Sudar Blogs: My Certification Experiences

A record of my experiences with certifications. Starting with BrainBench, moving on to Microsoft (MCP, MCDBA, MCAD) and … surely one day with Sun (SCJP), together with things I come across my day to day life.

Note: This blog has been moved to http://SudarMuthu.com/blog/

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Is FireFox 1.4.0 unstable?

Update: I have messed up with the title. It is actually Firefox 1.0.4 and not 1.4.0. (I am not changing the title because it is changing the permanent link) Sorry for that.

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 (2.8 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

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posted by Sudar @ 6/23/2005 04:18:00 AM   | |
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9 Comments:

  • At 6/23/2005 09:55:00 AM, Blogger J Anderson said…

    You could at least use the correct title!

     

  • At 6/23/2005 09:59:00 AM, Blogger J Anderson said…

    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

     

  • At 6/23/2005 10:01:00 AM, Blogger J Anderson said…

    Actually, I was having problems with Java applets loading.

    Try looking in

     

  • At 6/24/2005 06:22:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    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 ?

     

  • At 6/26/2005 06:14:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    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..

     

  • At 6/26/2005 06:15:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    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:)

     

  • At 6/30/2005 05:46:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    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.

     

  • At 7/08/2005 04:22:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

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

     

  • At 7/10/2005 10:05:00 PM, Blogger Sudar said…

    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 didn’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 ;-)

     

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