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The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 7, 2006 21:21 UTC (Wed) by h2 (guest, #27965)
In reply to: The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy by mlinksva
Parent article: The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

downsides are absolutely horrible memory handling, on each new firefox install I have to go in manually and set about:config to only store a cached version of the last page or two. Also turning off prefetch, which is another really bad thing to have as default, it causes all kinds of little problems. That should not have been a default setting.

There are other fixes that avoid firefox 1.5 eating up a huge chunk of your available ram, none of which should have been necessary, and none of which are applicable without doing manual about:config changes.

The gnome simple user interface coupled with limited gui user configuration options coupled with highly questionable default option choices disease seems to have crept into 1.5 to an unfortunate degree.

While I have used mozilla/phoenix/firebird/firefox since each version has come out as my default, the 1.5 had by far the most serious issues, and the worst default options, it's not uncommon to read reports of 1.5 munching upto 1/2 a gig of ram for example, that's simply absurd.

The way firefox tried to speed up page loads and history back was truly sad, when you compare it to say opera, it was just something that should not have been allowed out.

Still use firefox on linux as my default, but it was only because Konqueror did not have the same extension capability, it wasn't for firefox itself, I'd much rather use konqueror on linux if I could have the same extensions, but the extensions save firefox in this case.


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The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 7, 2006 21:40 UTC (Wed) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

I feel you. But I do great without extensions, so I use Konqueror
exclusively.

I could swear that Konqueror history sped up in 3.5.3, but maybe it was
just subliminal. In any case, Konqueror's history has always been
_faster_ for me than Firefox's (as well as Konqueror's rendering and
startup), so Firefox eating boatloads more memory seems silly (not to
mention the disturbing appearance that all the early claims of Firefox
being more secure than Internet Explorer appear, to my eyes anyway,
completely false).

One of the nice things about the KDE4/Qt4 efforts is that we're likely to
see apps like Konqueror ported over to Windows. I don't personally care
since I don't use the proprietary OS, but having an open source browser
as awesome as Konq available on Windows means more mainstream competition
for Firefox, which will hopefully force them to get their act together.

The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 7, 2006 21:50 UTC (Wed) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link]

I use a lot of extensions, i depend on them for development, konqueror as a base is better I think than firefox as a base, but the extensions just can't be matched, that's because konqueror extensions have to be done in c or c++, can't remember which, they don't have an extension scripting language like firefox has. Currently only adblock is ported. Which is great, but it's not good enough, sadly.

Konqueror really benefited from the applewebkit upgrades of safari in khtml, no doubt about that, it's very solid now.

I don't know where you got that idea about firefox vs MSIE, that's just some MS spin you fell for, firefox does not have active x, which is a core access to the OS. Firefox will never have that, so firefox will never have that deep level vulnerability. Firefox has vulnerabilities, and if you read them carefully, most are not very serious, not like somebody tricking active x to install a rootkit into windows. No firefox user I have switched from MSIE has experienced ANY spyware infections. All MSIE users have these, no matter what MS does to try to stop it. XP SP 2 did not succeed in securing it, nothing MS has done has succeeded, because MSIE is insecure by design, it can never resolve that issue as long as active x exists.

The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 8, 2006 10:44 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Konqueror extensions (KParts) are C++ (although of course you can write most of them in any language GCC can handle and specifically any language there are KParts bindings for).

It wouldn't be too terribly difficult to write a scripting language KPart, but there are security concerns: Konqueror can do anything KDE can do...

The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 7, 2006 21:50 UTC (Wed) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

In some ways version 0.9.3 was the high-water mark for Firefox (except for the security issues, of course). IIRC that was last release without that damnable search bar on the bottom of the window, and it didn't seem to crash too much.

Search bar

Posted Jun 7, 2006 21:56 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Hey, I like the search bar at the bottom! I can finally search for stuff without the dialog blocking what I was trying to find...

Crashes are a pain, though; Firefox has seemed a bit wobbly for a while now.

Search bar

Posted Jun 8, 2006 2:11 UTC (Thu) by Mithrandir (subscriber, #3031) [Link]

Most of the destabilisation I've noticed seems to be related to upgrades not playing so nicely with your old profile. If you're seeing a lot of crashes often you can improve things by moving away your old profile directory (in .mozilla/firefox on my box), then opening firefox to create a new profile, then copying back the important stuff from your old profile.

Firefox still won't be completely stable, but it helps.

Search bar

Posted Jun 8, 2006 12:20 UTC (Thu) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

Agreed regarding the search bar. Also, because the pop-up was specified in a particular fashion (some kind-of window ownership relation I forget the details of) with something like the ion window manager it was impossible to move the pop-up window out of the way of whatever it was obscuring.

Search bar

Posted Jun 8, 2006 14:15 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

Hey, I like the search bar at the bottom!
I had 0.9.3 configured to use vi keystrokes, so I could search with "/" and "n" without the dialog window getting in the way.

I have configured the search bar to use "/", but "n" doesn't work (and I find "F3" to be very Windows-like), and it seems to have focus problems which I have not been able to pin down. Sometimes I press "/" and start typing, the search bar doesn't pop, and the text goes to /dev/null, or some other useless place. I have to grab the mouse and click on the client area, and start over. I'm wondering if this is somehow related to using "focus follows pointer" on my window manager...

The problem of Firefox in Ubuntu Breezy

Posted Jun 8, 2006 9:18 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

How about using SeaMonkey? It's what I do, because the Firefox developers obviously target a user group where I'm not in. One can always just install the Browser component, if one wants a smaller installation.

Cheers, Joachim

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