So frustrated with Mozilla that I’ve got a sore throat from yelling
FireFox can crash any machine. Not “crash” in the sense of “blue screen of death” but crash as in “uses up all memory so the machine becomes unresponsive”. This is a reliable fact of using FireFox, regardless of whether you are on Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, or Mac OS X (I can’t speak of Camino, as I don’t use it).
Sometimes I say this to other programmers and they respond “It’s not FireFox that is the problem, it is the plugins that you use – it is FireBug and Session Manager and all the others.” Of course, any programmer who reveals this attitude needs to be re-educated. If you offer a plugin system that is unable to manage the plugins, then maybe you should not offer that plugin system? It suggests a (possibly frightening?) willingness to shirk responsibility if a programmer defends a plugin system that can crash a computer.
I wonder what Brendan Eich is thinking?
One suggestion for others: if you use FireFox, every time a new version of FireFox comes out, FireFox will ask you if you want to upgrade. I used to always say “yes”. Now I realize, if your computer is more than a year old, you should say “no”. Each version of FireFox tends to be heavier and slower than the previous version. My Ubuntu machine is from 2006, and that is part of the reason why FireFox is so slow on it.
On my Windows machine, I just switched over to Google Chrome as my new default browser. I’m giving up on FireFox. On my Ubuntu machine, I am stuck with FireFox for now. I’m not aware of any other serious browsers for Linux.
For email, I would love to give up on Thunderbird, if I could find a substitute. I run Thunderbird on my main desktop machine which runs Ubuntu. Thunderbird has had a persistent bug that has survived several upgrades (of both Thunderbird and Ubuntu). The bug is with the address auto-completion. If I type an address fast, hit “Enter” to accept and start typing again fast, Thunderbird crashes. This can lose a lot of work for me (Where “work” might simply mean “Opened email and left them open because I found some that were important and so answering them will take some time.”). Apparently there is no equivalent of SessionManager for Thunderbird, no way of remembering which emails were open, waiting for a response, when Thunderbird crashes. No, instead, after Thunderbird crashes, I need to re-start it, go back 3 days, and then read through all my email again, looking for the important ones.
At work we had a deadline today, and I worked through the weekend to meet it. I kept getting feedback from various people testing the site. Some of the email I got was thoughtful, and offered intelligent suggestions about what we should do next. By this morning, I had about 20 emails open, waiting for me to have the time and focus to write a reply. Then Thunderbird crashed and they all vanished. I yelled so loud my throat was sore. Now I have to go back to Friday and read through all the email again, to find the ones that I wanted to respond to.
If I could find something better than Thunderbird, that runs on Linux, I’d switch immediately.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:54 pm
You’ve probably already looked at evolution. I’m using that now and have found it to be better than thunderbird, though I have my gripes with it.
When kmail gets good at imap, I’ll go back to kmail because it has features that neither evolution nor thunderbird have:
1. a systray icon that’s always available. It drives me nuts that I have to go to a different virtual desktop just to start composing a mail. With kmail, I RMB click on the systray icon and choose “compose email”.
2. The systray icon shows how many unread messages I have. And the mail folders can be customized to be included or excluded in that number, which is major for me. I have lots of unread email that I don’t want counted in the systray.
3. I can delete a whole mail thread at once, w/o having to select each individual mail message.
I look forward to getting back to kmail once it’s imap support is good.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:12 am
Thanks, Tom. I didn’t give Evolution a look till Jacob Coby suggested it to me. I’m going to give it a try this month.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
You may have a good point about Firefox not being able to manage its plugins, but think about this: what is the difference between Microsoft allowing .NET desktop apps to use tons and tons of memory and Firefox allowing plugins to use tons and tons of memory? .NET and Firefox can both be thought of as a “platform” upon which to build software. Why do we hold Firefox responsible for buggy plugins but don’t hold the .NET framework responsible for buggy desktop apps? Something to think about. Though it does seem that people tend to blame a browser much more readily than an OS framework… probably because the browser is much more visible!
July 12th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
I am generally critical of all things Microsoft, but I work with Microsoft products so rarely, that I do not often have any reason to complain about them. My main machine is running Ubuntu Linux, so most of my concerns revolve around open source software. The universe of my computer concerns contains things such as Java, Apache, Tomcat, Linux, Grails, JavaFX, PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, etc. I’ve largely cut Microsoft out of my life, so when I’m complaining about things, Microsoft doesn’t come up very often.
I do have an old laptop running Windows, which I keep mostly to look at websites using IE. For a long time this laptop was my main travel computer, but just recently I switched over to a Mac laptop. I appreciate the fact that Macs run on a version of Unix and that I can get to the Terminal whenever I want.
However, I agree with your basic point: .NET is deserving of a great deal of criticism.