[SLL] Laughing down Firefox today at my work...

[Kurt Buff]

On Jan 8, 2008 7:21 PM, Nicholas Bodley <nbodley at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 January 2008 21:53:50 Kurt Buff wrote:
>
> > I don't use X on my *nix boxes, but I'll pipe up anyway.
>
> (Do you mean X window System? I'm gently confusen; not important.)

Yes, that's what I mean. Most of my *nix boxen are servers (dedicated
to squid, maia mailguard, ntop, etc.), and don't need a gui.

> > Firefox is *tons* better than IE on my MSFT boxes,
> Ouch; I never use IE unless the task is essential and there's no
> alternative. Haven't had such a situation for quite a while...
> (Recent news , conceivably a spoof, says that MS is discontinuing IE.)

It's a spoof. They're getting ready to roll out IE 8, and are saying
that it will be standards compliant. We'll see.

> > Whatever the cause, any page that does lots of refreshes (gmail, in
> > particular seems to cause the issue) memory just climbs, until I have
> > to kill FF and start it over.
>
> On XP, its GUI still works, but, so to speak, command the GUI feeds to the
> application itself are ignored. At that point, I kill it with the task
> manager.

I've actually had FF itself, or other apps die over a weekend if I
leave all of that running on my workstation at $job. Or else
ALT+tab-ing between apps/windows starts to get really wonky, or other
strangeness appears. Kill FF (my fave is pskill, from sysinternals -
http://www.microsoft.com/sysinternals) and all is well again, mostly.
Sometims I simply have to kill Windows, and save as much data as I can
in my other apps, then reboot to clear it all. But, I doubt *all* of
it is FF's problem - I'm sure some of the ancient apps we use here at
work (I'm stuck with Outlook 200, fer instance) contribute to the
problem.

> > I suppose it doesn't help that I have (usually) 20-30 windows open,
> > and many of those have several-to-many tabs open,
> [...]
> I typically have only 2 or 3 windows open, and only one with lots of tabs.

Multitasking is a wonderful thing, but I wish I could do less of it.
Having my attention split across so many things at once is not really
optimal.

> > Fortunately, it keeps session state, so after I kill it, I'll have
> everything back the way I want it soonish.
>
> So nice, indeed! Opera has done that for a long time; it's newer, in
> Firefox.

Never played with Opera. I suppose I should at some point.

Kurt