Friday, June 10, 2011

Upgrading to Firefox 4 was a mistake!

I use three different browsers, Opera, Chrome and Firefox. The one I use the most is of course the stable FF with all its wonderful add ons/extensions. While surfing the web using FF recently, a pop up asked me if I wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest, FF 4 so I thought why not… clicked yes, downloaded the new version that Mozilla claims to be “6x faster than FF 3.”

At first, I didn’t like how everything in the menu bar was now placed under one single menu button (think windows start button) but the new version quickly grew on me… until it started crashing. It crashed so many times, seemingly at random times but it crashed the most when I had too many tabs opened. I thought I had downloaded a beta version but no, I had the stable release! The frequency of crashes became so ridiculous I had to uninstall it and go back to the old, stable release.

A quick google of the phrase “Firefox 4 sucks” or “firefox 4 crashes” turns up an astonishing amount of FF 4 hate! Thankfully, one can still download the old releases here:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-older.html

So why do I use 3 browsers? I like Opera’s TURBO feature cos sometimes (actually many times!) my internet slows to a crawl and O’s turbo feature greatly speeds up page loads. I also like its download manager. I use Chrome when browsing certain websites that seem to appear better in it (mostly Google related websites like gmail etc. or when I’m playing certain online flash games and need to be logged into two different games at the same time, otherwise, I just use FF.

I used to use Flock a lot mainly because it had Social media features integrated into the browser  but the best thing about Flock was that FF extensions worked and it had a very useful Flickr and Facebook uploader. Then Flock switched to Chrome and it stopped support for Flock FF version. Last nail in its coffin came when they were bought by Zynga, the online game maker. Now Flock is no more.

Anyway, I’m back to using FF 3.6 so yay, no more crashes! xD

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