Sun 1 Apr 2007
Why do you crash all the time? You used to be so well-behaved, back in your 1.0.whatever days. Then you upgraded to 1.5 and you started segfaulting. Not every day, not even every week, but enough that it was a pain in the ass. Now, with the 2.0 branch, you crash every single goddamn day. Looking at the little TalkBack dialog that just popped up, you’ve crashed 10 times since I upgraded to 2.0.3 last week; I thought bug fix releases were supposed to, I don’t know, fix bugs.
Today you’ve segfaulted twice in two hours. This has got to stop.
Now I see that there’s a there’s a 3.0 release coming this year. New features are great fun to work on, I’m sure, and tracking down whatever bug keeps killing my browser sessions isn’t sexy, but seriously: how about putting in a little time to make the current release series stable? Please?
April 1st, 2007 at 22:55
Have you considered trying Epiphany?
http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/
April 1st, 2007 at 23:37
I finally got tired of this and started trying other browsers. I tried Camino, Safari, and Opera, each for at least two weeks, and every one of them crashed. So, even if you get annoyed enough to switch, you can’t get away from the crashing. This is an incredible state of affairs: apparently, no one can implement a modern browser that doesn’t crash. (I can’t speak for IE 7, though, because I don’t use Windows.)
April 2nd, 2007 at 00:23
Firefox 2.x has been quite stable for me — by itself. When I find it crashing, I turn off all extensions, then gradually enable them over the course of a day, to see which one is at fault.
The extension architecture unfortunately allows people to write shoddy code and have it run in the same process as Firefox — which means when that code crashes, it takes Firefox with it.
April 2nd, 2007 at 03:57
And there are two things to do right now, before anyone can fix the crashes:
1. Put each window in a separate process! You know, like most of my other tools do. Oh, they have to share some files? _That’s been solved before_, it doesn’t necessitate one giant process.
2. Restore state upon restart. Perfectly. All the windows, in all their places, with all their half-filled-out forms. How hard is this? I’ve tried ffox2’s builtin session recovery and SessionManager, and they both catch only some of the state.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:32
I have to agree. Today I logged into my desktop at work and Firefox was using 100% CPU and consuming 2.8GB of VM. It is really quite frustrating.
Thank God for session saving though, as it was *much* more annoying when all the sites you were on.
I do often suspect my extensions of causing the crashiness, but I just can’t bring myself to run Firefox without them.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:43
Oh my. Someone with the same problem as me, finally. I thought I was the only one.
My entire machine was stable except Firefox. I’ve changed RAM, changed Video drivers and still Firefox segfaulted on me 10 or 20 times a day, everyday (and as a web developer that’s pretty useless). In the end I moved to a new machine, where I’m just not having the same problem.
I’m afraid I can’t offer a solution, only sympathy. You’re not alone!
April 2nd, 2007 at 14:33
I don’t think my problems are extension-related: I’m not using anything obscure or niche, only extensions like Adblock, ForecastFox and del.icio.us.
My suspicion is most of the crashes I see are tab-related. Most crashes happen when I’m opening a new tab, and whenever I do web-development work (and consequently open and close tabs like mad), Firefox will crash four-five times a day.
April 2nd, 2007 at 22:24
Collin: As a programmer, I’m sure you’re well aware of the exact value of both “It keeps crashing” and “It works for me”. Both of us can assert our cases, but that’s not going to fix the bugs you’re seeing.
Have you narrowed down a specific use case to report to the Firefox crew? Have you ensured that your crashes result in debug reports sent to the project? If they’re not getting detailed information on the bugs you’re seeing, those bugs won’t be addressed.
April 3rd, 2007 at 14:24
Ben: I’ve got TalkBack enabled, and I make sure it sends crash reports back to whomever it sends crash reports to. I can’t come up with a reproducible test case because the trigger event is almost always “open a new tab”: it just depends on how many tabs I have open, or how many tabs I’ve opened/closed since the last crash.
In any case, this blog entry was more catharsis than cry-for-help : )