Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Slides, IE Gains?
limber writes "InformationWeek is reporting that a Dutch Web metrics company is stating that Microsoft's Internet Explorer has gained market share, contrary to other recent studies, while Firefox has lost market share, during the last two months. 'People are not switching so often to Firefox as before,' said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat."
So that would suggest that their statistics only count people who visit their customers' websites. I don't think I'd count that as a complete, objective picture of the Internet as a whole. Plus, whether or not you accept cookies from a site might skew their data further. [For the record, I use Firefox and only accept cookies when I have to].
That's what you get for running the first beta of Internet Explorer 7 illegally. Here's the fix. It wasn't Firefox's fault, it was your fault for running the first beta of MS IE7 using the iexplore.local trick.
It's an ugly fact, but Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. For me, that's ugly because it is my favorite browser. Perhaps people get tired of the crashing and CPU hogging, and have moved to Opera, which has no stability problems that I'm able to detect.
The CPU and memory hogging bug in Firefox 1.5 is well known. In two extensive articles, Information Week reports that opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs causes crashes and CPU and memory hogging. That kind of heavy user often sees Firefox consuming 99% CPU while idle and/or more than 400 Megabytes. See Firefox 1.5: Not Ready For Prime Time? and Firefox 1.5 Stability Problems? Readers And Mozilla Respond.
The bug seems to be due to insufficient allocation of resources inside Firefox, such as inadequate stack space. Those who use a browser to do extensive research, for example, are likely to have more windows and tabs open than the average user. Apparently Firefox developers did not plan for that.
The bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce (see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than 2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla URLs into a new tab. Remove the space:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660
See comments #48 and #49 of bug 222660 for an example of the symptoms under Windows XP. A typical Windows Task Manager screen shot attached to comment #49 shows the "I/O Other Bytes" increasing by 20K/second with no program activity. At that point, the bug was not yet showing the worst symptoms.
The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use or more with no activity, normally occur after opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer to appear. If the computer has perhaps 256 Megabytes of memory, the most obvious symptom at the beginning is hard disk thrashing.
You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.
Maybe the only solution is for a developer who knows the code to reproduce the problem and see what causes it. It is not clear to me why they are unwilling to do so. This bug seems especially interesting to me. It is likely that fixing this bug will fix other issues. It is likely that fixing this bug will make it easier to work on the Firefox code.
The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
" >http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=14 143632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671
It's an ugly fact, but Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.
Ever heard of Windows?
The old Windows versions were bad, but when using WHQL drivers, the only time I had stability problems with Windows NT, 2000 or XP was with failing or faulty hardware. I suppose in all fairness, there are probably more copies of 98 or ME in use than there are of the entire Firefox installed base.
More or less comprehensive Firefox marketshare metadata
Matthew Brundage
Silver Spring, MD
You can try the 1.5.0.1 nightlies, which are supposed to contain a lot of crash fixes and other major bugfixes. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/latest-mozilla1.8.0/
I used to get occasional crashes starting with the Deer Park builds before it was called 1.5, but they seemed to go away completely after I installed the flashblock extension and disabled java. Lots of flash ads across several tabs is a recipe for disaster. There's still a Linux-only tab dragging bug (drag doesn't end when button is released) that annoys me in 1.5, but I feel it beats the a Linux-only performance bug that annoyed me in 1.0.
... Internet Explorer BETA 2 is released to the public.
d irect.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/ie7betare
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