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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

jasonlefkowitz.net

51–60 of 211 posts

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#51
post #3

I remember one of my co-workers telling me that Firefox was running great for him now that he'd upgraded from 4GB of RAM to 8GB. It finally wasn't slowly grinding to a halt any time he had more than a handful of tabs open for more than an hour or two. Seemed a bit like Stockholm Syndrome to me.

I have a different problem. Firefox now aggressively trims memory usage - over-aggressively trims it, to the point that switching tabs incurs a 0.5 second pause as it reallocates memory it had thrown away. This is Firefox 7, and is most noticeable in image-heavy websites.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#52

This longstanding bug has been found and fixed in the past few weeks. There’s a workaround as well (use the Places Maintenance addon to properly index your Places database). https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025

I thought I hadn't seen Firefox hang in a while.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#53
post #38

> Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched — three years ago. This is an odd statement, considering that many Firefox devs run Linux. I'm running Firefox on Linux right now, and it works great. I guess the author of the article is hitting a specific bug. It isn't a general issue that affects all users of Firefox on Linux.

Well that's nice for you that it works, usually works for me at home.

I run about 200 desktop linux machines and sqlite locking is a common problem on firefox. Users are often completely unaware of how to fix even though they are quite technical.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#54
Jason, we’ve been working on this. There were some big performance improvements in Firefox 6 and 7 and we’ve got a big hang fix that’s just about to hit in Firefox 8.

Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#55

I share the same feeling. It is becoming a pain. If I keep it open for few hours, it inevitably crashes and needs a restart. I started using firefox few years back only because it won't crash and is stable. Not anymore I guess!

Yeah, I have to restart it at least once a day. In addition to "Clear Recent History", how about a "Clear Older History", where I can delete everything older than a month or a week? That would clean out probably more than 95% of the cruft possibly speeding things up. I'm sure there's a way to do this, but how about an easy way for the average user?

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#56
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people not use bookmarks? I have thousands of them. What are the alternatives that I'm missing out on? (big xmarks user too so sync is a must)

Most people use Google, or something like Facebook gets autocompleted.

And the autocomplete relies on the Places system, which is what is hanging (or was, until a few weeks ago).

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#57
I've also been using firefox since 1.0 and had such problems through 3.6

But 7.0 is the best version yet for me and radically faster on startup and operation (and I use a ton of extensions).

It just took a weekend to get 7.0 to behave like 3.x and then I was happy.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#58
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm impressed by the passion with which people want http:// back in their URLs. Perhaps it's tangential to the original thread, but why's it such a big deal?

> but why's it such a big deal? Because people copy&paste URLs all the time, and without the http:// they dont work where pasted. Not having http:// when youre copy-pasting feels like a part of your URL is missing. What I dont know is for whom they are hiding http:// ? I'd guess there are 2 types of users, those who need the URL, then they need it complete, including the http:// , and those who dont need the URL to b…

In both FF and Chrome, copying includes the http:// to the clipboard, so it's all there when you paste. So that's not an issue at all.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#59

The new rapid release development cycle has bit Mozilla in the rear. For example, FF 7.0.1 on Vista needs to be run as Administrator. I didn't find this out until it just stopped working on my wife's laptop.

The automatic updates have to ask for admin rights, is that what you are seeing? You can deny admin rights and it will run fine (without updating). And they know it's not optimal, they're fixing that in the next version.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#60
post #53
post #38

> Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched — three years ago. This is an odd statement, considering that many Firefox devs run Linux. I'm running Firefox on Linux right now, and it works great. I guess the author of the article is hitting a specific bug. It isn't a general issue that affects all users of Firefox on Linux.

Well that's nice for you that it works, usually works for me at home. I run about 200 desktop linux machines and sqlite locking is a common problem on firefox. Users are often completely unaware of how to fix even though they are quite technical.

As mentioned in the article's comments, this appears to have been recently resolved.

Here is the full thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025

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