Damien Katz

Although Firefox has been improved, it still does not quite match Internet Explorer 6, at least for my requirements.

When you are at the bottom of a web page, and hit F5 (refresh), Firefox jump up to the page, waits a long time, and then return to where you where. Sometimes it doesn't even return, but you are forced to the top of page. That kinda sucks if you are reading a web page which is miles long, and you are somewhere way down and want to refresh the page, to see if new comments have arrived. IE does this correctly, while it also jumps to the top, it does it so fast, that you barely notice it, and it always return the the offset of the web page where you were before pressing refresh.

I did notice that the latest firefox version (1.06) seems less stable than the rest. Worse, is that the talkback sometimes causes a BSOD on my WinX laptop.

I think that I tend to see crashes shortly after browsing to a PDF pages. Hard to say exactly.

Try Opera. I don't understand why Opera isn't more popular than Firefox, or hasn't been for years. The only bad strike against Opera is in the recent versions, they made the width of the URL field so damn small, if you edit the url you often have to scroll and it's annoying to me.

opera_vote++



To make your URL field wider, just get rid of the Google search field. To google search, go to your address bar and prefix with a 'g':



g damien katz couch



With the up-then-left mouse gesture, though, I rarely do any other url editing.



Give Opera a try. Once you memorize a few mouse gestures (open link in new tab, open link in new tab in background, close this tab, move up one level in the url path, back, forward) and get used to reliable sessions (Opera really keeps your tabs all just as you left them, no matter what), it totally changes the way you use the web.



I really, really tried to give Firefox a chance, but after installing 5 or 6 buggy extensions and spending an hour or so trying to configure everything... why bother?



Love Opera.

Not seeing many crashes with Deer Park alpha 2. To be honest - not seeing any crashes at all. But Deer Park does not run many plugins and extensions, so it's a pretty bare browser. Maybe that's the difference.

My Firefox has been crashy too, though I'm still thinking it's my RAM because other things have been crashing as well (and I get the occasional BSOD).

Dunno what to tell you... go back to 1.4?

I'm seeing a lot of really hard lockups lately, needing to power down and restart. Could be latest Firefox, I use it almost exclusively.

Instead of just crying foul and considering switching to a different browser, I thought the great engineer Damien Katz would apply a more methological approach to trying to figure out what's going on. Come on, dude, no slacking. Most likely the extensions are the culprit. Disable them, restart and use for a while, and I bet things will be fine. Here's why: I'm running Firefox 1.06 without ANY custom extensions for development purposes on my dev machine all day, and for normal browsing on my other systems. I didn't have even a SINGLE crash. And reloading/running Domino 7 webadmin.nsf in Firefox all day long gives that browser QUITE the workout (it's one gigantic DOM application with ~17K of javascript lines last time I checked, probably more now). How many extensions have you installed, and which ones? The list will probably scroll off screen ;-)

The good thing about Firefox is that it is developed much faster than IE, new versions are coming out so fast that you can't always keep up with the stream. However, I have a instinctive feeling that Firefox will never achieve the native Windows undocumented API speed that IE does. To me Firefox still looks a bit clumsy, while IE gives me the feeling of a solid and windows optimized browser. Maybe, when using Linux things would look different, but I'm using Windows XP because of it's ability to run the most applications.

Thomas, I know I could be diligent and methodical in debugging this, but I'd rather focus on making my own software work.

And I really don't have that many extensions:
- Greasemonkey 0.3.5 (only a few site specific scripts installed)
- JavaScript Debugger 0.9.85 (I never use this)
- Flashblock 1.2.9
- BugMeNot 0.6.2
- Google Toolbar for Firefox 1.0.20050707

I could be any of these or none of these, who knows? But I'd rather not browse without them.

Damien: Uninstall the debugger if you're not using it anyway?!, and then use your googlebar to search for '{name of extension goes here} crashes firefox'. If in doubt, uninstall everything which has a version number < 1.0.

Mika: I don't think the 'Microsoft uses undocumented API's' really flies anymore, because apparently no one is complaining that Opera ist faster than IE, right? The gecko reflow engine is extremely good, and actually even produces standards-based output, if so instructed ;-) Maybe they're getting their act together in IE 7. We'll see...

Thanks for the tip Chris!

I even added back the google bar above, in the Search bar panel strip. It does make it better, but I still wish I could move more crap up there to the search strip panel. They pack an amazing amount of features in such small amount of screen real estate. I just don't use even half of it and would gladly trade a long url bar for most of those features.

I also like Opera's integrated RSS reader.