your system.

Unknown said...

I thought I was the only person with this problem. I feel vindicated (but still quite vexed with Firefox).

Anonymous said...

Two words: Google Chrome

Shawn Klein said...

Two more Words: No Extensions.

I think I found the problem: it was with the rss feeds. I removed them all and Firefox doesn't stall out anymore.

Anonymous said...

FF3 on linux has sometimes the same problems. The problem is the source code of FF3, not the SO. Linux may feel less these problems to you... Check it by using firefox on facebook pages using Linux and return us the weakness of this browser. FF ruleD