Yes, I know it’s a First World Problem–and yes, I know these are just annoyances, not Big Fat Serious Issues…but still, in the spirit of the new year, why not?
The Past
I’d been a happy Firefox user for years. I dealt with recent changes in the layout. I like the flexibility of multiple search engines (in a separate search box, please, not in the address bar), and the ease with which I could add them and customize my list (which currently has more than half a dozen, including IMDB, Wolfram|Alpha and Wikipedia, although I mostly use Bing and Google). I like the fact that I can select my own typeface and size, with the typeface applied throughout. I like the addons, although I miss a word-count addon.
And I liked the speed and stability. Until Version 9.
The Present
Version 9 has been crash-prone ever since it installed itself. It seems like any time I hit a page that might have media on it, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll get a “we’re sorry” message and have to restart Firefox. Sometimes that happens twice in an hour, sometimes twice a day, sometimes not at all for hours or a full day.
It’s really annoying, especially when I have four tabs open to carry on a project–and at least once, I’ve had to force Firefox to abandon the tabs that were open in order to get back to work at all, as it kept re-crashing on a perfectly ordinary website.
So I thought I’d try Chrome again, even though I’m loathe to yield too much of my life to Google.
Not so much. It wouldn’t let me choose my own typeface (and enforce that choice), I found its control system and layout a little mysterious, and it didn’t seem to want to behave the way I wanted.
So back to IE? Well, maybe, but here again, the layout seems to confound me. What do I mean by the layout? I’m not sure; I just feel/felt clunky working with IE, especially if I tried to add search choices and use them.
The future?
For now, I’m back to Firefox, hoping some mini-upgrade will reduce the crashes.
Yes, I’ve (tried to) inform(ed) Firefox, twice. No, I haven’t received any response.
I know, I know: It’s freeware, open source software, and I shouldn’t really expect support. Guess I’m spoiled by WordPress.
I don’t plan to grump that much this year; I hope this is an exception. And, hey, despite this, I’ve finished revising Chapter 3 (for the first post-metrics draft, that is, not the final draft), and I’ll move on to Chapter 4 shortly…
Firefox has certainly been bugging me with their new and ridiculous upgrade schedule! Each time several very useful plugins won’t work. So I don’t upgrade until they do. All in all it is a real pain. I, too, have been a loyal Firefox user for several years.
I do not care for Chrome at all, although I could get used to it, perhaps. But Google has enough of my business as it is. As a Mac user IE isn’t even a choice if I wanted it to be.
I have yet to upgrade to FF9 and from what I’ve seen from you and one other, who I can’t remember at the moment, I won’t be any time soon. I was able to upgrade to 8 within days of its release but for 7 I had to wait until 2 days before 8 was released to have my plugins work. For 6 it was about 3/4 of the way to 7’s release. Ridiculous!