Is it just me or is Firefox getting pretty unstable?

Soldato
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In the good old days of Firebird and older versions of firefox it used to be really quick and hardly ever crash, nowadays it crashes at least once a day, I was reading the favourite GIFs thread and FF just froze for about 20 secs at a time 3 or 4 times before I closed it. It also seems to take longer to load up now too :(

Anyone else found this?
 
im not having any trouble at all since i updated but i have heard a few nightmare stories about this version such as memory leaks.
 
Itend to have problems with it crashing while downloading stuff... ie close the window and the dloader bit crashes. Also integtrated media players crash a lot too.
 
FF doesn't appear to release memory particularly well (a documented "feature" no less) - In the gif thread, your memory (and vm) use would have shot up, but may not have been freed up when you closed the tab.

It's particularly noticeable in image heavy tabs, or when you have been opening and closing multiple tabs over an extended period.

In all fairness, it's not strictly a firefox phenomenon (it happens in other tabbed browsers), or M$ specific (it happens on my ubuntu box).

There's a quick fix in the sticky, and you might consider running a stripped down ff (i.e. fewer extensions).
 
I've never seen Opera get like Firefox. Even with multiple tabs open with several pages viewed in each it still stays around 30MB IIRC.
 
It does crash occasionally, probably once or twice a week at a guess. It does get a bit sluggish at times as well, and I don't have a slow computer. I mean how much processing power should a web browser need anyway! :)

If there was a way of making Opera look and behave like Firefox then I'd try it again, but AFAIK there isn't.

edit - what the hell, I'm gonna give Opera another try. I have been thinking about how Firefox is getting sluggish recently and it's kind of irritating.

edit 2 - just tried Opera again and ugh, it's still as horrid as I remember it. And it seems just as sluggish as Firefox anyway! :)

Hopefully the Firefox devs will improve on future releases.
 
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Memory usage is shocking and now and again CPU load just shoots up for no apparant reason. They've undone a lot of the great work they did with previous versions. I still don't like the opera interface so I'm sticking with FF none the less.
 
crashes for me once a day, mainly when i have loads of tabs open and windows open, when u close a window that has like 8 tabs in, i close it and FF crashes and it cvloses every FF window.
 
Actually has anyone here tried any of the customised Firefox builds, which were compiled for i686 or A64 CPUs with SSE2, rather than just generic i386 builds? I wonder if they are slightly less sluggish.
 
JimmyEatWorms said:
Memory usage is shocking and now and again CPU load just shoots up for no apparant reason.
I get that quite regularly now using the latest build (1.5.0.1) and I find that the only cure is to close Firefox down and reload it.

Sometimes the firefox.exe file is still left in memory and you have to end the process in WTM before you can reload Firefox.

It also freezes quite regularly too :(

I am sticking with Firefox however and just hope these problems can be fixed in a future update?
 
I use it on NT at work on a p4 with 512 ram, now its probs just NT but FF will crash nearly any time there is some Flash on the page. It also requires constant restarting as it will get very sluggish, I can litterally read the page faster than it loads.

Opera is a nice browser, and you can always customise it quite nicely.
 
Hamish said:
In the good old days of Firebird and older versions of firefox it used to be really quick and hardly ever crash, nowadays it crashes at least once a day, I was reading the favourite GIFs thread and FF just froze for about 20 secs at a time 3 or 4 times before I closed it. It also seems to take longer to load up now too :(

Anyone else found this?

1.5 never crashes or freezes on me.
 
Doesn't crash for me although I do get another annoying problem. When I type a reply to a thread it puts in random "returns" sometimes. This happens on the Mac Firefox too :/
 
I have had Firefox crashing a lot recently to, I just thought it was a general unstable system problem but after defrag, reinstall, clear up it still occasionally crashes. Im glad its not just me whos noticed its a bit unstable. Is it maybe just a problem with the new release?
 
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