Try having firefox on a number of machines that may not be turned on for 2-3 weeks, depending on test schedules and kit rotation. The background auto download of updates is a serious annoyance!

(personally I prefer Safari 4 fractionally over Chrome, on the “do the least evil” basis – but then I have to keep reminding myself not to install iTunes & QT wherever I use it)

@Steve Cassidy

I’m confused, when did Apple become less evil than Google? I thought they were both equal-servants to the dark lord of consumerism?

WellI also got fed up with the browser and switched, I still use it over Safari on my mac, (for some reason the mac version never crashes), however on my PC I reverted to IE8 for which Foxmarks is now avalible.

I wasn’t sure about switching to IE, I mean it always gets the worst reviews and I am a web designer, but I just couldn’t put up with Firefox constantly crashing on the PC. It was time to switch.

Also IE isn’t really that bad, it’s not perfect but it’s simple and it works.

I run about eight third party add-ons, and haven’t been bothered by much nagging about upgrades. I think it comes down to what add-ons you’ve installed.

Also, Firefox on OS X has been 100% stable in the time I’ve been using it. Just my personal experience though. I wouldn’t mind if I was forced to use any of the main browsers – they’re all pretty good (which proves that the competition has been good).

Looks like Mozilla are taking Firefox down that well trodden road to bloatware hell. Me thinks the halo is starting to slip a little in the face of some strong competition. Damn it, even IE in its latest incarnation is a good browser, stable and fast and easy to use – so a lot of users will stay with it, or dare I say, go back to it!!

Stop whining and fix, you must have something better to write about than a spurious piece of nonsense. It seems like your angry with yourself for not being bothered to sort it out so I’m with operator error. I have very few issues, I get the odd freeze every now and again and more so at work on a pc I have no permissions for.

I can’t say I’ve experienced much nagging or pausing – NoScript went through a phase of daily updates, but apart from that it has been fairly quiet.

I quite like Safari, on my Mac (it causes the whole system to pause under Windows), but I don’t really get on with Chrome on the PC, the layout with the tabs IN the title bar is just wrong and breaks all the UI guidelines for Windows, Linux and OS X… :-S

I’d consider swapping, if the tabs dropped back down onto the tab bar AND NoScript and FlashBlock were available for Chrome or Safari.

You might like to try the ‘Vacuum places’ addon to speed things up:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13824

soon to be in Firefox core apparently – more details on what the command does here:

http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-for-better-performance-now-with-no-restart/

It’s one of the many reasons I switched to Safari and never looked back. Overall I think Safari is a much better user experience, both on the mac and in windows

I had a critical look at my add-ons and found that there was only one that I couldn’t live without (Sharaholic).

Then I found a way of doing it in Chrome.

I’ve been switched over on Chrome for about four months now and I’m no longer missing any of the add-ons.

It’s what you get used to.

What impatient, foolish complaints. I’m referring the bitching re: delays of a 1, 2 or 3 seconds. I can’t believe you notice. You must have a lot of nothing to do to be so aware of a trivial amount of time.
Seriously when your busy 3 seconds is like 3 nanoseconds.
Oh and I do agree with Firefox 3.5 Mozilla has gone off the deep end, and it’s fixes are mucking up the browser, so I regressed to 3.01 and all the problems disappeared. The obsession with obscure security holes is driving this constant security update nonsense as far as I’m concerned. In all the years of using Firefox I have yet to experience one bit of malware from these supposed hidden mines of software evil.

Barry stop being a little bitch. ~12 addons is too many, what do you expect to happen? Turn off automatic updates or whatever. This isn’t news or podcast worthy and is a non issue when you consider some other browsers don’t even have the addons in the first place. Jesus man.