Firefox disasters

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 18:26 +0100, Martin Kho wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 November 2009 17:51:18 Anne Wilson wrote:
> > For some time now I've been having problems with Firefox.  It seemed to
> >  give me some sort of runaway situation, where the cpu went sky high and
> >  stayed there.  That doesn't seem to happen any more, but now there seems
> >  to be a memory leak.  I had noticed things slowing down, but eventually I
> >  got one of the freezes at a moment when konsole+top was in view.  It was
> >  clear that there was abnormal memory usage.  In these situations it takes
> >  about 2 minutes for anything to respond to a mouse-click, and I can't shut
> >  firefox down with a mouse-click.  The only thing I can do is use pkill to
> >  get rid of it.  That also takes a very long time, but the moment firefox
> >  disappears everything is back to normal working speed.
> > 
> > It's got so bad that I won't use firefox if I can possibly avoid it, but
> >  there are some situations, like a shared googledoc, where I seem to have
> >  no option. The site won't accept konqueror, and if I use the agent to
> >  pretend that it's firefox konqueror crashes when I try to access the doc.
> > 
> > I tried renaming ~/.mozilla, but it seemed that something was still a
> >  problem - it was very slow to start up, then froze the system altogether.
> > 
> > I'm getting desperate.   I do need to be able to work on those shared
> > documents.  If I delete firefox is there any alternative?  Does anyone
> > successfully access googledocs in any other browser?

FF certainly leaks memory. I keep an eye on it (Ctrl-Esc in KDE) and
restart it before it gets out of hand, usually every 2 or 3 days. Of
course it could be some add-on, but I can't be bothered doing the work
to find out.

> > Anne
> > 
> Hi Anne,
> 
> You can try Chromium (can eat babies :-)), but I can access and edit Google 
> docs. Tom "spot" Callaway maintains it for Fedora. See [1] Maybe it's 
> something you can use.

Unfortunately I've never managed to get Chromium to connect to any web
site, even its own help page. I keep it up to date via the repo, but no
version has ever worked for me. It just sits there with a spinning
cursor and the message "Connecting ..." in the lower left corner.

Fedora 11 fully updated, 64-bit.

poc