Firefox 3 is full of fail

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07 July 2008 @ 02:42 pm

The one thing i was really looking forward to with Firefox 3 was the reported improvements in memory management. Well i currently have one Firefox 3 window open. That window has one tab. That tab has _no_ page loaded. The windows task manager currently shows firefox.exe's memory usage at 1,234,756 K.

Now that _is_ down from the 1,350,000 or so K it was using when i had three windows open with about 40-80 tabs open between them, but not much. I've taken a look at this page and tried a couple of their suggestions about clearing out histories and such, but it didn't cause any significant improvement. Their last suggestion of restarting Firefox from time to time will work of course, but i don't really consider that an acceptable solution. Besides, if i want to go with that option i can just stick with Firefox 2 =P

Also, in the week (approximately) that i've been using it Firefox 3 has crashed two or three times. So my limited use suggests that with the initial release you get all the memory issues of Firefox 2 _plus_ more stability issues. I'd say hopefully they'll fix these issues in future patches, and the stability issues probably will be dealt with, but if people have been complaining about the memory issues since when 2.0 came out and they didn't manage to fix them with the major update from 2 to 3, then what are the odds that they'll manage to take care of them in a minor patch?

Edit: Oh yeah, and despite the fact that it's still Times New Roman according to the settings, when i type things in text boxes in Firefox 3 it looks like it's in some weird kind of font to me, more roundy or something.

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steuard on July 8th, 2008 03:55 pm (UTC)

Let's talk extensions. What've you got running? Those can sometimes be the culprit for bad browser behavior. (Putting my anecdotal evidence head to head with yours, for example, I can't remember any crashes in Firefox 3 since the mid-betas. I haven't paid much attention to memory usage, so I can't contribute much there, but again it seems that a lot of people have seem big improvements in the new version. So I wouldn't be surprised if you're running into some sort of incompatibility between extensions or something. Not that I know enough to diagnose that, of course, but it might be something to search for...)

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donaithnen on July 8th, 2008 04:22 pm (UTC)

For extensions it looks like i've got "Long Titles 1.3", but it's got a little red exclamation mark and a message "Not compatible with Firefox 3.0"

For themes i have "Default 3.0" (is there a theme that will make it look like Firefox 2?)

For plugins i've got "Adobe Acrobat," "Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U2," "Mozilla Default Plug-in" and "Windows Presentation Foundation."

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steuard on July 8th, 2008 04:43 pm (UTC)

Well, that probably wouldn't be it, then. Rats. (I'm pretty sure that the obsolete extension has no effect, though it couldn't hurt to uninstall it at this point now that the functionality is built in.)

I don't know if it will help, but here's a troubleshooting technique to try: create a new profile and see if you still have these problems (memory hogging and occasional crashing: are the crashes reproducible, by the way?). It will be a bit of a pain to test it thoroughly without your bookmarks, but that's probably the most reliable way of figuring out whether you've got some weird deadwood in your old setup mysteriously clogging the works (maybe some obscure user settings from previous versions that just now started causing problems).

If there's no improvement, I don't know what to tell you. But if it helps, it shouldn't be too hard to copy your bookmarks to the new profile (the built-in export/import functions can probably do that for you: open the "Organize Bookmarks" window and look under "Import and Backup"). You could try to copy more than that (cookies, user settings, etc.), but the more you copy over, the more likely it would be that you'd copy the problem, too. It really shouldn't be necessary to mess around with profiles this way, but that's pretty much the only place I can think of where weird problems like what you're seeing may be hiding.

On another note, I'm pretty sure that there is a Firefox 2 style theme, but I don't recall what it's called. I'd hope that it would be pretty easy to track down on addons.mozilla.org, though.

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donaithnen on July 8th, 2008 08:24 pm (UTC)

Well really there's nothing preventing me from exporting the bookmarks, nuking the whole program and reinstalling. I don't really have much in the way of settings to lost i think.

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donaithnen on July 8th, 2008 10:43 pm (UTC)

oh also, the crash isn't really reproducible. Sometimes i come in to work in the morning and there's an error message sitting there and no Firefox anymore.

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