ContentJanuary 18th, 2007 by DeWitt Clinton
If Firefox/Linux hangs on me one more time, I swear I’m going to install Windows.
I’m that frustrated.
(Logo used with permission from Mozilla.org.)
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@sogrady Thanks for the introduction. Nice to meet you, @bcantrill. I'm a fan of your work, and subscribe to your blog.
Posted about 23 days ago
January 18th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Hi Dewitt,
I used firefox 2 on my ubuntu machine and I have hardly ever had it hang… Where as the version on my laptop keeps running out of memory (It only has 196mb)
Have you tried disabling some extensions? Maybe one of them is causing the instability?
January 18th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Hey James,
Yes, I think you’re on the right track. I’ve now disabled everything except the del.icio.us toolbar, AdBlock Plus, and Firebug.
Fingers crossed.
January 19th, 2007 at 1:55 am
i was trapped in that nightmare for a while, but uninstalling the Google Toolbar helped a bit. still crashes, but not several times per hour as it used to.
January 19th, 2007 at 8:21 am
You go from Linux to Windows?
Do you not want a good looking unix? (OSX)
:)
D
January 19th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Dion,
Sadly, it’s even worse on my OSX boxes… I just counted and we’re up to 5 Macs in the apartment now!
But no, aside from the XBox, there’s no Windows in the house.
January 19th, 2007 at 10:31 am
Well, even with the stripped down extension set of del.icio.us, AdBlock, and Firebug, Firefox still hung on me this morning.
January 19th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
maybe it’s AdBlock. i’m using both the del.icio.us toolbar and Firebug with a reasonable level of performance, but no AdBlock.
January 19th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
But I’d sooner give up the Internet than give up AdBlock.
January 19th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
two other things:
i killed a current session that had about 15 tabs open and started fresh, and that helped.
it might not just be Linux: http://www.churbuck.com/wordpress/?p=835
January 19th, 2007 at 10:32 pm
[...] DeWitt Clinton » Blog Archive » Firefox. Reloaded, again, and again, and again. DeWitt suffering from some of the same issues i was (tags: Clinton Firefox 2.0 instability) [...]
January 20th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Do you have any Flash content in any of your tabbed pages when Firefox crashes? I had similar problems a while back. Disabling a lot of unused extensions helped, but I still get the occasional crash with Flash content (even with the new Adobe final release). I’m on Edgy. By the way, one of the extensions I disabled that I think lead to greater stability was Firebug (though I’m not 100% sure). I guess you might not want to give that up if you’re doing a lot of web development, but it could be something to consider as a culprit. I still have Adblock installed without any problems apart from the aforementioned Flash issues.
January 20th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Dan, my guess is that you’re totally right that it is Flash. My problem is that FF just hangs completely, and I’m not sure that a XUL extension would do that.
I’m wondering if the best solution is to run two browsers. One without flash, one with.
January 21st, 2007 at 5:36 pm
An extension might trigger issues in the browser or a plugin, this way it would still case crashes. In particular Adblock is known to have issues with Flash. Adblock Plus (sorry about the shameless plug) is somewhat better at that but still far from perfect. Once Firefox 3.0 is out things should get better, quite a few issues have been fixed there.
January 21st, 2007 at 5:43 pm
Not a shameless plug at all, Wladimir. I happily use AdBlock Plus!