Hey Guys

I am long time linux user and have been using Linux since 1995. On
my desktop at home I run ubuntu and have mandrake 9.0 on my
router machine. Hey ,what have your experiences been with Firefox
of late. I know more users , more bugs and the all-wonderful browser that
we all love isnt all that pretty when comes to dedicated day to day use.

Please post your experiences good or bad :

never had any real issues with firefox, it has anything i need through the extensions, like adblock and tabbrowser prefs, so i couldn't live without it

EDIT: hmmm could be a bit quicker to start.

Generally very good,

Particularly like the tabbed browsing

Could start quicker and can't add engines to the search bar thingy on my machine.

The Monkey

I have used it since 0.8 and had very few problems.

You can use prelink to get it start faster. On my Debian system it starts in under 5 seconds.

The search engines installed for all users. Try running Firefox as root and installing the engines you want. They will be available for all users and profiles.

I have had a generally good experience with FF. It crashes sometimes when I try to delete cookies, that is the only negative I can think of. It is not as full featured as Opera, but it is a good browser nonetheless.

I'd have to say, I've had a pretty good experience so far. I've only been using Firefox for about 6 months now I guess. On both Windows and Linux, I have the same problem. Well, it's more of a complaint than a problem. The font just seems a bit fuzzy to me. It's not quite as crisp as it is in other browsers.
All in all though, I love Firefox. When I want to surf the net, I want to do just that. I don't want all the bells and whistles, the 600 buttons, I just want to hit some websites and do it efficiently. As far as problems go, the only thing I've noticed is that occasionally, it lags up a bit while loading. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Just the font ugliness, that's all.

With Kde and Kubuntu, the fonts look pretty good. I'm sure there is a way to fix them in Gnome.

The worst problem I've had with Firefox is it crashing every now and then (usually because of buggy extensions). This is in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Not so often in Linux, but it does happen. Other than that, it's a wonderful browser.

I've use FF since Phoenix 0.1 (yes, it was called Phoenix in the beginning - who remebers that?) and I must say that as it becomes more feature-rich, it seems to get a bit slower to load, but the rendering is faster. I don't have any realy issues with the browser itself. Sometimes an extension will crap out the whole thing, but you can usually get rid of the offender and carry on. There could be clearer docs for some of the extensions.

Initially i fell in love with the browser but lately .... we have hit a rough spot.
I find firefox reaaaaallly slow now. I mean really slow. I run it on a 1.2Ghz 700MB+ Ram
and Firefox takes a lot of CPU time. its not as snappy as I remember it being when
i first used a few versions ago.

What winds up me up though, and I mean right up to the point of screaming is the
broken find bar. If you search more than twice it blanks out all your menus. Find is the
most important feature that I use. I also find that the more plugins I have installed , used or
unused, the slower my browsing experience becomes. I dont mind these problems
so much , but the find bar thing is INFURIATING.

Dont mean to sound like i am complaining, but i was just wondering if ppl were
having similar experiences. I am sure that the problems will disappear soon but 'till
then . ....

The only issue i have with Firefox (and Mozilla) is that when the application crashes in Linux, KDE or Gnome, you then XKill it, or "killall firefox" or "killall mozilla" when then trying to open it again, it asks you to choose another profile, even restarting the machine causes it to ask you to choose another profile, the only way to fix is to delete the default one and start again - which of course deletes all your settings.... extremely frustrating!!!

One thing that you'll notice with the ubuntu release of firefox at the moment is not a problem with the browser itself, but the way the ubuntu people have not changed the version string... As we know, we're all using firefox 1.0.4 with the security updates, etc. But, if you look in help... about, you'll see this:

Firefox/1.0 (Ubuntu package 1.0.2 MFSA2005-44)

"Well, this is nothing, just a typo" I hear you say. Unfortunately not. The string is also stored internally, and checked by the firefox website when you attempt to addon items to it. Thus, if you try installing themes or extensions from the mozilla website at the moment, it will not work. Of course, this bug is being fixed as we speak. Still, it has been slightly annoying.

It could start quicker and use less RAM. Other than that it's freaking great !

@Kirmonkey : You can add search engines as root (as someone mentioned) or you can chown lib/searchplugins directory where your firefox is located.

A vanilla Firefox browser is fairly lousy - I keep trying to use extensions that aren't there; It allows web pages to define keyboard shortcuts that override default browser functionality; the searchbar is too small & has the wrong search engines; I don't like the default theme. . .

But because it's so customizeable, when I've got it set up the way I want it, there's no better browser!

I actually sat down and wrote out a list of what I do to make Firefox work the way I want it. It turned out a lot longer than I expected: http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/firefox.htm

The final two screenshots, to me, summarize the benefits of using FF beautifully. . .