

Ask HN: Is it just me or does Firefox suck now? - kgermino

Ever since I upgraded to 3.5 Firefox always crashes and fails to load pages.  Updates didn't help.  WTF Mozilla.  Is it just me?
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jsz0
I haven't experienced any increased crashing but I don't use FF that often
anymore so it's hard to generalize. I mostly used FF because it was faster
than IE. Now I use WebKit because it's faster than FF. I don't care about a
kitchen sink selection of plugins and themes -- I just want a very fast
browser.

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byoung2
I used to work in tech support, so I have to ask...did you restart your
computer? ;)

It is probably some plugin that worked perfectly under 3.0 that is not playing
well under 3.5. Try disabling all of your plugins and re-enabling them one by
one. For me it was BetterGmail that was crashing FireFox. Disabling it fixed
everything.

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scrame
Firefox itself is OK for me, but firebug and flash have made firefox unusable
in the last 6 months. At least on linux. It seems to need a lot of memory on
windows, though.

~~~
blasdel
For me Firebug is crapping out all the time even when it's off -- I regularly
see the "This script is stalled" dialog from it.

Firefox is pretty useless to me without firebug -- extensions can't be
disabled/enabled without restarting, and it seems impossible for any
nontrivial extension to noop itself because of the event handling nonsense. I
really don't want to have to always be using multiple profiles, but it might
come to that.

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Daishiman
FF 3.5 is extremely slow on Linux on comparison to Chrome, so I switched
there. It's faster on Windows, but that may be because I use it less so the
cache is smaller. The lookup times for the awesomebar are too slow.

~~~
RobGR
It is faster because you use it less so the cache is smaller ? Think about
that.

I have no reason to doubt it is true; I know poeple who claim to have made
Firefox run much quicker by disabling the cache or making the cache direstory
read only.

One of those people uses a 56k dialup connection that rarely connects as fast
as 56k.

How badly do you have to screw up a cache implementation to get it where it is
faster to fetch the data over a 56k dialup than look it up on the local
harddisk ?

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nickmolnar2
I have constant problems with Firefox, but they are all related to add-ons.
When I turn all of them off, the thing runs smoothly. Of course, the add-ons
are why I use Firefox in the first place.

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zv
It's just you

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garnet7
Firefox takes ...

...

...

... a very long time to start up. :(

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Travis
Not just you. I see it on my Mac and Windows at work. There are times when it
just goes unresponsive for 3-10 seconds, then unfreezes and runs fine. But
it's def. a slow bloated POS at this point (and IMO).

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SwellJoe
Firefox 3.5 in its current incarnation is extremely stable for me on both
Linux and Windows. Betas were rough, and 3.0 remained pretty crappy, for me,
throughout its entire cycle, but mostly that was memory usage complaints.

I _did_ have a few weeks worth of horrible Firefox instability last month, but
it turned out to be due to faulty memory in my desktop machine.

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marze
I have used Mozilla / Firefox for what seems like forever, but 3.5 just is
sluggish for some reason. It might just be my installation, but ever since
upgrading to 3.5 Firefox is really slow starting up.

Now I've switched to Chrome but I do miss the Flashblock plugin.

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Gibbon
Firefox 3.5 crashes frequently on both my macbook and my wife's older macbook.
It's slow to load, sometimes slow to load some pages and hyperlinks
occasionally don't actually work (mostly only on facebook.)

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makecheck
On which platform? Firefox can vary _a lot_ on other systems.

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sy11
I have similar experience with Firefox. But, I don't attribute that to
upgrade. The crashes used to happen even before.

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IncidentalEcon
I like speed. I like the Google Toolbar. I look forward to the day when Chrome
satisfies both.

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fatdog789
It's not just you. Firefox has the Netscape syndrome: it gets crappier with
every release. And that's _without_ any damn addons.

~~~
startupcomment
Compared to Safari's recent versions, FF's recent versions have typically been
more sluggish. I just downloaded Camino and will be testing that out.

