I've liked FF, but yesterday I officially switched to Chrome. I don't think it's going to be a perfectly smooth switch, but I felt I had no choice.
The stability of FF has been dismal lately. This is largely a memory issue: my system starts to bog down if I leave FF running too long, so I have to restart it at least once a day. But more recently, it hasn't been able to survive more than a couple of hours. It will randomly "tear off" a tab, and then freeze itself using 100% of one CPU core, and must be killed. I assume this is a badly-behaved extension, since I haven't heard the world screaming about it, but I haven't been able to determine which one it is.
It must be an extension, especially given the recent release of Firefox 7 and its vastly improved long-term memory usage situation.
Anecdotally, I routinely have around 100 tabs open and Firefox runs for days on end, if not weeks. It only gets closed for OS updates requiring a restart.
Oddly, I also recently switched to chrome. Firefox started randomly freezing up. Sadly, it looks like some corner-cases have slipped through the FF quality control now that they are releasing faster.
I notice that Firefox 7 has gone to 7.01 today. What's changed? It doesn't seem to have helped me.
Agreed.. I restart FF maybe once a week and most of the time it's sitting open with 10-15 tabs. If you're having stability issues with FF it's a plugin IMO.
I'm sure it is an extension. The thing is, I can't easily figure out which one. Since it takes a couple of hours for the problem to occur, it's too much of a big deal to try a binary search of all extensions to figure it out.
Compare to Chrome, which has its own task manager, which shows CPU and RAM usage of each extension.
I remember reading that FF now has something similar. It might be in the nightly or a plugin or something though. Unfortunately I can't find it now :( Sorry
The stability of FF has been dismal lately. This is largely a memory issue: my system starts to bog down if I leave FF running too long, so I have to restart it at least once a day. But more recently, it hasn't been able to survive more than a couple of hours. It will randomly "tear off" a tab, and then freeze itself using 100% of one CPU core, and must be killed. I assume this is a badly-behaved extension, since I haven't heard the world screaming about it, but I haven't been able to determine which one it is.