What is Digg?214 Comments
- kewldude606, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6It was loading slow for me, here's the gist of it:
* Firefox's use of physical and virtual memory is exceptionally high.
* CPU usage spikes to 100 percent (usually while loading a Web page).
* The browser freezes up for seconds, minutes, or permanently.
* The browser won't launch until they remove an errant "firefox.exe" process in Task Manager.
* The browser crashes suddenly (usually while loading a Web page).
* The browser has trouble loading specific pages, but there's no commonality among users as to which pages won't load.
* The initial launch of Firefox loads slower.
* Third-party application hyperlinks (such as a link in an e-mail message) take a long time to open a new Firefox tab or to launch the browser. - craterburnsu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I haven't had any problems, be it in windows or under Gentoo. Guess I'm one of the lucky ones, and i suppose it's like the Xbox 360 problems, very isolated and is just being blown up to a much larger size. At least that's how it sounds to me.
- TheSiz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Good article. I have seen Javascript related memory leaks, strange tab behavior (especially while using Gmail), and memory overload when too many tabs are open. I hope they will concentrate some of their efforts on these type of problems in the future. But for now, Firefox is still the best browser for me.
- A-Dog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2These very reason are why I have decided to switch back to IE and wait for IE7. Some things are not worth dealing with. Customizing my browser and keeping pop-ups at bay is not enough for me to continue to deal with frozen pages, memory leaks, and random inoperability. After using Firefox since it was known as Firebird I'm convinced that these issues are not going away any time soon.
- bloodylip, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Then reinstall a set of extension that you ACTUALLY NEED, instead of everything that 'sounds cool'."
I NEED to know whether Abe Vigoda is alive or not. - undauntedspirit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I have the freezing issues, but it's when I open a ton of tabs at the same time. It can freeze the entire ui..... Firefox desperately needs multithreaded tabs. It seems like that would be just a gimme doesn't it??? It's very annoying but I can't live without the extensions!!
Does anyone know if it's even being planned to become multithreaded?? - proglottis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think it should be noted that Firefox isn't nearly as old as IE, I bet IE was a lot worse than Firefox when it was this young.
Opera is pretty cool, I can't work out how to put the tab's below the address bar, I really hate that, so maybe after some fiddling I might end up using it. Though I do much prefer to support open source. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2In Fedora 4, FF 1.5 has not had a single problem thus far. In fact, it almost works too well. The only thing I personally think should really be improved is memory usage, and there are in fact some intelligent people coming up with some great improvements there.
I used to run WinXP and FF 1.0 did have some issues, mainly the FF process that would not end. However, I haven't used 1.5 in Windows much.
Something seems fishy to me. Articles coming out in tech magazines and blogs that overly criticize open source/free spirited projects have cropped up like mad very recently. For whatever problems firefox, openoffice, wikipedia, or digg for that matter have, they are products that are comparable if not better than the alternatives.
For instance, Firefox is a cross-platform, mostly standards-compliant, secure (compared to MSIE), and speedy *modern* browser, meant for *modern* browsing. This means that it will eat up a lot of memory and CPU cycles, sometimes far more than called for. However, if MSIE could do half the things Firefox does in terms of features and usability, I'm sure it would have even more problems than either of them do today, which is saying a lot. I think some of you forget how 'well' MSIE works. Also, Firefox has a huge community behind it, security and other issues are often fixed within weeks, and its become a serious threat to Microsoft. Please keep in mind, competition is a good thing for everyone.
Microsoft is typically very reflexive, in that it has its antiquated software: Software that does not change much at all for years, sometimes over a decade. Microsoft is like a slumbering monster. When a threat comes along, MS reaches its tentacles of fury out and, often times, successfully smashes the threat to pieces. After this, it simply goes back to sleep, letting its products fester. It happened in the old browser wars. MS saw that they needed to get on the WWW bandwagon (fairly late to the party) and did what they always do, bought someone elses' product and rebranded it. Then, they shoved it down people's throats, and when people puked it up, they sprinkled some seasonings on it and tried shoving it back down. Eventually people just started swallowing.
I apologize for the length of all this, but honestly, stop fighting your own best interests people. FF is an alternative, and in my personal opinion a superior one.
As a final little note... I would consider Opera an alternative, but they did what Apple did and destroyed any chance of a real market share. I think the recent offering of Opera for free was too little, too late. It is unfortunately a great browser... except for that fact that there is no good embedded video player for it in Linux... - rpeterclark, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I really like FireFox, but I have that issue where it occasionally decides to freeze up for a minute or indefinitely. It's not a high CPU load freeze, it just locks up. Some websites seem more prone to causing the freeze, but not consistently. Tried re-installs and with/without extensions but it still happens. Frustrating.
- headflipper, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I"m having similar problems. One new problem I'm having is I can't close a tab when i only have two open. the second one never closes. I'm ready for 1.5.01
- AttroPheed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The only one I have trouble with is the errant firefox.exe in task manager. I was gonna see if it still did it without extensions but then I may as well use opera.
- Chipmunk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1FF, no extensions, 1.5, installed on Ubuntu "Breezy Badger" (Yes I know it's not officially supported yet). The "errant process" mentioned for windows also happens there, a ps -A shows firefox-bin running at 3Gb of memory :-|
This doesn't happen all the time, but it's a definite issue. - SpeshulK926, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oh yeah, and Opera won't display ASPX pages successfully. Sorry, forgot to mention that...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+10(IE FLAWS)
1. Web production is tailored to it instead of standards!
2. Does not support portable Networks graphics
3. Does not support CSS Fully!
4. Will Not uninstall!
5. Built completely in your operating system
6. Makes Windows Load slower on boot up!
7. Must be used to do windows update (almost;)
8. No support for RSS!
9. No support for text increase!
10. The best at getting hacked and viruses! - Genericity, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I guess it comes down to which company do you like / hate the most, okay now you have a browser you will support and love regardless of the flaws.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1By the way, marketing and hype do not mean "this product is perfect". You smart asses with the "ohh suddenly people admit it isn't perfect!" attitude are sort've misinterpreting something.
Hype, marketing, etc. are what actual real businesses deal in. A large number of companies spend more time on marketing than actually having a real product. Suddenly an open source project starts putting itself out in front of the masses and there is some sort of expectation that it will be perfect?
Have you EVER read any of Microsoft's hype and marketing material? You'd think the company was crapping solid gold software. Yet somehow their buggy and unstable software manages to escape these unrealistic expectations.
Why is that? Are people not willing to admit that something they pay $100, $200, possibly more for, could be of similar or lower quality to a free alternative? Why does free software have such high expectations when people are willing to deal with a thousand little irritating nuances of expensive commercial software? Is it really that hard to believe that a person or a company can actually do well in the world with, say, Openoffice.org instead of MS Office?
And keep in mind that we cannot have alternative Operating Systems without alternative browsers these days. The web is so damned important to people that if only MSIE worked with the web pages out there, we'd be stuck with Windows forever..
NOTHING is perfect. Ever. Most likely the actress you lust after has had her share of plastic surgery, your expensive car will someday break down, and oh, eventually earth will blow up or something...
I have never been an obsessive fanboy. I question my decisions every day. Whether its politics, software, religion, or anything else.
By the way, anyone see the PTV episode of Family Guy? Ok so 1 vocally pissed person does not equal 1,000,000 non-vocal pissed off people. An expose such as this article could be written about anything, including MSIE.
I guess the point of all these posts I've made is this:
This article neither confirms nor denies superiority of one browser over another. You must step back and look at the bigger picture, actually try to compare apples to apples. Balance pros and cons. If FF hoses your system, then I dont blame you if you dont want to use it. Again, the FF crowd is trying to spread by word of mouth, promoting a product, marketing so to speak. Some of them are too pushy, which is stupid, but there is nothing wrong with promoting a product. That is, a product that a good deal of people spend a lot of time working on, for free, for your enjoyment, and to give you the freedom of choice... - camintmier, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2For people who are having problems with Firefox crashing at a bad time, get the Sessionsaver extension. http://adblock.ethereal.net/alchemy.cgi/SessionSaver It remembers what pages you had up at the time, and even where you were on the page. It's worked perfectly for me.
- nihilator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"(IE FLAWS)
9. No support for text increase!"
posted by mrfx
Not to pick, but from the menu bar, View > Text Size > Largest. - Jakanden, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I still believe Firefox to be the best browser out there despite my few problems with it =)
- Bogtha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1> The browser freezes up for seconds, minutes, or permanently.
Isn' t this the age-old problem of single-threaded applications and blocking on DNS lookups? This has been a problem since at least Netscape 4. With the advent of tabs, I've also noticed that when a page is being rendered in a background tab, the *whole UI* freezes until the rendering is finished. Ugh. Multi-threaded applications aren't rocket science.
I've noticed a bug where pressing the up and down arrows in a textarea brings the cursor to the beginning or end of a line instead of directly above where the cursor was. Clicking in a text input section such as the address bar has changed since 1.0.x also - so I have to click further to the left. Anybody else experiencing those? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Shall i do IE FLAWS don't get me started!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I apologize for this immediate second posting, but I forgot to add one thing.
I agree with everyone in that FF for OS X sucks a whole lot. I think they released it for OS X as a sort of 'resume padding' attempt. OS X users will usually use Safari, or possibly Camino or Opera. Firefox seems more to be for recent PC to Mac converts and/or people that only use Macs part of the time. Having a consistent interface across all your systems is nice... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have opera, FF 1.5 and of course IE 6 with all the SP's installed. IE is the fastest and renders everything perfectly, but you have to deal with the security issues etc... FF BLOWS so bad it isn't funny. It crashes, it's slow, it doesn't work with any of my work related websites or my bank.... Opera is very nice, but it doesn't render pages properly. Pick your poison. This does blow a big whole in the "eyes on the code" theory that the OSS community holds as their main defense against proprietary software.
- robche, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1wow i thought it was my extensions causing those problems, hope the fix it, opera is looking a bit better these days
- r3zonance, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'd still rather have "FLAWS", as opposed to IE's "SECURITY FLAWS"
- KriTenKs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Im experiecing all those problems, its annoying. Firefox still rulez though
- cwcheang, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah I've been experiencing some of the problems too... but still.. Firefox is still light years ahead of IE..
Well.. at least IE 6. - .dotfortune, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I agree with one of the first commenters with the fact that these just might be isolated incidents getting blown way out of proportion. But, I have noticed that 1.5 loads initially slower, and I have to use IE every now and then because Firefox doesn't have things like java and macromedia built-in. BUT, I still think that FF is the most effecient browser I've ever used and I hope it stays that way for a long time. (btw- my pages load faster in FF than in IE.)
- n8f8, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1* The browser crashes suddenly (usually while loading a Web page)
For me this seems to be related to 3rd party controls loading. If I set VLC to run a media type and it has any problem ,then FF just dies. - cybrauralninjuh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So now Opera is the underground indie hit... give it time, it'll blow harder. For now, just buy some more ram and quit bitching. Problems from then on are few and far between; in a span of 16 hours (roughly) spent with it, assloads of tabs, without restarting or closing: one crash. One since 1.5 came out. And I did have to ctrlaltdel-endtask the exe, which shouldn't have had to happen, [needless to say the crash] but you can't get excited about IE's stability either. But in all honesty, it seems that the older version of FF ran a bit quicker, yet this is no time to run to teh new indie idol, at least for me.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The reason that the posting in this place isn't really constructive is because this feedback area is not the place to improve Firefox. This is the place to respond to the specific story.
Dont get upset about the fact that we express our opinions instead of all working together in some sort of collaborative way to improve the browser. That's what developer mailing lists, forums, irc channels, and bug trackers are for. This comment section is for 'comments', ie. what people think of the article... - estvir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1the memory leak has been around forever, and is gradually getting worse; mozilla has simply ignored it.
and for the rehabs saying 'sponsored by microsoft' go get a clue and stop being ignorant paranoid lemmings, please. - shiftless, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I can never go back to IE. That thing crashes on me all the time.
Firefox crashes very rarely for me and usually when it's trying to do something with a media player like quicktime, real or windows player. - Chango_Family, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Im a diehard Firefox user but the amount of crashing with 1.5 is getting very annoying.
I couldnt remember if my browser ever crashed before the latest version but now its a regular occurence.
Considering how much I pimp it to my IE friends, its a bit disconcerting. - jo42, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0So Firefox isn't The Golden Browser it was purported to be?
Oh, dear... - JulianMorrison, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Debian linux, firefox 1.5 from unstable, and a slew of extensions. No problems, faster, nicer, doesn't leak like 1.0.7. Tips: (1) install session saver. It will save your ass when the 101st tab crashes. (2) install bookmark backup, turn on all the optional things to save, and, *important*, change the save directory away from the default. Then if something toasts your config, the new bad config will be written over the default save location, not over your precious good backup.
- 9kindsofidiot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Opps forgot my last point. Firefox 1.5 is the embodiment of Phase 2. It still has a ways to go. But is still loads better than IE.
- icexe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0i get the errant firefox.exe process and the occasional huge memory leak.
I've narrowed it down the errant process to sites that stream video. If i close a browser window that is in the middle of streaming a Windows media video, i get the errant process EVERY time (it doesn't happen if I let the entire video finish it's streaming though). like others reported, i cannot restart firefox until i kill the errant process.
still trying to pinpoint the cause of the occasional memory leaks. - brhad56, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have firefox 1.5 installed on three different machines and I don't experiance the heavy CPU and RAM problem. I suspect the flaw isn't caused by firefox, but rather a popular extension. If I had to guess, it would be the faster fox extension, because of its parallel nature.
- rmendis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Funny, if these problems were found in IE, everyone would be bashing Microsoft to no end. When they are found in Firefox, all the fanboys come out to say its not that bad.
- motionblur, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Firefox 1.5 has been a killer app for me. Only one crash so far in the print preview switching from portrait to landscape.
- daze, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"* The browser won't launch until they remove an errant "firefox.exe" process in Task Manager."
i've had this problem daily since 1.0x - kill3r, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0 i had problems with sessionsaver when i restart my firefox it doesn't restart with my extensions so i don't recommend sessionsaver.
- edot, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Here's the catch - most open source software doesn't have the backing of a large corporation that allows them to do massive amounts of testing. As it is a community project, they're relying on the masses to let them know what is working and what isn't. Complaining out loud will do nothing. When you spot a problem, take the time to give back a little by filing a bug. The same goes for OpenOffice, and any other open source software you may use...
- orphex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I know you have all probably noticed this, but Firefox's freeze-ups and 100% CPU usage is often because of the windows Client-Server thread (CSRSS.exe) spiking to 100%. This seems like a Windows-based issue with how Firefox communicates with the CSRSS... Anyone have some insight on this?
- cybrauralninjuh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0rmendis:
True. That's mainly because we're right, and ff has gotten so much attention lately that the people who aren't devoted to it are feeling a bit relieved. How can someone really outdo a software giant like microsoft, really.... it wouldn't make any sense. - nihilator, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0When will FF support horizontal scrolling from ALPS touchpads?
And before anyone says that it's the touchpad driver, it's not, since it works for all other apps. And changing the about:config seems to only work for Macs with two-finger scrolling.
I consider this a major flaw. - sremick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Firefox has problems. IE has problems.
Firefox runs on my computer. IE does not.
Supporting Firefox by using it will nudge the web to how we (end users) want it to be. Supporting IE by using it will support how MS wants the web to be (which is quite different).
A Firefox problems results in a slow browser, some excessive memory usage, or having to end-task. An IE problem results in your computer being 0wned by a few dozens pieces of adware, spyware, and other malware, costing you maybe $100 to have it cleaned by a tech and maybe even reformatted.
Which would you have in your town? A handful of litterbugs or a handful of serial-killers? I'll take the Firefox problems. - Viperiii, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is a pretty accurate list...
Where is the IE list of flaws... No one wanted to write a Novel about those I see...
Unfortunately those who don't like Firefox, LOVE AOL and Extremely slow browsing speeds...
They typcally also install every piece of software they ever find which is also loaded with Spyware and other crap...
MY Theory..:
MS and others are loading Spyware that attacks FireFox's Operations... heheh - bonzooznob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0People keep comparing Firefox to IE... what's IE? is it new? should I get it?
Oh, wait!, oh Get Out! you mean that Browser from 1999!?!?!?
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