Argh! Firefox 1.5!

Argh! Firefox 1.5 is making talk like a pirate: it crashes and I go ARGH! I installed Firefox 1.5 on a less important machine over the weekend, and the browser has been crashing regularly. It could be one of the extensions crashing (SessionSaver?) instead of the core browser, but the net effect is still that Talk Like a Pirate Day arrives early and several times a day.

ARGH! Is Firefox 1.5 stable for you?

158 Responses to Argh! Firefox 1.5! (Leave a comment)

  1. Videos don’t play in Firefox. I assume it’s because of Quicktime Alternative but videos (including .mov) play fine in Internet Explorer.

    Also, if I have anything running that take up a lot of resources or if I’m playing any video with media player classic when firefox starts it always tells me that a script it taking too long to run and asks me whether I want to stop it or not. Whether I tell it to continue or stop doesn’t really matter since firefox starts and the page loads either way.

    I still use firefox though because I can’t do without a bunch of these great extensions.

  2. I’ve been running it for a while on three different machines and never had any issues with it. I don’t have SessionSaver installed.

  3. Good morning Matt

    My Firefox 1.5 is stable. It must be your “less important machine” which is causing you problems πŸ™‚

    Why have you stopped posting those lovely “personal” and “Gadgets” stuff?

    Btw, aren’t we going to hear anymore from my good WMW friend, GoogleGuy?

    Have a great sunny day.

  4. SessionSaver was the only extension I had to uninstall when going to 1.5. On Mac OS X 10.4/PPC it is rock solid. My extensions list includes aardvark, the google toolbar, tabbrowser preferences, web developer, ad block, viamatic foxpose, the netcraft toolbar, adblock filterset.g updater, and furl tools.

  5. Strange Matt,
    My experience is that Firefox 1.5 has less problems with stability (virtually none) than the previous versions. Most of the time the extensions are the blame.
    SessionSaver also does not cause me any pain and I even have had some warnings from this extensions after a page with bad behaving Javascript caused Firefox to hang and I had to kill it. SessionSaver asked if I really would like to restore the previous session, since it caused a crash.
    Well, that is good behaviour.

    Hmm, maybe talking kind words in a sweet voice to the “less important machine” will help. Why not call it the “more important machine”?

  6. I have Firefox 1.5 w/ various extensions and I really have not had much trouble, though I do not have the SessionSaver extension.

  7. crashing is as fun as it gets

  8. Yes, it’s been stable since the official 1.5 and another machine with the latest nightly.

    Just disable your extensions one by one and check and/or create a new profile w/o any extensions and see if it crashes again.

  9. http://www.mattcutts.com/images/inigo1.jpg

    And you look like a swashbuckling pirate too Matt.

  10. Firefox has never been stable on my Mac. I love the browser, but hate what seems to be slow memory leaks. However, it’s always been super fast and stable on all of the Windows-based PCs I’ve run it on.

  11. I’ve been having the same problem, although my pirate dialect is lacking. I have session saver also…it might be worth an uninstall for a day or two

  12. No it isn`t real stable for me. OFten it crashes down – i dont have intsalled a lot of addons πŸ™ . It is far away to be an good Browser

  13. Yes, unfortunately 1.5 has crashed on me a lot.. I often surf with 10 to twenty tabs open on different firefox wondows at the same time. It seems that firefox is not using the ram I have available well – almost always using 500 MB of space, even after closing a bunch of tabs.. add that to the fact I often run outlook with netobjects fusion and a few open folders on an older machine, I really need my browser to do a lot, and manage memory and processor use effeciently (running an older AMD Athlon 1.33 proc and trying to do a lot).

    I have tried using the adblock plug in to save memory and tab opening speed, but I have only seen improvements in viewing a new tab, not is actual memory usage.

    I can’t live without firefox though, I am too addicted to the tabbed browsing. I really should take the time to uninstall and use the older one, but there is a story on digg today about firefox 2.0 coming out next month (http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/82216/firefox-20-alpha-due-next-month.html )

    So maybe I will just save my pages often, or have to go through the history to catch up where I often crash and leave off.. kind of like the new wordpress 2.0, and many other software apps that come out, often it is best to keep running with the older version until the bugs are worked out – then of course we are always a few months behind the joneses who are bragging about thier new features in newer software.

    Unfortunatley as pros we can often not afford an upgrade that causes crashes or problems, which is why I am still using an older web site creation package – netobjects 7.0 – which of course has a lot of issues, but at least it doesn’t currupt and crash my older site templates – so what can ya do?!

    Wow, sorry to rant on your blog space man! ( you get me started sometimes – Argh!)

  14. Matt interesting stuff well not really lol. Have a question I ran accross this blog post Googles Hypocrisy located here http://ashleybowers.com/blog/2006/01/04/googles-hypochracy/ and wanted to see what the Google man had to say for hisself and ofcourse ask you if it was true and if so why is Google doing this.

  15. That’s what you get for using a non-standard browser πŸ™‚

    If it’s tabs you want, then use IE – it has always done what is effectively tabbed browing.

  16. I’ve had similar problems. Mine crashses and/or just starts using a lot fo ram (400mb+). Not very fun, I’m considering downgrading still..

  17. I’ve had no problems with FF 1.5, but I’ve heard many people have when using it with the session saver extension.

  18. Works for me, crashes less than IE and FF 1.06. It must be that Secret Google Tool you have running in the background. If you send me a copy, I can see if it causes my Firefox to crash as well.

  19. had the same problem, only use FF for testing and the rest is Opera wich now totaly rules after they removed the banners
    tabbed browsing is integrated πŸ™‚

  20. My Firefox 1.5 crashes all the time, mostly when I’m logging in to my gmail account. Very annoying.

  21. Hi Matt,

    It’s very fast and solid on Mac OS X 10.4

    Are you ranning it on Windows 98!

  22. I’m having major problems with 1.5
    – Regularly crashing/errors eg: ‘Firefox is already open’ errors
    – PDF compatability – still garbage – freezing up when opening PDFs
    – Alt + Tabbing between windows from Firefox then returning is screwing it up

    I’m having problems on both my home machine + work machine too!

    AFAIK… 1.5 was supposed to be an ‘improvement’… I can tell you it’s one I personally am yet to see!

    It’s honestly pushed me to the point where I may look for an alternative… to an ‘alternative web browser’ lol…

  23. Yes, I had the same negative experience, not on one, but on two computers. I had to uninstal it and revert to 1.0.7. I would like to switch to Opera, but the only thing – and VERY annoying – that I don’t like in Opera is that when I search something in Google and choose in “Google preferences > Open search in new window”, Opera will use only _one_ new window, always the same, so I wouldn’t be able to open several results, but only one by one (I am too lazy to right click on result > new window). Firefox understands correctly user’s need, and will open _several_ new windows for several results.

  24. No Arghs from me so far. Working perfectly on Mac OS X and Windows XP with a few plugins.

  25. Unfortunately I seem to be having a similar experience to Steve. I tend to browse with quite a few windows open, and I get a slow and steadily expanding memory footprint. It gets up to around 500Mb, and then it becomes quite unwieldy. Last week was really bad on the crashing front, but I went and cleaned out quite a few extensions (sorry, can’t remember what they are).

    I considered going back to 1.0, but never got around to it, and this week has been relatively good.

    Oh, on WinXP.

  26. No problem with my firefox 1.5, works like a charm for me on my 2 comps with 1 US & 1 FR vers.
    I’m sure JohnMu got it ! It must be your new secret beta GTool ! ; )
    My only problem with FF comes when I need to go to MSNAdcenter, the site just won’t open…really strange isn’t it ? ^_^

  27. Firefox/1.5 stable on my Linux, but GreaseMonkey 0.6.4 won’t work πŸ™

  28. PhilC Said,
    “That’s what you get for using a non-standard browser”

    Is that a joke? Or maybe I have just been reading too much about this stuff lately. IE is non-standard… just with a different meaning πŸ˜‰

    If you want to see HTML like how it’s suppose to.. use Firefox, Safari or Opera. Not IE.

    Anyhow… I’ve been having the ARGHs as well… and I don’t have that extension either. It could be a different one.. but who knows?

    It really ticked me today when I was working on something important. Just crashed and wham! No more FF. Really really really hurts when writing a long entry and it suddenly crashes.

    I reported this issue a while back with no reply…

  29. Hi, I use FF 1.5 since it was released on several computers and it has never crashed.

  30. Using Firefox 1.5 for 2 month, never saw it crashed. SessionSaver is also pretty stable now, look at the official forum for “stable” version. Good luck

  31. It works for me . i had an extension called switch proxy and FF sucked with it and when i installed the appropriate version of that extension which had a lower version number it stopped crashing.

  32. Hi Matt,
    Firefox crashes for me only when the site I open has Flash objects. So check out whether the culprit is Firefox or Flash.

  33. Matey, we’ve had no troubles w/ 1.5.

  34. Firefox 1.5 is very stable here on WinXP. But I miss Bookmarks Synchronizer. :-/ The Reload Every extension seems to go crazy every now and then and constantly reloads the webpage it’s activated on (usually newssites), which is a waste of bandwidth and cpu. I have some 10-15 extensions installed. The problems I experience are problems with extensions, not Firefox 1.5.

  35. 1.5 seems to be fairly stable for the amount i use it. It has crashed a couple of times recently when i’ve had loads of tabs open at once. Then again it could be one of many extensions πŸ˜‰ I don’t have session saver installed either.

  36. Totally stable on our windows PCs. Whereas IE6 ain’t! But then we have no plug-ins…

  37. Sessionsavers is most likely the cause of your crashings..
    And it also happens when you try to upload files since I have noticed (in my use) that firefox freezes _somtimes_ when you try to upload files.

  38. Add Flashblock to your extensions and you get rid of any Flash problems.

    Flash is still, to use Nielsen’s words 99% bad.

  39. “That’s what you get for using a non-standard browser ”

    By non-standard I assume you mean a browser which doesnt have the market share that internet explorer has. IE is years old, the only updates that have been done are for security flaws. Hopefully when v7 is released it will be able to display code how it should be displayed (rather than force us web developers to write little hacks into the code so that it actually shows properly)

    Firefox is a relatively new browser, so there are bound to be bugs (just as there are bugs in any software) – but the good thing is that there are hundreds of people working on it and the bugs will be fixed a lot quicker than in browsers like IE. So the best option is to let Firefox know about where the problems are happening so that they can be fixed.

    I’ve been using Firefox for quite a long time now, using it all day everyday at home and at work. It’s had the odd crash but I’d say that no more than other software on my computer (I regularly have 20-30 tabs open in Firefox with no problems at all, while at the same time running Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Outlook and a few other programs)

  40. Hi Matt

    I haven’t experienced any problems with. 1.5 on WinXP.
    However, I only installed the Google Toolbar and web developer toolbar after upgrading.

    Thanks for a great blog!

  41. Works on my PC (ducks and runs for cover)

  42. Matt,

    It may be that extension, but I’ve noticed Firefox was taking up some memory lately.

    Information Week wrote an article recently about the trouble Firefox and posted some solutions.

    Trouble with Firefox (Link goes to my site briefly, just follow the Reference link).

    Hope this helps.
    JD

  43. it’s stable on my massion w/o any extensions buuuuuut it’s so damn slow. not only with flash but jpgs, too.
    when i open a few tabs with images it takes up to 5 seconds to switch tabs. that wasn’t a problem with any other ff version in the past.

  44. Firefox is a bit unstable. But at the same time what would I do without my i.e. switcher these days. More funny is the Pagerank results the extensions keep giving me. Must both be querying different DC.

  45. I find Firefox on one of my computers (the one at work) periodically hangs up for 1-10 seconds about once per hour. Very annoying.

  46. Matt,

    Works like a champ. But, the only extensions I have installed are the Google Toolbar, and the Gmail Manager.

    Steve

  47. It’s very stable on my pc. I recommend you to install the Session Saver plugin (If firefox crashes this plugin can reopen the open urls when the crash (Excuse me for my bad english)

  48. Firefox 1.5 is rock solid for me.

  49. Yep, it’s is surely your “less important” machine, I got a pile of them barely running in my basement, want some? :=)

    On another note, just installed win98 on a little ol’ laptop to take to disney next week cuz it fits in the small hotel safe. does Microsloth give updates for win98 anymore? Anyone got an IP so I can drop by and grab a service pack?

  50. 1.5 has been very unstable and it is getting beyond a joke now. I’ve been thinking about seeing if my blog readers have been having problems as well.

    If I wasn’t hooked on my extensions I would have gone back to IE by now.

    I think it is memory issues. My installations hang and if I’m patient will resume after a few mins.

  51. I have had a lot of crashing issues too – but only on an XP machine, Win 2000 laptop and desktop have both been OK. I think it is probably the profile on the XP machine that is to blame – time to do a fresh install methinks.

  52. Only problems I have had are my mouse scroll wheel causing erratic back/forward action (this through a KVM), and periodic timeouts that don’t seem to be caused by the site in question.

    It does hang for a minute or two every once in a blue moon, but usually recovers.

  53. I’m afraid I’m with you Matt, after a poor experience trying Firefox I’ve retired to the safe but boring IE

  54. Well if having a memory leak, crashing unexpectedly, and loading webpages slowly is stable….The yes it is stable. πŸ˜‰

    I am a recent convert to it from Maxthon (tabs for IE) and I loved it until this last release, now it just irritates me.

  55. All the Mozilla versions (Mozilla/Mozilla Suite 1.0RC1/1.0/1.1/1.4b/1.6/1.7a/1.7.1/1.7.3/1.7.12, Mozilla Firebird 0.7, Mozilla Firefox 0.8/0.9.2/1.0PR/1.0/1.0.1/1.0.2/1.0.4/1.0.6/1.0.7/1.5b1/1.5, etc.) I have used in Windows 2000 SP3/SP4 have been stable even though I usually have 10-15 different Mozillas installed, because I always think I might need an older version to experiment with something. On the other hand I haven’t installed much of extensions (7 at the moment for Firefox 1.5).

  56. Firefox has been unstable for me and just about every PC that i’ve used it on since v1.0.7. Infact my university *removed* it from the entire network due to the problems that it was causing (upwards of 2000 machines).

    Opera or Safari for me now – I can live without extensions easily.

  57. I only had a problem with Firefox 1.5 on my PC after I updated the developer tool bar I had installed. It did several funky things, including making the Google toolbar disappear! So I uninstalled it and it worked fine.

    I looked into it and they recommend that you don’t update the extension but uninstall it and then download and install the new one. Once I manually installed the new one, it worked fine.

    I don’t use it much on the Mac because Firefox has not been able to run very well on it. I also think it is a problem with how it displays Flash. I use Safari instead and don’t have any problems.

  58. Yes! Too much crashing!

    I love FF but it is starting to be annoying. I find myself launching Opera once in a while to save my computer a lashing. πŸ™‚

    When is Gbrowser coming, so we can browse in total bliss? πŸ˜‰

  59. On my iMac G5 it’s great! The only crash I had was when I had the Performancing blog extension installed.

  60. I had some crashes also with the upgrade. For me it turned out to be a simple upgrade to the latest AdBlock.

    Firefox’s forum contains all the details here
    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=320838

    If your computer is running slowly with Firefox, clean out the download folder. Tools>Downloads>Cleanup button
    If that doesn’t do it, download Spybot, AdAware and AVG antivirus and follow these instructions to the tee.
    http://tinyurl.com/dad4t

    I do not work for any of these companies. I took the red pill. lol

  61. FF1.5 runs very nicely both here on my WinXP box at work and my Linux box at home, with quite a few extensions on both (SessionSaver *isn’t* one of them, though).

    Possibly I’m not seeing any memory leak effects (I have 2GB of RAM here at work πŸ˜€ and have dial-up access at home so don’t really spend long periods of time browsing there.)

    Only reason I use IE at all is for site testing. Otherwise, I wouldn’t use it if you pointed a gun at my head! πŸ˜‰

  62. Been using 1.5 since release candidate 2. I experienced a few crashes after updating, removed plug-ins that I realized I really didn’t need (or that Mozilla has now integrated into FF) and since it has been running quite smoothly. This is on a P4 2.8 with WinXP Corp. At home, same story, on an Athalon XP 2100 also XP Corp. Different plugins on the different machines, currently 24 at work (including Jeremy Zawodny’s hacked text box resizer. See it at http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005752.html ).

    Now that I think about it, I believe I got rid of the updated PrefBar because I suspected it was throwing me fits, but I don’t use it as much as you obviously rely on it. I would suggest uninstalling it temporarily to see if it is the problem.

    Maybe it was that Pong extension. πŸ˜‰ (I heard they had to hit the hardware on that one.*)

    Anyway, good luck on the hunting.

    Matt G

    * – This may be a joke. (If it was funny, then yes it was a joke.)

  63. I’ve a lot of problem with ff 1.5, usually the text boxes don’t accept the arrows, just backspace, this is a bug reported with the betas but remain in the release. Also I can’t use the Alt+xxx on the text boxes, jump to address line.

    Also I know of same bugs of the javascript engine that remains in the release, just because don’t get caught on time to release. A friend of mine report that usually ff 1.5 get stuck with “no response” in a HyperThread machine.

    Sorry but I will downgrade to 1.0.7, until there’s a new version. Perhaps this time there is too much ‘schedule’ preasure to cumply with.

  64. I have 1.0.7 and it is working perfectly.
    I have always been told that when a new version is coming I should not jump on it because every new version has bugs. I will wait for 1.5.1 (?).

  65. There’s nothing wrong with talking like a pirate. Pirates are pimp. They get to carry swords… And pillage… And plunder…

    It’s a good time.

  66. the comment about bookmarks sychronizer – it’s been hacked to work with FF 1.5, but not by the original author ; http://extensions.geckozone.org/BookmarksSynchronizer

    Enjoy!

  67. It has to be Session Saver. I had that extension installed on my firefox and while it was neat that it remembered what pages you were browsing after restarting from a browser crash, it was causing even more browser crashes so I deemed it pretty worthless. Also, it made browsing slow especially when I had more than two or three tabs up.

    If I would close out a tab it would take like 5-6 seconds for it to register and perform. I uninstalled it a couple days ago and everything seems fine. Go figure.

  68. I downloaded the new version of my webmaster toolbar plugin, and BOOM… nothing worked in firefox anymore. I couldn’t click on the address bar to type in URLS, pages wouldn’t load, and I lost my left click.

    It forced me to update to the newewst version… and now the javascript debugger extension doesn’t work.

    It’s been a pain for me too.

  69. It does seem like 1.5 crashes more on my personal laptop than did the 1.0.x versions. It would crash maybe once a day now. (Back when it was the default browser, IE would crash several times a day so it’s not about FF being “non-standard”). I am also using Session Saver. Even if it might be the cause of the crashes, I can’t bear to part with it because even if it crashes the browser, it is able to help with the recovery. And if there are crashes that aren’t caused by SS, I’d be sad not to have it come to the rescue.

    I heard that there is an issue with memory management… hopefully the developers can fix this.

  70. For me it’s generally stable, with a few exceptions. On my Windows machine (quite new) if I go over say 43 tabs at once, I usually can’t keep that up very long. On my Mac machine (OS X 10.2.8 running on a PowerBook G3 Lombard) if I go over 23 or so, same story. Also, on my Mac, if I have a RealPlayer video playing within it, after the video’s gone, my mouse disappears when it goes into the space in the screen the video had taken up … even when I’m in other tabs / other websites.

    Harith said “Btw, aren’t we going to hear anymore from my good WMW friend, GoogleGuy?”

    Looks to me like GoogleGuy stopped posting after Brett Tabke excluded the SE’s in his robots.txt … as you can see here (http://www.webmasterworld.com/vewprofile.cgi?action=view&member=GoogleGuy), he’s really basically made 2 posts since late November.

  71. For those of you who fixed the problem by uninstalling extensions…

    What extensions did you uninstall per se?

  72. Yes….. we all miss GG.

    Matt could you have a word to see if he is OK and would like to post in this thread:-

    http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/32808-3-25.htm

    πŸ˜‰

  73. I had a similar experience of Firefox constantly crashing, slowing down, eating memory, etc. This was on multiple computers too. That’s why I switched to Opera and haven’t looked back. πŸ™‚

  74. my firefox 1.5 is not stable
    it uses waaay too much memory and usually hangs for abut a minute

    firefox 1 was not working better, but much worst

  75. It is stabl for me
    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051227 Firefox/1.5

  76. BjΓΈrn Nielsen

    Firefox 1.5 at my PC laptop crashes frequently.
    I used to have some Greasemonkey scripts for my Gmail, but they made Firefox crash all the time, so I removed them.
    Now I experience it some times, mostly when I enter a page with integrated multimedia (WMP or alike, quicktime plugin closes perfect, no problem there).
    I haven’t figured out what exactly makes it crash, but task manager -> terminate fixefox.exe has been a daily rutine, the last week or two…

  77. I think it has to do with the extensions. Two days ago FF was running perfectly fine and smooth, then I updated some extensions (tabmix, sessionsaver, and a couple others) and now it seems like FF can’t handle some heavily coded or heavlily contented pages and freezes up and crashes. Maybe it’s because I have too many extensions (currently i’m at 29, not including any greasemonkey scripts I have installed). This could probably cause the problems i’m seeing since FF now has to load so many extensions and scripts all the time. I guess too much of a good thing really can be bad.

  78. Hey Matt,

    I’ve downloaded it and it is very stable on my machine. I’m not experiencing any loss of speed and my machine isn’t the newest.

    I would think that it could be an extension that is unstable.

  79. Firefox 1.5 is not stable for me at all. It crashes, freezes and it leaks on my WinXP box. I was hoping that some of the money they got from Google and other search engines would be used to fund more QA:

    I entreat the powers that be at Mozilla here:
    http://gotads.blogspot.com/2006/01/firefox-15-sucks-memory.html

    I’ll be waiting for some dot releases before I put it anywhere else.

  80. Almost all reports I hear about Firefox instability problems are due to over-installs (installing a new version to the same location as an old version) and not creating a new profile at upgrade time. These issues are getting less important with each new release, but still should be done when upgrading to a newer version.

    To anyone with any tech skills at all, a Firefox upgrade by installing to a new location and with a new profile can be done in about fifteen or twenty minutes – including locating and installing all important extensions, plus transferring bookmarks and adjusting most preferences.

    You’ll be rewarded with ultra-stable performance and a “snappier” interface (it will respond better and faster).

  81. I too would be interested to hear if any particular extension causes the instability on FF 1.5

    I have around 20 FF extensions installed. Ironically the only site that causes my FF 1.5 to crash is Threadwatch. And it does so regularly, yet didn’t with my earlier FF version. I suspect that it is one of my FF extensions conflicting with the editors privs there.

    Graywolf does not have the problem, and he is an editor there too. Could be I am using an extension that he isn’t.

    Currently I have to edit at TW using IE to stop crashes.

  82. Hey Matt, I’ve found that most instability problems with Firefox come from not creating a fresh new user profile with every major version upgrade.

    It’s fairly easy to copy over the important user settings, just search for that one the web, copy firefox user profile settings, just involves dragging over a few files.

    The session saver sounds questionable, I used a similar feature offered by another extension that caused exactly the same instability on firefox 1.0.x. Once I switched that off, everything got better.

    What happens I think, at least in that case, is that a history/session file is created, and gets bigger and bigger after each session, until firefox can barely move. That’s not a firefox issue, it’s an extension issue.

    Again, the vast majority of instability issues are caused by not creating a fresh user profile. Check it out, though it sounds like that’s an extension issue.

    Oh, for the record, no firefox instability to speak of with 1.5 windows or linux.

    To determine fully the cause, simply boot into firefox safe-mode ( start->programs->mozilla-firefox->firefox (safe-mode)

    Surf as normal, this just turns off all extensions. If firefox is still unstable it’s probably a corrupted userprefs.js file, caused by not creating a fresh user profile.

  83. Hi Matt! I like 1.5 better (it’s on my main machine) but found a few buggies. For instance if the search term buttons generated by Google Toolbar (1.0.2005112) are in the bottom-most toolbar they make the screen wobble.

    Instead of Session Saver, try the new Tab Mix Plus 0.3 – it comes with a Session Manager that seems better behaved than Session Saver. I also have GreaseMonkey 0.6.4, Web Developer 1.0, IE View 1.2.7, del.icio.us 1.0.2, Forecastfox 0.8.2.5 (thanks for sharing that one!), DOM Inspector 1.8…

    Good luck! Miss seeing you oftener, but reading your blog makes me smile.

    Best, Lisa πŸ™‚

  84. I’ve experienced more crashes this month in firefox, than I did in IE last year. However the benefits of dealing with those crashes outway the annoyance. I figure it crashing and closing all my windows periodically helps me to take a break and get back to work (cuz I tend to drift anyhow..)

  85. Dude! It’s HORRIBLE for me too! It’s so horrible I’m now a two browser kinda guy…if you know what I mean. Some pages won’t even load in Firefox anymore. They’re Insta-crashers.

  86. Only a few outright crashes, but consistently has memory usage swell to hundreds of MB after browsing sessions.

  87. Firefox 1.5 works find for me and I have sessionsaver installed.

  88. Dunno Matt – thanks to your review I (and 50k more peeps?) won’t be upgrading for awhile.

  89. Keep up the testing Matt and let us know when it’s safe to use it without getting arrows in the back! LOL.

  90. I’ve been using 1.5 since the first beta and I haven’t had a problem with it crashing. The only place I run into problems is when I try to open 20+ windows(tabs) simultaneously. Other than that, it has been solid as a rock. I have numerous extentions installed and use it every single day.

  91. cornwall,
    How exactly is that ironic? πŸ™‚

  92. The release version has been stable for me, but has anyone noticed how if you are on a page with a form, and reload, it will re-enter all your data? On a page where stuff gets stuffed in hidden form elements via JavaScript, this is a big problem, since it changes hidden elements data too! So the hidden element and the values in JS are all out of sync. It is driving me nuts!

  93. I installed on my G5 2.0 GHZ running 10.4.4 Tiger and uninstalled it straight away. Not entirely sure what was going on but it didn’t feel right to me. It just hangs foe some reason and so did the beta and i uninstalled that too.

    In fact every recent build of Firefox somehow doesn’t behave in the same way as it used to. I’m back on Safari now which seems a better browser for me at the mo.

  94. I have the same problem with SessionSaver, and disabled it the other day. I’ve noticed it crashes Firefox 1.5 when I have a bunch of tabs open (around 10 tabs?)

  95. same problem here. forced me to install 1.5, then crashed on me.

    finally got 1.5 working after uninstalling everything (extensions included) and reinstalling into a NEW folder.

  96. Crashes on my XP machine several times per week (sometimes per day). It crashed on Flash pages, PDFs and static pages. I don’t have the SessionSaver extension. 1.0.x never crashed on me.

  97. I haven’t played with 1.5 enough to know if it is stable.

    However running any browser with extensions is an automatic must remove and retest. No browser extensions allowed here.

    Running anything on a system with known exploits requires that you fix the exploit and retest. A pain to keep up with, but a must.

    What shape are your library routines and media plugins in (many of these may have to be updated). Treat the media plugins like extensions.

    In sort KISS and a lot of “Browser” stability issues evaporate.

  98. Firefox 1.5 works generally well for me but crashes everytime I highlight part of a text (words, sentence) and right click to use one of the extension.

    F1.5 is a major improvement over 1.0, it is much more stable, fast and easy restart, which is well appreciated while using lots of extensions at the same time.

    I only use IE when a website has not been designed to work properly with F1.5, and still, often use the IE Tab Extension which launches IE within F1.5.

    Bruno

  99. Super stable on xp. I notice that it sometimes hogs around 100mb of ram though

  100. Not on my Mac. It gets hung up and sometimes makes me feel like its dial-up. Problem here is there’s nothing else like it, except Camino, but that has no plugin support, so its no fun.
    πŸ™

  101. The 1.0.7 version crashed very little for me… and 1.5, I think has only crashed once on me on XP since day 1 of final release. Except for (maybe) Opera, which I don’t use, it’s certainly the most stable web browser for a PC. I remember when I used to use MSIE, hardly a day went by in which it didn’t crash! I run with one or two browsers open and usually 3 to 10+ tabs open all the time. I don’t use Session Saver, but do run maybe 20+ extentions. Long live the Fox.

  102. Very stable for me. I run numerous windows and tabs within windows spanning four virtual desktops (using the XP MSVDM power tool). Extensions I use are: Flashblock, DOM Inspector, and Web Developer. There is still the rare crash but I can go days without one (without rebooting XP as well).

  103. Firefox 1.5 is rock solid for me. ultra stable on my xp

  104. slower than the 7 year itch.

  105. Can somebody ask FF and IE to sit together at a table and agree on how HTML, CSS and all should work?

    I don’t care who is right, I just wish they agree on a way so we don’t have to bother with “oh looks good in ie and bad in ff” or the other way around.

    All that “we do it better than them” BS is resulting only in 1 thing: More work for us. πŸ™

  106. Mine is stable too… and I have lots of extensions installed (not SessionSaver).

    In the last version (1.07) I had lots of problems with forums… it just hang up my browser… now with 1.5 works great.

  107. hrm, have been running FF for ages, never had a crash (on a really old machine, P100, maybe, though)

    Btw, Matt,what are your reasons for using FF over Opera? Opera has nice mouse gestures implemented (no need to install extensions – a mouse gesture ext doesnt cut it for FF -, and built-in tabbed browsing is available as well). Do you mostly use FF for the web developer tool kit or Im missing some useful extensions myself?

  108. I expressed my frustration with 1.5 constant crashes earlier this week. It seems to happen most when there’s heavy Javascript/Ajax going on. I’ve been removing extensions one by one and right now I believe the Google Blogger Web Comments plugin is the culprit.

  109. If your Firefox is crashing, chewing memory, losing bookmarks etc etc it must be your computer because there’s no way the browser with the most vulnerabilities last year could be at fault.

  110. I was considering switching to Fire Fox maybe I should wait a while, is it really better thab IE and why?

  111. Firefox regularly crashes on me while using the SearchStatus extension, which is odd enough, but it only EVER does it while I’m doing an “Indexed Pages > Google” check, which is even odder.

    Henry

  112. I’ve been having some issues with Firefox 1.5 as well. It seems really slow at times on XP at work and 2000 at home. I thought FF was supposed to be faster than IE but maybe it’s just because I’m using 1.5. The older version seemed to work better. Maybe I will have to revert. IE’s tabbed browsing is kind of sucky.

  113. FF 1.5 on W2K (Athlon 1800, 512 MB RAM) works pretty stable for me. Usually 5+ windows with 10+ (sometimes 30+ tabs open), with around 10 extensions installed. Eats a alot of memory and has sometimes problems with multimedi (listening to radio). On average a bit less than 1 crash every 16 h, but IE and Opera do not work any better.
    Generally, I would recommend it to anyone (worked on FF from 0.6, tested several versions of Opera and previously used IE)

  114. It works great for me. It must be your computer or an extension you have installed.

    What I want to know is why Gmail and AdSense have been running horribly slow this past week……..

  115. The previous version of Firefox was rock solid with all 20 or so extensions
    I used regularly.

    When I migrated to 1.5, I had to leave two or three extensions behind that
    were not yet 1.5 compatible.

    Bottom line is: 1.5 has been crashing on me more than a windoze 3.1 release!!! I’m happy to hear that some folks have a solid experience with it
    and I’m puzzled as to what (if any) of the extensions I installed crashes the
    browser… I wish there was some detail in the crash report that could
    hint at the culprit!

    Cheers!
    – Christian

  116. Ah, Matt! I was just cursing FF 1.5 the other day, too, and wondering if I was the only one that was getting at least 1-2 FF crashes a day!

    I do have a handful of extensions loaded, but no greasemonkey stuff. And my system is geekily powerful (3.0ghz, 2gb RAM, etc.).

  117. This is why Firefox isn’t going to take over the world any time soon. “Spread Firefox” to people who don’t mind dealing with a lot of screwy stuff, like extensions breaking with every release, losing all preferences when you “upgrade” unless you’re comfortable hacking ’em back into existence, random crashes, etc. Every update is an adventure, especially if you like to use extensions.

    Matt, SessionSaver is great, but having it installed means that FF will crash if I try to upload files via web forms. This bug has been there for a long time, but I live with it because it’s worth it. πŸ˜€

    SessionSaver should be part of the FF core in my opinion, like undoclosetab (also broke on 1.5 but can be replaced by tabmixplus) and drag and drop to change the position of tabs.

  118. Yes,

    Firefox 1.5 does crash and even hangs due to some memory leak issues.

    http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/01/solutions-to-common-firefox-15.html

    Good part is that most of the issues can be fixed. Read the story above.

    Amit.

  119. I was having a lot of trouble with crashing, and uninstalling SessionSaver stopped the crashes. I still have some issues with memory usage getting crazy when there’s lots of tabs open, but other than that I’m pretty happy with Firefox 1.5.

  120. You jinxed my computer… My 1.5 has been perfectly superb until I read this post… Now I experience a crash per day at least… /David

  121. Firefox 1.5 has never been stable for me. See my blog for more info:

    http://www.psynixis.com/blog/?p=106

  122. no end of problems with the new Firefox, I wish I still had a copy of the older version, it worked like a dream where as 1.5
    1. freezes during downloads
    2. Crashes…fairly regularly
    3. starts becoming slow, randomly..

    to name but a few problems.

  123. I’m a massive supporter of Firefox but I have to say 1.5 is driving me nuts.

    It has just crashed again and it is so resouce hungry that I periodically have to shut it down and reboot.

    Those guys need to do something soon or I’ll be going back to the dreaded IE.

  124. No it isn`t real stable for me. OFten it crashes down – i dont have intsalled a lot of addons πŸ™ . It is far away to be an good Browser

  125. Is Firefox stable? Aye, aye mate!

    It has crashed on me maybe twice in the past few months. Nothing repeatable and nothing that gets in my way. I have a nice selection of extensions installed, too.

  126. I encounter many problem with firefox 1.5..
    – often crash if open too many tab windows…
    – suddenly freezing and need to restart using safe-mode.. (i reckon because of the plugins, but even though I disabled all the plugins, no effect)
    – seemly sucking too much resource.. i noticed my machine becomes slower and slower…

  127. Nope, not stable for me. Thank god for the session-saver extension. Im actually looking forward to IE7.

  128. I’m also getting periodic freeze-ups with FF 1.5.
    At first I thought it was one of the plugins I had installed.

    I am not using sessionsaver and I get freeze-ups, so I can tell you right now it is not just sessionsaver that is causing problems.

    I am using web developer, sage, and nextplease.

    I used to have a lot of greasemonkey scripts and abstractmouse bookmark synchronizer but after removing them, I still have the same freeze-ups so I guess it’s not either of those plugins responsible either.

  129. Hello,I wonder if there is an addon that can handle my at-once requests. Lets say if you got 45 tabs to open at-once it automatically pauses 30 seconds before starting the next page. So if you leave it open for 10 minutes it gets everything without struggle and errors.

    Thanks

  130. I have found FF 1.5 to be very unstable on a number of PCs. I don’t have SessionSaver installed and constantly get timeouts on sites which I can reach on that ‘Other” browser.

    I am a bit upset at Mozilla by some of their rants in ALL CAPS on their support forum where they berate users for not understanding complex profile installs and cannot understand why some users want to re-install 1.0.7.

    –Simon

  131. Even me too experienced Firefox 1.5 crashing often when I open too many tab windows. My machine becomes slower too. I end up restarting my machine after a while to bring it up to the full speed. Hope Firefox guys will fix the issue soon!!

  132. Just upgraded to 1.5 and I’m disappointed that it no longer displays the Flash ads we have on our web site correctly. It displays code above and below all of our Flash ads. v1.0.7 did not do this. πŸ™

  133. My FireFox 1.5 also crashes often! Arg Matey!

    I have an extension called “Tax Mix Plus 0.3” installed, which somehow came with the SessionSaver built in. Does that seem right? Because I never remember installing the SessionSaver extension and it doesn’t show up on my extensions list.

    Maybe the author of SessionSaver put something in there to make FF crash often so that his extension could always be there to save the session when you restart! – j/k

    I usually use IE, but decided last week to take a closer look at FF since I tried 1.0 a while back, so I recently switched and LOVE the add-ons! The constant crashing makes me want to possibly ditch FF though and just go back to IE.

  134. It was stable until v. 1.5. No it often crashes. A lot of extensions doesn’t works between (the automatic) updates. Firefox has became so unpredictable that I decided to switch to The Opera Web Browser. The best there is.

    Latest beta version works better with Gmail, search the Community > Forum on the Opera homepage to find it
    http://www.opera.com/

  135. I have never used FIREFOX, but still I think it must be great as the name suggests it is full of FIRE and also FOXy.

  136. Mine crashes all the time; the only extension I have installed is Greasemonkey.
    Perhaps that’s the problem, but at any rate, it grinds my gears.
    I downloaded an older version a second ago, hopefully that’ll work better.

  137. Do you seriously use a browser that auto-complete and remember field’s response on ssl pages ???
    God! yes it’s stable, and thanks Firefox to give me my mam’ credit card number!

  138. Well.. I read about your problems with the firefox 1.5 and I got the exact same problem. It can’t be a plugin matter. This happened to me just after a fresh OS install (win xp). Maybe some hardware matter? Or maybe some update from MS that FF didn’t like at all.. I know I’ve been running FF 1.5 before, and never experienced this trouble..

  139. Anyone on this form whos says anything about 1.5 being good and not buggy must be smoking somthing funky. I installed it on my machine and had to start using internet explorer (YUCK). The people making coments like “It works fine” “must be your low end syst” probally only used it for 5 minutes of testing. I on the pother hand have multiple tabs open all day long. Please before making coments please be sure you know what you are talking about. Otherwise you look quite foolish.

  140. My Firefox 1.5 crashes on average twice a day on my Linux desktop. I am seriously considering downgrading to 1.0 which was very stable for me.

  141. 1.5 keeps crashing!

    No wonder, my Firefox 1.5 kept crashing, very frequently. I thought there was something wrong with my computer lol. Now that I just updated to 1.5.0.1, i hope it will help. In the release notes, it says that it fixed “memory leaks” among other things.

    Yeah, it remembered my credit card at least on one website. I don’t know that is because of the site design or Firefox itself though. Either way, it’s plain silly.

  142. Install the nightly tester tools, this tool enable you to fake compatibility of past applications into the new firefox, so you can run past versions into the 1.5 firefox version.
    http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/buildid/nightly.html
    i use it for my site as well as the developer toolbar
    Santiago

  143. My Firefox 1.5 crashes constantly, even after about 1 minute of use. It’s absolutely hopeless. And, Firefox makes no mention of the widespread problems with 1.5 on its website. Firefox market share has been rising quickly, but it’s definitely on its way down now. Mark my words.

  144. And, oh yeah, somebody mentioned downgrading from Firefox 1.5 to Firefox 1.0 because 1.0 was stable. Hah! I did exactly that, but 1.0 inherited the instability problems from the previously installed version of 1.5.

    So, I waited a month for 1.501 to come out, installed that, and it was even worse than 1.5.

    I’ll tell you what, this is a shame because Firefox used to be a great browser, now it’s one of the worst ever. VERY, VERY bad.

  145. Well, well, well, whadya know… I uninstalled Firefox 1.5 and then reinstalled it in a different directory, and now it works fine. Sure wish they’d have advised that from the beginning, because it’s not normally the way upgrades of browsers are done.

    From the looks of this discussion board, a lot of other guys don’t know about this either.

  146. Hey Matt,

    I just wanted to let you know that I was using FireFox when I was downloading a file and noticed a typo. When you hover your mouse over the “Clean Up” button, there is a tag that has says “canceled” instead of “cancelled.”

    A bit off topic, but I thought you would be able to inform whoever needs to know.

  147. 1) Open new firefox window
    2) Type: about:conf
    3) Locate this value: browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers , change it: -1 to 0
    4) Close Firefox and fun

    Best Regards

  148. Yes, Firefox 1.5.0.1 crashes when uploading some files. This seems to hapen somewhat randomly (e.g. in gmail sometimes it crashes, sometimes it does not, and it happens, say once every 3 tries).

    Bad bug, really bad.

    Not a gmail issue because this has happened elsewhere (infojobs.net) as well. Javascript-firefox integrations looks like the suspect.

    Hope this is fixed promptly.

  149. FireFox 1.5 has suck aLL of my memory ..! (about 97-101 MB)
    think about it when u used it, except when u have 512-1000MB RAM.

  150. never had ay problems with 1.0x – since 1.5 it’s totally unstable
    firefox is no longer a viable option for me

    am now using another browser – faster, more stable

  151. yes firefox crashes……..i dont think it is now a stable browser..the earlier version was better

  152. Firefox makes much trouble for us, too. By programming our CMS we have to check everey Syntax expecialy for Firefox and Opera.

    That’s not so funny for us.

  153. kid disco –
    “Canceled” is correctly spelled with one or two L’s.
    http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=canceled

  154. Firefox javasvript debug is very good i think.

  155. This is so frustrating. Every since the 1.5xx versions I constantly get crashes. I have no plugins installed only the “naked firefox”.

    I also get the “firefox is already running” errors.

    when I check for the reason it’s crashing it tells me “js3250.dll”. But even with an updated one there is no change. I even did a hex dump + compare and found no difference.

    irritating πŸ™

  156. Firefox 1.5 really sucks…not only does it crash but its taking longer to load pages. Does anyone know how i can downgrade to 1.0.7? I’d really aprreciate it if someone could post a link to it.

  157. Firefox is the best browser ever, but 1.5x is not very stable for me. When one tab freezes for some reason (eg. flash awaits data from network) the whole browser does not respond. And even another just opened instance behave the same way. That’s very very annoying.

    Another experience I have with it that it runs better on WinXP rather than on Win2k.

    As for FF 1.0.7 it is solid rock stable on every system I use(Win2k/WinXP/Gentoo Linux/MacOsX 10.4)!

    I hope it is not the same story we had with NN browser long ago (when they releases it very poor tested).

  158. My firefox lags like hell and crashes all the time. Can’t even browse text based websites properly!

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