When Did Firefox Start To Suck So Bad?
Not that long ago Firefox was the best thing on the planet. Remember laughing at your fuddy-duddy coworkers or friends still using internet explorer? Well since you drive a Datsun I guess you’re used to going slow.
Looks like the joke is on us.
At work this week, my firefox browser crashed an average of 6 times per day. When I say crash I don’t mean that it froze up, it does that about 100 times per day. I mean a hard crash.
Would you like to send an error report to Mozilla?
Shit why not.
Connecting to error reporting server……. Checking status of problem (haha)… Error reporting complete.
I should add, I push my computer and software very hard.
At work I usually run the following applications:
- Outlook, 5-10 mails open at any given time
- Excel, 3-5 spreadsheets with 100-200 lines each
- Word 2007, 2-4 docs
- Notepad, 1-2 .txt docs
- Gimp 2, for 4chan and reports and stuff
- Firefox, 5-15 tabs open
- Core FTP Lite, a very nice and light FTP client (also free)
- Sometimes iTunes, or the like
At home I run Windows Vista (dual booted with Ubuntu linux, which is another story) on a HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop. While my home computer is far superior to my work computer, I don’t usually push it as hard:
- Windows Mail (some light child molester mail client bundled with Vista, 1-2 mails)
- Firefox (2-3 tabs)
- Limewire
- Core FTP (ibid)
Yet, Firefox still breaks down like a hooker at church.
I’ve found a few possible reasons for this:
- Firefox cannot handle AJAX based web apps (such as meebo) along with other ajax or javascript heavy sites, such as Google Analytics or Youtube
- Firefox’s tabbed system is flawed and feels like it’s leeching resources (ram and bandwidth) from the other tabs whereas IE appears to almost open a new instance of the program in each tab, if that makes sense.
- Because of the above leeching, Firefox often gets confused and doesn’t move smoothly between tabs (sometimes even puts content from one tab onto another—yay meebo chat in Google Analytics!)
- Firefox was built by open-source hippies that look like ones below:
The photo above is an honest to goodness picture of the people who wrote “Python For Dummies” (for extra credit, research the woman on the right’s polyamory interests–i’m not kidding). Thanks to Tannaz and her internet ninja skills for resurrecting this image for me.
Protip: to find original pictures of really authentic looking programmers (not the stereotypical joke pics) kindly phrase your google image queries thusly: “<any programming language>+ expert”.
Back To Firefox:
I did a few tests using IE vs. Firefox and the results speak for themselves:
These three tabs (meebo running, blog editing, video playing) used this much RAM:
221k!
Now IE, same tabs, same actions:
80k, thats more like it. Notice something funny though. I had closed all the tabs in Firefox but my homepage (Yahoo.com) and it was still burning 208k! Who says the Firefox memory leak was a myth? If so, can you explain this to me?
The sad thing is, the cult of Firefox and all the “it’s faster, it’s better…” talk has affected me because even in the face of all this, I’m writing this using Firefox.
This goes to show how effective counter-culture marketing is. Look at VW, Apple, American Spirit Cigarettes for further examples.
Any browser recommendations? If someone says Konqueror or Safari I will go Bakersfield Chimp.
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Bob
Huh, your firefox uses twice as much memory as mine.
February 10th, 2008 at 10:21 pmI win the game
your problem is simple really, you’re using vista. ive had 10 tabs open with videos playing/paused before and they didnt go past 48mb. obviously somethings wrong with your shitty hp store bought pc if your shit is crashing 100 times a day, either reformat since youve downloaded too much porn or don’t be such a dumbass and use windows xp for such a shitty computer.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:15 amandyfox1979
nice to see the mozilla dev team stopping by.. the crashing happens on my work computer, which is a desktop from Dell bought through our corp account. It is not a slow computer. Firefox fails.
February 11th, 2008 at 10:19 pmMungo9000
This is probably a vista issue. I run Firefox with a similar load to what you’re describing across two computers, the XP platform works fine, the newer, supposedly better computer runs Vista and it sucks monkey balls.
I hate to sound like I’m bashing micro$oft, but this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve played badly. (Do you remember the trouble you had playing embedded WMV files the first time you used Firefox?).
I have a lot of vista problems, the worst coming from screenwriting software Final Draft. For some reason, it takes two minutes to load or save a file, 30 seconds to search, a serious lag on the scrolling. It’s junk. Utterly frustrating.
I blame vista. Not Firefox.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:18 amandyfox1979
mungo, i’ve used final draft on XP but not on vista. I think for what it does (basically a word processor program with built in formatting and a few throwaway features—text to speech, etc) Final Draft is too clunky. Especially for the price $300??
I agree that vista causes problems but I don’t think that firefox is off the hook completely. Vista doesn’t decide how ajax and js are handled, firefox does. This is a problem and until the firefox people admit that it has flaws it wont be fixed.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:31 amThomas
Uh oh, you said the magic word… dell. I will say firefox is a memory whore, but that is because of the way it stores websites to make it faster. But the reason your computer and programs crashe is because it is a dell.
February 12th, 2008 at 6:12 amJoe
Geez dude, what the f*ck did u do to ur comp?!?
February 12th, 2008 at 11:35 amMy firefox on Vista runs about 48mb - 80mb, and i use it all day basically.
Im guessing u have a memory leak or spywear/virus on ur comp =S
Hogwash
I find FF quite reliable…but then again I’m running it on a mac so I find most things reliable.
February 12th, 2008 at 4:29 pmmGoLos
Phew,
I was worried for a while until I read Vista.
Go back on XP, watch all your problems vanish.
February 12th, 2008 at 9:20 pmandyfox1979
guys, the majority of the crashes happen at work, on a desktop running XP Pro. So, what now?
February 12th, 2008 at 9:25 pmSumyungho
Browser recommendation? Opera
It’s fast, reliable and even with the 50 tabs i keep open at any one time, memory usage doesn’t go past 200MB. Plus it has a bunch of features built in(without having to hunt down plugins) many of which might not seem like much at first but once you start using them you’ll never want to go back. Mouse gestures, fit to width, disable images, block content, trash can(for accidentally closed tabs), user mode(for unreadable websites) to name a few.
Browser compatibility isn’t as much of a problem anymore as more websites seem to have gotten smarter with their web design. But i’d keep Firefox/IE around for those few websites and use Opera the rest of the time.
ps- I had the same problem back when I was trying out firefox. I had 2 tabs open but one was to some crazy effect heavy website. My computer was slowing to a crawl and i checked the memory usage for Firefox: 600MB. =_=
February 13th, 2008 at 7:15 pmbagel
Use IE, as God intended.
February 20th, 2008 at 5:55 amJames Dalton
As much as I champion firefox, I think I might have to go back to the devil IE. I am getting memory usage of up 350mb but im sure dumb ass vista plays a role in this…..firefox is too sweet though.
March 8th, 2008 at 7:26 pmchris
ive got a gateway laptop, vista, 1GB and an AMD turion (not the x2)
March 18th, 2008 at 3:59 ami have firefox open all day, avg 10-15 at any given time, i also have a ton of add-on, pretty big ones
at this moment its using 270k lol, but it runs smoothly, no probs
also at this moment IE is using 26k (literally 10%)but it runs like crap. i got one tab open and everything i do, it lags
whats the deal
anyway, numbers are the whole deal, and i love FF
Hammy
Strange here’s my memory stats:
firefox: 294604
opera: 164084
ubuntu edgy, 512k ram, PD 2.8×2 GHz
I’d suggest you try opera
March 18th, 2008 at 8:43 pmAhab
Yay Safari! I hate to say it fellow smug Mac users, but we aren’t in the clear on this mess. FF crashes constantly on both my 15″ Leopard Mac Book Pro and my little 12″ Tiger Mac. I happens every time I load my blog, which worries me. Today I tossed out all the unneeded widgets and links to see if it made a difference. It didn’t, but now my blog looks cleaner than ever (uh, yay!). Can you guys load my blog without crashing on FF? -Mike (myrightwingdad.net)
March 23rd, 2008 at 11:24 pmeve
You are all wrong, it is a hardware issue…though the Mozilla developers do admit instabilities in Firefox. Disable or disconnect burners, cards, or other peripherals (besides the mouse and keyboard of course) and you will find the culprit.
March 25th, 2008 at 2:02 pmNate
FYI, Firefox has SUCKED MOOSEBALLS on a Mac for the last 2 years or something. I can’t remember when it started to suck, either, but it is fucking annoying!
1. crashes at least once per day, usually 2 or 3 times
2. inexplicably, URL field becomes inoperable. solution? New window. Not new tab; that doesn’t work. Close the window and open a new one. Problem solved. What the FUCK? Happens several times per week.
3. slow. Yeah, it’s not that fucking fast anymore… even with the pipeline hack or whatever it’s called where you adjust the preferences.
April 1st, 2008 at 1:42 pmCase
Use Opera. It’s fast, reliable, and has few security holes. Sure there are a few quirks, but that’s becuase they have the guy who invented CSS writing it.
April 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pmAdam
was firefox’s logo fundded by the crop circyles on the fields ???
May 16th, 2008 at 11:11 pmAlucard
I have the same problem on an hp pavilion dv6000 and firefox is crashing like crazy, and much more frequently than once a day. It’s NOT a hardware problem like some naive people said (obviously), I’m pretty convinced that it’s a Vista problem like smarter people pointed out. I run Firefox with 3 windows and 15-20 tabs on my ancient ibook G4 without a problem, it NEVER crashes there. Heck I’ve even thought that M$ might have made it so that Firefox runs crappy on their system, who knows.
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 pmAlucard
And yeah right now I’m on Opera which I decided to download after 3 months of suffering the Vista-Firefox BS. Just out of curiosity I typed “firefox windows vista crashing all the fucking time” on google and reached this blog.
July 3rd, 2008 at 11:37 pmRyan
I’ve noticed that Firefox has been crashing a LOT in the last few months. Three months ago or so, I had no problems at all with FF. I recommended it to everyone. Since then, something must have changed. I wonder if it’s possible to go back to an older version of FF before they screwed it up. Right now, I am writing this from Opera because FF is unusable.
July 20th, 2008 at 3:39 pmAlexander Ewering
Heh. Absolutely agree, and I also understand your “Open-source hippies” comment VERY well, I’ve written a few similar articles
(Though they are in German).
When I was 16 years old, I also found open-source software “cool” and loved to be “different”… but since I need to get work done in order to earn money, I prefer software that just works
July 28th, 2008 at 8:15 amAdam Fabian
The Internet Explorer 7 interface has FF beat for elegance. Opera’s tab management is superior. FF’s unsorted bookmarks feature is pretty nice. Firefox just barely beats out Opera for me, and the main reason is ad-block plus. If you come at Firefox from the perspective of not wanting to like it because it’s the peppy open-source underdog, the only killer feature is the plug-in ecosystem. But it’s enough that I use it, despite Opera being nicer for a number of things I like doing. (I like dragging tabs out of the main window in Opera, and I also like making windows really narrow; in Firefox, there’s a bug that makes the horizontal scrollbar disappear when I do that.) IE7’s big lose for me is no good ad-blocking. The web is incredibly annoying without ad-blocking.
October 25th, 2008 at 5:17 pmUtnapishtim
I agree that firefox started to suck, but its not because it consumes a lot of memory (and when we talk about memory, all of you should write “M” instead of “k” - yours 200k is really 200Megabytes) but some real bugs, which they refuse to admit. Like parsing Ajax an JS.
November 10th, 2008 at 1:14 am