# Firefox



## Digitalpotato (Feb 15, 2008)

Alright, so I'm having problems with Firefox. Simply put, on my desktop, it's crashing like a little kid playing Grand Theft Auto. This only started happening recently - well fairly recently, it started around Christmas and it's kept randomly crashing and freezing up like Internet Explorer (Sometimes called Idiot Exploder as a joke) used to in the years before I switched over. 


I've reinstalled Firefox several times, but all times it continues to just crash. It's not just one crash and then it's done, it's more like it crashes once, start a new session, it crashes again, does it again, and then it stops for an hour or so, then crashes again. 

Do I have a program that hates Firefox? I'm pretty sure it isn't STEAM. I've had STEAM regrettably on my computer since 2006 and it's never given me any problems except to make it boot really slowly. iTunes has never given me any problems.

Is it Pidgin and/or Skype? I usually ahve them running and these problems didn't start until around the time Installed them. 

QuickTime (Which should be called QuitTime) also tends to make Firefox crash. 
Does Firefox version 3 fix any of these problems or do I need to find something that doesn't rapidly crash?


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## Ron Overdrive (Feb 15, 2008)

Did you install any addons around then?


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## Digitalpotato (Feb 15, 2008)

Ron Overdrive said:
			
		

> Did you install any addons around then?



No, I haven't added any Addons.


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## Eevee (Feb 15, 2008)

I've heard similar complaints about 2.0.0.11.  Could try using beta 3.


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## Ron Overdrive (Feb 15, 2008)

Eevee said:
			
		

> I've heard similar complaints about 2.0.0.11.  Could try using beta 3.



Aren't we using 2.0.0.12 now though?


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## Eevee (Feb 16, 2008)

Didn't .11 come out around Christmas, though?


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## Ron Overdrive (Feb 16, 2008)

.12 came out a few days ago I think. I know .12 is what I'm running on.


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## Rhainor (Feb 16, 2008)

Yup, v2.0.0.12 came out a week into February.  Here's part of the .12-specific release notes from the official site:



> *Release Date:*
> February 7, 2008
> *Security & Stability Update:*
> This release fixes a number of security and stability issues discovered in Firefox 2.0.0.11. A list of fixed security issues is available.


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## Janglur (Feb 16, 2008)

I ended up with so many issues with Firefox I finally abandoned it.  For the browser that screams "IE doesn't follow standards!" so loudly, it sure does a lousy damn job itself.  Plus it has got to be the most resource intensive browser in existance.   Thing chomps almost 200MB of RAM on startup and just slowly grows until you shut it down entirely.


I use Opera now.  No problems with it, yet.


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## Coffee (Feb 16, 2008)

I had a nightmare getting quicktime working with FF. 

But Hell if I know.


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## Rhainor (Feb 17, 2008)

Janglur said:
			
		

> I ended up with so many issues with Firefox I finally abandoned it.  For the browser that screams "IE doesn't follow standards!" so loudly, it sure does a lousy damn job itself.  Plus it has got to be the most resource intensive browser in existance.   Thing chomps almost 200MB of RAM on startup and just slowly grows until you shut it down entirely.



Uh, either you had a fuckton of extensions, or something was wrong.  My Firefox right now is using 130MB of RAM, and that's after it's been running for over two hours.  At startup, it's always below 100MB.

As for standards-compliance, compare the Acid2 test results from Firefox and IE7.  Neither of 'em render it correctly, but Firefox comes a *hell* of a lot closer than IE.


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## Huey (Feb 17, 2008)

Expanding upon what the previous poster said, Firefox is a memory hog. One advantage of this is that it is good at telling you that one or more of your memory sticks has gone bad. Unfortunately, it does this by crashing itself. Memory sticks go bad regularly and cause all sorts of strange problems when they do - especially with memory-hogging programs. They are, however, easy to replace.

Go to http://www.memtest.org/ and follow their directions. Memtest is a memory diagnostic program designed to find problems in your RAM. The program will plainly show any glitches that are present because it is a very thorough diagnostic. If you have more than one stick of RAM, you may have to isolate them to figure out which has gone bad. If indeed one or more memory sticks has gone bad, then I'm 99% certain that they're what's causing your crashes. Yank/replace them and you should be good to go.


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## Ceceil Felias (Feb 17, 2008)

Haha. I've been running Opera for days, oftentimes with enough tabs to make their own names almost unintelligible from the lack of space, and I've never seen it go above 150MB in consumption. It's just 100 right now, and is usually just 20MBs on startup.

Firefox has a massive memory leak issue. Why they still haven't pinpointed it and fixed it is beyond me.


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## Eevee (Feb 17, 2008)

Janglur said:
			
		

> For the browser that screams "IE doesn't follow standards!" so loudly, it sure does a lousy damn job itself.


What standards-compliance issues have you had with Firefox?



			
				Janglur said:
			
		

> Plus it has got to be the most resource intensive browser in existance.   Thing chomps almost 200MB of RAM on startup and just slowly grows until you shut it down entirely.


What on earth are you doing to get 200MB taken on startup?  Reloading 80 tabs on startup doesn't count.



			
				Ceceil Felias said:
			
		

> Firefox has a massive memory leak issue. Why they still haven't pinpointed it and fixed it is beyond me.


Well, hey, the source is freely available.  Knock yourself out.  You may find, though, that memory usage is slightly more complicated an issue than hunting down "the leak", whatever that is, and fixing one line somewhere.

I'm not sure when you expected this miraculous fix to appear, either, since there has not been a major release in a year and a half.  You could always try Firefox 3 beta 3 to see if it has improved.


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## Digitalpotato (Feb 18, 2008)

Alright, I'm going to try this...

...I'm gonna try Opera, and then Firefox 3 Beta 3. Already, I'm leaning towards opera. I had twice the amount of tabs open on Opera and it didn't even take up half the amount of RAM that Firefox was taking up last night. But then again one window of Opera crashed and the other one worked just fine.  

Perhaps I am having a Virus? Whenever I run adaware I always seem to have the exact same viruses that all pop up within two or three seconds. Norton Antivirus scan also seems to miss many viruses wheneer I run that. 

(Keep in mind I am a complete absolute Computer Retard here - I only get computers to do what I want them to do. I don't even have that new OS on my MacBook)


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## HaTcH (Feb 22, 2008)

Firefox does some stuff where even when you close a tab, you can still re-visit it. Now, I dont know if it keeps the whole page around or not, but my guess is more than a memory leak, its doing this on purpose. I could care less, as I have 2 gigs of memory anyway. As far as I know, it caches things in memory, then writes it to disk later. It's more 'hard drive' friendly that way, versus IE which just copies the internet to separate files in its cache constantly.


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## kitetsu (Feb 22, 2008)

> I could care less, as I have 2 gigs of memory anyway.



Hey, spare a thought for a 256MB user, would you?


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## HaTcH (Feb 22, 2008)

Eeeewww. RAM is cheap get some! 

I can proudly say, every computer in my house has *atleast* 512mb


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## kitetsu (Feb 22, 2008)

That would've been extremely easy if i knew what RAM even looks like, and what the requirements are.


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## Ceceil Felias (Feb 23, 2008)

HaTcH said:
			
		

> Eeeewww. RAM is cheap get some!
> 
> I can proudly say, every computer in my house has *atleast* 512mb


Pff. DDR2 may be cheap, but the previous generations aren't getting any better in price. If Kitetsu has just 256MBs, he probably has DDR or perhaps even just plain SDRAM (which is even worse pricewise). I've never, ever heard of a prebuilt system with only 256MBs of DDR2.

EDIT: ...Wait.



			
				Digitalpotato said:
			
		

> [ ... ] Norton Antivirus scan also seems to miss many viruses wheneer I run that. [ ... ]


Waitwaitwait, WHAT? Norton!? Drop that shit like a bad habit. D: My recommendation is to use any combination of AVG or Avast, free or full depending on whether or not you want to shell out the money (I mean, you do have Norton).


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## Ron Overdrive (Feb 23, 2008)

Ceceil Felias said:
			
		

> Digitalpotato said:
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Agreed. Norton WAS good back in the day now its over bloated crap. Another good AV is ClamWin. Its based off of the Linux version ClamAV which is used commonly on email servers to filter out email viruses, but it detects and cleans up alot more. Only problem with it is you have to schedule the scans or do them manually as there's not active scan yet.


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## Digitalpotato (Feb 23, 2008)

Avast? I got avast running in the background of my computer.


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## Ceceil Felias (Feb 23, 2008)

Ron Overdrive said:
			
		

> Ceceil Felias said:
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As much as I support an open-source antivirus solution myself, I've been hearing crap from others that Clam's less than satisfactory. I'll still be installing it on my server box, and probably work out a method to have it do an immediate scan of any uploaded files (for the sake of minimizing spread, not actually preventing the server from getting viruses ), but ClamWin... Eh, as a secondary solution, I'm sure it'd serve some purpose even still.


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## Eevee (Feb 23, 2008)

I've never run anti-virus software.  Ever.

I have also never had a virus.  Ever.


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## kitetsu (Feb 23, 2008)

You sure? A friend of mine had to kidnap my PC after he found that i had more than 10 of them because i didn't have an anti-virus software for a long period.


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## XeNoX (Feb 23, 2008)

Eevee said:
			
		

> I've never run anti-virus software.  Ever.
> 
> I have also never had a virus.  Ever.



how do you even know if you never checked :wink:


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## Ceceil Felias (Feb 24, 2008)

XeNoX said:
			
		

> Eevee said:
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(http://www.xkcd.com/272/)

At least that's what I'm assuming. It's either that or he maintains a very secure Windows system, in which case I can agree with him that I've never needed an antivirus program except when checking warez -- not that it makes him any "cooler" or "better", it just makes him look silly for not taking a single precaution in the event that *GASP* HE MIGHT BE WRONG! But that's only in the latter case.

Also, back on the ClamWin front, I forgot to mention that I noticed it picks quite a few false positives in addition. :x Either way, my money's more on AVG -- it's just that if you end up running a server that deals with file transfers, it might be wise to devote ClamAV to scanning incoming ones.


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## jayhusky (Feb 24, 2008)

Ceceil Felias said:
			
		

> HaTcH said:
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My old desktop had only 128mb of DDR2 RAM and that was pre loaded
My laptop however has a comfy 1GB of DDR2 RAM so I now often use the laptop.

Going Back to Norton for a moment, I had them for a about 9 months and they let so many viruses in I had the computer fixed about 5 times.

Now I use AVG and McAfee for AV and IE and FireFox Portable  for browsers.


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## greg-the-fox (Feb 24, 2008)

I like firefox a lot, even though it does occasionally have some problems, but you can always restore your session if it crashes. And I love the tabbed browsing, I never have more than one window open like I used to.


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## yak (Feb 24, 2008)

Two hours worth of statistics on FA show that Firebox is the most preferred browser of our users, despite all of it's shortcomings


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## CyberFoxx (Feb 24, 2008)

I'm wondering of those Konqueror hits are just me. ^_^


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## Eevee (Feb 25, 2008)

Ceceil Felias said:
			
		

> (http://www.xkcd.com/272/)


As much as I enjoy motorcycling away, alas, no.



			
				Ceceil Felias said:
			
		

> It's either that or he maintains a very secure Windows system


I'm behind a router with UPnP disabled, and I'm not an idiot.  Nothing more has ever been required.



			
				Ceceil Felias said:
			
		

> not that it makes him any "cooler" or "better", it just makes him look silly for not taking a single precaution in the event that *GASP* HE MIGHT BE WRONG! But that's only in the latter case.


Most antivirus software I've seen is more invasive and more of a tax on my system than most viruses I've seen.  Moreover, if all that overkill misses even a single new infection -- and I've yet to hear of any 100% all the time stats -- then it was all for naught anyway.  Given that I have never had a problem with malware (and do scan manually once in a while) I don't think it's quite worth it.


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## rexar (Feb 25, 2008)

This is my main complaint about firefox:

   PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP       
  1793 rexar     273M  183M sleep   50    0  21:02:33 4.9% firefox-bin/9

I restarted it recently.  If I leave it up for a month or so, it gets pretty nasty.  Just because this workstation has four gigabytes of RAM does not mean I want Firefox to have an 1/8 of it; availability of RAM is not an excuse for memory leaks.

Beta 3 was much better about that, last I checked, however.  I appreciate that somebody is fixing that, rather than just saying "buy more RAM".


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## Eevee (Feb 25, 2008)

It's not so much "a leak" as architectural problems within the original Netscape code, which was not really intended to have a myriad of tabs open and never be closed.  Fixing that is a lot more complicated than adding a free(foo); somewhere.

It could also not be fixed in Firefox 2 as there were no major architectural changes for 2; it was a branch release and backend work was going into trunk, from which 3 is being released.  3 has a good two years' worth of memory, performance, and standards compatibility work in it over 2.


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## Xenofur (Mar 2, 2008)

XeNoX said:
			
		

> Eevee said:
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Simple, there's two very definite ways of determining whether you have a virus or not without even as much as touching an antivirus program:

1. Network activity. If you're doing nothing and there's shit going through your line, good probability of being infected. Helps to have a program that tells you the bandwidth use of each program on your box individually.

2. Processes running. Always know exactly what is running on your computer, from which directory it is running and what started it. Process Explorer, there is not a single excuse for not knowing every single task on your computer.

As for avoiding virii... There is one single completely 100% safe way of doing it:
Don't be a gullible idiot.
I could expound on this, but everyone who knows computer security knows what i mean when i say this.

[/derails]


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## Eevee (Mar 2, 2008)

I stare at process managers frequently too, but I didn't mention that because I figured some smartass would bring up cloaking and I don't know if that affects Process Explorer as it affects Task Manager  8)


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## Xenofur (Mar 2, 2008)

cloaking doesn't work with process explorer. :3


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## Eevee (Mar 2, 2008)

Then ^4 we are super awesome.


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## yak (Mar 2, 2008)

Xenofur said:
			
		

> 1. Network activity. If you're doing nothing and there's shit going through your line, good probability of being infected. Helps to have a program that tells you the bandwidth use of each program on your box individually.


`TCPView` from Sysinternals



			
				Xenofur said:
			
		

> 2. Processes running. Always know exactly what is running on your computer, from which directory it is running and what started it. Process Explorer, there is not a single excuse for not knowing every single task on your computer.


<3

I would also like to add `Autoruns`to the list.


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## Xenofur (Mar 2, 2008)

yak said:
			
		

> `TCPView` from Sysinternals


ok, wow, i didn't even know about that. have been using www.netlimiter.com to analyze if i thought something was odd and www.dumeter.com as a means to get early warnings.





			
				yak said:
			
		

> <3
> 
> I would also like to add `Autoruns`to the list.


yes, it's love AND helps boot faster.


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