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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?
Considering the size of the Slashdot audience and the fact that Slashdot is a "news" site (in theory) and not a "tech support" site... a larger question might be, Is it irresponsible for Slashdot to post a bug report of a single user as a story for a million people to see? How many people will just read the headline and not read the comments, and automatically think that Firefox is having widespread problems?
Are there really a bunch of people who have problems with Firefox? Without even looking at Mozilla's tech support forums, I can tell you, unequivocally, YES. When you distribute a program to millions of users, some people are going to run into problems, that's a given. But how do we know that this fella's problem is really with Firefox, and not with, say, a memory chip he installed last week? Or maybe he has some spyware installed that is screwing it up?
The REAL question that Slashdot ought to be concerned with is, Does the number of people having problems with Firefox 1.0 appear to be statistically significant? If it's not, then this whole story grossly exaggerates the problems and gives Firefox a lot of unnecessarily bad PR.
Me, I just recently reformatted my hard drive, installed Win XP and Firefox 1.0, and have not had any problems with it.
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.