Yes, you read it right. I’m disappointed with Firefox 3.0.11. I’m not saying this based on one or two crashes. I’m judging this on my past 2-3 months of usage. I am a die-hard FF-user. I recently switched back to FF after trying Chrome for sometime. But Firefox has been posing serious problems since then, mainly 2 problems.

1) Frequent Crashes

Since installing this version of Firefox, the Mozilla Crash Reporter has become my best friend. Its been coming up almost daily to meet me. I know that i’ve installed Beta plugins like Ubiquity and this kind of behaviour is expected. So, this is not my main complaint. But still this kind of crash-on-a-daily-basis is too much for a browser like Firefox. I don’t know why i enter my email address there every time. Though i send a crash report every 24 hours, i do not get any kind of response. Firefox is free software and i know that shouldn’t be complaining about lack of support.

2) Memory Leak

My 2GB RAM Windows 7 system becomes god-damn slow with just Firefox, foobar2000 and Twhirl running. Guess who’s the culprit, it is the people’s (include me) favourite browser Firefox. And i’ve not been crash-testing it with 100 tabs open, 150 addons installed etc. I have about 10-20 tabs open at a time. I have 13 addons installed out of which 5 are disabled, to see if they are the culprit. Others are just very popular ones like Google toolbar, SU toolbar etc. which i’ve been using since Firefox 0.1 (not really).

So how much memory does my firefox use ? The answer is God only knows. It changes every time though i have the same tabs open. When i open Firefox with 10 tabs, the memory usage remains at ~120MB. If i just leave my system idle and go out, i’ll return after few hours to find that Firefox is using ~500MB. Two more hours and it would be ~800MB.

I’ve been resisting myself from writing such a post about Firefox. I did some search and research on the top to see if something specific is causing this or Firefox itself. When i did a google search on the topic i seem to get relevant results for a memory leak as high as 1GB (300MB, 400MB, 500MB, 600MB, 700MB, 800MB, 900MB). But most of them are complaint posts like this or unreplied forum topics. The point is that there is no specific solution. Most commonly suggested troubleshooting step is to check out the list of Problematic Extension. I went through the list in and out and concluded that the none of the memory-leaking extension is on my list.

There are other possible steps like trying to run Firefox in safe mode, reinstalling Firefox etc. But, as a customer i wouldn’t want to go through all this hassle to find out what’s wrong. I’m deeply in love with Firefox, so i’m still clinging onto it. But an average FF user will make the switch to the supposed-to-be-faster Chrome or the faster-in-reality Opera.

Last year when i made a post about a copyright breach, i received immediate response from a Mozilla Staff Member. I hope they’ll pay little attention to this post as well.

PS : If you’re a fan of Firefox, i might have hurt you. I am sorry. Don’t take me wrong. I’m a fan of FF too. In this condition, i wouldn’t be recommending FF to anyone. So, i really hope i find a solution to this.

There are lots of ways to run Web Apps on the Desktop. But, the one that came with Google Chrome became my favorite. Mainly because of its simplicity and inbuilt Gears support. I started creating such “application shortcuts” and as I usually do, I put up these shortcuts in the taskbar.

I prefer Web Apps for various reasons. Like, they don’t occupy any space in your hard drive. They are much more simpler to use than desktop apps and you can access your data from all over the world.

Recently, I began to use Twitter a lot and so I was searching for a desktop client. But, most of the popular ones were Adobe Air apps and I didn’t wanna install Air. So, I decided to use a web app. Since, I needed simplicity, I went around looking for “twitter for iphone” and found this website. I simple opened it in Chrome and created an application shortcut. Now, it sits there on my desktop as a simple Twitter client. Similarly, I have created the shortcuts for Gmail, Google Reader and Remember the Milk, all with Gears support. Also, I have LiteSum for quick Wikipedia look up. With the upcoming Greasemonkey support for Chrome, this Application shortcut feature will become much more useful.

Similarly, I’m looking for more simple apps to add, preferably iPhone version of sites, because they have simpler interface. Do you know any ? Do you have any such Web Apps on your Desktop ?

Check out a screenshot of my desktop running these web apps. (Click to enlarge) :