The Little Browser That Wouldn't

Posted by Al Twohill on 28 January 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: browsers, desktop

When Firefox first came out it was such a breath of fresh air compared to Internet Explorer. Now its feeling like that same air has been kept in a box for the last year or so and has gone a little stale.

I use Firefox to do my work, which is creating and managing websites. I spend most of my time with the Firebug extension open, and also use the HTML validator extension extensively as well (notice that all these pages validate - check the links in the footer). For the most part, I love it. But, as the saying goes it only takes a little bit of urine to wreck the wine. Lately I've been irked by some issues that seem to have been around for a while.

Memory

If I open up my Task Manager on my Vista laptop, or the ProcessTable on my KDE System Guard and sort my processes by memory use, guess which app is usually up the top? Its our little wonderchild, who seems to have gotten a little fat of late.

In Vista, with only two tabs open (I usually have many more), Firefox is using about 107mb of my main memory, plus another 144mb of virtual memory. In KDE, it's using 133mb of main memor, and 235mb of virtual memory!! Contrast this with IE7 which with two tabs open is using 43mb of main memory and 108mb of virtual memory, and IE6 which is running on an XP virtual machine ticking along at only 32mb memory/23mb virtual memory.

Stability

It never used to be this way; Firefox has always been pretty reliable. Except lately, Gmail crashes on every second access attempt, as well as other pages crashing it. Now I know Google like to develop funky javascript code, but browsers should not let client side scripts do anything bad enough to crash!

My other stability irk is that every now and again, usually while running the Linux version of Firefox, new pages will appear to take the time to load, but Firefox won't update the screen to show that new page. You click on a link and the status bar shows the progress, then its all done - except you still see the old page. Closing down all the browser windows, waiting until the Firefox thread finishes (which is an annoying while after the last window closes), then reopening Fx and reloading all the tabs you had open. Annoying, huh? Worst part is it isn't an actual crash so no error report gets generated, and it's kinda hard to reproduce the problem, as it seems to happen fairly randomly.

Speed

I've nothing to conclusively test this against, but Firefox just feels slower these days. Of course, this is purely subjective, but then again, what really matters is the overal user experience isn't it? It doesn't really matter to me if any particular browser is any percent faster in loading time, javascript processing, page rendering, etc, until I notice a difference. And to be honest, right now I'm looking for alternatives.

In the end

At the end of the day, I'm not going to leave Fx until I find something as good as (or better than) Firebug. It has to be one of the most useful tools for a web developer, so I'm prepared to stay in the Fx camp and whinge until there is a better alternative or the Fx team sort out their little issues.