[CentOS] problem with firefox

[Florin Andrei]

Jimmy Bradley wrote:
>        Just out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a problem that has
> developed with firefox? This started on both of my machines after the
> newest updates. I'll be at a website, even the mozilla website, and when
> I click on a link to go to another part of the site or to download a
> file, Firefox will just simply close. It's random for the most part, but
> it happened quite often at the sourceforge.net website too. I'm not
> having this problem with Seamonkey.

I've heard a lot of complaints from Firefox/CentOS users. I never used
CentOS as a desktop OS, so I can't confirm those issues from my own
experience.

However, I use Fedora, Ubuntu and (very rarely) Windows XP as desktop
OS, usually with the latest Firefox version and a set of plugins (Java,
Flash, multimedia, Adobe) and extensions (SlimSearch [disclaimer: I'm
the author], Forecastfox, Google Browser Sync, It's All Text,
StumbleUpon, maybe others too) and the only issue I see is with 2.0.0.x
slowly leaking memory. But there are no crashes.

It looks like the particular Firefox version distributed with CentOS /
Red Hat has some serious issues.

My suggestion is to try a newer version. If you put it in /opt/firefox
and add the bin/ subdirectory (or wherever the firefox binary is) to the
front end of the $PATH variable, it will Simply Work with minimal
changes. 2.0.0.x works fine for me on the abovementioned OS's. I've
tried briefly 3.0beta on Ubuntu and Fedora and it seemed to work fine
too, but I don't have much experience with it.

Bottom line: upgrade Firefox.

Maybe this should be put in the FAQ.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/