Firefox 3 (and 2) on Mac OS X - Major Suckage!

**Advocate** · 11 December 2008, 17:34

Works fine for me... must be all the porn you're looking at!

**NickFitz** · 11 December 2008, 17:46

Although I use Safari as my normal browser, I use Firefox constantly for development, running extensions such as the Web Developer toolbar and, of course, Firebug. I don't encounter any problems such as running slowly, and its memory usage doesn't seem excessive - currently showing about 550MB virtual, 78MB real after being open for several days, varying numbers of tabs but generally about five, repeatedly reloading JS-heavy pages and spending a lot of time in Firebug.

For comparison, Safari has also been open for several days and currently has nineteen open tabs: memory usage is 2.79GB virtual, 357MB real.

I suppose if I used Firefox as intensively as I do Safari then I might encounter the same problems, but Safari is a much superior browser to actually use, as opposed to develop with. All IMHO, of course

**interested** · 15 December 2008, 12:33

Originally posted by bogeyman View Post

Now I like FF. It is my browser of choice. It has some nice add-ons for developers, and so on.

However, FF3 (or 2) on OS X seems to slowly grind to a halt and exhibit flaky behaviour after a period of use. It did it under Windows too, but FF Win seems much more stable than FF Mac nowadays.

With my Dev hat on, I'd say FF has some serious leakage or lack of cleanup issues.

I'm getting sick of doing a Force Quit FireFox twice a day.

I have even resorted to using Safari for my weekly Tesco online shop.

Why have the FF team/community not fixed the damn thing yet?

It has plagued FF on Win and OS X for ages

Camino is definitely worth checking out, FF on the Mac used to annoy the hell out of me all the time as well.

Firefox 3 (and 2) on Mac OS X - Major Suckage!