Firefox 3 on Linux: Questions about Stability

software downloaded in 24 hours

On a Lenovo Thinkpad with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), Firefox 3 was nigh unusable for the past few weeks. The distro was released with Firefox 3 Beta 5 " and the instability was maddening " with Firefox crashing several times an hour. It didn't matter how many tabs were open, or what sites were running. Trying to close a tab (after reading my Dilbert comic for the day) often crashed the browser. At one point, we even downgraded to Firefox 2 to stop the crashes. (Crashes trump leaks when it comes to useability.)

With RC1 and RC2, the stability started to improve. With RC3, we are down to one crash a day. So far, we haven't isolated a particular web site culprit for the crash, but we suspect the pop-up ads. But is the stability thanks to the fixes made to the Firefox 3 core browser, or is it the third-party plugin AdBlock? At the moment, the add-on is doing more for this box's stability than the browser itself.

The add-ons have been slow in coming, but they are slowly trickling in (Google Toolbar! Firebug! Greasemonkey!), and will only make the browser more useable after the launch. The feature list is extensive, so it's easy to see why Firefox 3 is generating so much enthusiasm. However, one of its new features " the "smart bar" - just seems jam-packed with features that will never be used. We are ready to be proven wrong.

After almost three years of development, it seems a little silly to say that Firefox 3 feels like it was rushed out. But even with RC3, we worry about stability. We want the confidence of not having random crashes, and we want to know that memory leaks are a thing of the past. It's clearly come a long way, but with all the download hype, is Mozilla pushing out a not-quite solid product just for a publicity stunt? At least on this Ubuntu box, FF3 is not quite yet the World's Best Browser.