I really hate to have to knock on Firefox from a negative direction, but yesterday the newest version of the open source giant gave me one of the worst days of web surfing that I’ve had in a very long time.
I downloaded Firefox 2.0 on Tuesday but didn’t spend much time online that day because I had other things to do. On Wednesday I was online for a bit, probably an hour or so, and I noticed some slight glitches in the performance of the browser but brushed it off because at the time it wasn’t that bad and I figured my laptop was just having issues. Yesterday proved to be a much bigger headache as I spent a better part of the day working on all of my sites and blogs.
In the first 10 minutes online my browser locked up. All other processes were running just fine during the freeze. I could switch back and forth between my audio devices, Word documents, HTML editors and e-mail client with ease. But getting Firefox to respond was not an option. No switching between tabs, no closing the window… nothing. It just freezes up for no reason at all.
After about a minute it finally let go and everything caught back up, but it wasn’t more than 20 minutes before I found myself sitting there waiting for the browser to break itself out of the weird vortex again. To make matters worse, it crashes on most video sites like YouTube. I was trying to watch a short film and it wouldn’t let me get more than a minute of distraction free viewing before going into lala land again.
All in all I think Firefox probably froze up on me at least 25 times yesterday. That’s even with a re-install and several other changed settings.
Come on Firefox! I’ve been in love with you for years, don’t let me down now.
