I’ve been a big proponent of the Firefox browser. I have been using it since it’s pre-release days. And, it has been my browser of choice since release 1.0. Generally, I have upgraded to new releases pretty quickly and have never had a serious issue. In fact, I frequently visit a few online support forums and answer questions about Firefox. Well, all that has changed.
Mozilla (the parent of the Firefox browser) has been working on a new release for several months. I intially downloaded a beta release of 3.5 and was using it. I noticed a couple of anomalies while using it. When loading large pages or streaming pages it would seem to freeze for 5 – 10 seconds. But eventually the page would load.Well, I figured it is a beta release and a few quirks are to be expected. No doubt they will be fixed in the release version.
Well, Firfox 3.5 final was released about 2 weeks ago. I am sorry to say that not only have the freezes not been fixed, they are worse. An example; one of my favorite extensions is ‘CustomizeGoogle’. This extension allows you to stream the results from a Google search. Normally when you do a Google search, it gives you a page with the first 20 results. If you need to see more then you must load a new page. With the CustomizeGoogle extension, it loads the first 20 results, but as you scroll down the results, it automatically loads the next 20, and the next without having to reload the page. It is very convenient when you are not especially good at refining searches (as I am not). Well, with FF 3.5, it would load the first 20, but then it would cause FF to freeze if you tried to scroll down the page. True, I could disable the extension and view Google normally, but it was an inconvenience. Another example; I was trying to load a list of active usenet newsgroups from a usenet server. Now at any given time there are 12 – 17,000 newsgroups on a given server, so the page would have had about 12,000 lines of text. Well, Firefox started loading the page and then froze. The only way to break out was to use Task Manager to kill the process.
I’ve spent an hour or two browsing the Firefox support forums, and this problem is not unique to me. In fact it is a frequent complaint. No viable solutions have been posted except for rolling back to FF 3.0. So I did roll back. My suggestion to you is if you have not upgraded to 3.5, don’t. If you have and you are not experiencing problems, good for you. But, if you are experiencing issues with 3.5, roll back to release 3.0.11.
