February 09, 2006

Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, And Other Browsers In Four-Way Shootout

Firefox 1.5: A Dark Side?

By Ed Bott, Scot Finnie, Dennis Fowler, and Ron White Courtesy of InternetWeek


Page 10 of 18


A Dark Side?
Firefox is not perfect, and the release of the 1.5 version of the browser in late November, 2005, washed a wave of problem reports my way from Scot's Newsletter readers. Just before the holidays, I wrote an in-depth news/technology article on InternetWeek about some problematic behaviors of Firefox 1.5. The follow-up InternetWeek story, Firefox 1.5 Stability Problems? Readers And Mozilla Respond, offers the deepest detail on the subject.

In a nutshell, a small but apparently growing percentage of Firefox 1.5 users have experienced some or most of these problems:

  • Firefox's use of physical and virtual memory is exceptionally high.
  • CPU usage spikes to 100 percent.
  • The browser freezes up for seconds, minutes, or permanently.
  • The browser won't launch until you remove an errant "firefox.exe" process in Task Manager.
  • The browser crashes suddenly (usually while loading a Web page).
  • Browser performance slows down.
  • The initial launch of Firefox loads slower.
  • Third-party application hyperlinks (such as a link in an e-mail message) take a very long time to open a new Firefox tab or to launch the browser.

When, back in December, co-author Matt McKenzie and I interviewed Mozilla's Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering, and Chris Beard, VP of products, about the detailed reports we'd received from readers, the response was not encouraging. Mozilla had at that time identified only one of the problems we were talking about: the high memory usage. There was no commitment on the part of the two Mozilla execs to look further into the information we were passing along.

Since then, there have been at least half a dozen Bugzilla bug reports (such as here, here, and here, that seem to corroborate several of our reader reports. Mozilla appears to be describing some of the symptoms as memory leaks. Several of the reports have been ganged up into one thread and a programmer has accepted the challenge. So a fix, or series of fixes, may be on the way.

Mozilla released Firefox 1.5.0.1 on February 1, 2006, and it included several memory leak fixes, although it's unlikely that the bullet-point issues above were addressed, since the changes for the 1.5.0.1 release were reportedly frozen around January 10. It's too early to say for sure.



Some Firefox user have reported extremely high memory use. (Click image to enlarge and to see the Image Gallery.)

This is the only dark cloud appearing over the otherwise stellar Firefox. Mozilla is certain to fix these problems. But will it fix them fast enough? In order for the browser to succeed, users must be able to trust its reliability. Mozilla's developers should listen to and work with the user community.

I believe Mozilla may be relying too heavily on its Bugzilla online bug-reporting site. What's the percentage of Firefox users experiencing problems like this who will take the time to fill in an intimidating form and face questions directly from developers? It's got to be a fraction of a percent.



Page 11: Firefox 1.5: What's Next?


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