Why are Firefox programmers making it a memory eater?

[turbo]

As turbo-1 said, each OS has it's strengths and weaknesses and my Mac experience has been quite favorable.

I had never been a fan of Commodore, but a friend of mine who is a musician and graphics artist impressed the hell out of me with stuff he could make on his Amiga. Not too long after, a company in coastal Maine used banks of Amigas in parallel (an array called the Video Toaster) to create the eye-popping graphics used in Babylon 5. Every computing device has a use, and some of them are really great at what they do. My first "portable" PC was a suitcase with a tiny green CRT, running CP/M. It was pricey, but since I was writing and distributing accounting application software at the time, it was a necessary expense.

 

[Chi Meson]

From my user experience, the old versions of the Mac OS (pre-OS-X) were the most crash-prone operating system I ever used, even more unstable than Windows 95.

Virtual memory was the issue. If the pre-OSX Mac did not have the maximum possible RAM installed, then it had "issues."

I'm working on my brand-new 24" iMac. It's my fourth iMac since 1999. I'm biased. Sue me.

 

[Moonbear]

Are we talking about software crashing (i.e., program shutting down unexpectedly), computer freezes where it becomes unresponsive, or computer crashes (i.e., blue screen of death)? I've only gotten those blue screens of death on versions of windows older than XP and maybe once on XP. Freezes happen as soon as I open too many things at once on a PC. I haven't had freezes on my mac. Software crashes I get on both, though with less frequency on my mac than I did on the PC, and yeah, pretty much limited to the browsers and Flash intensive sites.

Though, I'm not pleased with something in my current Mac...they've apparently monkeyed around with the video chips and something is not working right when running Snow Leopard and connecting to an external monitor for several of us who got new mac laptops around the same time. Our IT guy hasn't found a fix, and doesn't think there is one yet, but said he's found that a lot of people are having the same issues. It's the first time I've had a real problem with a Mac, but then, I also don't usually upgrade my OS so early after release for any computer. This time I did because it provided better functionality between Mail and our university mail servers so I could stop using Entourage, which I despise (that's supposed to be the Mac version of Outlook, but it's not and loses a lot of the functionality that Outlook offers).

I do suspect a lot of it really has to do with hardware too, and not necessarily Windows. I've seen some people with PC laptops that really don't have issues. The problem I have is I work for a university, which means I have to order computers from the places we have educational contracts, so basically, they force everyone to buy Dell P(O)Cs. The hardware is horridly unstable in those. If they actually let us buy quality hardware, the PCs would probably be comparable in cost to Macs, but for now, our choices are Dell or Mac, so of course it makes sense to go with Macs, which usually work better than Dells (one new video chip notwithstanding).

 

[Dembadon]

Have you removed the programs other than Adobe and MS Office to see which is causing the problem?

Out of that list, AVG is the only one that I could see being the program which is crashing Windows Explorer. I did not have any issues with AVG in XP (SP3). In Vista, though, there have been quite a few occasions where AVG would stop responding and require me to perform the 'Ctrl+Alt+Del' -> 'End Task' routine.

putty is the telnet/ssh client we used to access our infrastructure devices and does not run in the background. 3CDaemon and tftpd are both file transfer programs we use and also do not run in the background. ImgBurn has never crashed on me.

In other words, the error occurs when the programs I mentioned are not up and running and each of those programs (aside from AVG) do not have running processes which could fail.

I hate the thought of having to go back to Norton.

 

[Moonbear]

Virtual memory was the issue. If the pre-OSX Mac did not have the maximum possible RAM installed, then it had "issues."

Oh, I completely agree, Macs in the pre-OSX era were horrendous, and never came with enough RAM to run right. Of course, that was in the days of Windows 3.11 and 95-98. I never had problems with Windows 3.11, and that was back when there was only one shared computer for an entire lab of people, so if there was a chance of someone screwing up a computer, it was doomed to happen. I started having PC problems with Windows 95, and then Windows 98 came out and got even worse. That's around when Mac OSX came out (or was it Windows 2000 it came out with?...it was sometime near Y2K) and the balance for me tipped in favor of Macs. I think most of the issues I had with Win XP were hardware, not software related, but Macs were still consistently stable for me. I have never tried Vista...some seem to love it, some seem to hate it, and I got the impression it was highly dependent on what peripherals you were using with it. I've heard some positive comments from people installing Windows 7 though, while I'm now starting to have these issues with Snow Leopard that I hope get fixed soon. So, who knows?

I know which platform I LIKE using best, but in terms of performance, I do switch back and forth between Macs and PCs (since I have a functioning PC laptop, I didn't bother to take up space installing Windows on my Mac) and use each for the applications they are strongest for. For working with lots of photos and images, I prefer the Mac. For crunching data, I use the PC.

 

[turbo]

I hate the thought of having to go back to Norton.

Norton sucks, and AVG is not a lot better. Get AVAST and be happy. The development team will stream you new threat definitions and/or functionality daily or more often. They are right on top of things. Please try AVAST (and this goes for everybody reading this thread!). It is top-quality protection with real-time updates. It is free for personal use, and if you want to use it professionally, it will still cost you less than commercial AV programs that do less in terms of protecting you against new types of threats.

 

[turbo]

Virtual memory was the issue. If the pre-OSX Mac did not have the maximum possible RAM installed, then it had "issues."

I'm working on my brand-new 24" iMac. It's my fourth iMac since 1999. I'm biased. Sue me.

Can we settle out of court? A class-action suit could bankrupt you.

 

[Dembadon]

Norton sucks, and AVG is not a lot better. Get AVAST and be happy. The development team will stream you new threat definitions and/or functionality daily or more often. They are right on top of things. Please try AVAST (and this goes for everybody reading this thread!). It is top-quality protection with real-time updates. It is free for personal use, and if you want to use it professionally, it will still cost you less than commercial AV programs that do less in terms of protecting you against new types of threats.

I'll take you up on the AVAST recommendation. Thanks for the info.

 

[turbo]

I'll take you up on the AVAST recommendation. Thanks for the info.

You won't regret it. The AVAST team is top-notch! They actually prevent intrusions and damage, as opposed to some folks that want you to pay for remediation and clean-up after the fact.

 

[Pythagorean]

I almost miss that one. A crash was never so cute!

Yeah, one of my fonder elementary school computer memories.

So did all schools move over to PC, or was it always mac for elementary and high school, PC's for college? Or is it completely up to each institution?

 

[Sorry!]

Yep no problems with Vista been running it on my laptop for over a year with 0 problems... sometimes things are annoying like the 'do you want to run this' after clicking yes already to basically the same question... ACTUALLY there was one problem I had. Occured about 6 months ago... I was changing my password to my laptop and I apparently made a typo... twice (once in the password and once in the re-type password) and I couldn't figure out what the typo was I tried everything. So I had to reinstall fresh windows vista :(

I like macs but windows in my opinion is a much better OS

 

[Pythagorean]

Yep no problems with Vista been running it on my laptop for over a year with 0 problems... sometimes things are annoying like the 'do you want to run this' after clicking yes already to basically the same question... ACTUALLY there was one problem I had. Occured about 6 months ago... I was changing my password to my laptop and I apparently made a typo... twice (once in the password and once in the re-type password) and I couldn't figure out what the typo was I tried everything. So I had to reinstall fresh windows vista :(

I like macs but windows in my opinion is a much better OS

Windows has the monopoly on the cool games for PC. Pretty much the only reason I stick to MS.

 

[martharon]

The firefox i am using is getting crashed if i open more than 5 tabs. if i see the memory usage in task manager its showing firefox is the one which is sucking too much of it.
i have fully removed firefox and using opera.

 

[Sorry!]

Well I checked out my own firefox memory usage... I have a few of those add-ons installed and I noticed that it's only about double what Internet Explorer uses but internet explorer has a lot of hard faults (page faults) and firefox had 0 over the time i was watching...

I'm running it on my laptop AMD64 X2 so 2 CPUs about 1.9GHz
and I have 4 gigs of ram
running on windows vista home just installed not to long ago I always have my email running, msn, office onenote, and AVG anti-virus.

I never have any problems with Firefox or Vista in anyway...

 

[Pattonias]

Yep no problems with Vista been running it on my laptop for over a year with 0 problems... sometimes things are annoying like the 'do you want to run this' after clicking yes already to basically the same question... ACTUALLY there was one problem I had. Occured about 6 months ago... I was changing my password to my laptop and I apparently made a typo... twice (once in the password and once in the re-type password) and I couldn't figure out what the typo was I tried everything. So I had to reinstall fresh windows vista :(

I like macs but windows in my opinion is a much better OS

I actually did the exact same thing a few years ago. Oddly enough an IT friend of mine was able to hack the admin account with a miniOS version of Linux designed for exactly that purpose. As excited as I was at his ability to get me back into my computer, I was a little unnerved at the ability of doing this existing and being so readily available. He said that he actually had to use this program all the time for different companies with people who had a habit of locking themselves out of there computer that had high level access (other IT people). He even had a small thumb drive that allowed him to simply plug it in and start it up through the bios. It was like watching a spy movie.

 

[Math Jeans]

I think everyone here needs to understand that programmers occasionally miss the Balmer peak. It's an honest mistake, but it does happen.

 

[Pattonias]

Ok I give up. I tried to search it out, but to no avail.
What is Ballmer Peak?

 

[Sorry!]

Ok I give up. I tried to search it out, but to no avail.
What is Ballmer Peak?

Lol I think it means that programmers code better and do things previously impossible when they code drunk/high.