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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?"
I don't know about anyone else, but I haven't had ANY issues with 1.0, perhaps the author of the article is using unsupported plugins / extensions that haven't been upgraded yet?
Isn't there some kind of firefox mailing list for this kind of stuff?
I'm horrified that this is a front page post. What is wrong w/ you people?
Also, you are reporting the crash data back to the developers, right?
[o]_O
I don't want to come off as rude (of course but) but, why is this considered newsworthy?
Complaining is more fun than actually solving problems.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
If you need to mod me down now, but I am starting to get PO'd!
Just what in the F*CK is going on with Slashdot???
Is there any justification what so freakin' ever this is a frontpage story? As far as anyone can tell this is about as informative and useful as 85% of the Usenet.
The quality of frontpage postings has gone down dramatically. After weeks of every story just being a heavily editorialiazed piece of crap, we now have, "Hey, does anyone elses FF 1.0 crash?".
Editors, Taco, Cowboy Neal?!? Is anyone awake here? Have we totally lost our standards?
Cripes.
You might want to go back to Mozilla then. Oddly enough, I have observed Mozilla being less prone to this kind of behavior than FireFox.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
This should be deleted. This is really sorry.
I know you aren't serious about this. At least I hope now, otherwise I'm wasting my time responding to a troll. But you may actually have some truth in what you say.
My first question to ask the original poster would be, "Have you done any OS updates between the two versions?" It would not surprise me in the least if MSFT was busy making patches to interfere with the FireFox application.
You might consider me a troll, but you do have to first recognize the rather extensive number of current lawsuits, convictions, investigations, and other forms of inquiry that Microsoft is currently trying to defend for just this kind of behavior.
Before you accuse the FireFox application of having a problem with Windows you had better prove the Windows doesn't have a problem with FireFox. Based on past performance I would trust FireFox long before I would trust Microsoft.
And you would be better off posting to Mozilla.org instead of trying to effectively FUD the competition against MSIE.
Is this really news? A single user's negative experience of Firefox hardly seems to me to be worth reading - more like a troll instead.This belongs on the Mozilla forums.
Next off, someone will post an article saying that they wish that their graphics card was faster for HL2. Purely subjective information, and not really worth repeating.
I'm running windows and linux builds and it's running flawlessly. Check your settings.
Perhaps in an age of blogging, there's a common tendency in thinking that every single thought that crosses one's mind is worthy of becoming an article. Unfortunately, this isn't the case.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Perhaps because posting on the forums doesn't get the sort of response you would expect.
I've had problems with firefox since I started using it, but I keep using in hopes that with each release it will get better and have less bugs. I don't to use IE, I want something to use standards for my websites so they work.
Unfortunately, firefox is a long way off from approaching IE's stability and speed. There hasn't been a day that has gone by where I haven't experienced a firefox crash or error.
My coworker and I just upgraded to 1.0 and have bothed noticed that firefox will eventually eat up most/all system memory, forcing us to kill firefox and restart it. (we ran the beta/pre releases with no issues) The only common factor is that we both had to reinstall the web developer (version .8?) after upgrading to FF1.0....
Could this problem be related to specific extensions and not specifically to firefox itself?
I don't regularly read the Mozilla.org forums. Do you? The article on /. interested me because I was thinking about whether or not I should update Firefox to the new release.
Logic, macros, and more
You'll get answers quicker this way. Probably better quality ones, and you won't have someone whose name is Samir and lives in Bangalore claiming his name is "Fred" and speaks with a thick Indian accent trying to solve the problem based on some lame-assed script. (Apologies to any Indian people who find this offensive.)
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
I thought I had seen it all, but "Firefox crashes because... umm... Microsoft" absolutely takes the cake.
Open source software is not bugfree by any means. But the development time is by orders of magnitude faster than that of closed source development. Combine that with lots of eyes and there are no "easy" bugs left like there often are in closed source offerings.
Most closed source supporters don't even dispute this. Instead they claim that it only works in a very popular project and most projects arent. There is a counter argument to that but I won't go into it. The point is that firefox is an extremely popular project so that argument doesn't refute that the open source development model should yield the ideal result.
Microsoft probably has the worst reputation for stability in the software industry and it is one that is not lacking in actual merit by any account. So this is not exactly random piece of open source software versus random equivelent closed source software.
This is one of the best open source applications with repute for one of the cleanest designs, against the absolute worst repute closed source firm and further a product of theirs with a known terrible design.
"Are you proposing that Microsoft has a "black ops" department, whose sole purpose is to cause Windows to behave incorrectly when 3rd party software is run?"
You try to make it sound like he is mel gibson in a Conspiracy Theory. This isn't exactly that, this is a company with a PROVEN track record of doing just that, RECENTLY and doing so IN THE BROWSER MARKET specifically. Read up on the MSN website and the way it renders in Opera.
Further you speak as if your a developer on windows, that means if you've done anything non-trivial you know that windows does NOT behave as documented in NUMEROUS cases. Finding a system call which is only used by one competitor with a significant user base and making an intentional design change to break them is easy enough. If too many people report the problem you can claim it's a bug introduced by the update instead of an intentional change. This would be blatantly obvious if the relevant source were revealed, but it's not.
It's hardly a conspiracy theory at all to believe Microsoft would engage in any illegal anti-competative practices they can which they believe will ultimately preserve more market share than they will cost.
Particually after US CERT advisories to change browsers firefox has become a serious threat to their browser monopoly. I'd venture Microsoft would be willing to risk a substantial number of customers to discredit the stability of the first fully stable release of the first significant threat to their monopoly in almost a decade.
"If you vote with your pocketbook, the company will listen."
Well, either listen, or engage in anti-competitive practices to ensure you no longer have that option. After all, allowing you the option to choose a competitors product simply because it is superior or you don't them is a bad business strategy! First step is as simple as a minor api change that doesn't affect many applications but that firefox uses. This way you can make some customers feel firefox is unstable. That way you can buy time until you can get DRM'd which use encryption that is only compatible with windows. After all, you've already got the DMCA in place to ensure competition can't beat that simply because they figure out how the encryption works.
Then you don't have to worry about competiton on inexpensive x86 systems anymore.
I've been experiencing the exact same phenomenon. So have a few of my friends. I'm sure it's not happening to everybody, but yeah, for me, the PR seemed more stable. On my system the official release goes to 99% CPU utilization and has to be shut down a few times a day, typically.
It doesn't throw errors to report. I'm not savvy enough to know how to get debugging information out of it, and I don't have the time to spend on mozilla forums trying to get someone's attention and then working it out.
So I won't put in the time. I don't expect the firefox people to fix it for me, given that, of course. They've already given me plenty, and it's still a great browser.
But I have been having this problem, and if other people have, too, then I'm glad to see it being discussed. Beyond hoping the problem becomes well-characterized, I think it's worth having a discussion about this because it could have implications for how OSS is perceived by the mass culture. The Firefox campaign is the biggest, most successful open source push in recent memory. Let's not act like it's heresy to talk about it here instead of in a newsgroup somewhere.
doesn't it seem strange like somebody is baiting the comment posters with this story...
post an FUD filled anonymous story about a popular open-source project....
is this the editors looking to boost their comments on a Saturday or is it an Opera or Microsoft Employee looking to shake the tree?
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Ray Raspberry
raspberry@b3l33t.org
Call me old fashioned, but DNS/network/firewall issues should never cause a web browser to crash and enter into an unusable state.
Dude, we're not talking impossible here. I'm typing this from a Linux notebook, and I own only the Microsoft products that came with my equipment.
/. really believed that strongly in the movement, then they would do what I do and run it on their home equipment, and we wouldn't be worried about Windows bugs affecting open source products.
The point of my argument was that it's absolutely annoying to no end to hear people claim that just because a piece of software is open source, it can't be that software's fault. Certainly at some point in ones life, they have to accept the things that they like as "good" without needing to consider it "flawless."
I am an open source advocate, but I feel that making laughable claims in support of open source software is no way to promote it. How about, before we go pointing fingers, we take a quick look at the problem, and then prove that it's Microsoft's fault.
If open source software were naturally bug-free, nobody would be running software to track those bugs. If everyone in open source were a developer, there would be many more developers here.
If everyone on
I would recommend Firefox only if you have a need for 100% free software with source code and the whole shebang. But every time I tried to install and use a Mozilla based browser, I was left disappointed. Opera is definitely worth paying for.
Disclaimer: I am NOT in any way affiliated with the cool folks who make either of these browsers.
You'll probably want to uninstall the 1.0pr release before you install 1.0. Matter of fact, it's not a bad idea to do that to anything you intend to upgrade. I know it's definately save me some headaches and $$$ on aspirin.
I don't understand that inquirer letter:
The fact is that Firefox only cuts the mustard as a modern browser because of its extensions (...
Without these missing extensions (for example one called autohide which facilitates kiosk browsing), Firefox is, in my opinion, a long way behind some of the IE-based browser
Is he saying Firefox doesn't have these "missing" extensions? Or that he doesn't know how to install them? Or is he saying "if I refuse to install any of the functionality of Firefox, it doesn't have much functionality"?
"if the Firefox authors don't deem their product worthy of a 1.0 release, then we must assume that their product isn't ready yet"
In their eyes yes. Perhaps the authors have a bit higher standards of "ready" than their competitors? Internet Explorer has been in development for how long? From the very first release of IE to the release of sp2 is how long it took Microsoft to develop a program of the stability, security, and function set IE has today. Version numbers, or the number of releases or whether those releases were labeled preview or stable is meaningless.
The fact of the matter is that in 2 years the mozilla foundation has using an open source process developed and released a browser with a comparable feature set (arguably a superior one), comparable stability, and superior security. They've done all this without adding any features that break standards compliance, and yet HAVE added great features which IE is lacking, such as popup blocking, transparent png, and tabbed browsing. There is a multi-search bar. There are several annoying javascript functions which you can disable. There is an interface through which almost all critical default settings and behaviors are accesible to the user and can be directly manipulated. The browser they've released weighs in at under 5mb and is completely self contained, it can operate out of a folder. This browser runs on a plethora of platforms which IE is incapable of running on.
It's taken MS over 10yrs to develop a browser which is inferior to what the mozilla foundation developed in 2yrs. You can talk about "stable" releases and version numbers all day sir. But you'll never convince me that achieving a result in 2yrs isn't faster than achieving less or even the same results in 10.