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Firefox Advises Users To Disable McAfee Plugin
itwbennett writes "Mozilla is advising Firefox users to disable McAfee's ScriptScan software, saying that it could cause 'stability or security problems.' ScriptScan, which ships with McAfee's VirusScan antivirus program, is designed to keep Web surfers safe by scanning for any malicious scripting code that might be running in the browser. But according to Mozilla, it has an unintended side-effect: It can cause Firefox to crash ... a lot."
It's just as bad as norton.
We have it at our work and it makes my computer twice as slow. As long as it makes our sysadmin feel safe, who cares wright.
Yes, because McAfee is a piece of shit!!! If this is news to you, please proceed to perform hara-kiri to save your honor for you currently have none.
program, is designed to keep Web surfer's safe
Keep his safe where?
S'erious'ly, do people ju'st put in apo'strophe's around random s's the'se day's?
A McAfee product which causes more problems than it solves?
I think you just destroyed my faith in the universe. ;)
If you can't surf the web, you can't get infected. McAfee has done it again!
I say this so often it should be in my sig... There is absurdly little difference between so-called "anti-virus" and desktop "internet security" products and the malware from which they are supposed to protect you. When family members ask me how I manage to happily use a 5 year-old PC that seems to be faster than their 1-2 year-old PC, I simply say "I don't have anti-virus installed"
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I suggest that people switch to MSE or Avast and stay away from AVG, Norton and McAfee... If you are worried about bad sites install adblock plus and WoT (web of trust).
Firefox really CAN virtualize the complete Windows experience!
Glad they do such great QA work, since like nobody uses FireFox.....
...is to uninstall the bloated piece of crap that is Firefox and install Chrome. :D
...I might just suspect Microsoft's hand in this somewhere.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
The only way to uninstall McAfee/Symantec/Norton products 100% is to reformat and reinstall. Once their foot is in your door, it is permanently in your door -- unless you have to inclination to tear out your perfectly good door and replace it.
actually Firefox seven is pretty nice I'm considering moving from chrome back to it.
Yes, but Chrome has the "actually @^@#$ing works" feature, whereby the browser actually @^@#$ing works! Sometime around Firefox 3.6-ish, I couldn't keep more than one or two tabs open in Firefox without it crashing on me. I switched to Chrome and haven't regretted it for an instant.
I have no idea why you think that, it has been proven time and time again chrome uses WAYYY more memory than firefox, over twice as much. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-14.html Chrome is the bloated one.
not to install McAfee. I mean, it's a notch above Kaspersky when it comes to "not slowing the computer down to an unmanageable mess" but it still reigns in the "how does this terrible software still exist in a market of vastly superior and more advertised competitors."
The last time I used Firefox, I could open and close it over and over and see my memory usage increase with each opening. Firefox leaks memory like a sieve and is extremely unstable. Chrome just works.
Lack of proper adblock, lack of the ability to have extensions that save to the disk (mass file/image downloaders, etc.) and a large bug/problem that occurs (that utterly breaks the browser) when you have lots of tabs and windows (each with lots of images) open that the Chrome support forums has more or less admitted exists but won't be solved are all quite good reasons to stick with Firefox. There are about an equal amount of reasons, if not more, to leave modern Firefox for Chrome though.
Hopefully, it crashes Chrome or IE too. It'd be a shame for only Firefox users to uninstall needless software.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
As one would expect of a security company whose name sounds like it belongs on the McDonald's dollar menu and served with cream.
* It is a greasy mess and will bloat your computer
* It will ruin your web-nuggets
* Not protect you from viruses. McAfee couldn't stop salmonella.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
When factoring in the plugin_container process, Firefox usually uses a good chunk more than Chrome while watching videos/using plugins like Flash. In my experience, that is. Memory is cheap so stability and features are more important these days, except on mobile platforms but then the Browser's software architecture is different enough to not really be a fair comparison to their desktop counterparts.
No leaks like that exist in firefox 7, I had opened 20 windows on firefox and had my memory at 450MB (flash videos included) and chrome opening the same windows took 2GB of memory....
I can't have more than two tabs open in Firefox without a crash, but I am able to have two dozen tabs across 2--3 windows open in Chrome with no issues whatsoever. Adblock Plus exists for Chrome and works just fine.
What are you running? A pentium 3? I can open ten or more tabs and have never had a crash problem. Chrome is fine if you like less features and more memory usage.
Firefox leaks memory like a sieve and is extremely unstable. Chrome just works.
Firefox has been running here for over a week with seven windows and about twenty-five tabs open. It's using 190MB of RAM. Chrome hands your soul to Google. Hmm, which would I prefer?
Honestly, how do all these Google fanboys manage to get Firefox to crash regularly or eat RAM? I've rarely seen a crash and the RAM usage seems reasonable for the number of pages it has open.
Of course I do have noscript installed, but everyone should do that if they don't want their computer pwned by a remote exploit.
Microsoft's Security Essentials used to be pretty lightweight but it's hitting middle age weight gain. At least it's not intrusive and doesn't nag you to pay up since it's free.
Could you refer me to some source about that weight gain? I'm interested as I've ended up using/recommending MSE nearly exclusively when it comes to Windwos AV-applications. It's always felt relatively efficient and non-intrusive so I've never paid much attention to how much resources it actually uses... so if that's changing/about to change, I might need to re-evaluate this.
Chrome is good if you have a few windows you want to do something really fast or fill out forms. Firefox is better for general browsing with lots of tabs, firefox is also better at facebook games ( http://media.bestofmicro.com/K/1/309169/original/jsgamebenchwbgp7.png )
Lately, I've noticed FF wasting a lot of my time "installing" "updates", when I had a previously functional browser to start with.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Don't pay attention to him. Based on UID, he registered less than 5 minutes ago.
No thanks, I'll stick to a browser that I trust to actually work.
Nope, it's been more than five minutes since I registered, but even if I had registered five minutes ago, so what?
25 tabs isn't many. Go open at least 200 tabs to random pages and then start your normal browsing.
It has noticeable "pop" time before an ad is blocked (depends on how ad-heavy a site is though) and it doesn't work to block ads through things like flash streams, which is where they're really quite pervasive. Granted, a proper hosts file is the best alternative but a browser with a few plugins on a stick is quite nice when you have to change machines frequently.
Hell, I can get up to 12 tabs on a pentium 3 in fact. Chrome? 4, then it starts swapping.
Sorry to actually have to ask this when you call get buggered by relatives, coworkers, friends...
I haven't routinely ran windows since about 2000. About that time, I'd recommend to family f-prot, spybot s&d, and ad-aware.
The same people /still/ ask me what I recommend, and I just look at them and tell them "I haven't worked with that pile of rot in over a decade. Try asking your kid, and make sure to use firefox or chrome instead of IE"
What is the current recommended windows free AV?
I put a copy of avast on a netbook I got two years ago for the once in a blue moon I boot it, but that seems to slow it down as much as Symantec's toxic burning shitpile used to....
No my home system runs on an AMD Phenom II 1090T with 8GB of RAM. Chrome works great on it, but, as I've said, I can't get Firefox to hold more than two tabs open without crashing horribly.
... I see more of this in the future, Firefox 42 does not work with Plugin Foo 1.3, Bar 2.3. It does support Baz 2.1, but only if not also using quux 17.1
Firefox Users are now known as Mozilla QA.
I have the McAfee slows me down argument with IT once or twice a year, but it has been easier to move to OS X and Linux than to get McAfee off my Windows machine. What I would like is an effective way to measure the pain. IT always points out that McAfee is only taking 5% or whatever of my CPU - but I know it is I/O bound as it scans every file opened and that is not reflected in CPU use ( can I argue 1-CPU use is the right metric ?). And I suspect it scans the whole file even if the whole file is not read. Opening Eclipse or doing anything with a few hundred Meg of svn files is quite painful.
Anyone know how to capture metrics on the time spent waiting for McAfee to unblock my I/O? I've poked around SysInternals for the right tool, and I've done some Google searches but patching windows FS calls for metrics is not my area of interest. If this was a OS X problem I'd learn enough DTrace to figure it out.
I also occasionally see build script failures where a file or directory can not be deleted, and I suspect McAfee is holding on to it - anyone have proof McAfee is bad for builds?
Thanks in advance.
In my experience Firefox doesn't need any outside help to crash.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I advise people to uninstall Norton and Mcafee as a general rule. I can't tell you how often I clean systems with those two products on it, happily grinding away the CPU cycles telling you that everything is fine despite the rampant infection of whatever AntiVirus 2011 variant is going crazy on the machine.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Fewer people are going to, with their boneheaded moves of late. I don't use anything McAfee makes, but after breaking so many plugins, perhaps the better advice would be "disable Firefox".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
A new account would suggest that he'd just signed up to shill for Mozilla. Although, you can look at his posting history and see that he was complimenting Chrome not too long ago, so he's probably genuine.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
If Chrome had rational tab and bookmark handling, I might use it. But shrinking tabs as you open more until they're identical little grey squares is just plain idiotic, and not having bookmarks in a drop down menu is infuriating to me. I uninstalled it pretty much immediately the last 3 times I tried it.
I can deal with a browser having problems with some things some times, but having two of the most commonly used items done so badly drives me crazy every time I've had to use Chrome.
It's well-known that due to the "one process per tab" design of Chrome, opening a new tab reserves a fixed amount of memory. So it's quite clear that if you open 40 tabs in several browsers and do nothing else, Chrome is likely to use the most memory (though I can't imagine how they got it to use about a gig of memory. When I open new tabs, they each reserve something like 3 megs...). However, if you look at the "Memory Management" chart, you see that FireFox is pretty bad at freeing the reserved memory, even after a significant amount of time has went by... When 39 of the open tabs were closed, FireFox used several times as much memory as Chrome. Even after they waited 5 minutes, FF used nearly twice as much as Chrome.
When I surf, I frequently open and close tabs and the browser is on for several hours at the time. What matters is whether the browser can free the memory it no longer needs or does it keep hogging more and more. In that aspect, FF fared pretty badly...
Do you happen to have McAfee installed by chance?
That joke is sooooo six weeks ago.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Firefox 7 is sooooo last Monday.
Upgrade to the latest version: Firefox 789564.
You are horribly out of date. Firefox 2147483647 is the current version, to be followed by Firefox –2147483648. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Go open at least 200 tabs to random pages and then start your normal browsing.
Yes, because opening 200 tabs to random pages is normal web browser usage and Firefox shouldn't need more than 2MB of RAM to do so.
That surprises me, I haven't had much trouble at all with Firefox in years. It seems to have more trouble on Linux, but even there it doesn't crash that often.
Nope.
200 tabs? How is having 200 tabs open productive or reasonable in any way? Doesn't anyone know how to bookmark web pages any more?
McAfee offers a removal tool to cleanly uninstall their products. I use it any time I clean up a system: http://download.mcafee.com/products/licensed/cust_support_patches/MCPR.exe
A McAfee product which causes more problems than it solves?
I think you just destroyed my faith in the universe. ;)
Hmm, in a dimension with the infinite possibility of infinite universes there won't be many where universes where McAfee doesn't more problems than it fixes! ;-)
no?
That's what I though, I'll stick with Firefox.
Then your home system is a piece of shit. I have that same processor also with 8 Gb of RAM and I've never had an issue with any version of firefox.
Then why does Chrome work on it with no issue whatsoever? If it were a piece of shit, the system would be crashing, not the browser.
It is conceivable that the real issue here is that Firefox's new rapid release is causing various compatibility problems to crop up at such a fast rate that the third parties can no longer fix issues in their software quickly enough.
In the past it was not uncommon that a major browser release would introduce compatibility problems, or the need for additional small features, with third party programs that interacted with them. There would be a month or so before those issues were resolved and it was back to stability again - which would last a year or two before the next major version.
With rapid release, stability goes away.
What (Commercial) anti-malware programs do FF developers recommend
What (free) anti-malware programs do FF developers recommend
Does this issue affect SeaMonkey?
Where can I get cheap 3 metre poles for not touching either norton or mcaffee with.
no need for noscript, adblock is sufficient to stop those leaks....
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
It only takes one or two to watch the bug lists. Then when a memory leak gets reported, they repeat the behavior on the specific version over and over until they can actually see the result of the bug. They then loudly declare the software unusable, and tell all the other people with the same dysfunction how to "prove" that the software doesn't work.
This dysfunction is not limited to Firefox, and I don't think it really has anything to do with being a fan of Google. It appears to be more about wanting to appear "knowledgeable" about software at any cost. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that there really is bad software out there. Norton anti-virus being a good example of this.
I am with you in the fact that I have never witnessed these heavy crashes of Firefox or it's huge memory leaks. Of course, I have never witnessed the problems people claim about Flash either. I have watched my son playing Flash games embedded in Firefox on a N270 based Atom laptop with a dozen different web pages open and each running a flash game with no problems. He will leave the thing running for days with no ill effects.
Followed by "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
And immediately after the relaunch, "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
And immediately after the relaunch, "You are horribly out of date. Firefox -2147483648 is three days old. The current version is 2147483648. Would you like to download the update?"
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
People are still using McAfee?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I know that the latest Firefox versions (5, 6, 7b) are known for being RAM-hungry and crashing a lot...
Really?
The last time I used Firefox, I could open and close it over and over and see my memory usage increase with each opening. Firefox leaks memory like a sieve and is extremely unstable.
Really?
You can't download malware with a browser that doesn't work. What's the problem?
No leaks like that exist in firefox 7,
Yeah, they do.
Sitting with only 3 tabs open (iGoogle, The Daily WTF, and Techdirt), Firefox 7 keeps increasing memory usage to about 900MB. At that point my system becomes so slow (due to having only 3GB of total RAM) that editing this post causes the system to pause for about 5 seconds after every 10 or so characters typed. So, I restart Firefox and it's OK again for a day. But, if I leave it running overnight right after a restart with just those 3 tabs open, by the next morning it's at 700MB.
This only happens on my Windows XP machine at work...64-bit XP at home with the same tabs open grows to about 300MB then holds steady for weeks. So, it's not universal, but it still leaks in some cases. And, yes, I've reproduced this with no add-ons enabled.
Or he could be a consistent shill for Chrome...
Yep, time for me to do that too. Disabling the Java console was the last straw. I need to write applets for school work.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
ScriptScan is an extension. Extensions and plugins are not the same thing.
Plugins only run when content in a page requires the plugin to be loaded. Extensions can run whenever they want.
A bad plugin can be killed by ending the process plugin-container.exe. A bad extension cannot, and can cause your entire browser interface to hang up, which should trigger Firefox's warning about a script that seems to be taking a long time.
Why would the plugin cause the browser to crash... in such an instance, couldn't Firefox halt the plugin for the current tab and prevent the damage?
I switched to Linux so, well, I don't really have to worry about viruses much (much...) but on my 2k and XP machines I ran Norton AV Corporate Edition. It was available freely on the networks of both universities I have attended, ran quietly in the background, and allowed virus definition updates without a subscription. In fact, one of the main reasons I switched to Linux was that I couldn't get my copy of NAV Corp. to run in Win7....perhaps I answered my own question?
LOL....I was always under the impression that McAfee/Norton WAS a virus. You ever try fixing a computer with one of those and try to completely remove it?
free > nagware > payware
I had AVG for a while until they endlessly annoyed me with upgrade messages. MS Essentials replaced it and seems to not be a hog at all. Seems I had some malware a while back but a few runs of malwarebytes fixed it.
They've gotten really good at disabling add-ons.
Actually, I was curious so I did it. 1.8 GB. Worked fine if slightly sluggish in the Tab Groups view. Now somebody try the same thing with Chrome.
May the source be with you.
There was a version of FireFox recently that had a bad memory leak. I used to need to restart it nearly every other day. That seems to have been fixed, though.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
McAffee and Norton suck. Crappy at catching malware, sluggish. The only redeeming quality is that they are better than nothing.
1: Don't click yes to every single UAC prompt.
2: Install Firefox and NoScript.
3: There's no step 3. I'm Jeff Goldblum and I'm going to act incredulously exasperated at the fact that there's no step 3, to the point of repeating it. There's no step 3!
The botnet you are infected by does not recognize Chrome.
It kills FF because it can't dynamically throttle it the way it does IE.
Boot from a clean CD, reformat your HDD, re-install windows from scratch, you will run FF just fine.
Zombie.
I'm sure the next time Firefox updates the plugin will be incompatible anyways, just wait a week and the problem will solve itself.
But FireFox is a 32-bit application...
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Doesn't mean it can't do 64-bit math. Just use uint64_t or unsigned long long.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
seriously, you spend the $ to buy a new computer, then put anti-virus on it to make it run as slow as your previous one. Havent ran a virus system-hog for 10 years, have had 1 virus, which I deleted by hand.
I would go so far as to say 3.6-ish was a low point for Firefox. Firefox 7, if you have not tried it, is very good. I can't stand Chrome for more than 5 minutes.
On my previous laptop, Firefox was much more snappy than Chrome. Explain that.
Seriously, by now, no browser is *really* all that bloated. Some of the browsers may run slower or faster depending on your hardware, but it kind of seems random according to my experiences.
I am not devoid of humor.
The increased RAM usage was a design decision picked to make sure it doesn't crash as easily (one process per tab, extension and plugin is bound to take up more RAM...). Considering how fast Chrome still is on a lot of systems, I don't necessarily consider that a bad thing.
I am not devoid of humor.
Firefox crashes a lot on random hardware configuration, just how like Chrome doesn't like to work well on other configurations... On my previous system, Chrome was slower than Firefox, but I used it anyway because Firefox would sometimes crash.
Use what works. That's also the reason I dual boot. (Blasphemy, I know.)
I am not devoid of humor.
What is it with people stating "lack of proper adblock" all the time? The only thing Adblock for Chrome is bad at is blocking ads inside Flash videos, and even then that at least still works on YouTube...
I am not devoid of humor.
Which is a huge part of the feature. That, and as mentioned elsewhere, the adblock's effects can sometimes be visible and jarring - post-blocking after loading instead of pre-blocking.
I guess I can see what you mean there - an empty div suddenly disappears, bumping the rest of the content up a bit. Still, Adblock mostly does its job properly if you look beside that visually jarring part (it's much preferable to actually seeing ads).
I am not devoid of humor.
Are you kidding? 3.6 was the last best version for memory (unless 7 turns out to be that - it hasn't been out long enough for me to form an opinion). I seriously considered downgrading back to 3.6, but the Javascript speed improvements in version 4 kept me around, though it's been a constant nuisance having to restart FF every few days due to its memory use.
I actually gave in last night and installed Firefox 7. Amazingly, I was able to open four tabs! At a glance, it seems as though Firefox might have redeemed itself. However, I'm used to Chrome, so I'll stick with it for the foreseeable future. However, it's good to know that if Chrome becomes bloated and unstable then Firefox could actually be a usable alternative.
It should be recommended to get rid of McAfee altogether. Get MSE or if you want something more robust pay for NOD32.