Hi,
I’m a big fan of the Firefox browser; it’s fast, nimble and has a great plug-in architecture, that has made Firefox into a true tool for web designers. That said, Firefox has one big failing - it sucks on the Mac.
Yes, for reasons beyond the comprehension of this humble nerd, Firefox crashes like crazy on the typically ultra stable Mac OSX.
… It’s so bad in fact, that sometimes it feels like I’m using crash-crazy Mac OS 9!
What is the source of the Firefox problem?
I haven’t done any thorough testing, but it seems to me that the constant crashing has to do with the Firefox Javascript engine - it only seems to crash when I’m on a page that uses Javascript.
So if any of your Firefox developers happen to come across this post, please take a closer look at this glaring problem. Believe me, I am not the only one who has seen this.
PS: The Flash player also doesn’t work properly in Firefox on Mac.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com
I have a MacBook Pro and have never had a problem with Firefox at all.
I have the same problem. I work on a PC and live on a Mac (MBP). FF on the PC is so much more stable and responsive. As the title says, “Firefox Sucks on Mac.”
Here’s a VERY good way to demonstrate the problem. Install the “Pencil Sketching” extension in FF for both a Mac and a PC. On the PC, this is an amazing little app. It literally flies along. On the Mac, it’s an absolute dog. It takes forever to drag objects around. Saving the project takes forever.
Please fix. I use Safari for all day to day browsing now. I only fire up FF when I’m doing web development and need Firebug and the developer toolbar.
I switched to a Mac in January of this year. I have an iMac, MacBook, and my new job provided me with a 2nd MacBook. On all three I exclusively use FF and have yet to run into any problems.
Cheers.
I’ve found firefox to be strangely erratic when it comes to flaws and bugs. Whenever I use it, (admittedly on a PC) it consumes vast amounts of memory, and closing all tabs doesn’t release this memory.
Other than that, it’s good though!
Solarise i have noticed the memory leak in Firefox as well it some times hogs a lot of my system resources. I used a mac at school and i did not notice a a major difference from firfox on pc (my home use.)
I have a MacBook Pro, *never* had a problem.
Sadly I have the same experience of FF sucking on Mac. It’s the best thing that happened to the PC world but it crashes like crazy for me when I use it on my Macbook. I even tried that troubleshooting thing on the FF website to fix frequent Mac crashes but it didn’t work at all. And not only that, seems the download manager has stopped working for some odd reason. I click on a link to start a download and even choose where to save the file but nothing ever starts. I never have these problems with FF on my PC. So sad because I really loved the Fox. I guess I’ll have to go back to using Opera browser on my Mac and save myself the headaches.
Hi Anaya,
I found Safari to be a pretty good browser, you may want to give it a try.
Stefan
Have to say I agree. I use firefox on my PC exclusively, but it is AWFUL on my macs (2 G4s, and an intel). All of them. It takes forever to load up when I launch the app. Even when firefox is already up, opening a new window… forever. Longer than Safari takes to load up the same page with the app not running—by a lot.
Glad I’m not alone with this problem! I finally had to completely ditch Firefox on my macbook. It takes forever to open up initially, won’t accept text as fast as I can type it, and crashes a handful of times each day. Even my gmail inbox will take around 20 seconds to load vs opening instantly on Camino or Safari. It’s upsetting because I still can’t find a decent browser for os x that includes a drop down address bar.
Firefox totally sucks on my MacBook Pro. I just tried to save a page as a PDF file and Firefox choked and died. The page I was trying to save was a receipt that I’ll need to pick up some personalized license plates. The receipt is gone thanks to Firefox. Good work guys. Oh, and Firefox ALWAYS crashes when I try to quit. Great feature!
Doesn’t Mozilla have a Mac alternative? I want to say it’s called Camino but I’m not sure. I don’t use a Mac so I don’t have this problem, but I still assumed Firefox was for PC and Camino is for Mac.
I used to have this problem when browsing JavaScript heavy sites such as Gmail. It seemed to start when Firefox 3 was first released. However, about a month later the problems seemed to dwindle. I’m running OS 10.5 and haven’t had a problem since.