Now don’t get me wrong - I love Firefox (usually). I use it exclusively. I love the tabs, I love the pop-up blocker and the security; I love the look and feel of it. Bear that in mind before the pile-on starts.
But when it crashes and loses all my settings and bookmarks and saved passwords and histories and extensions and cache, that makes me fucking mad (Ok, obligatory swearing complete, this is now properly pit-worthy). Even IE, that peice of security-hole-ridden junk that I happily abandoned years ago, never did that to me. Losing bookmarks isn’t a big deal; I re-imported them from my backup. But being on dial-up and having your cache wiped out is a serious pain in the butt. Everything now crawls as the images are reloaded; I have to go and remember my passwords to the umpteen sites that I routinely visit. Most of them I don’t remember, so I have to go through the whole “forgot password” thingy again.
So I ask: E tu, Firefox? I trusted thee! I gave my soul to thee! All I asketh in return is that thee back up thy data in such a way that when thy soul gives up the ghost (as all software must occassionally), you KEEP MY FRIGGIN DATA!
I followed Mozilla’s instructions to restore my profile, and nada. No dice. Nothing’s left of my old settings, or else Firefox choked on them and decided they were unpalatable.
In short: I LOVED YOU, FIREFOX! HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME?
grumble, grumble
Btw, I know it’s a sorta lame pitting. But hey, it’s my first time, and baby steps and all that. The flaming may now commence.
From the “too little, too late” category comes “MozBackup”, and from the obligatory “I use (product name here) and I’ve never had it do that to me” category, well… you can guess.
I’ve had it happen to me. Several times. Only with older versions though (knock on wood and all that) – I haven’t experienced that particular problem since the early 1.0 days. I’ve had Firefox crash, but it has yet to take out my personal stuff with it yet.
Even when it did though it wasn’t enough to make me switch back to Exploiter.
A while back I needed a laptop I couldn’t afford, so a very obsolete one was given me. One with a nearly full 80 MB (NO NOT GB) drive, a slow processor, and not much memory.
Firefox was really really slow. Slow to start, slow to switch tabs, and slow to load pages. Also took up a lot of disk space.
So I tried Opera. Seemed to want about 1/3 the resources, and speed was nearly tolerable. Tabs and pop-up blocking work great, which are the two features a firefox lover MUST have. I like the download UI much better than firefox’s.
Opera does seem to have issues with more non-standard pages than firefox, but it gets better each version. Occasionally I do have to resort to IE, but that was the case with firefox as well.
I’m totally with you on this, Dervorin. I love Firefox, usually, but twice now it lost my saved password data, so I’ve also had to painstakingly find the sites and reinstate them, which required doing the whole ‘forgot password’ thing sevaral times. I guess I shouldn’t depend on Firefox to remember my passwords, but I can’t help it, dammit! There are just so many!
Thanks for the link to MozBackup, RumMunkey – hopefully that’ll let me continue to not remember my passwords.
Huh. I haven’t had problems with bookmarks or passwords, but I do have some issues with it.
There is one website in particular that seems to give Firefox fits. At random points, it will just start to eat more and more memory. The hard drive runs constantly and everything else slows to a crawl. Well, I’d heard Firefox had memory leak issues, and I figured out which website was causing it in my instance. Whatever, no biggie.
What pisses me off is that Firefox will randomly disappear from my taskbar. WTF? It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and now I keep Task Manager open to “refresh” the taskbar when needed. I figured this was a rather glaring and fairly obvious bug that would be fixed shortly, but umpteen updates later, still no joy.
Given the hype, I’m disappointed. Still (marginally) better than IE, though.
That’s a bit of a pain, but you don’t need Task Manager. Just press Alt-Tab (keeping Alt pressed) to cycle through open applications, and when you get to FF, release Alt. Viola! The return of the button.
Well, to my knowledge, Firefox has never had a bug in which viewing an image could give your computer a virus. I don’t trust Microsoft not to make such an enormous fuck up again.
Bwa-hahahahahaha!! Yes, I need Grief Counseling! Take away my PAIN!!
Incidentally, Kevbo, how on earth did you run FF on an 80MB drive? I can’t think of any installation of Windows (post-95, that is) that would even install on that, let alone leave space for applications. 800MB, perhaps?
Upon encountering a Java app that the currently installed Java-doohickymajig can’t run (the little coffe-cup icon appears in the toolbar), it doesn’t simply report an error.
No, the whole friggin thing locks up completely, requiring me to task-kill the entire thing.
Just update to the latest Java version, you say? Well, it’s a corporate install of Firefox that is locked down by admin so I can’t update, yet many of the internal corporate websites are developed in non-firefox-friendly IE environments, and only work in IE, despit admin pusing Firefox as the corporate desktop standard.
So I have to task-kill the cute little orange weasel a half-dozen times a day.
