Monday 9 May 2011

Gnashing of teeth

The other day a popup dialog appeared asking if I'd like to upgrade to Firefox 4, to which I blithely agreed.

Woe is me.

In Firefox 4 the buttons have been moved around and the address bar has been incorporated into each tab. Trivial stuff, but I'm becoming more adverse to change for the sake of change as my brain fossilizes into middle age. When I discovered the option to move the address bar back to its proper position I resolved to stick with version 4.

After the next reboot my Firefox woes began in earnest. Each time I tried to navigate to a new page, open a new tab, or even refesh the page I was on, Firefox 4 hung in a not responding state. The browser would eventually spring back to life, but the net effect was much the same as if I'd reduced my connection speed to 2400 baud, placing Firefox 4 in the chocolate teapot category of browsers.

Googling 'I hate Firefox 4', 'Firefox 4 sucks' and other such blunt phrases I discovered I was not alone in my pain.

And lo, there was much lamenting and gnashing of teeth.

Mozilla's advice was to turn off lots of add-ins, uninstall other software products, and Firefox might just decide to play nicely. Everyone else recommended downgrading to Firefox 3.6.

And thus it came to pass that Firefox 4 was banished to the netherworld, and the people rejoiced.

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