Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0

grandgator writes, "Hyped by a good deal of fanfare, outfitted with some new features, and now available for download, Firefox 2.0 has already passed 2 million downloads in less than 24 hours. However, a growing number of users are reporting bugs, widening memory leaks, unexpected instability, poor compatibility, and an overall experience that is inferior to that offered by prior versions of the browser. Expanding on these ideas, this list compiles nine reasons why it might be a good idea to stick with 1.5 until the debut of 3.0, skipping the "poorly badged" 2.0 release completely." OK, maybe it's 10 reasons. An anonymous reader writes, "SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0. This defect has been known since June 2006 but no patch has yet been made available. The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus (and I have witnessed the crash personally). If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?"
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."

I've switched back to 1.5.0.7

[bruce_the_loon]

I didn't switch because of security problems, but because of the attempts to foist session management onto all of us and because the Tab Killer plugin which I use to eradicate all record of tabs from Firefox doesn't work in 2.0 yet.

Why can't the Moz developers make a simple Tabs On/Off switch in the Options Panel, and the same for session management. I do not want my browser to remember that I had ten pages open and then reopen them when it starts. I'd be running Opera if I wanted that.

One final rant, why did they move the proxy settings panel from the front of Options to somewhere buried again. Not that IE is a great browser, but they don't jumble the preferences UI around every release. For an IT department that supports over 20000 users on a university network, trying to figure out which version of a browser they're running just to find their proxy settings is painful.

Direction

[ballwall]

I love firefox, but I question where they are going. If you look at the blog post every 3rd entry is complaining about memory issues or bloat. Now here comes FF 2.0, with more features, but these seem to only exacerbate the problems. Firefox's original claim to fame was "Not being IE". It didn't have ActiveX, supported tabs, and was super speedy. Firefox gained popularity because it was a viable option when people went looking for a replacement to IE. But that was the catch, people were looking for a replacement.

Now I find myself getting more and more frustrated with Firefox's bloat, and looking for a replacement for it. (I have way too many greasemonkey scripts to make the switch lightly).

The memory issue is huge for those with less than a gig of ram. The fast back/forward switching is nice, but not if it ends up getting paged out. Yes, users can turn it off in about:config, is that viable? And while the developers keep complaining about extensions being the culprit, it seems like some work there on the garbage collector is in order, or at least isolating and counting usage by each extension to show users which is causing the problem. (Instead of forcing each user to manually disable them until they happen upon the one that's causing the issue).

All of these new 2.0 features have an audience, and should probably even be included in the installer. But why aren't they extensions? Is there some technical reason my browser should have the overhead of a spellchecker if I don't want it? And finally, why aren't they solutioning what the users are asking for?

Re:The 9 Reasons

[Tim C]

Hhhmmmm, actually it does try to, doesn't it? However, in a small handful of unscientific tests (typing stuff into this textarea then killing the process) it only managed to successfully restore what I typed 1; the other couple of times it was either what was there previously, or something completely different.

So, it may well restore the bulk of a long-ish message, which is certainly better than nothing. I'm not sure I'd want to rely on it, but then so far I've not had any stability issues, so for me it's a moot point.

Nice to see I was wrong though.

Re:The 9 Reasons

[Onan]

Memory leak: I often run Firefoxes for a whole week long. Yes, you read that correctly. I often just leave important links open when I leave work, then I login back from home and continue useing it, then again tomorrow from work, and so on. After a week it often eats up around half a gigs of memory, true. But really, how many of you do such things?

The only thing impressive about this statement is exactly how far your standards have been lowered. You actually feel that it is incredible or unusual to be able to leave an application running for a week?

When I've been using javascript-heavy sites (eg, google stuff), safari gets a little slow after it's been running for about a month. And I consider that a failing on its part, not something to brag about. The fact that firefox runs for a whole shiny week for you should be a point of shame, not pride.

Memory "leak" (was: Re:The 9 Reasons)

[Richard W.M. Jones]

5). Memory leak: I often run Firefoxes for a whole week long. Yes, you read that correctly. I often just leave important links open when I leave work, then I login back from home and continue useing it, then again tomorrow from work, and so on. After a week it often eats up around half a gigs of memory, true. But really, how many of you do such things ?

Sorry, I'm gonna rant now ...

What, a whole week? My computer (running Ubuntu 6.06LTS) is up all the time. Basically it goes down when there's a power cut. Current uptime is 55 days (reflects the fact that I moved house 55 days ago). X hasn't been restarted in all that time.

Why does Firefox need so much memory to display a few web pages? And why doesn't it at the very least return the memory when I, say, close all but one web page? I mean, I know C++ is an awful computing language to write anything in, and modern languages have garbage collectors, but still there's enough memory checking tools [cprogramming.com] out there so they can catch these memory leaks by now.

Or is it a misguided attempt to "cache" stuff in memory [wordpress.com], which is about the stupidist thing you can do given that today memory is very slow versus processors, so usually it's faster just to recompute what you need when it's needed. Typical C++ programmers wouldn't know that though - they're still reimplementing reference counting [informit.com] on every one of their classes, when a central, optimized garbage collector would be a lot faster [inria.fr].

/rant over

Rich.

Still has problems with ESPN scoreboards

[streak]

Well, it seems like every version of Firefox still has issues with espn.com.
Its definitely the most reliable site to crash and/or generate 100% cpu time on any recent version (1.5.x and 2.0).
Just go browse to one of the scoreboard pages a few times. It really likes to do this on Mac.

Re:Do volunteers care about tracking down memory l

[joto]

Maybe it's because you aren't surfing. If you actually use firefox, instead of simply letting it remain minimized at about:blank for a month, it will quickly use ridiculous amounts of memory. Here it's at 305MB and counting... Oops, just checked, it's now 306MB. And I haven't really done anything apart from writing this in the meantime.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:The 9 Reasons

[Pecisk]

I have to second that. I was very surprised that Firefox 2 restores ALL session - I mean, not only cookies, urls, and that stuff, but WHOLE state. Where you have been logged in, there you are.

For lot of advanced users it is a must. It is whole reason to use FF 2, nevermind other new features.

And yes, FF 2 has bugs. But in contrary of IE, I have NO doubts that sooner or later they will be fixed.

Can we get rid of C please?

[master_p]

The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox

For how long major applications like Firefox will have memory leaks? can we please stop using C altogether and use a decent garbage-collected language like D [digitalmars.com] (there are other languages around, but D is as close to C as possible)...

Re:Firefox is a piece of shit

[Dun Malg]

Nobody has ever accused Slashdot of having intelligence, but I think the average user would consider themselves to be a notch or 2 above average.

The problem with slashdot is that it's essentially six rational adults trying to hold a conversation in the same room with sixty screaming children. Intelligence does not, unfortunately, ensure maturity. Nor does it make one's conclusions correct. The moderation is the side effect of giving power to a bunch of bright children.