Is Firefox on Mac Unusable?

For me, it crashes/hangs much more on Linux, but it usually seems related to some type of alternative media, like clicking on a PDF or a page with a bunch of Flash.

It also does seem to crash occasionally but no more frequently than the linux version (from the ubuntu repos)

I do pull up Firefox to do some web development, but otherwise it's easier to live without the extra bells & whistles lately.

The usual symptom is either the browser stops responding or the styles disappear from a page. If I restart it is ok for another couple of hours.

All in all, very disappointing!

However it has terrible typehandling. when i do web-based email , or even just typing text into form, then try to edit the text, the screen doesn't update properly. i can't believe all the FF fans on Mac aren't all over that. Completely incompetent type handling.

OTOH, never have a problem with Safari.

Ben

Tried Camino, Jeremy?

It's probably the second-best linux browser for Mac. The people who like it mostly seem to be into it for the plugins.

Also I cannot open a second (or more) window unless I have one on the desktop. If I only have FF windows in the dock I have to bring one of them up, open the new one and then send the one back to the dock.

These two issues alone mean I am on the point of dropping FF completely.

also have occasionally had the text input fields not responding problem, but that's way less bothersome than the general slowness.

it's way faster on my linux machine, despite having more extensions installed.

Camino, which uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, is much much better as regards the UI. Don't forget that you can remap any menu entry (of any application) you want to your preferred key bindings through the Keyboard preferences panel (as you may not like the default keybindings if compared to Firefox). Try it ;-)

I've had no crashes, and no other problems with Firefox. I cannot say the same about Safari. For example, with Safari I cannot access my major company brokerage account(asks me to logon again many times) but I can with Firefox. I'm using an iMac Intel Core 2 Duo.

Does anyone know how many Mac Firefox vrs Safari users there are? Actual user numbers may be a better indication of Firefox's reliability and satisfaction.

Camino is a far better choice with the same rendering engine as Firefox. Unless you need the plug-in architecture, this is a no-brainer.

Do you use Firebug? One thing that will help quite a bit: Instead of having Firebug enabled for all sites, *disable* it and then enable it only for the specific sites you want to use it on. Firebug can leak a lot of memory.

Even if it didn't hang constantly, it is just too ugly to deal with on a regular basis

Even if it didn't hang constantly, it is just too ugly to deal with on a regular basis

FF 2 for Win XP seems to be fine, or at least "as good as it gets" on Windows, software-wise.

Hoping the Firefox team have a huge update in the pipes for us Mac users.

Trunk and branch nightlies usually are stable enough for daily use. OTOH, when a bug appears in a nightly, it will hork your browsing experience. I've found them to be pretty stable, but YMMV. Should you try a trunk or branch nightly, be aware they could blow up and make an ugly mess.

Even so, Camino positively rocks for a web-browsing experience. It browses the web without a great deal of fuss or muss, and doesn't try to be all things to all people.

I started doing this because auto-updates I had no choice about frequently broke my extensions. You simply cannot trust the Mozilla guys to maintain backwards compatibility or stability, but have to do your own update testing and change management. They really need to get more professional.

It seems like a handful of extensions/add-ons invariably aggravate any memory leak issues. I generally keep extensions to a minimum on my laptop anyway. Usually only things like firebug, faviconize, foxmarks, and a couple of google maps-related context extensions.

FF does get finicky if left running with a load of tabs, ajax-driven pages that are updating a lot, etc. But this isn't unique to mac. I find that my usual number of browser restarts keeps things in check by itself (1-2x daily).

Under normal usage though it works just great. I haven't seen a crash since 1.x. I've also noticed that Safari seems faster but Firefox has so many more features and extensions that it's still the best choice.

No - I'm not using Firebug. The only plugins I'm using are FlashBlock, FoxyProxy, and UA Switcher. Oh - and my FF doesn't need help hogging the memory. It was getting in the 100MB+ range daily. Sometimes upwards of 300MB or more.

I just upgraded from 1GB to 3GB on my MacBook. Hopefully this isn't a resource issue.

Those comments were from me. I actually just switched over to Camino to test it out and forgot to put in my name and website... I'm so used to not entering it in there....