firefox keeps crashing

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What should I do?

Download the latest version is the first thing. I guess you will have to use IE to do that.

When does he crash ?

Did you noticed when it happen ?

I downloaded the newest version a few weeks ago and mine keeps crashing too. It just freezes up and won't open links or new web pages, or even go home. It's driving me nuts, because I love Firefox. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to when it does this. It just decides to stop working.

Do you have a Mac?

get opera. firefox sucks

Use IE7.

firefox shouldn't crash all the time so the solution about getting a different browser doesn't seem like a very good one. If she wanted to use a different browser, she would have chosen to do so...

Use IE7. Then you'd know why it crashed.

I use SeaMonkey.

close firefox

do:
Start->Run

type in:

and press enter

move everything there to a new folder on your desktop and make sure that everything is gone

Then try running firefox again, your stuff will be gone so if you have any bookmarks be sure to export them, but the crashing should go away

try this
delete firefox DIR out of program files and documents and settings. then reinstall it fresh. if problem continues then i donno.

On a less frivolous note, what exactly happens when Firefox crashes? Does it just crash as soon as you start, or is it when you do something specific? (Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this. Doctor: So stop doing it!).

I have a friend who has just been having some trouble with Firefox 1.0.1 on the site "www.youscotland.com". I used almost exactly the same setup and it worked fine for me. The only difference was that he had installed some Firefox extensions that I hadn't.

The difference with Firefox versus IE7 crashing is, provided someone reports the circumstances back to the programmers, they'll fix it - soon.

I've noticed that on Windows Vista, Firefox runs much slower than IE7, and consumes up to 7 times as much memory.

microsoft prob made changes in vista that would specifically cause this, to incurage ppl to use IE7.

Not necessarily. Or rather, nothing specific would need changing. As MS are the source of both Vista and IE7, and they were developed in parallel, they can make them share libraries. Almost all of the code for IE7 is probably essential parts of Vista. When showing what memory IE7 is using, MS can just forgot to count that most of Vista is needed. I haven't tried it, but comparing the usage of IE7 versus Firefox under XP would be more meaningful, except that the same sort of trick will still be happening, to a lesser degree.

The above applies to memory usage and will reflect, to some extent, in speed. I gather Vista is a little memory hungry (laugh). If you are near the limit, a small change in memory requirements can cause a huge change in performance. See "Thrashing", which is where the OS isn't able to fit all the actively in-use code into RAM at the same time. A bad OS ploughs on, and starts swapping RAM on/off disk like mad. I think this is roughly what "Your System has Become Unstable" (does that sound familar) is all about. A good OS will detect thrashing and take steps to avoid the worst aspects of it.

Out of silliness, I just checked - I'm running Ubuntu with 107 active processes, most of which will be multi-threaded. They are using 103Mb of my swap space on top of my 512Mb RAM. Nothing is taxing my 1.7GHz processor much.

There may be other reasons for the speed difference. The fact that Firefox displays pages correctly?

PS. Firefox does not need Windows. IE7 does.

since version 1.5? (not sure if it was earlier) firefox puts all the tabs into memory so if you have multiple tabs open, you will use a lot of ram in firefox.... just putting that out there.

By this, are you saying that IE7 regenerates the pages for each tab?

By choosing to be, in a sense, honest about it, Firefox has let itself show the tabs as part of its memory map. When there are tabs open that you have not clicked on, they will eventually be swapped out to disk, so they don't really matter (but they are still showing as Firefox RAM space). They are no longer part of its "Working Set" of pages of RAM.

If IE7 does not keep tabs in memory, it must rebuild them each time. That will be from cached versions of various bits, but the regeneration will cost CPU time (as if MS would care about that). This will impact differently on the working set. There may be far less total memory tied up in the cached items, all told, but they will be spread out. It is more than likely that the net effect is to cause more pages of memory to be accessed (swapped in) than is the case with Firefox, where it will be a single contiguous chunk.

If my analysis is anywhere near the truth, I would expect switching between tabs to almost instantaneous in Firefox and noticeably hiccupy in IE7. I would not expect there to be an awful hit on performance (memory or speed) when each has a lot of tabs open, except than Firefox would need the swap file to be large enough to accommodate the tabs.

I have to say, I've only used IE7 a couple of times since it appeared. Other than it screwing up my connection (somehow it suddenly want me to go back to dialup!), and it having hidden some buttons, I can't comment.

I also use Seamonkey, versus Firefox, but that's not a huge difference.