Let me start of by saying that Firefox is some decent amount of code, and if you read this blog regularly you know I have use that as my primary browser as opposed to IE. In spite of all the comparisons and market share updates , I still have a few issues with it - and these are serious issues (in my context) and not minor gripes. <p> <img src="images/firefox_memory_usage.png" alt=""/> </p>
Crashes - yes every now and then the whole thing just hangs and the only way to recover from it is to kill the whole process and restart it. Now, some of you would come back and argue that his might be one of the many add-ins I run , but I say baloney to that. I don’t know anything about its design, so not sure how it loads the various extensions, but it should be designed that the whole thing does not come down - that of course is a longer discussion topic that one that can be had in this post. But, this is not an everyday occurrence, at the same time it is not all that rare either - I would say about 2-3 times a month!
Memory Usage - the next one is memory usage - for my average use (this of course would vary based on your usage), it averages > 100 mb (wow!). Yes memory is cheap, yes I have a gig on most machines I use, but that is no excuse!
Update (Size) - Every time there is a security update (and there have been a whole load of them in the last few weeks), why do I have to download the *whole install set* and install the whole application? Why cannot I just download the required files (dlls, exe, etc on Windows) and restart the application? Many companies have done it and you can there are solutions in the open domain to help out with this - it is not rocket science?
Update (Timing) - Why can’t the Firefox team take a step back and think a little before “releasing” something? I have moved from v1.0 to v1.0.1 to v1.0.2 - all within a span of 2-3 weeks and everytime doing the full-download/reinstall routine (see above point). If they can fix the update issues, then I can also push out updates from one central place - today I have a few computers at home and installing this on everyone of them does take time!