Whither Firefox

May 05, 2009- Permalink

Firefox is was my favourite browser. I run it as the default on my XP desktop and my Vista laptop. Lately, though, Firefox can’t seem to stop freezing the XP system. The Vista laptop seems to run it fine but the XP desktop hasn’t been stable running Firefox 3.0.X in some time.

I’m not talking crashes here. The browser just freezes. Most of the time it freezes the system solid, as in hit the power button frozen solid. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can bring the task manager up, but that just begins a frustrating game of hitting “End Now” and not having the unresponsive program end at all.

A Google search on Firefox freezes brings up quite a few complaints, all stemming back to the latest few versions. In some cases people blame just the browser, its interaction with Java, or its workings with Flash. Quite a few people mention that it happens when they’re watching videos, especially on Youtube.

Regardless, the fact is that Firefox isn’t acting like the browser we fell in love with. I’m writing this post in Chrome right now, afraid that Firefox would have crashed mid-post. Sometimes I’m even running…shudder…IE8.