Firefox instability driving users away?

Good intentions

When Firefox 1.0 was released, I found my web surfing a little more enjoyable and a lot less worrying. Successive releases and updates seemed to have no negative effect and it was fantastic to see the project making progress in almost every area, including market share. I, like many others, did what I could to aid the progress of this free and OpenSource web browser and raise awareness of it and the features that were setting it apart from it's rivals. However, in recent weeks I have come to dread using it and end up with a text editor sat on one side, to 'swap' any text I may be typing into, should the browser suddenly disappear from my screen.

I add and edit content for another of my websites, via forms and so it can be more than just a little annoying when the browser bombs out and my work is lost. There are also complaints from many users, concerning the resource hogging of Firefox and the strain that it imposes on their system. I don't have this problem as I have plenty of physical RAM, but I don't doubt that it could be a contributing factor in the crash-athon that I am subjected to on a very regular basis. Depending on the websites that I visit, it may happen soon after launching the browser. Frankly, it's not good enough and I would imagine that Microsoft and the IE loving community are rubbing their hands in smug satisfaction.

Gerroff my laaand!!!

So, before I smash my monitor in frustration and anger at having lost yet another 45 minutes of work, I decided that enough was enough and promptly stopped using Firefox 1.5, the latest edition in the series. I only upgraded to 1.5, because 1.0.7 was acting pretty much the same and I thought that the extensive rewrite of core components, might resolve these matters. At least for the time being, I have switched to Mozilla 1.7.12, mainly because it causes me the least disruption. My main requirement, other than general surfing of pages, is to be able to listen to streamed audio and watch streamed video, provided by a paid-for sports service that I subscribe to. They use ms-streaming asf/wma/wmv formats, which is almost enough to stop me using the service altogether, but thanks to mplayer and it's mozilla plugin, I am able to tune in. Although slightly more stable and I do mean slightly, Mozilla also bombs out on me, pretty much on the same web pages that Firefox was bombing out on, so it looks to me like a parsing or rendering problem, or possibly javascript. The sites that will almost always result in a crash are the premiumtv.co.uk set of sites, browsing around Bristol City's website will see you directed to such a site. Various others in the fleet faithfully reproduce this problem. Our local rivals' website also does the same. I found that simply browsing these sites, or often enough just hitting the real (non splash page) content pages, followed by an attempt to browse to another site, say from bookmarks, will usually bomb the browser out. This happens both in Firefox and Mozilla. It's not very impressive, to say the least!

Looking around

I will be looking around for a suitable alternative, but importantly I need to integrate a 'win32' set of audio and video codecs with it, which so far mplayer seems the only thing to do it well enough for my liking. I have heard rumour that this is achieveable using Opera 8.5, which may well prove to be a viable option to me. I'm not massively keen on Opera, due to my memory of their business model. Anybody who adds advertising into the application, doesn't deserve a place on my machine for their binaries and when a 'free' and a paid for version of the same application exist, I tend to get very suspicious indeed. If I could find a graphical web browser for FreeBSD that can incorporate plugin-like integration with mplayer, I'll be more than willing to give it a try. I care little for FlashPlayer, as it can be used for spawning pop-ups and as a result I do not trust it and to be honest I'm also not overly keen on the Java Runtime Environment integration, either. Although I have used these quite extensively in the past, I do not miss out on much, as a result of not having them in place, within my current browsing environment.

It's really disappointing to see this decline in Firefox, which is exactly how I see it. I had hoped that it would make a real difference in the browser market and also add a huge amount of credibility to the OpenSource movement as a whole, but if anything it has been playing into the hands of the big boys like Microsoft and adding fuel to their fires. Personally, I would like to see them (the Firefox people) build a security enhanced version of a previous and more stable release of the browser and recommend that everybody 'downgrade' to it, while the issues in v1.5 are resolved. I'm not the best qualified, technically, to be making such a suggestion, but to me it makes sense and might show real commitment to the users of Firefox, their system stability and security. Come on chaps, sort it out, before you do yourselves and the OpenSource movement some lasting damage and set everything back a couple of years. I am experiencing these issues on FreeBSD, with Firefox 1.0.7 and Firefox 1.5. On my wife's Ubuntu based machine, Firefox 1.0.7 (and only Firefox) completely locks the machine up, when loading. To the extent that it needs the reset button, to get out of it. What is going on and why haven't the Mozilla people come clean about this? Or is there some form of vulnerability that we're not being told about? I have read the claims that these are 'isolated problems', but as far as I am concerned, this is a crock of shite! Isolated? When I am getting major problems on the two latest releases of Firefox and on two completely different operating systems. Isolated? To where? Outside of the Mozilla PR office?

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