 RE: The return of Netscape?
Firefox rant:
Firefox used to crash sometimes for me. Not regularly, but sometimes. It was almost always while viewing WMP or QT content, so I put it down to those plugins, and that there isn't enough isolation between the browser and the plugin. These days I block plugins and javascript by default [they add nothing to the browsing experience, other than weight].
I can't say I haven't had any crashes in the last year. However, I assume that these have mostly been out-of-memory crashes. With the known resource leaks when using Firefox with X, and my 256 MB ram, not to mention all the other stuff I have loaded [usually two Evinces, one or two open offices, Firefox with 200+ tabs, two Emacsen with 20-30 open buffers, terminals and repls, sage, xmms] it's hard to believe it runs at all.
Thankfully I don't have to deal with proprietary plugins so much anymore [the gnu flash clone is well written], and so any crash that has happened during the last few months I attribute to running an unstable and rather buggy old kernel.
The conclusion I've drawn is that Firefox crashes are in fact plugin crashes. Blocking plugins and Javascript, aside from getting rid of the cruft from the net (such as popups and advertisements that steal focus), seem to make for a much better browser.
was put impeccably into words at DebianDay for me last Saturday, by Knut Yrvin of Trolltech - adults try something once, fail, and then are like "ffs this doesn't work". Children try, fail, and then try again, and succeed - maybe on the second, or even fifth retry. But the thing is that they keep at it and overcome the problems in the end.
-andrewdodd13 | 
