Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Users Clamoring For Bug Fix

crn.com ^ | July 2, 2009 | Steven Burke

[smokingfrog]

"It's seriously bugged is what it is," posted Jeremy in a July 1 post on hothardware.com." "My Firefox load time went from a heartbeat or two to 50-60 seconds. First time, second time, didn't matter if it was pre-fetched or not. Numerous other people having the same issue as well judging from their forum.

"I've seen the same issue on both on my Vista x64 machine and my XP machine at work," added Jeremy."I downgraded both and am back to happy browsing. Hopefully Firefox 3.5.1 hits soon and resolves whatever the issue is."

TGDaily.com is reporting that Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1 is due in mid- to late July and will include fixes for at least three of 55 published bugs for the new Web browser. TGDaily.com reports that the browser bug fixes in store for Mozilla Firefox 3.5 include crashes caused by the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Mozilla has not yet decided whether Firefox 3.5.1 will be labeled as a major update or if that phrase will be reserved for version 3.5.2, according to TGDaily.com.

Mozilla is relying on the community development model to confirm and fix the bugs with its Firefox 3.5 browser.

At the Mozilla community quality assurance Web site, quality.mozilla.org, a banner headline proclaims: "Firefox BugDay - Catch Missed Blocker, Critical, and Major 3.5 bugs!"

"We will try to narrow down any important bugs that were missed, or were regressions from Firefox 3.5, and get them into a point update quickly," reads a call to action on quality.mozilla.org. "Triage, what is it? Well, simply put, Triage is taking a bug, making sure it has enough information to reproduce, and ensuring that it is in the proper component. After that you should try to reproduce the issue. Problems that are easily reproducible (such as a crash that occurs every time you visit a certain Web site), are more valuable than those that are impossible to reproduce. If you can reproduce a bug, please add a comment to the bug or recommend in #bugday that the bug be confirmed."

Posted by Steven Burke at 11:00 AM

[smokingfrog]

Might be a good idea to wait before installing version 3.5?

[Slapshot68]

I think they’re missing the point of why people liked FF in the first place. Less bloat, less security issues, shorter load times.

[Texas Fossil]

I have been using Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 for months and am very happy with it. Using it on an XP Pro box.

Much more stable than 3.0.

At this point some of the plug-ins are not yet compatible, but I love Firefox 3.5 beta.

TF

[Blennos]

Hmmm. I still have 3.0 but 3.5 is advertised as being “Twice as fast as Firefox 3.” Just to be safe, I think I will wait until the next bug fix to upgrade.

[freedumb2003]

>>Might be a good idea to wait before installing version 3.5? <<

I am.

But Firefox has been slowing down every release since 2. How they got into the MS bloatware pattern is anyone’s guess.

[mysterio]

So that’s why it is slow. I thought it was because of Itunes or something.

[Slapshot68]

“Hmmm. I still have 3.0 but 3.5 is advertised as being “Twice as fast as Firefox 3.” Just to be safe, I think I will wait until the next bug fix to upgrade.”

Agreed. FF3 has been the slowest iteration of FF I’ve experienced. I’ve been hoping 3.5 speeds things up. But I’ll wait until the bugs are fixed.

[HonorInPa]

Try IE8 running under Win 7 - my experience show it to be faster than FF

[Slapshot68]

“Try IE8 running under Win 7 - my experience show it to be faster than FF”

I’ve read good things about Win 7. Hope to experience it soon.

[MarineBrat]

I updated to 3.5 yesterday and have noticed no slowdown. All of my plugins but one are fine, and the one that wasn’t fine didn’t cause a problem because FireFox warned me when I was updating that it would have to disable one of my plugins.

WinXP Pro

[Slapshot68]

I’ve also been running latest version of Safari. First impressions are pretty good.

[catbertz]

I’m running 3.5 now and its been noticeably faster than 3.0. I haven’t experienced this slowdown described.

Yes addons are behind the compatibility curve, but tbey always are. I use “nightly tester tool” to get them working.

[vaudine]

I am using 3.0.11 and it loads slowly, sometimes refuses to load, so I use Safari. What should I upgrade to and what do they mean by the Java remark. I am such a computer novice it is embarrassing.Vaudine

[Moonman62]

I upgraded and downgraded within an hour yesterday. All sorts of stalls and freezing, even in safe mode.

[Concho]

I installed the new 3.5 this week and it just hammered my speed. It is a hog of a program that injects unneeded crap on the basis that it is smarter and can think of what you need better than you can.

[Moonman62]

But Firefox has been slowing down every release since 2. How they got into the MS bloatware pattern is anyone’s guess.

I've wondered if Microsoft has moles working on the open source.

[Slapshot68]

I upgraded to 3.5 just now so we’ll see how it goes :)

[edcoil]

I like foxit it is much faster then Adobe’s pdf reader.

[dila813]

Use Opera Unite

[kenth]

There’s one bug that I’ve seen with FF for quite a number of versions, including the most recent. It is the copy bug, wherein text sometimes is not able to be copied. Highlighted text will not be offered a copy function in the context menu. It just does not exist. Using the copy shortcut keys also does not work.