4 ms·

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

13 points by kgermino 17y ago

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?

zv 17y ago
It's just you
jsz0 17y ago
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.
nickmolnar2 17y ago
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.
byoung2 17y ago
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.
SwellJoe 17y ago
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.
Travis 17y ago
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).
Daishiman 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 ?
makecheck 17y ago
On which platform? Firefox can vary a lot on other systems.
fatdog789 17y ago
It's not just you. Firefox has the Netscape syndrome: it gets crappier with every release. And that's without any damn addons.
- startupcomment 17y ago
  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.
scrame 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
- manvsmachine 17y ago
  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.
garnet7 17y ago
Firefox takes ... ... ... ... a very long time to start up. :(
marze 17y ago
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.
Gibbon 17y ago
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.)
IncidentalEcon 17y ago
I like speed. I like the Google Toolbar. I look forward to the day when Chrome satisfies both.
sy11 17y ago
I have similar experience with Firefox. But, I don't attribute that to upgrade. The crashes used to happen even before.

13 points by kgermino 17y ago

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?

zv 17y ago

It's just you

jsz0 17y ago

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.

nickmolnar2 17y ago

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.

byoung2 17y ago

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.

SwellJoe 17y ago

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.

Travis 17y ago

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).

Daishiman 17y ago

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 17y ago
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 ?

makecheck 17y ago

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

fatdog789 17y ago

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

startupcomment 17y ago
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.

scrame 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.
manvsmachine 17y ago
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.

garnet7 17y ago

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

marze 17y ago

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.

Gibbon 17y ago

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.)

IncidentalEcon 17y ago

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

sy11 17y ago

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