Firefox is the dominant browser, here at w3schools !

[mihai11]

Who would have guessed this 2 years ago ? IE6 is going down while IE7 is going up, but very slowly. If FF will maintain a small but constant growth then there is no chance that it will loose the top position in the future.http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.aspRegards,Razvan

[Ingolme]

The W3Schools statistics aren't as accurate. Firefox is greater there than generally in the internet because W3Schools is mostly visited by web developers, which have a preference to firefox.

[aspnetguy]

Firefox has an approx overall share of a 14%. Lately it has been reported that users and some developers are jumping off the Firefox ship in favor of Opera and in some cases even IE7 because of firefox is starting to suffer from bad memory bloating.Mozilla says they are working hard to fix this.

[boen_robot]

Firefox has an approx overall share of a 14%. Lately it has been reported that users and some developers are jumping off the Firefox ship in favor of Opera and in some cases even IE7 because of firefox is starting to suffer from bad memory bloating.Mozilla says they are working hard to fix this.

This does seem to be the situation at the W3Schools forums, but what about other sources?BTW, if you look at the W3Schools' stats, you'll see all IE versions combined are still dominant over Firefox. If you take only a single version, you'll see Firefox has larger share, but that's normal, since people are still transitioning from one version to the next, splitting the shares.

[Jonas]

Firefox has an approx overall share of a 14%. Lately it has been reported that users and some developers are jumping off the Firefox ship in favor of Opera and in some cases even IE7 because of firefox is starting to suffer from bad memory bloating.Mozilla says they are working hard to fix this.

Could this be why the forum has been crashing in Firefox? Or rather, the browser has crashed when viewing the forum? Bad memory bloating + maybe something demanding (for firefox anyhow) about this forum?

[mihai11]

Could this be why the forum has been crashing in Firefox? Or rather, the browser has crashed when viewing the forum? Bad memory bloating + maybe something demanding (for firefox anyhow) about this forum?

Who can complain about this ? I am using FF for about 3 years now and I *very* rarely have crashes, nothing consistent (I mean reproducible). FF is a very stable piece of software.From my experience, the problem is not with the browser, but with the people. Why am I saying this ? One of the lead developers from IE said that they will never support the plugin architecture of FF in Internet Explorer because this will be a nightmare for the people offering support.There are a lot of unreasonable people out there that will just load the browser with any plugin they can put their hands on. I am using 2 plugins – the first one is AdBlock Plus and the second one is a plugin that helps with the development of web pages. That is all ! There are hundreds of other plugins that *may* help in certain conditions, but unless I really need a plugin I would not install it.A bit more freedom than what Internet Explorer can offer is coming with the burden of more responsibility towards your system. Some people just cannot handle that, then they start to complain: FF is not stable or is eating too much memory.I have yet to see evidence that FF is not stable. I am a “heavy” user in the sense that I usually have about 20-30 web pages open at any given time. What is worst is that I reboot my system at most 1 time per week. When I finish working I just put the system in hibernation because I want to keep all the applications and windows at the same state as in the previous working day. In these conditions, memory usage for FF stays at around 200MB – 500MB. For a system with 4 GB of RAM this is nothing and it would still be reasonable for a system with 1 GB of RAM.Note: You don't need Google toolbar, Yahoo toolbar or any other toolbar that you can think of. Both toolbars (Yahoo and Google) have *known* stability issues. Usually, this software calls “home” whenever you are browsing to a new web page. In fact, those toolbars are just monitoring tools. For example, when installing a piece of software called Vbulletin you get consistent crashes if any of the above plugins are installed. This is happening because the install application sends many, many requests to the server where the installation is performed and the toolbar cannot deal with so many requests done in a short amount of time.What is worse, is that Yahoo does NOT even ask you whether you want to install anything for FF. You just need to read about it then to manually delete / edit some files. If you are using Yahoo Messenger then you may think that your FF installation is clean but you are wrong.Regards,Razvan

[jesh]

A bit more freedom than what Internet Explorer can offer is coming with the burden of more responsibility towards your system. Some people just cannot handle that, then they start to complain: FF is not stable or is eating too much memory.I have yet to see evidence that FF is not stable. I am a “heavy” user in the sense that I usually have about 20-30 web pages open at any given time. What is worst is that I reboot my system at most 1 time per week. When I finish working I just put the system in hibernation because I want to keep all the applications and windows at the same state as in the previous working day. In these conditions, memory usage for FF stays at around 200MB – 500MB. For a system with 4 GB of RAM this is nothing and it would still be reasonable for a system with 1 GB of RAM.

I was going to write to you with evidence of a pretty severe memory leak in Firefox when you play around with the sattelite images in Google Maps. I had all the data ready to go in my response. Firefox was using 450MB within a minute whereas IE was peaking at about 48MB. Then, the scientist in me spoke up and I disabled my extensions. Turns out, just as you mentioned, that it was an extension that was causing the memory leak. Once I disabled that (Firebug - my favorite extension), Firefox, even with 6 more extensions enabled, never took more than 50MB.So, I'm going to have to agree with pretty much everything you said.

[Jesdisciple]

Razvan, I'm also a "heavy" user, and I use the Google toolbar. I also have extremely rare crashes (and even rarer loss of important data, because of Reload Session or whatever it is) and hardly ever shut the computer off. So I see no grounds for your claim that Google's toolbar is unstable (or that it's a monitoring tool, as its privacy options are fully configurable).Jesh, does disabling Firebug only for Google Maps (rather than the entire extension) help?

[Jonas]

Well, in this thread, people have reported crashes in Firefox when viewing the forum:http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=16229

[Shonumi]

Silly people, never judge something technical against personal experience. Simply due to your experience being faultless is by no means a better method than if we were to research this beside variables we can measure definetely, i.e. the kind digital security firms do. I don't think that the Mozilla team has affirmatively said that there is a problem, but we should all be wary of what we recieve, *cough*Microsoft*cough*. 4GB is a hefty number, but what about my 600mhz laptop with 512MB of RAM? You can't say there's not a memory leak when you go to different systems. A memory leak would essentially affect a system with less RAM, becuase less data is there providing a better chance at a leak occuring. And leaks do not always incur visible signs, and to judge it based purely upon how your computer is processing something is just poor. I know this from C++, you can spot a memory leak even without anything giving you an error. It should be proven, above all, in code before we let what we experience be the end all.Personally, I do think there is a stability issue to some extent. I notice sometimes when I have several inappropiate sites open at once, it crashes. Luckily I can just resume the session.

[jesh]

Jesh, does disabling Firebug only for Google Maps (rather than the entire extension) help?

Actually, what I finally ended up doing was to enable the extension, but disable it for all websites except for those that I develop regularly and the memory was up around 52MB or so.

[mihai11]

Silly people, never judge something technical against personal experience.

I don't agree with this. There are complex things like human interaction that cannot be judged from personal experience. For example, if all the people that you ever met were honest, it would be a big mistake to think that all the people that exist are honest. I am browsing every day more than 100 new web sites, (I am gathering data for some web sites that I own). If you ever worked as a developer (as I did) then you know what unit-testing is. Certainly, just browsing web pages is not a way to do unit-testing because that kind of testing deals with very small details – like what is happening if the user enters invalid data in the address bar. Is the browser going to crash ? However, my browsing is relevant as an end-to-end testing method. Like a testing team in a company, I am looking at the business logic and see that it is working. I can browse practically any web page with good stability and that speaks about the quality of the software that I am using.

You can't say there's not a memory leak when you go to different systems.

True, I haven't tested all possible systems. I worked with FF on Windows XP and Linux (both KDE and Gnome) and it made me a good impression, stability wise. I never used FF on a Mac so, if you are telling me that FF crashes every 30 seconds on a Mac than I won't have anything to say about that.

A memory leak would essentially affect a system with less RAM, becuase less data is there providing a better chance at a leak occuring. And leaks do not always incur visible signs, and to judge it based purely upon how your computer is processing something is just poor.

I cannot only speak about my experience just as you do. I would love to find somebody that speaks from someone else's experience. According to you, my experience is irrelevant. Good. That's your opinion and I have no intention to counter that.

I know this from C++, you can spot a memory leak even without anything giving you an error. It should be proven, above all, in code before we let what we experience be the end all.

After carefully checking all possible memory leaks (like you said) the next step for testing an application is to make it run for days (or maybe weeks) while constantly measuring its memory footprint. Monitoring your browser's memory requirements while using it for days (or even weeks) without ever closing down all its instances in all this time is a pretty tough memory test which FF passes.Regards,Razvan

[mihai11]

Well, in this thread, people have reported crashes in Firefox when viewing the forum:http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=16229

Just parse that thread and see how many extensions that guy was using ! After "cleaning up" his browser he still had 4 extensions left:Web DevHTML TidyTalk backFirebugLooks like the problem is his case was Firebug. Once that plugin was disabled he had no more problems.No, why would you blame Mozilla foundation for a bug in Firebug ?!?!It could be possible that Microsoft was right about this. People install Firefox, then they install a myriad of extensions but when something is wrong they all blame FF. It is hard to remember what plugins you installed last month but it is very easy to see that it is FF that crashed.

[mihai11]

Razvan, I'm also a "heavy" user, and I use the Google toolbar. I also have extremely rare crashes (and even rarer loss of important data, because of Reload Session or whatever it is) and hardly ever shut the computer off. So I see no grounds for your claim that Google's toolbar is unstable (or that it's a monitoring tool, as its privacy options are fully configurable).Jesh, does disabling Firebug only for Google Maps (rather than the entire extension) help?

I know one instance where Google toolbar is crashing FF constantly and that is when you are installing a piece of software called "Vbulletin". I cannot provide you with the software because it is not free (it is 160 USD) so you'd have to trust me on this.

[Shonumi]

I don't agree with this. There are complex things like human interaction that cannot be judged from personal experience. For example, if all the people that you ever met were honest, it would be a big mistake to think that all the people that exist are honest.

Not to be contentious, but it seems you have wholly misconstrued my point of view. More on that later, but regardless the factor of human involvement, we are dealing with technology; people must not take their personal experiences as an the "end all be all" with which they deem judgement. I'm giving this admonishment on the account that just because something can "seem" to work does not mean it "does" work, but more on that with a later address.

However, my browsing is relevant as an end-to-end testing method. Like a testing team in a company, I am looking at the business logic and see that it is working. I can browse practically any web page with good stability and that speaks about the quality of the software that I am using.

That's all very well and good for you. FF runs, and it performs pragmatically without being imposed, more power to you. Yet again you miss my whole point of argument. I could frankly care less about how many pages you as a user can sucessfully view or how many hours you can clock on FF, that's your business. What I am saying is don't let this affirm your view that FF does not have the possibility of a memory leak. This is most basically, even with thorough testing, looking at the surface. The code needs to examined, not runtime performance, to determine with great surety if there is or isn't a memory leak. Browse whatever you what and tally me the results. You haven't proved it too me yet. Show me some lines of code and your thoughts on it, and then I'll account for it.

I cannot only speak about my experience just as you do. I would love to find somebody that speaks from someone else's experience. According to you, my experience is irrelevant. Good. That's your opinion and I have no intention to counter that.

Again, taking things beyond of their contexts. I said to never judge something that can be proven by actual fact against what one knows either offhandedly or has some dealing with. I never equated it to being invalid. At best experience is an indication to where favors lay. Example, I myself have never come up against the "Blue Screen Of Death", ever, and I've been with Windows since 95. Am I to assume that me encountering it is an incredulous impossibility? Absolutely not. Just the same, having used Firefox since it was Mozilla without any hamper from memory, does that mean it hasn't the chance of containing faulty memory proceedures in its code? Absolutely not. Also, I involve alot of other people's experiences aside from my own, and it is impolitic for anyone to assume that I don't get outside views simply on a basis of them not being so explicitive in my text.

After carefully checking all possible memory leaks (like you said) the next step for testing an application is to make it run for days (or maybe weeks) while constantly measuring its memory footprint. Monitoring your browser's memory requirements while using it for days (or even weeks) without ever closing down all its instances in all this time is a pretty tough memory test which FF passes.

Again, runtime dynamics are only a part of the equation, the outer surface. Get some programmers and researchers under the hood. A memory leak is initiated, most often times from the program. Everything the program does, every piece of data it will ever touch, is in some way manipulated by the code running inside of it. You can put it through all the tests you like, but if you can prove that the programming in it causes a memory issue, even in computational theory, then it has a memory issue, regardless if it is even exploited in runtime.In reiteration, you can't take what comes by you as the definite end all be all, not until you have verfied it within the strictest of systems. This, I believe, is the manner I stated above, not simply looking on how it fares when you run it. Again, I'm not accusing Mozilla of anything, I'm just saying that you cannot discount the possibility of some memory issue, unless you've taken up the matter in the course I have aforementioned.Lastly, you do know that you could have very well just edited your post instead of triple posting? I'm sure seperate paragraphs would have gotten the same effect.