Becoming So Unstable It's Practicaly Unusable!

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Becoming So Unstable It's Practicaly Unusable!

Post by Guest »

Okay. What's the deal with Firefox? Three years ago, it was the most stable, easiest-to-use browser on the Web. Today, using my MacBook Pro, I can't get Firefox to last more than an hour without hanging, crashing, or otherwise becoming useless to me. I constantly have to force quite and restart at least once or twice per hour. All of the updates to Firefox have not corrected this problem. Actually, they've made it worse.

I spend a lot of time on MySpace and YouTube. The back-and-froth navigation in these environments seem to cause Firefox endless problems. Why? And what can be done about it? And -- more importantly -- why is this getting worse, not better? My computer is only about eight months old, if that. It's in prime shape. Only Firefox seems to be going downhill.

If this continues I'm going to have to jettison Firefox in favor of another browser.

Also, I don't think users should have to wade through endless threads and poke around in obscure files within the browser's operating system to fix this. We've already wasted time trying to use Firefox. Why put us through more agony by turning us into computer repair technicians? This is ridiculous. I want a simple, quick, easy, and permanent solution to this problem.

So, do I toss Firefox out the window? Or is there a solution to it's incredible instability?

BIll
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DanRaisch
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Location: Somewhere on the right coast

Post by DanRaisch »

The instability is most likely NOT in the application itself but in the user profile. Have you ever tried starting Firefox in Mozilla Safe Mode? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_mode

Or creating a new profile? http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager

Both of those actions might identify the problems as being related to corrupt settings files or extensions/addons.

Also see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diag ... Firefox%29
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the-edmeister
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Joined: February 25th, 2003, 12:51 am
Location: Chicago, IL, USA

Post by the-edmeister »

BIll wrote:We've already wasted time trying to use Firefox.
I'd demand a refund of the original purchase price!

.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Mine has wandered off and I'm out looking for it.
VanillaMozilla
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Joined: November 7th, 2005, 11:26 am

Post by VanillaMozilla »

Bill, that's not normal. Ordinarily runs just fine, and you shouldn't have any problem. However, it is possible to mung it up with addons, which vary greatly in quality. And very occasionally something else goes wrong, but it's easily solved.

The steps DanRaisch gave you should solve the problem. If you are the impatient type, I would suggest just going for the new profile. That should get you running again in about 1 minute. If that doesn't solve it, very rarely one of the program files is not correctly updated or otherwise munged. In that case you can just uninstall it and reinstall it (won't affect your data--no special precautions needed). Be sure you get Firefox from www.mozilla.org , not from some flaky third party.
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