Is Firefox Buggier Than Internet Explorer?

[Johnsie]

My experience with Firefox on Ubuntu has not always been a good one. I find that Firefox crashes quite regularly on all the machines I run Ubuntu on.

What do you guys think?

[Nomearod]

Fire Fox runs really well under Ubuntu here. In windows I don't like to use Fire Fox, so I use Opera, but in Ubuntu I only use Fire Fox.

Don't know why but under Windows, Fire Fox start "shacking" and I really can't read anything... Probably it's a virus ou spyware #-o

[aysiu]

In my experience, Firefox crashing is usually due to buggy or incompatible (with each other) extensions.

When I first started using Firefox, I installed just about every extension I could find. Then I realized those extensions (in combination with one another) were making Firefox a bit unstable.

So now I have a set of just a handful of extensions that I know work well together. No crashing any more.

And I'd take a buggy Firefox over a crippled IE any day.

[Johnsie]

Hmmm maybe I'll have a better look at my extensions. The one that seems to cause the most problems is java and I need that because I'm working on a web accessibility project (java provides decent cross browser text-to-speech capabilites). Our project doesn't IE or Firefox thought becase they are not accessible enough for a blind person to use. I think it's better for the visually impaired to browse simple wml/xml rather than html just cos most sites have a lot of uneccessary crap on them. Anyway, I've gone totally off topic now :-)

[glotz]

The "Java" is not an extension, it's a plugin. Huge difference. And it's infamous for causing problems.

[Kvark]

Java :eek:

I think you have found the problem. I had to learn Java throughly in highschool. I really like the language, it's a true pleasure to work with compared with most other languages. But Sun's Java runtime environment has always been just as slow, buggy, memory leaking and otherwise nasty as an experimental gaming console emulator a 15 year old wrote because he didn't get a real console from santa.

[Simian]

I can only think that it crashes due to extensions. Honhestly firefox never crashes on ubuntu for me and I use it a lot. But I have no extensions.

[nuvo]

Firefox isn't perfect, but it's my browser of choice because it's free, standards compliant and I like it more than Opera.

Internet Explorer 6 is utter garbage.
It cannot render W3C compliant code without hacks, it has an incredibly outdated interface (so, Internet Explorer 7 has tabs... Mozilla Suite had tabs... Years ago), it's insecure (oh look, someone's trying to kill my PC using ActiveX and code hole exploits!) and generally, it doesn't do a very good job of anything.

The Firefox dev team admits that Firefox isn't perfect, but they are doing their best to fix bugs which often show up in such complex applications.
Memory leak issues are known, but it takes time to fix these as well as maintaining the rest of the application.
Firefox isn't just some basic interface wrapped around an ActiveX control like Explorer, it has introduced new concepts such as XUL and interfaces built using web languages such as CSS and JavaScript (XUL itself is a form of XML).

I've had Firefox close on my a few times, but that's most probably caused by having some extensions installed which don't work as well as they should (it's only started doing it since I installed Fasterfox and SessionSaver).

[it.henrik]

I have had some problems with firefox crashing and freezing my system for some minutes .. but that was during "lots of tabs with pdf:s"-browsing. Research isnt good for my trusty ol' firefox.

[jc87]

I think is the other way around , at least according to my personall experience.

[ajgreeny]

No problems with firefox here, nor when I use it on winXP - yes I do boot it up occasionally just to keep up with what it is like and to enable me to help my wife when she needs me to. I only ever use IE6 in winXP to update the system, because you have to do it that way.
Firefox 1.5.0.4 installed on both OSs, with a few extensions I can't manage without such as tabmix plus, cookieculler, googlebar lite,quicknotes, all-in-one gestures, but almost nothing crashes it, just very occasionally on sites with strange plugin requirements, that are not covered by my plugins.

[nocturn]

My experience with Firefox on Ubuntu has not always been a good one. I find that Firefox crashes quite regularly on all the machines I run Ubuntu on.

What do you guys think?

Strange, I have been on Ubuntu since Warty on all my home machines and I think I had 2 FireFox crashes, none since Breezy for sure.

[m0gsi]

Firefox has never appeared buggy to me and i was using firebird before , but i use opera ; Firefox takes to long to load in comparison.

Also i think firefox should as standard give a little red x to close a tab, like opera (i know extensions can do this ) it would make it alot more user friendly.

[Simian]

Also i think firefox should as standard give a little red x to close a tab, like opera (i know extensions can do this ) it would make it alot more user friendly.

Epiphany does that as well. I like prefer it too.

[bruce89]

Epiphany does that as well. I like prefer it too.
Don't bother trying to convert Firefox users, it never works.

[sophtpaw]

Don't bother trying to convert Firefox users, it never works.
Ok, try Opera then;)

[G Morgan]

Don't bother trying to convert Firefox users, it never works.

Theres no reason to switch from Firefox though generally if you are happy with the memory requirements (its not as if they can't be reduced either). As for little x's, I'm happy middle clicking on the tab.

[bruce89]

Ok, try Opera then;)
Even less likely, I like my software free (as in speech). Also, I like to use GTK+ apps, not QT ones. (They look funny in GNOME)

Theres no reason to switch from Firefox though generally if you are happy with the memory requirements (its not as if they can't be reduced either). As for little x's, I'm happy middle clicking on the tab.
I did switch from Firefox to Epiphany, not because of the memory (uses nearly the same amount, gecko based), but mostly because of the bookmark tagging feature.

[Stromham]

well i love firefox, but i hate the random crash's when the window just dissappears or the window on the windows bar dissappears, other than that its great :D

[fluffington]

The only crashes I've had with firefox were either Java's fault or the result of running out of memory. And no, the memory thing was generally not Firefox's fault (I tend to run 400+ tabs, multiple compiles, at least one other OS via VMWare Server, and maybe a 3D render or some other computationally expensive operation at the same time on a fairly regular basis).

IE (which I run via VMWare Server for testing my work) and Konqueror, on the other hand, generally crash about every 5-10 minutes, regardless of what I'm doing. Konqueror has always been extremely stable on other distros I've used, though, so I'm hoping (K)Ubuntu's version will be too whenever I get around installing KDE on this box.

[ahaslam]

In my experience, Firefox crashing is usually due to buggy or incompatible (with each other) extensions.

When I first started using Firefox, I installed just about every extension I could find. Then I realized those extensions (in combination with one another) were making Firefox a bit unstable.

So now I have a set of just a handful of extensions that I know work well together. No crashing any more.

And I'd take a buggy Firefox over a crippled IE any day.
I have no additional extensions and experienced my first FireFox crash today. I wouldn't usually complain, but the only things that have ever crashed my system are 3D games. This is because my particular chipset is not fully supported for hardware 3D acceleration (Via k8m800). See this screen, my systems' resources are hardly being stretched:
11996

Tony.

PS. I never had Internet Explorer crash, but I prefer FireFox and I dislike Windows.

[Lux Perpetua]

I think Firefox has Javascript issues, actually. There are certain sites that crash Firefox reliably here, but they never crash if I disable Javascript.

The same is observed in Epiphany, interestingly enough.

[bruce89]

The same is observed in Epiphany, interestingly enough.
They use the same rendering engine (Gecko), the only difference is the UI.

[Johnsie]

I've found that some sites that use messy html like myspace tend to crash it more than others.

[Ubunted]

The only thing that has ever crashed Firefox for me - under Windows or Linux - was badly-made javascript/flash/Java.

It has been solid as a rock for me since 0.8.

[oyvindaa]

Firefox has always been good and stable for me, on both Linux and Windows.

[bruce89]

I've found that some sites that use messy html like myspace tend to crash it more than others.
That's hardly a Gecko bug, more of a bad HTML issue. MySpace is notorious for bad HTML.

[Lux Perpetua]

That's hardly a Gecko bug, more of a bad HTML issue. MySpace is notorious for bad HTML.Nope, we can't deflect blame here, whatever contempt we may have for MySpace and its unsatisfactory coding. A program should never crash. At worst, it refuses to load whatever you gave it but keeps running so you can continue to work, or it exits gracefully if appropriate (not appropriate here, since there are probably other tabs open). This is definitely a software bug. I don't know enough to say whether the bug is in Gecko or some other part of the program, though (although if Gecko is the only code shared between Epiphany and Firefox, then it does appear to be a Gecko bug).