You mean FireFox 3 Beta 4. ;)

(Reply) (Thread)

I assume so, but I'm sure he'll be able to say the same about FF4b4 in a couple of years when they're done rewriting everything again. There seem to be no plans for making the hard CPU intensive bits of the Mozilla platform multithreaded. I have four cpus! By the time FF4 comes out I'll have eight or sixteen!

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

Yeah, whoops. When I originally wrote "Firefox 4", I meant "Firefox 3b4".

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

I switched to Camino a long time ago... but I don't use any fancy plugins so I wasn't already invested in FireFox in any way.

(Reply) (Thread)

Is Firefox your preferred browser in Linux or would you recommend a better one?

(Reply) (Thread)

What else is there? :(

Yeah, I use Firefox on Linux. On a Mac I tend to use Camino or Safari.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

I use Opera; it occasionally sucks less, though sometimes things don't work.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

Issue must be Mac-only, then? Never seen it before on any version.

I'm very happy with FF3B4, really. It took me a while to get my extensions working successfully (a combination of figuring out which ones were _really_ incompatible, and which just had a too-low MaxVersion).

Their "secure updates only" for extensions change has me a bit miffed, but the reasoning behind it is good, in general. (I realize you can turn it off, but then you're presented with that stupid "YOU IDIOT, TURN THAT BACK ON" bar at the top of the add-ons dialog for the rest of eternity.)

(Reply) (Thread)

Hmm, the plugins comment has me wondering about extensions: If you have any extensions installed (I'd be surprised if you didn't), do you still get the beachball behavior when you disable all of them? Kinduva shot in the dark, but easy enough to test. As best I can recall, I have rarely gotten the beachball, even in poor Wifi conditions. Although it's also possible that I've just developed a blindspot.

Just trying to address the problem itself, rather than adding to the bitchfest.

(Reply) (Thread)

No extensions. Extensions are the fool's game. Quickest way to make FF suck.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

Its not just windows. My FF 3 B 4 on XP will hourglass when I am using Pandora Internet radio.

(Reply) (Thread)

Say a little prayer for fixed ALT tags display, too. I can never read the full tags on the xkcd comics. :-(

(Reply) (Thread) (Expand)

Woohoo, great news! (Actually not so much since my Shredinger cat wen...

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

you get what you pay for...
also their bug fixing track record is not that stellar, not to mention their security

(Reply) (Thread)

Do you get waht you pay for with IE, Opera and Safari as well?

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

(Reply) (Thread)

Seriously! WTF!

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

So when you are hating on Firefox, what do you use as a default browser in OSX?

(Reply) (Thread) (Expand)

Camino and/or Safari.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)

It's amazing how many things on OS X just freeze EVERYTHING this way. It feels like there's one thread and the rest of them all went out to lunch. Especially during I/O and network operations, where the damned thing blocks like Windows 3.1 with Trumpet Winsock and a goose.

Between that and the window manager doing aleatory focus management, I'm having a really hard time with my girlfriend lately.

(Reply) (Thread)

Well, I'm glad I have an explanation for the beach-balling, finally!

(Reply) (Thread)

I actually loled at the pic of Firefox shitting its image cache. Man, memories...

(Reply) (Thread)

Ah, sweet memories of Netscape 4 on the old Macintosh System Software, where it'd block the entire system while thinking about how to render a page.

(Reply) (Thread)

Such an impressive string of buzz-words and ignorant generalizations. Say "beach-balling" one more time on this thread and maybe it'll catch on in some other jerk's lexicon.

GAWD

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread)

I also love firefox but it can get crappy at times I dont get it. eh..go figure..

(Reply) (Thread)

Just use Lynx.

(Reply) (Thread)

Is this the issue you're talking about? I have this problem all the time, but it sounds like they're making headway on it? Slow and steady I guess.

(Reply) (Thread)

Um, can I just say I love you for writing this? Seriously, on XP and in Linux, I was all about the Firefox love - but for the last seven months that I've been on my MacBook fulltime, it's Safari/Camino, except when I absolutely have to use Firefox -- and trust me, I'd love to make Firefox my default browser -- but the beachball issues fucking kill that. Not to mention, I'm still essentially forced to use the memory leaking POS that is FF2 because even in FF3b4, it still doesn't work with the CMS backend I use for what is quickly becoming my day job (school/schmool), Safari doesn't work with that backend period and Camino is give or take. And I thought it was the CMS, but I talked to those guys extensively at SXSW and it isn't them -- it's Mozilla. And Mozilla doesn't care enough to fix it. GRR.

(Reply) (Thread)

I can't believe yr 2000 was EIGHT YEARS AGO!!!

(Reply) (Thread)

I've been using Firefox trunk on Mac for over a year, and I've never seen a problem like this. My wifi connection is frequently slow and flaky, so if this were a universal problem, I think I would have encountered it. I've also been triaging bug reports for several years and have never heard of a problem like this.

Since not everyone sees this, I think a detailed bug report -- one we can use to reproduce the bug you're seeing -- would be more useful than a rant for getting it solved.

Are you using a proxy? Does this only happen when you are loading specific sites?

(Reply) (Thread)

After posting this, dozens of people have replied to me privately or in person, saying, "Phew, it's not just me. I always wondered why Firefox hung so often."

Most notable with EVDO + Cisco VPN + HTTP proxy selected by a .pac file.

(Reply) (Parent) (Thread) (Expand)