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Is Firefox 1.0 Less Stable than Firefox PR1.0?
An anonymous reader wonders: "I had Firefox 1.0PR running smoothly on three different machines and it hardly ever crashed. After upgrading to 1.0, I seem to have at least one annoying crash a day. On one of the machines, using the 'self update' feature caused Firefox to crash in middle of the upgrade and left it in a completely unusable state. Eventually, I had to uninstall it and resort to using IE to download the full installer, again. Is it just me, or are other heavy Firefox users noticing this sort of behavior?"
Why don't you try posting on the Mozilla.org forums?
Make sure you uninstall any old versions before installing the new version. Its in the faq.. well hidden, but i've had no problems when uninstalling then re-installing. Make sure to back up, but your savings should be saved as they are not held in the same area as the executeables and whatnot. I have had problems just upgrading, but i've been problemless since i've done the above.
"We are eternal.. all this pain is an illusion." -Maynard James Kenan
Go to CNN. View a few stories. **CRASH**
This is:
Linux 2.6, GNOME, 32-bit ppc, libswf installed,
multiple windows open, Debian-unstable, the tab
preferences extension installed so I can go back
to the old pre-tab Mozilla ways...
This really, really, sucks. I was one of those
people that would keep a browser running for
several weeks at a time. I'd let it sit on one
virtual desktop with two dozen windows open.
It is a well known bug. The fix is in the current gecko devel tree. The quick workaround is to hit ctrl- followed by ctrl+. The shrinks then expands the text on the screen. It also causes the text to reflow correctly.
I much prefer to hold down CTRL and then scroll the mouse wheel up, then down. Does the exact same thing, just easier than taking my hand off the mouse ;)
Interpreting how much memory an application is using is somewhat difficult. Modern virtual memory operating systems page memory into both physical RAM and disk storage (swap, pagefile, whatever). Next, there are operating system features that try to preserve actual memory by not allocating real chunks of memory on an application's request, until that memory is really made use of. Finally, using some system GUI widgets etc can "increase" the amount of memory use as shown in Task Manager etc where really the memory use is within the OS, not the app.
:)
What this comes down to is: the figure you generally see for memory use of an app is not physical RAM use. It might not even reflect the actual amount of physical+disk memory in use! Finally, memory usage might be overstated due to transient external allocations (e.g. win32 API dialog boxes) that deceivingly appear as memory used by an application.
What you have to look for is how that memory usage figure changes over time. In most cases, it grows until it hits a ceiling - even at that point, it is way overstated (a conservative measure, so to speak). What is bad is if it regularly grows by 50 MB per day, without limit. Then there is a leak
I must agree. I have had many different identities and have been around since very close to the beginning (damn master passwords - always make me lose passwords!). As far back as I can remember people have been complaining about this very issue. Actually /. has stayed relatively the same over the years IMHO, other than a few joke evolutions :)
I've done several upgrades of Phoenix, Firebird and now Firefox on different machines, and I have grown accustomed to letting the new version create a new profile and then copy the stuff you still want back into it. I normally delete "C:\Docs and Settings\MYNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox", then copy the old bookmarks.html into my profile again.
Did so with PR1 -> 1.0, and have had no issues on several machines.
it's been open for about 5 days straight, running on Win2KPro. It's using 104MB of RAM.
Even worse, there's this System Idle process that's taking up 99% of my CPU time!
Sheesh. It's called memory caching. That's why TOP differentiates between RSIZE, VSIZE and RSHRD.
RSIZE is the amount of ram being actively used by a process. I doubt RSIZE is 104megs.
1.0PR had a javascript pop-up crash bug that drove me crazy. 1.0 fixed that.
Some things to consider:
1. How did you install 1.0? Did you do an overwrite? If so, do a clean install.
2. What extensions are you using? Have you disabled the extension version check?
>On one of the machines, using the 'self update' feature caused Firefox to crash in middle of the upgrade
When was this? Do you have DNS/network/firewall issues which could be causing this?
Lastly, to get some real answers from the experts people should asking here.
http://www.hardgrok.org/blog/item/slashfix-firefo
Isn't open source great?!
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
do you leave firefox in a page with flash animations? nowadays many of the animated figures in a web page are flash and not animated gifs anymore. a badly made flash can take up tons of CPU even when you leave it there. also, are you viewing web sites with automatic page refreshing? it will eat up the CPU everytime the page refreshes.
if that bothers you, you can always use the task manager to set the process's priority to either "below normal" or "low".
however, games are memory intensive. so as a browser, which uses memory caching to be fast. when real memory is used up, "thrashing" occurs (to swap some memory pages to the disk). even adjusting task priority won't help here, since thrashing is inherently slow. whenever a web page that you leave in the background refreshes itself, the OS has to swap out a few pages of game memory and swap in memory pages for the browser. as the game continues, it needs the memory back, and the OS has to juggle around memory pages again.
if you see a periodic frame loss, then self-refreshing web pages are definitely the culprit.
I once had a signature.
I'm going to guess that over the five days, you have opened and closed a whole bunch of tabs (probably dozens). It's a known issue in Firefox that when you close tabs, it doesnt release the memory.
See the bugzilla: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131456
I've had FF running for a week straight and using upwards of 200MB and only one tab open :). The only remedy is to restart FF. This has been an issue for over two years now. Dont expect it change anytime soon though, if it was a simple fix, I supppose it would have been done by now.
Try uninstalling Firefox 1.0PR, don't worry the profile will be left intact, then install Firefox 1.0, this works just fine, and Firefox 1.0 is completely stable.
Well, the validation works fine from Opera. I get 227 errors on that page, and something about it not being valid HTML 3.2.
Some of the errors are:
Line 8, column 14: there is no attribute "TYPE"
Line 38, column 11: there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN"
Line 38, column 26: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN"
Line 39, column 13: there is no attribute "MARGINWIDTH"
Line 39, column 30: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT"
Line 43, column 8: there is no attribute "BGCOLOR"
It goes on...
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Actually it's a synaptics touchpad hardware/driver feature. The touchpad normally emulates a PS2 mouse; however, there is a 'raw' mode that you can put the hardware into that basically returns the position of the user's finger on the pad. This allows you to do a lot of different things in software such as simulate a scroll wheel when the user tracks up and down the right edge, horizontally scroll when the user tracks on the bottom edge, perform browsing back/forward actions on the top edge, simulate extra mouse buttons with corner taps, etc.
A really really good implementation of a raw-mode synaptics driver is available for MacOS as SideTrack. It used to be free while it was in beta. Now it is $15 and a heck of a good deal. It fixes the powerbooks' problem of lacking a right mousebutton and scroll wheel while giving all sorts of extra enhancements that really make that one button mouse a lot more usable.