I never thought I’d live to see the day when IE beats Firefox

Firefox loses to IE over issues with reliability, memory leaks and just dumbnessOver the past couple of weeks I had been limping along trying to figure out why my bandwidth at home was sucking eggs hard-core. Come to find out it isn’t Verizon after all; it’s Firefox!

I’m gonna surf like it’s 1999

I had been talking with br4x just the other day (well, last week(, and I was saying how it was weird that I would run a bandwidth check in Firefox and get like 1.8 mg down, then try again mere moments later and I get speeds of up to 226 k. WTF?! So I started poking around and there are numerous postings and threads across various blogs and forums bemoaning how Firefox just decides to slow down. There is some speculation that it has to do with just Gmail, and Google Sync, but I could hardly even stand looking at flickr using Firefox. Ryan is having trouble at home on Ubuntu with Gmail and CPU spikes with Firefox. There is a common version here too, it’s version 2.0.0.6 – the most recent release. It really reminds me of the old dial-up days when I was happy that I was getting 48k from my 56k modem.

Trying the suggestions of a few, I uninstalled Google browser Sync and it did help a bit, but not totally or reliably. I even started having errors with Gmail, and getting locked out "due to unusual activity". This never lasted very long, never the declared 24 hours, but at its worst it happened multiple times a day. It hasn’t happened since I started using IE again. Just for clarification, I use IE 7 almost exclusively when I use IE. I do have Multiple Versions installed, but I rarely use them for anything other than testing.

So what gives Mozilla? Is it  a memory leak? Did someone fatch the code and you guys can’t figure it out? Or is it some sinister plot by at Redmond the Gates and Ballmer concocted in order to "adjust some security settings" to make windows stronger – which unfortunately did some random douche-bagery to Firefox?

I am still on version 2.0.0.4 at work and have zero problems, but other folks claimed to have downgraded to 2.0.0.4 from .6, but I suspect there were some left-over’s that left that option useless – as they continued to have problems.

Blessed Silence

From what I can tell there isn’t any kind of official response, there are tons of very helpful folks on the message boards, but unfortunately even running in safe-mode Firefox is slow for me. It’s not an issue of placing blame either – I don’t care about that, I just want my browser back. I prefer it over IE 7 days a week and twice on Sunday. Google doesn’t seem to have a dang thing to say either about the droves of users having problems with the unusual activity garbage. If you check their support forums there are hundreds of folks having this issue – maybe it’s browser related; maybe it’s not. You would think that they would at least give a slight crap.

Can we fix it? No we can’t….

Well, not really. I aced Google Browser Sync, and switched Foxmarks, disabled Faster fox after having installed it to try and help (which it did not), and ultimately just gave up and started using IE. So no more problems.

I just hope the issues get sorted out soon. It’s not as bad as using IE 6, but I still would rather have Firefox up and running smoothly again.

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