I'm on the slow, but innevitable, countdown to sending Firefox packing (Mac OS X). Every release makes it into more of a pig (more bloat, slower performance, more crashing). Prior to the 1.5.01 update it was taking up more memory than Photoshop on my system (over 1GB of real + virtual mem with only 2 or 3 tabs open, meanwhile Photoshop had a 1000x700 file with 20-30 layers).

Camino unfortunately had some shortcomings the last time I tried it out. And after posting on its message forum concurring with another poster who had mentioned a lacking feature, one of the developers chimed in and was so negative I'm reluctant to even try the program again. His second or third post went so far as to say he'd go out of his way to petition that the feature/fix never be implemented. The feature in question is the ability to set the browser to ask where to save a file any time you perform a download - like in Firefox and what IE has done for 10 years.

Then there's Safari... I love Apple Mail, and if Safari were as good for the web as Mail is for mail.... but I it isn't and it's just not right for me. Maybe with the Leopard (10.5) upgrade...

Bruno

I've noticed the same thing with Firefox under Solaris.

My only suggestions are trying the full Mozilla Suite's browser and Opera. I have no idea if Mozilla has the same memory hog problem or not, and I personally really dislike Opera's UI. But those are the only ones I know of.

Apparently, many of these Firefox leaks have been fixed in the latest trunk builds. See this blog. I'll just sit it out until the next major point release comes out, but it certainly looks like the developers are on top of the issue.

I'd believe that more if it hadn't been getting consistently worse over the course of the last five or so releases, if not longer. Leaks were listed as the fourth bullet point on the 1.5.0.1 release notes, right below "International Domain Name support for Iceland (.is) is now enabled." No offense meant to the four people who were clamoring for the Icelandic support, but memory leaks that cause me to have to restart the browser multiple times a day seems a little more important. Also, the leading quote of "I don't know how often these leaks were severe enough to cause noticeable slowdowns or thrashing, but enough Firefox users seem to care about memory leaks..." doesn't inspire confidence in their concern. They seem to think that this is a theoretical problem.

I generally don't have much faith in community-driven open-source type projects. Another big PITA one (on Mac OS) is Adium. Wow, what a buggy piece of crap. i still use it unfortunately, because there's nothing better. But seriously, how hard is it to make a UI wrapper for GAIM? Like Firefox, every "final" release is a beta at best. I hate seeing software releases with numbers less than 1.0 (Adium and Camino perfect examples).

In any case, I took a closer look at Camino and might be able to run it after all. There are a number of programs written to modify and add to its features. The same goes for Safari - though my biggest problem with that one is that I can't change the behavior of horizontal scroll like I can with Mozilla-based stuff. I use an MS notebook mouse with one of the tilt wheels - I set up Firefox to go back and forward pages by using the wheel left and right. Very simple to use and much quicker than trying to use the tiny thumb button on the side of the mouse. I wish MS would just add that to the configuration options in their control panel. Horizontal scrolling is of marginal interest to most people at best. It's usually slow even when you want to use it.

Bruno

Have you ever tried Omniweb? It is a bit slow, and has it's own share of bugs, but it also has a lot of advanced features that can come in handy. It has been my preferred browser for most uses on OS X for years.

-Mike

You know, I just have to say: either I have the best luck in the world with software or you guys all have the worst.

I use both Adium and Firefox constantly, and I have no problems whatsoever. Never have. Neither have any of my friends who use them. I think it's kind of harsh to call either of them a "buggy piece of crap"; my empeg crashes more often that either of them. If Adium changed it's version number to "3.0.13" would that be better?

</snarky>

Yeah. Omniweb is great.

I thought you were allowed to say it was Firefox but you weren't allowed to use the logo? All of the third party tweaked versions I've tried have been called Firefox but had other logos.

I'm not sure how it is on the Mac, but up until two releases ago, it wasn't uncommon for Firefox to be chewing up over 1.5g of memory on my machine. If I had more than two tabs open, it was the biggest memory hog of anything running (including games). It has gotten better, but to claim that it never had problems is really using rose colored glasses.

- Tim

I'm another one that has found 1.5 more stable than 1.0, I would often get cases where Firefox and Thunderbird would hang at the same time with 1.0, which doesn't happen with the latest version.

The only outstanding problem that I have with Firefox is that after a specific instance of it has been running a couple of days it will suddenly decide that its window is much wider than it actually is, resulting in some of the right hand side of pages (and the address bar) being clipped. Closing and reopening fixes this.

While it appears to use more memory than IE, it is by no means a memory hog. Even when I have had an instance running for a few days, if I close all the tabs it is only using about 120MB.

This is on Windows, when I have used Firefox on the Mac it didn't seem to be quite as stable.

I use GMail, which appears to be a big source of the memory expansion of Firefox (presently using 273MB after perhaps a day or two of running, and typically expanding to 500+MB after a few more days, when I'll typically kill and restart it). This works for me, but if it didn't, I'd be downloading one of these "burning edge" daily builds to see if it got any better.

Wow, I find Adium to be troublesome and I haven't had even 20% of the trouble a friend has. We both installed it at the same time though I use it more often. Adium is in my Mac OS X login items list, so it's always active. I haven't had a crash with the current version .89, phew. I normally update to all new versions a day or two after they're released.

I have accounts for ICQ, MSN, AIM, YAHOO, Bonjour and .Mac and I have a few people defined as meta contacts which is a single contact with multiple accounts. In addition, all communication between my friend and I use encryption, regardless of protocol.

Aside from crashing which I've seen too much of for my tastes, I'm more likely to run into other bugs that just get on one's nerves.

Numbr one for a long time (and it's still not 100%) is the ability to connect or reconnect to servers after being disconnected for one reason or other. Including, sleep/wake the system, disconnect the network connection, etc. Then we have.... Constantly asking for my password for one connection or other (mostly the .Mac) showing it's not using the keychain properly. It always tries to send unencrypted text when I first contact said friend, even though I have the prefs set to ALWAYS use encyption. It selects a different account/protocol to send the message to even though I have clearly selected the one I want in the chat window on initial message. Trying to delete an empty contact group always says it won't delete it because it's not empty - but it seems to be gone after doing it anyway. Poor polish like not automatically closing the initial message Growl pop-up after having selected the chat window. Can't drag groups around in anything but the regular window style (can't really do anything with groups unless you revert to this style first actually), can't drag any group up above the first (even though it shows the insertion mark it won't do anything when you release the mouse button). I still don't think I've managed to get fiule transfer working on any protocol with any contact - outgoing or incoming (though we can probably blame GAIM for this rather than the Adium UI).

The crashes I've had have also mostly been while not actively using the program. I'll just be using Firefox or Word or whatever, and Adium will just blow up in the background. Now it's done it fairly gracefully every time, popping up a crash report window, etc.. Not like Firefox which has managed to take down the entire system multiple times (likely because of the memory leaks).

IMO, the Firefox team isn't really doing anything to innovate and since even before 1.0 had become complacent. I'm sticking with it for now, but in all honesty it's just because I don't have the time to properly investigate or configure the other solutions right now. On top of which is my fear that Safari (even if I do make it look/feel/work like I want it to) won't be supported by as many web sites.

You know who's programs have never crashed on me under Mac OS? Microsoft's. Strange but true.

Bruno

In Solaris, this instance that I've had running for less than 24 hours, currently at seven tabs, maybe as many as a dozen tabs open at once at sometime during the run, currently at 233MB (219MB RSS). If I close all the tabs but this one, it doesn't shrink at all, in either of those statistics. It takes up more memory and more CPU, and is slower than OpenOffice.org.

Memory usage problems explained in this post.

Hmm. Fair enough. Elsewhere I posited that it might also bee poor memory management. I've just set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to zero. We'll see if that has an effect on my poor performance.

Okay, for the last hour, that setting has made a *huge* improvement in my browsing. This page describing the option states that it's been there since 1.5b2, which explains why my browsing went to shit after upgrading to 1.5. They obviously need a better algorithm than the one they're currently using.

It just explains that Firefox programmers are damn inneficient and don't really think through the crap they're putting onto peoples' systems.

It's caching baby! These are probbably the same guys who "cache" a few hundred used coffee cups and other litter in their cars.

Bruno