Ask HN: Is it just me or does Firefox suck now? | Hacker News Reader

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

13 pointskgermino19 comments

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

Do you use the firefox package that comes with the distro or are you running a custom package / building from source? Depending on the distro, the firefox included can be considerably older that current. 3.0 was kinda slow for me on Ubuntu, but 3.5 is quick.

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.

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 ?

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.

It's just you

Firefox takes ...

...

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

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).

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.

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.

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.)

On which platform? Firefox can vary a lot on other systems.

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

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

It's not just you. Firefox has the Netscape syndrome: it gets crappier with every release. And that's without any damn addons.

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.

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