sometimes things suck in awesome ways
by Jon on Jan.03, 2009, under Arts & Entertainment, Babble, Food & Beverage, General Tech, Life, Theater / Opera, teh internets
After stumbling to the computer this morning, as coffee medicated a mild hangover from a kickass shindig the agonyzer hosted with his partners in crime to celebrate their success in a damn fine production of A Christmas Carol — my firefox went batshit and commandeered my morning.
Long story short, over the course of maybe a half to a dozen page loads, the thing just ground to a halt. It wouldn’t respond within the page or in the menus. It acted like took control of X, or at least of KDE, by seeming not to let you switch to a different window, but it was actually just slow, and once switched, you could move between all the *other* windows and terminals with ease. One thing it did leave me was the ability to close the program from the corner ‘X’, and it closed quickly and cleanly. I’d relaunch — no alerts, it was a clean close and didn’t believe itself to have crashed — and as the tabs from the previous session opened, it crawled to the same condition.
Repeat several times, closing out all but the standard dozen or so tabs I keep open 24-7, which I know aren’t likely to have any out of control scripting — no change. No change in safe mode, or after using safe mode launch to restore some program defaults. Try an apt-get upgrade (think “Windows Update”) on the system (running debian testing on a pretty old amd xp-1700), and a dist-upgrade (think “Windows Service Pack”). These installed a new enough firefox that I had to upgrade some plugins. Finally an install –reinstall on firefox, err, iceweasel. Rebooted after each of the last three. All without making a lick of difference.
Exasperated, I closed all the aforementioned always-open tabs, restarted one last time — and everything worked like a champ. Of course I immediately reopened all the same standard tabs, without a hitch.
So it doesn’t seem to have been the pages, but something with the browser’s cache of information about and controlling one or more of the tabs and their content.
As far as the awesomeness goes — well it *was* pretty impressive how consistently firefox reproduced my session tabs, through all those ups and downs and upgrades and even the reinstall. Even if it did suck that it had to reproduce whatever the hell was wrong in the process.
January 5th, 2009 on 8:46 pm
while this should not affect clean instances of firefox, i do recommend that you set firefox’s recent page cache to 0. by default, iirc, it caches the 8 most recent pages. i can’t find the appropriate config option; it may have changed with firefox 3.
there are a TON of preferences that you can modify in the about:cache window. check out: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_Firefox
i doubt any of this is likely to address your weirdness, since it’s been working just fine. honestly, though, i’d recommend you switch to google’s chromium. while i don’t believe the linux port of chromium works yet, the windows version works under wine: http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/
i haven’t yet tried crossover chromium, so ymmv.
since the beta of google chrome was released, i no longer use firefox. the days of the monolithic browser are over. unless mozilla and/or microsoft can quickly and efficiently convert to the model that chromium uses, google will own the browser market inside of 5 years.
sorry, firefox, our time was sweet, but you grew fat and lazy.
January 5th, 2009 on 8:55 pm
sorry, i meant about:config, not about:cache, though the about:cache window does have some interesting statistics.
again, chromium has a near-perfect architecture, has never crashed, and has consistently lower memory usage than firefox. my chrome instance has been open for several days, seen tons of tabs and, with 3 current tabs, is only using 88M. in sharp contrast is the firefox instance i’ve just opened and, currently only viewing the about:config and about:cache tabs, is already using 53M.
did i mention that, with chromium, if one page has some javascript that goes wonkers and eats the page, it doesn’t affect other tabs?
chromium rocks. firefox sucks. the disparity is as great as that between firefox and internet explorer. it. is. simply. amazing.
January 5th, 2009 on 8:59 pm
btw, i’ve had openoffice commandeer my entire x session before. NOTHING would fix it except for killing X and restarting it. it may be a bug in my window manager (fvwm), but the fact that openoffice has been the ONLY offender (and a repeat one at that) makes me think not.
so consider yourself lucky that killing the process worked for you ;)
January 5th, 2009 on 9:57 pm
Heh, yeah I’ve had open office do that a few times. In addition to seeing it do a good impersonation of a strobe light :)
That’s quite a recommendation for chromium, I’ll definitely check out the crossover version.