More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
TeleRead poll: Is Firefox 2.0 Crash City on your machine?
October 30, 2006 | 9:09 am
|
By David Rothman
[poll=18]
Other than actual e-book reading software, what’s more important than a good, reliable browser for us junkies–to aid in finding and downloading e-books? And yet I regard Firefox 2.0 as a major disappointment, now that I’ve used it in various versions.
I love the new spell-checker for online forms, but even more than the betas, the supposed production version keeps crashing on my PC.
Is this a typical experience? Despite denials, might 2.0 have major memory-handling problems?
Meanwhile you can bet I’m saving my blog drafts very often. Grrr!
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
It’s not crashing (I don’t use Microsoft products, so my systems tend to be more stable overall). But its performance is very poor. I switched back to 1.5.x and that took care of the performance problem.
Have you tried creating a new profile and testing it that way? Some of that accumulated crud in a typical never-cleared profile might affect 2.0 adversely, and a fresh profile can help; you can usually copy most of the stuff back, though apart from bookmarks, I’d advise against it (you might end up copying back the very thing that causes it to malfunction).
KP, thanks for the Firefox suggestion. When I have time, I want to follow up. David
I had some curious crash behavior on the first day or two of installation, on Win98SE. This problem seemed to self heal, perhaps as certain selected extensions updated.
With past versions of Firefox I had no choice but to install several extensions, generally related to scripting, to keep it from routinely crashing at some sites. Whether 2.0 still crashes without these extensions, I haven’t a clue.
I set the “browser.cache.disk.capacity” to 150000 according to the instructions in Gina Trapani’s “Lifehacker.com blog:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/firefox-2/geek-to-live–top-firefox-2-config-tweaks-209941.php
Never had a big problem before, haven’t had any problems with 2.0.
I have been crashing like crazy, and never did before with the older Firefox. I’m trying Gregg’s/Gina’s fix. I’ll let you know.
I just found out that when I use Firefox 2 to visit a certain web page on the Technology Review website the browser begins to play an advertisement that consists of a movie using the Adobe Flash Player 9 plug-in. If I leave this browser window and begin to work on other tasks then after a delay problems start to develop and Firefox 2 browser starts to become non-responsive and begins to lock-up. The machine slows down as CPU time is consumed. (This is just my preliminary analysis of what seems to be behind the problem. My diagnosis may be inaccurate.)
Definitely crashes a lot more, but I pretty much expected this when I downloaded it. Other than that, I like the new features and I’ll stick with it while they work things out. If increased crashing bothers you, I would suggest sticking with version 1.5.
Firefox now sucks on the mac. It is Crashfox. It is sir crashe a lot. It is FireCrashAndBurn. It needs to be fixed before I actually get accustomed to using safari.