Decaflon Thread: Fire the Fox

Fire the Fox

daxgti — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:31:22

Yeah, my coworker has multiple crashes everyday while using it on the Mac. FF on PC running in Parallels seems to be fine. He finds that it crashes most when working in Gmail. I only use it for testing typically, so I don't have a lot of opportunity for it to crash.

Fire the Fox

elliothere — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 03:26:48

I haven't really noticed any issues, but I've recently switched to Safari 3 for basic browsing (faster, better-looking) and only use FireFox on Mac for developing.

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AsceticMonk — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:26:16

I am another Camino user on Mac. FF is just too slow on Mac, launching it on my PowerBook takes like a century.

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Mike — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:22:01

FF has always sucked on the Mac. I use Camino too but it's not as customizable and cannot use FF plugins. Still suffers from occasional memory leaks too.

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xirclebox — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:14:35

I have had some issue with it but that could be all the plugins I'm running for development testing. It's still my browser of choice on both mac and pc though.

I see the biggest problem when I visit gmail on my pc. It hangs up. GRRRRR!!!

Fire the Fox

maryann — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:19:03

It used to make me curse but I upgraded to 3beta and it's much faster. Doesn't help those who rely on their plugins (I'm missing Google Gears badly!) though but the StumbleUpon toolbar works OK FWIW.

Fire the Fox

jay-baker — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:08:17

I've noticed these issues as well, but I have to say I'm sticking with Firefox. It has all the features I still need, del.icio.us, tab mix plus, colorzilla, adblock plus, firebug etc.

I do have something to add that may help some of you having crashing problems. A few weeks ago, Firefox (and openoffice) was crashing several times a day and after a few days, OSX started crashing too. It turns out the problem was the third party RAM upgrade I bought.

Apple support told me the problem was something called kernel panic caused by errors in my RAM. If you're using thrid party RAM try switching to your stock or getting some from Apple. When I switched back to my stock RAM, the problem went away and now Firefox doesn't crash anymore than any other program.

Then again, Safari is faster. If that's what does it for you, like jstamant, then make the switch. Otherwise, don't abandon the fox just yet.

Fire the Fox

jstamant — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 09:34:58

I was a long time lobbyist for Firefox. It is so feature rich and had all the right plug-ins for social networks I was into like StumbleUpon, Newsvine, and Del.ici.ous.

The emphasis here is was. These days it is all about Safari. Apple's web browser is just so fast and handles bookmarks very well in my opinion. I originally got into Safari when my blog stats told my that 75% of my visitors used Safari.

Camino was nice to look at, but I found it to be just as slow as Firefox. For me its all about speed.

Fire the Fox

rjc29 — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:33:16

I had that problem when I first upgraded to the newest version (PC). I had to completely uninstall Firefox and reinstall. It's been fine since then.

Fire the Fox

clicknathan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:37:44

Oooh, I didn't realize Camino was made by Mozilla. In.terest.in/g

Is it as customizable as Firefox?

That is, does it have plugins? Can you at least move around where you want the bookmarks bar?

Fire the Fox

clicknathan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:34:43

I've tried switching over to Safari, but it's lacking in that:

No Google Toolbar and I often use image search and the custom searches that provides.
You can't customize the toolbars
All of my usernames/passwords are stored in Firefox and I hate the idea of repopulating Safari with these. Shouldn't keychain be able to handle this for me?

Fire the Fox

peroty — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 22:08:32

I see a typo. You spelled Firefox wrong. On the mac it is spelled Camino.

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jensized — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:38:00

Dale, marry me?

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clicknathan — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:30:19

Hell yes, Dale! Again, my favorite person on this site...

I'm running 2.0.0.6, about 6 plugins, nothing too heavy (other than the Web Developer toolbar, I suppose).

Anything over 10 tabs just dies. I have a pretty brand new Mac that's high end enough that it should be able to handle 10 tabs. My old Windows machine + FF 1.5 could easily run 20 tabs...

Fire the Fox

Dale — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:24:32

i hate foxes to. but setten them on fire's is cruel. just shoot em and skin em and make a nice hat.

Fire the Fox

publicenergy — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:28:13

I have exactly the same set-up and usage pattern as dreamweaver - no probs at all.

I did have a problem with Firefox crashing a lot a long time ago (when I was using XP I think) - all I did was created a new Firefox user profile and destroyed the old one and that cleared out some crap and it worked fine afterwards.

Fire the Fox

davidhayes — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:26:48

I have 2.0.0.6 installed on Windows XP, and it does hang from time to time. But I'm thinking it has more to do with the strain I'm putting on my system and not Firefox itself. I suppose I could be mistaken about that...

Fire the Fox

dreamweaver — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 19:01:12

What "latest version" are we talking about? I run 2.0.0.6 on Vista daily, all day long with multiple tabs open and lots of extensions, and never have a problem with it. Most times I don't even shut down at night, just let the PC go into sleep mode, so sometimes FF is on 24/7 literally.

Fire the Fox

jackosh — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:32:09

FF has been crappy to me too :(

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superrats — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:18:24

I'm a Windows based user and find the latest FF version hangs up on me enough that I expect it to hang up. I only run two extensions with it, so it's not like I'm taxing it.

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alisa — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:11:10

I quit using Firefox on my mac the day I tried out Camino.

Firefox was making my poor fans go wild, and I wouldn't even be doing anything that crazy.

Camino is pretty sharp, it feels kind of like Firefox, but I would guess that Safari is still lighter.

Fire the Fox

Ozone42 — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 18:01:40

How many plugins are you running? I haven't had any crashes, but I only use it for testing, so I could be missing things. On your mac I'd recomend camino, or going and getting an optimized build.

I run safari 99% of the time on my mac. There's just nothing faster and lighter available that still renders everything right.

Fire the Fox

clicknathan — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 17:57:30

Side note: It would be cool if we could do polls on here. User-initiated, baby.

Does anyone else think that Firefox totally sucks since the latest release? I'm using it on a Mac and my girlfriend's using the latest version on her PC, and we've both noticed that it's crashing multiple times a day.

This has been happening for a few weeks now. Has anyone heard of whether or not they're planning on fixing this? Are they even aware?

She's even gone as far as to use IE, so you know things are getting rough...