Worst Browser Ever.
And I've been in love with FireFox for a very long time. (Ironically, I still like it more than IE, but I think I'm going to switch to Chrome.)
But frankly, other than the fact that I love how FF3 renders, I think it's one of the worst browsers ever built. It's so insanely buggy, crashes all the time, and feels like a damned tug-boat.
When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I'm feeling sad...
I simply remember a few of my favorite things, like:
a) The fact that FF3 crashes 4-5 times per day
b) That whole: Firefox is still running so you can't launch it. But feel free to either use task-manager to kill it or restart your machine.
c) The fact that it 100% broke the WMP plugin. (And that FF knows about it as a posted/confirmed bug yet refuses to do anything about it.)
d) The way it frequently looses its friggin mind when accessing content on a local network. (I do my dev locally, and when I hit F5 to refresh changes from my dev server, FF3 frequently just completely forgets where to grab that content and won't load the requested page for minutes. Yet I can fire up IE and Chrome and the page loads instantly.)
e) The fact that it goes completely limp 15-20 times per day - and becomes completely un-responsive for 2-3 seconds while it's apparently either choking on a bone, or waiting to see whether or not it will crash again.
Yeah, it definitely feels like it was rushed into production.
It's the plugins, stupid
And before some-one pipes-up and blames my plugins:
a) I’ve only got 4 installed (a password import/export plugin, delicious, and firebug + yslow)
b) If plugins can make the entire browser so unstable and buggy/crash-prone, then that’s not an issue with the plugins, it’s an issue with the browser’s ability to sand-box correctly.
Guess I'll be curious to see what IE8 is like too. (Though I'm just getting too old to bother installing the beta.)
Mike, w.r.t. the slow web surfing on FireFox when coming through localhost, could this be the issue?
http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/13367.aspx
In short, FF uses IPv6 by default. If the web server returns an IPv4 address when an IPv6 address is requested, there can be a long delay. You can turn off IPv6 support in total or on a website by website basis (i.e., for localhost).
hth
Posted by: Scott Mitchell | October 07, 2008 at 11:12 AM
Have you tried creating a new profile? http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles
Posted by: Mark Scholes | October 07, 2008 at 12:29 PM
Scott,
Yeah, that was totally it. I tried using the ipv4OnlyDomains option against my local dev domains. But since I access them without DNS and by using my hosts file instead, that totally didn't work.
So then I just wholesale turned off the IPv6 Flag and FF is working like a champ. Thanks for the tip (ironically I saw your blog post a while back and was going to try this hack out - but totally spaced it out and forgot.)
Posted by: Michael K. Campbell | October 07, 2008 at 12:29 PM