Thu, 05 Nov 2009

Firefox Keeps Finding New Ways to Fail

I have been using—and whining about—Firefox since it first appeared. It has improved in many ways since the early days, and I am pleased about that. But it still finds new and astonishing ways of driving me crazy.

I have been using a Ubuntu-badged variant with the ridiculous name Shiretoko, and it appears to be based on Firefox-3.5.3 (which I know is not the latest, but it’s pointless going through upgrade pain when I am on the verge of changing a few other elements of my desktop—new motherboard, new memory, and a non-Linux operating system).

The new misfeature in this Firefox is that it constantly appears to freeze, for between 8 and 25 seconds. This is sometimes accompanied by greying out the Firefox windows, which seems to say that Firefox knows that it’s dragging its feet. The only good thing is that, whatever it happens to be doing while it’s doing nothing useful, it doesn’t also elect to bring the rest of the machine to its knees—all other windows and processes are able to operate quite normally while Firefox is thinking. (Which is why I’m able to write this as I wait.)

The machine is a quad-core 64-bit Intel thing with 8 GB of memory, so it should be more than enough to handle simple web browsing. By simple web browsing, I include accessing static web pages on my LAN, which is also afflicted by this bizarre behaviour.

A partial list of the activities that provoke this behaviour includes: pressing a key to scroll the page down; clicking on anything; attempting to grab a scroll-bar to do the obvious; typing in an input field; and so on. This makes net banking a fraught and perilous exercise, as it’s necessary to wait for up to 30 seconds to see if the click you made was actually registered or not—you don’t want to be clicking bank buttons more than once, but it’s not a lot of fun if the bank website times you out near the end of some complex transaction while you waited to see if your click was being processed.

It’s almost enough to make me go back to bricks and mortar banks. It’s certainly enough to make me hope I can get some other software installed pretty soon. And it’s certainly sufficiently annoying that I’d be hard-pressed to maintain my normal exemplary politeness if I met a Firefox developer any time soon.

Oh, that bit about my normal exemplary politeness was a joke. Just so you know.

Posted at: 18:13

Path: /software/discuss   |  permalink