Firefox Sucks Sometimes

I like Firefox but no one seems to point out it’s flaws. Sure it’s more secure than IE but the hoops I have to jump through sometimes to get it to work are incredible. Take just there for example, Dad’s browser stopped working and he spent the morning trying to get it to work, he tried the normal things, uninstalling, reinstalling but to no avail. Whatever he did he couldn’t open new tabs etc. So he asked me about it and I had to tell him to go delete his ‘chrome’ directory. That’s not acceptable at all to be honest.

Personally the problems I have are that after a lot of use it eats processor and I have to kill the process and reopen it. Thank god for SessionSaver. Also when I try and upgrade any version I have huge issues, it always whinges that it’s not finished installing when it is and spawns loads of ‘XPIInstall’ Processes. So I basically have to delete my profile every time I upgrade, it sucks so badly.

I’ve submitted bug reports in the past but some of them took months to be resolved despite the problem being clear. Of course it’s still better than IE.


21 Responses to “Firefox Sucks Sometimes”  

  1. Gravatar Icon 1 Shadow3

    um.. Wow..
    I’ve never had such problems with FireFox.
    Well, at some version it once in a while crashed, but tossing that one aside and upgrading to the latest version fixed that.

    Try Opera? It’s supposed to be better than FF in virtually every way, except for that it lacks extensions.
    Which is the only reason for why FF will continue to be my main webbrowser.. all the added functionality of the extensions i have makes quite a difference, and not having to install a gazillion tiny programs outside of the webbrowser for surfing needs is insanely handy.

  2. Gravatar Icon 2 Haroon Shafiq

    I suggest Opera too. FF really sucks some time, infact most of the times. Besides, as with all gtk apps, it consumes too much of memory. Opera is fine.

  3. Gravatar Icon 3 Bonzo

    “Personally the problems I have are that after a lot of use it eats processor and I have to kill the process and reopen it. Thank god for SessionSaver.”

    This is why I find Firefox advocates funny.

    I have the same problems with Firefox. After about 15 minutes of surfing a set of forums I hang out on, it’s up to 150MB. After another 15 minutes, I have to close down and restart Firefox because it’s well over 200MB.

    If IE sucked up memory like that, all the Firefox advocates would be screaming that Bill Gates was abusing their machines and doing something malicious in order to sell all their personal info to aliens.

    But since it’s Firefox, these same people just say get “SessionSaver and restart every once in a while”.

    The blatant hypocrisy of Firefox fans is mind numbing.

  4. Gravatar Icon 4 Dave

    Agree 100% Bonzo, don’t think I’m a Firefox advocate, I just find the upsides more important than the downsides. But sometimes the memory usage is insane take a look at this - http://filepile.davidoneill.net/mem-usage.JPG

  5. Gravatar Icon 5 Bonzo

    Yea. I wasn’t saying you were a Firefox advocate. I’ve been trying to find a fix for the memory problem and have been reading a lot of the FF fanboys over the last couple of days. This was just a convenient place for me to comment. ;)

    I’ve found a bunch of about:config settings that people say to set to fix the problem (browser.cache.memory.capacity and browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to name a couple), but it hasn’t fixed it. The new release of Firefox is the worst one for memory chugging by far, and it’s become completely unreasonable at this point as your pic clearly shows.

    I liked Firefox and have been using it at least partially since the days of Firebird, but I can’t see using a browser that eats 300, 400 or even 600MB of memory.

  6. Gravatar Icon 6 Dave

    Agreed, Firefox fanboys are the worst too! I like you have been using Firefox since well before it was called Firefox (personally I remember installing Phoenix) and most people who bang on about it have been using it for about 10 minutes!

  7. Gravatar Icon 7 Bonzo

    Phoenix! I remember that one, too. Damn…I had forgotten about that. I never really used that one, though. I installed it, tried it a few times, then stuck with IE back then. When Firebird came out, I started using it more since it seemed a bit more stable.

    Have you used Opera at all? I tried that a while ago, but stayed with IE at the time, too. I’ve heard really good stuff about Opera lately though, so I might be giving it a whirl in the near future.

    I think a lot of the fanboys who found Firefox in the last 6 months are just trying to rebel against “the man” or something. I like Firefox, but it’s not nearly as perfect as some of them make it seem.

    Anyways, here’s to Firefox fixing the memory problems. The more quality browsers out there, the better for everyone. Competition brings out the best in in people and companies.

  8. Gravatar Icon 8 Dave

    Yeah looks like that setting you talked about might be a fix for the issues. One of the Firefox developers has a post on the issue of it eating up gigs of RAM.

  9. Gravatar Icon 9 Dave (A different one)

    All browsers suck, each in their own way. FF just seems to suck the least at the moment.

  10. Gravatar Icon 10 Leon

    I’ve really never had such problems in the year and a half that I’ve used Firefox. I am a bit of a fanboy, but facts are facts: Software will run differently on different machines. I can run five tabs in FF without breaking 40megs of RAM taken up. Competition is good, and I’ve even tried Opera, though it wasn’t to my liking. I would recommend it, though, if you want both a FF and IE alternative. I’m glad that you voice your problems, as it helps contribute to the improvement of the software.

  11. Gravatar Icon 11 Some random guy

    “Of course it’s still better than IE.”

    WRONG. IE is WAY better than Firefox. I think Firefox should cease to exist. (that’s just my opinion)

  12. Gravatar Icon 12 C NYC

    I work on an e-comm web site. Time, $$, and effort are limited and at a premium. The target of our site is IE, not firefox. This is because the business would go broke spending all the time and effort it would take to get firefox to correctly render the site according to our needs. This is why IE dominates the market, pure and simple: IE WORKS for us — firefox makes US work for IT. IE is built with our needs in mind, i.e., it provides a useful service — firefox is, far to often, an obstacle to our goals.

    This whole argument about which browser is better — it similar to the argument about which economic system is better: capitalism verses socialism/communism. Yes, Socialism might be “more pure,” “the way it should be” by some set of standards, but look — people just get tried of starvation, stagnation, lack of opportunity, and simply watching their hopes and dreams die because they’re force to live with a “morally superior” system that just doesn’t meet their (selfish) needs. So we go with “the evil,” IE (or capitalism) because both, either by design or accident, serve US rather than making us serve IT — and killing us the process.

  13. Gravatar Icon 13 The Gnome

    The only people who use Firefox are those who can’t think for themself.

    Firefox has to rely on people putting its stupid little image on their webpage to get people to download it, rather than making it well known for being good at what it does, (you don’t get every music site saying “WinAmp, taking back your ears”), or any BS like that, because WinAmp is decent at playing music and video’s, (more so than WMP, QT, ROP, etc.), and doesn’t have to rely on some retarded images for noobs to put on their site.

    That, and is FF was any decent, Microsoft would do what they do with any half-decent competition, they’d buy them out, but they haven’t done that have they, because they realise that FF is a joke, that only idiots use, and never poses a threat to IE, but FF users are too far up their own rear-ends to see this, as they think they’re rebelling against “the man” or whatever.

    And it’s no more secure than IE or any other browser, that’s like saying Mac OS is more secure than XP, the reason you’re getting viruses, ain’t because you’re using a certain browser, it’s because you can’t get laid, switch over to a different one because you’re stupid, and still download all the porn and use P2P that your computer is FUBAR’d, so next time you’re touching yourself up to some pictures of the FireFox logo on Paris Hilton’s body or whoever, remember, it’s because you’re doing that, that your computer is virused in the first place.

    Also, think for a moment, it’s not like your computer has any government secrets on it or anything, and if your system is so valueable that you can’t stand to lose all your porn until you re-download it, GHOST your hard-drive, you can easily do it onto another HD or a few DVD’s, and since FireFox users think they know more about computers than everyone else, (when, in fact, at 13 [the mental & physical age of most users], you know nothing about them0, this should be a piece of cake for you.

    If this isn’t posted, I know it’s because a certain someone doesn’t want to offend all the FireFox bum-bandits that come here, (heck, you’ve gotta’ get hits some way right dude, and you can’t exactly make a stupid logo up for it for everyone to put on their sites like they’re doing something special), but if it is put up, I bet there will be influx of FireFox fan-whores who can’t take being wrong.

    As for what browser I use: IE/NN/Mozilla, anything that’s better than that scrap of coding people call a “browser”, lol.

  14. Gravatar Icon 14 Zetanor

    You fail.
    No, seriously, I never had these problems. It only sucks when you uninstall it, because you’re stuck with another sucky Browser.

    Good day, sir.

  15. Gravatar Icon 15 Ebzent

    I use firefox. I wouldn’t call myself a fanboy, nor did I choose to switch to it to be morally superior or stick it to the man.

    I’m a graphic designer, have been for many years. When I design a website, I use CSS… because it leaves cleaner code. I usually have one or two pages for a site made and filled with sample text before I start testing for bugs. And I’ve found that most of the time I spend fixing bugs is to make the pages look right in IE. They’ll require no more than a few minutes of poking around to look virtually the same in all other major browsers.

    My computer is by no means top-of-the-line. Yet, I can run firefox (5 tabs), 2-3 versions of IE (because they all display different), 2-3 versions of Opera (ditto), 2 versions of netscape, photoshop, dreamweaver - all with no problems, no crashes, nothing going wrong. I usually keep FF open through the entire creation procedure, as there are web design plugins there that make my life easier. Within an hour of starting testing, I’m down to FF and IE browser-wise. Then it’s 3 to 8 hours of tracking down every place IE makes a strange decision about the HTML/XHTML/CSS and writing separate code just to baby IE into playing nice with the rest of the kids on the playground. Reference positioniseverything.net for more details.

    Most of the rest of the complaints about IE/FF/Opera/Netscape/etc. I could care less about. I use Firefox mostly because I have it installed with all the plugins I need, it has my bookmarks, and pages that take advantage of CSS & CSS2 look better and operate with less kludges in Firefox. Simple as that. But when I’m designing a website, IE is a nightmare - in many cases caused by the “hasLayout” feature. Oh, and dumbing down a good layout because IE can’t handle png alpha channels (without some kludgy and code-bloating, sort-of-working “fixes”) makes me scream.

    Yes, all browsers have problems and bugs, and things they just refuse to do. No browser gets it completely right. For my purposes, Firefox gets close enough that I now design for firefox first, before adding code to make my pages work in other browsers. And it saves me a lot of time, plus my code is shorter.

  16. Gravatar Icon 16 mountain goat

    I find that Firefox lacks the horsepower to process graphics well, especially animations.

    I visited a website for graphics the other day, and Firefox stalled out on pages that gave Internet Explorer zero problems.

    As far as I am concerned, Firefox is hodling back the Information Age. Webmasters need to “dumb down their pages” to accommodate Firefox, a fact that makes Firefox an enemy of progress.

    If you love Firefox, then you don’t own a website that is rich in graphic content.

  17. Gravatar Icon 17 Another Random Reader

    Couldn’t agree more. I am a web developer, and can’t stand working with FF. FF is lucky it has hype behind it.

  18. Gravatar Icon 18 zehawk

    FF seems to be devolving as far as memory and processor time is concerned. I do a lot of work on the internet, and have 10-15 tabs open all the time. I shut down my laptop n FF once every 10 days or so. I’ve been using FF for nearly 2 years.

    I was happy with the 1.x version of FF. With each release of 2.x FF, it seems to be slower to load, slower to exit. It hangs frequently when the CPU util goes to 99% and nothing responds and I have no idea what FF is up to but always recovers if I wait long enough, and uses a ton of memory.

    Is IE 7 better? I’m not sure, I really like some of the stuff in FF, I cant do without Adblock and NoScript, two of the most powerful extensions, SwitchProxy and so many others. But if IE7 is faster and hogs less memory, I’m willing to (sadly) go back to it…

  19. Gravatar Icon 19 Condor

    I just upgraded to Firefox 2.0.0.4 from v. 1.x. For some reason, they’ve removed the direct link to mail and newsgroups. Unfortunately, doing so wiped out my e-mail address book and all the e-mails I had saved. The ones I hadn’t moved to another folder (saved, trash, etc.) are still there, when I access my Comcast.net e-mail account through the Comcast website, but my address book is gone! I called the third party support (InfoSpan) and, after holding for a “technician” for nearly an hour (thank goodness for speaker phones!), he told me that it was “impossible for Firefox to have an e-mail link.” I guess I was seeing things.

    Anyway, after being treated as if I were an idiot, I’ve decided that Firefox sucks and I’m going back to Netscape. Besides, FF v. 2.0.0.4 is s-l-o-w and hangs frequently. SO, FO FF!

  20. Gravatar Icon 20 Derek

    I just found this site by, uh, using FF to get here. I did the search because of it eventually failing to respond. It’s funny that I had to finally type “firefox sucks” into google to even find ANY info on people having the same problem.

    My quick rants:
    1st, I know less about computer coding than anyone. In fact, I know nothing other than it’s concepts.
    I’m an audio guy, and have my PC’s (I have 3) setup accordingly, with this one I am posting with the surfing/gaming/sometimes audio app bastard child PC.
    I can work on MAC, too.

    Anyway. I have never, ever, ever had securtiy problems with IE. I mean, be smart about your surf habits, and you dont have anything to worry about. It’s 2007, do people really click on .exe files from random emails??????

    I know this is kinda lame, but I like sites like wikipedia, allmusicguide or snopes, where I will frequently have 10 tabs open as I click related links. I like to know stuff (even if of dubious origin).
    And, this unresponsive bit has happened WAY too many times.

    I’m just annoyed and pissed that my tabs are gone, inexplicably.

    And, yeah..I’ve used session restore and had it lock up all over again.
    Just needed to vent, going to try out Opera, and then probably back to IE.
    I’m smart enough to handle potential security concerns, but not patient enough for FF to get it’s act together.

    Oh yeah, and my alphabatized bookmarks suddenly reverted back to there non sensical ways.

    Also, I admit my ingorance about these coding things, so flame away if need be.
    It’s still to much of an annoyance to continue on with FF, for me.

    Rant over.

  21. Gravatar Icon 21 Matt Thompson

    Here is one firefox gocha’s for me.

    I had to debug why some paragraph of text was not appearing in firefox, but it was in IE.

    It turns out the user put in an ‘invalid’ html comment before the paragraph tag. They put in before it.

    To my eyes it looked fine.

    Firefox hated it and did not show anything after it. The view-source in firefox also showed the text in green, meaning it was commenting the rest out.

    IE was fine, it displayed the content ‘correctly’.

    I found out that it actually is an invalid comment according to W3C. The W3C admits it’s a common mistake. Not all W3C rules are good ones…

    But still, ff should be a little smarter than that.

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