More on the Firefox hangups
We got some good commentary to the Firefox hangup post yesterday and a number of you said that your Firefox hangups were happening on Mac OS X only. At the time of my original post I was only having the problem on the Vista version of Firefox but last night I received my first hangup on my Mac. I did some banging around on the Vista version of Firefox that is really giving me fits and uncovered something interesting. I discovered that when Firefox hangs up and I close the window that the instance of Firefox is still showing in the Task Manager. I can close Firefox but it’s not really quitting when it’s hung up. What’s interesting is I can fire Firefox back up after "closing" it and it will run for a while and then hang up again. I did this all night last night and at one point had three different instances of Firefox showing up in the Task Manager taking anywhere from 70 MB to 100+ MB of memory each. Something definitely changed in Firefox last week but I haven’t found anybody offering any information about what was changed and why it’s giving us fits. Maybe Mozilla will do something about it since it’s affecting quite a few of us.
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I have had hangs for several years with Firefox after extended use. I truly believe there is still a memory leak in FF. 70Kbytes is a good size soon after starting but when things get bad later on, it has sometimes between 150k and 200k used. So, I kill the task and restart.
I have lived with this for a long time and still consider FF the better alternative the IE.
thanks
..wiley
I’ve seen memory leak issues, but I do believe this may be an extension (excuse me, add-on) issue. Or it could even be a plug-in issue, which we will have to wait for FF3 to easily manage them. But do an about:plugins and see if you see anything strange there.
I’d say to try and keep track of the sites that are giving you errors and report them to Mozilla. It is very possible that some content on pages you are visiting is causing this problem. Mozilla can’t fix problems that they don’t know about.
My problem was consistent on Java pages, so I knew where to look.
… and continuing my own little viral marketing campaign for Opera, I should mention that the 9.50 alpha release contains a killer feature to sync your bookmarks between multiple instances and the MyOpera server – use it at home and work to always have all my bookmarks available – not to mention that Opera is provably benchmarked as much faster than FF, with the 9.50 alpha blindingly fast even compared to the current 9.23 release of Opera – which already beats all others.
Opera has no extensions, just Opera-produced great quality code and great feature set. ;)
Seeing it here as well. Glad you spotlighted it.
Oh, and as for the three instances – kill them manually from the task list or using Process Explorer from Sysinternals.
If you close all Firefox windows and still have Firefox exes in your task lists, they are almost assuredly gone rogue on you. Kill all of them manually, then restart Firefox and see if it is more stable.
I’m on Firefox all the time on two different XP machines. I’ve had some funny behavior with PDFs open in multiple tabs, but I have yet to see the kind of hangups being described, and I’ve been on the lookout since the previous post. Might be linked to the operating systems.
I sometimes get similar behavior when I have bloglines or googlereader running in one of my tabs. When they ‘refresh’ my feeds in the left-hand bar it can freeze the rest of my tabs for a while.
As Gecko alternatives to firefox I have been using the full-featured SeaMonkey:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/
and for sheer speed, K-Meleon:
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net
[I am also quite impressed with the speed of Apple's Safari running on win xp]
When I want to troubleshoot ‘firefox’ on windows I quickly create another clean profile for myself by typing the following into the ‘run’ dialogue box:
“c:program filesmozilla firefoxfirefox.exe” -profilemanager
I go to Old Apps to download old versions when the new acts up. The problem with firefox is that it want to update to the latest. Firefox 1.5 is more stable. I have had similar issues with quicktime 7.
I don’t think we can have this conversation without mentioning which extensions and themes are in use.