Firefox and other gecko browsers

[Collins Richey]

Just curious to know if any of you have been encountering problems
with any of the gecko-based browsers lately?.

As most of you know, I'm running Sidux which is basically Debian sid.
Debian in their great wisdom decided not to agree with some of the
requirements for distributing Firefox, et al, and forked (others might
say fsck'd) Firefox as Iceweasel. Starting a few weeks back, I began
to encounter problems with Iceweasel that only a few others have
encountered. Particularly troublesome was the www.howtoforge.com site
that caused Iceweasel to crash with a well reported bug. After a
couple of maintenance cycles, the problem disappeared on my desktop by
not on my laptop.

Last week, the problems worsened. Iceweasel began to segfault and/or
hang at weird times, expescially after several days of running. Very
likely the very well known memory leaks in Firefox, etc.

So, I've been experimenting with Swiftfox as well. Swiftfox is
offering the latest version 3 beta. When I first tried it, Swiftfox
exhibited the same problems as Iceweasel, but there is a new release
with a later version, namely 3.0b5pre-1, and I've found this to be
quite stable. Running for several days with none of the old problems.
Swiftfox, in case you haven't encountered it, basically recompiles
Firefox optimized for specific cpus. I'm running the Athlon64-32bit
version.

Before any of you run off the rails, as did some folks when I posted
this on the Sidux forum, I run no Firefox extensions, only a few
plugins, and I always nuke the ~/.mozilla directory when switching
browsers.

It appears that Mozilla is not putting much effort into fixing
problems on the version 2 browser, now that they are nearing version 3
release.

Just a little fodder to keep you busy on an otherwise boring weekend.

-- 
Collins Richey
 If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
 of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.