Well, this is embarrassing. TechCrunch doesn’t know a lot about Firefox. The recent article by Erick Schonfeld shows a complete disregard for professional journalism. Now, I’m not going to sit here and say this blog is professional journalism by any stretch of the imagination. But this guy works for TechCrunch so he’s obligated to have a bit more polish than I am.
According to Schonfeld’s article, he has had a lot of trouble with Firefox crashing on him. He’s using, or was using, a developer build of the browser. He typically opens 15 to 20 tabs and often has issues with crashes.
Firstly if you’re using a developer build, EXPECT crashes. For crying out loud.
Secondly, if you’re experiencing crashes you should run Firefox in safe mode and make sure there aren’t any problematic extensions or plugins installed.
If you’re still having issues with Firefox crashing, you either have an issue with your computer or a website you frequent has a bug in their website’s code. And I’m not trying to say that Firefox doesn’t have bugs, is perfect, or can’t crash. But what I AM saying is that I run Firefox 3.5 on a Windows Vista machine daily and a Mac OS X Leopard machine daily with 15 tabs and 5 extensions installed and I have not had Firefox 3.5 crash on me once since it came out. I also regularly use Firefox developer builds and the only problem I run into with those is weird placement of text or images on pages like Facebook with AJAX.
So TechCrunch, please don’t run an article saying “oh gee I’d love to run Firefox but the darn thing keeps crashing on me” without doing your homework. From my experience, the vast majority of Firefox users enjoy rock solid stability.
Weak.
