Firefox Woe

May 1, 2008

Mark Rizzn Hopkins writes over at Mashable how he’s pissed off with Firefox. He’s not alone. I dumped Firefox 2 and switched to Flock after trying Safari for a short time (it doesn’t play nice with WordPress). Then I tried Webkit for a while, super fast, and now I’m back at Firefox 3 as everybody told me they’d finally fixed Firefox and all was good again.

It’s not good. It’s better, but its better than crappy. FF3 still crashes, still leaks memory (not always, but particularly on streaming video sites), and has other bugs that don’t make my day miserable, but they’re not a positive contribution either. Just going to write this post and I couldn’t type in FF3: had to close one tab (had less than 10 open) to get FF to allow me to type again. Maybe I’ve got rose colored glasses, but I think FF 1.5 will be remembered as the last great Firefox release, because I never remember having any of these problems then, even going back as far as 0.8 beta.

To answer Rizzn’s poll question: yes, I’d happily pay for a browser that was stable, quick and bug free. Note though that it would REALLY have to be all of those things, and so far I just haven’t seen a browser able to meet that criteria.

In Web 2.0
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7 responses to Firefox Woe

  1. Shane May 1, 2008 at 8:21 am

    What about Opera? I know it’s cross platform and I don’t see it mentioned above. I’ve only ever used it on Windows though, so I don’t know how well it travels on other systems.

  2. NathanaelB May 1, 2008 at 9:22 am

    Opera? Puleez – no one builds sites for Opera 🙂

  3. Bryce May 1, 2008 at 12:16 pm

    I’m really pissed with Firefox 3 at the moment, it seems to want to quit every 5 minutes.

  4. Kate Carruthers May 1, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    Have had the same beef with FF for a while – love it but it does keep crashing. It’s a sad day for open source when IE is the more stable browser!

  5. Dominic Rivera May 1, 2008 at 5:07 pm

    …and all the while I thought that my Firefox was acting very weird. Very unproductive.

  6. Findlay May 2, 2008 at 6:21 am

    Hi Duncan

    Haven’t upgraded to FF3 yet, good thing too by the sounds of it.
    I’ve noticed that FF2 has got some bug issues but not huge and for me, no crashes.
    So I’ll stick with FF2 and continue to ridicule those who still use IE. 🙂

    Cheers
    Fin

  7. Brettski May 5, 2008 at 10:37 am

    Definitely go with Opera. I’ve used it on multiple platforms (Windows/Linux/Mac) and it is just the best thing.