Firefox’s instability

Okay, here’s a rant: I’m thisclose to switching to Google Chrome from Mozilla Firefox. As a matter of fact, I would switch if not for the fact that Chrome was responsible for me having to reformat my computer several weeks ago (seriously), I would. However, I’m writing this post because I think I may have the culprit. Caveat: Umm, I know zilch about the innards about web applications, but I can, at least, run unscientific ‘tests’ to narrow down the source of such crashes. Here are the various issues:

  1. When Bitdefender Internet Security 2009  received an update, the antiphishing toolbar for Mozilla Firefox caused Firefox to crash and it even triggered Windows Data Execution Prevention (DEP). So, the solution to this after scouring message boards & Google was to disable the antiphishing toolbar as quickly as I could before DEP kicked in.
  2. Now, my latest firefox issue is sometimes when I simply open Firefox, it crashes instantly. This actually reminds me of Hunter Cressel’s rant about macs where he talks about how it’s really easy to shut down? Yes, that’s exactly my experience with Firefox 3.0.4 these days. I think I need to make a movie titled: “A day in the life of Firefox 3.0.4”. Well, the point (sort of) of this post/rant was to identify (maybe) a culprit in my Firefox crashes: Facebook.
  3. Yes, Facebook. I never put two and two together before, but my latest crash was the last straw. For a while now, I haven’t been able to use the “Take a Photo” or “Make a Video” feature of Facebook and that was a minor inconvenience. Now, sometimes, merely opening the login page for Facebook causes Firefox to instantly shut down. Am I alone in this phenomenon of having Facebook crash my Firefox installation?

Well, I’m putting the last crash report I submitted to Mozilla thanks to the Crash reporting feature built into firefox. Quick tip: You can see all the reported crashes in Firefox by typing “about:crashes” into the address toolbar!

Details
Signature @0x6e63fe39
UUID 5f195df8-f87f-4c18-9b95-b84e02081121
Time 11/21/2008 18:10
Uptime 80
Last Crash 113884 seconds before submission
Product Firefox
Version 3.0.4
Build ID 2008102920
Branch 1.9
OS Windows NT
OS Version 6.0.6001 Service Pack 1
CPU x86
CPU Info GenuineIntel family 6 model 23 stepping 6
Crash Reason EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION
Crash Address 0x6e63fe39

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Jane Ullah

I wear many hats. In no particular order, I am a: wife, geeky blogger, a twitter-happy aspiring photographer, and passionate about things I believe in.