Is FireFox 1.0.4 unstable?

Towards the end of last year I came to know about Firefox and soon it became my default browser. I use IE only for Microsoft site and my company’s intranet sites. I updated it to 1.0.4 about a month ago.

Recently I saw Swaroop saying that Firefox 1.0.4 is frequently crashing in his system. It was only after reading his blog and the comments I began to notice that even I have a similar problem, particularly when I keep it open for long time without using it. (I have the habit of not shutting down my system for weeks together).

The problem that I am facing is that Firefox freezes whenever I try to open it after keeping it idle for some time (say 30 minutes). It takes about 5 minutes for it to come back to life and sometimes it doesn’t. I am having this behavior only in 1.0.4.

But I cannot blame Firefox completely for this because I have installed the famous (?) Window XP Service Pack 2 around the same time I updated Firefox and also I have recently installed some extensions.

I was googling for around 2 days to find out the reason for this problem or at least someone with a similar problem. And I came across some good articles by Joel Webber. He talks about a serious flaw in IE by which memory leak occurs when the JavaScript in the webpage contains closures. He also claims that even other browses apart from IE have this flaw.

Asa can you throw some light on this issue. (Probably after you are back from your vacation)

I would be really happy if this is not the problem with Firefox. Does any one else face the same issue? Please leave a comment or an email

While searching I found this page which contains pics of earlier versions of IE. What was more interesting than the pictures was the title – History of Err – Internet Explorer 😉

Here is my System Configuration

Pentium 4 (1.8 GHz)
512 MB Ram
Window XP SP 2 with all latest updates and patches
Firefox 1.0.4 with the following extensions
Tabbrowser Preferrences 1.2.6
Web Developer 0.9.3
Greasemonkey 0.3.3
All-in-One Gestures 0.15.2
Inspect Element 0.3

Related posts

Tags:

12 Comments so far

Follow up comments through RSS Feed | Post a comment

  • Mr Anderson says:

    You could at least use the correct title!

  • Mr Anderson says:

    Personally Sudar, in the month I used this build I experienced no unusual problems (naturally they were a few which were my fault).

    It is more likely to be your extensions which are causing any problems, but I can’t really comment as I don’t use Firefox 1.0.4, but Firefox 1.1 .

    Try switching to a truly un-stable browser, Deer Park Alpha 1 (Firefox 1.1). It’s not even in Beta stages! I’ve not had any problems with it though except uncompatible skins and extensions.

    Regards,

    Joe

  • Mr Anderson says:

    Actually, I was having problems with Java applets loading.

    Try looking in

  • Fred says:

    Sudar, FireFox is said to be open and one of Open Source’s Advantages is supposed to be Easy Bug Fixes.

    So, Why Don’t You Look into FireFox’s Source and Fix the Bug Yourself ?

    So, Is there No Advantage for Opensource ?

  • Fred says:

    Hey Sudar.

    i think U tried to Find FireFox SOurce. And when U found it, It would’ve been a huge 32 MB C/C++ program. The thought Itself would’ve Scared You and u’d have stopped.

    See, OpenSource dosn’t Really have any advantages, as is Cross-Platform. They are Really Over-Hyped.

    The Quality and Succes of Everything Depends on the Quality of Code in it, Not the Other Way About.

    And If u really Believe in Open-Source, Just Download that Mamoth Code and Try Finding Bugs..

  • Fred says:

    PS.

    The FireFox team has announced a Prize of $500 and a T-Shirt to Anyone Who Discovers and Proves A Bug.

    Try To get it:)

  • wpbasti says:

    We have some people how report this errors while developing applications with our new javascript toolkit qooxdoo (http://qooxdoo.sourceforge.net). Are there any news for this strange behaviour?

  • Fred says:

    See, Lots of ppl still Encouterin the Same Problem and YET No fixes. If dis’s been a MS Product, I’d suppose I’dve Got a Fix Faster.

  • Fred says:

    And Sudar, Do Reply to previous Posts, not only the Recent one;)

  • Sudar says:

    Hi Fred,

    The reason for me not commenting on this post is that, I was doing some research on this and so I waited till I could finish that and come up with some solid answer for the cause of the problem.

    As you told I have downloaded the source code, but that didnâ??t helped me at all as I was not able to figure out anything using the code.

    Then I found one more important observation. Firefox is not crashing when I keep the Firefox window minimized. Then I read some article for optimizing Windows XP and found that the memory consumption reduces greatly when we keep the unused windows minimized.

    So now I am not able to confirm whether it is the problem with Firefox or with Windows XP SP2 or with the manner in which I use both of them. 😉

    And Fred thanks for taking active interest and making me comment too 😉

  • Yuvi says:

    Hey, I just remembered about this today. Well, I wrote an Article about this behaviour in Windows XP some time back, but remembered the connection only today. Well, that’s because when you minimize a window, Windows swaps the Program back to disk, so Memory usage looks like it decreases, but does not actually decrease. So, when you go back to that window, you’ll hit the disk, which is much slower than Memory. On my 256 MB RAM, some apps tend to take even a minute to stop invalidating. And, for Memory Usage, TaskMon Lies: You need to do some extra work to get the real truth. It’s in that article.

  • Sudar says:

    Well, the problem solved for me when I updated to the next version of Firefox, so I was under the impression that it was because of some problem in that particular version.

    Sometimes, your browser (not just Firefox) may also crash if the web page you are visiting is using lot of closures in their javascript. There is a tool to check that too. Check out this url http://dbaron.org/log/2006-05#e20060506a

    And my god just now checked the date and found that itâ??s going to be one year since posting it. But it just looks as if it was last month. Time is flying like anythingâ?¦

1 Trackbacks/Pingbacks so far

Leave a Reply to Sudar Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *