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Firefox is a turkey—I’m rolling back to version 2.0 out of desperation and may switch to Chrome or Safari
August 19, 2009 | 10:09 am
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By David Rothman
Firefox has been stealing perhaps an hour of my time each week, due to its slowness and frequent crashes on my Vista system. I’ve downgraded from Version 3.5.2 to Version 2.0.0.20 even though the security isn’t as good; do the same only at your own peril. Luckily I have other security measures in place. The other problem is that you may lose your bookmarks and other settings if you downgrade. So far mine appear to be AWOL.
If the current arrangements won’t work—and maybe even if they do—I’ll go on to Google Chrome or Safari 4. I’m sure fixes exist. But I’ve got better things to do than start up a career as a Firefox jock.
Why, just why, can’t Firefox get things right? Happy Firefox users abound, and I’m giving this app one last chance because of all the related plug-ins. But on my system at least, Firefox is a big, fat gobbler. Lots and lots of other people agree—check out the 51 positive and negative comments under an earlier post, Is Firefox 3.5 crap? I don’t care if Firefox says newer version are improved. Not as run on my machine.
I‘d love Firefox to include an ePub app. But then again, if Firefox is as rotten at that as for Web-browsing, then this might unwittingly sabotage e-bookdom. I wonder if the shortcomings of Firefox, not just commercial considerations, might be why Google went on to Chrome.
Technicality: The turkey photo is from Wikipedia and actually is of a fairly lean wild bird.
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Comments:
So, if you’re going back to FF 2.x then you can install Openberg add-on for epub, can’t you? I’ve thought of doing so, as there seems to be no other FF extension for epub, and Openberg stopped at version 2.x. I wish they developed something like the Scrapbook or Scrapbook+ extension, allowing for annotation, link insertion, and text highlighting. I’d like to capture web pages as epub (Scrapbook saves them as html docs, plus images, css, etc.;what if all files went into an .epub file)
I thought it was just me! I’ve been having a terrible time with Firefox on my PC at work and my Mac at home. Sigh…
Have you thought that maybe it is not Firefox, but your plugins that are causing problems? I expect some plugins don’t behave well yet in 3.5. I am running 3.5 with just a few plugins on a Vista and a Windows 7 machine and haven’t had any crashes in ages.
No reason to lose your bookmarks – ever! Just export the bookmarks with the export function of the old browser to a directory you will remember and import them again with the import function of the new browser. All browsers export marks to a universal format that can be read by any other browser. I’ve done this with Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome and they all interact well. That’s how I keep my bookmarks uniform among browsers and between my Mac and PC.
By the way, I have absolutely no problems with the latest Firefox on my XP netbook, or on my Mac, so the plugin comment might be on point. However, for Windows work I prefer Chrome because it is so much faster. For the Mac I use Safari because Safari is much faster and renders color better. I will switch to Chrome when the come out with a Mac version.
Why not just USE OPERA?
USE OPERA
USE OPERA
http://www.opera.com
best browser on earth. REALLY
I understand completely this article. I have just been waiting for bookmark syncing to move back to Chrome. I have found Firefox to be slow in several ways. Most notably when closing in releasing memory. In the latest version I found that after loading my first web page after load, Firefox would stall and I would ave to wait a significant amount of time while it did who knows what. With the release of bookmark syncing in the new Dev build of chrome and Xmarks in alpha, I’m saying good by to Firefox, Thanks for all the good times but it is time for me to move on.
The latest version of Firefox has been rather crash prone on my Mac. It could be due to extensions as I use rather a lot of them (and that is what keeps me using Firefox). I also tend to open very large tab sets (60+ tabs at a time) and that could contribute to the problem.
As far as bookmarks I really like the Xmarks (FKA Foxmarks) addon which allows you to easily sync bookmarks across all your machines.
No Firefox crashes on my MacBook Pro so far, but I basically only use the NoScript and AdBlock Plus extensions.
Funnily enough, within hours of commenting on your last post, David, that FF 3.5 was working just fine on my machine, it started going acting like, well, like a turkey. FF 3.5.2 solved nothing. May even have made it worse. I have now stopped using it entirely, in favor of Chrome. Which is a shame, because there were so many great plug-ins and useful tools FF had that Chrome doesn’t.
But like you, I’m not prepared to spend half my days sorting out technical problems with FF, any more than I would happily spend half my days fixing mechanical problems on my car. I’m mystified as to why the FF people haven’t jumped on fixing these problems after so long. They must be losing users in droves. Oh well. Like it or not, Google wins again.
If you’re considering Chrome, I’d agree with Joseph and say you should also try Opera, which is much more mature. It’s my main browser. Three things I like about it more than Firefox (which I use as backup): much more configurable appearance and key mappings; smoother zooming (I’ve keys set to zoom in 1, 5, 10, and 100% jumps) plus fit-to-width ability; better site-style adjustments (though once you version patch ReadEasily, it can do 70% of this last in FF). Opera is currently doing roughly weekly snapshots as it approaches version 10.
Epub note: there was an Opera widget that could read the format, but I don’t believe it works with the latest versions.
Geez, I’m slightly stunned by this. I had a few problems w/FF 3.5 in late beta on Fedora, but 3.5.2 on Vista is fine. I don’t think I could give up the extensions.
I do plan on trying Chrome when I get my new Viliv X70, but w/o CoolPreviews and Scrapbook will probably go back to FF.
Hey, Deanna, go with what works for you. It’s just that more than a few people seem to have problems with Firefox. I hope you don’t. But if you do, at least we’re blazing the way by investigating the most up-to-date versions of alternatives.
Thanks,
David
I had many of these issues, general slowness, lagging when typing in the url bar, forever opening and closing. I ended up flushing the majority of my history after coming across this link;
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/08/15/firefox-3-5-slow-and-hangs-after-typing-a-few-letters-in-url-location-bar/
I trimmed my history to 15 days since I do use it and don’t want it flushed on every exit. Made a world of difference for me.
Edit: I also removed lots of history data (ctrl-shift-h). Going back as far as April.
Thanks for sharing your tips, Gabriel. I’d encourage Firefox stalwart to try ‘em and share their experiences.
Of course, I’d rather not bother with cache-clearing, etc. But people should use what THEY like! It’s really great to see you helping out fellow FF fans. Feel free to drop by here with further tips!
David