Forking Firefox could fix the constant freezing and crashing.
As I write this column, my mouse pointer, whereever it is on the screen, is blinking incessantly. This happens when a webpage is loaded and a video someplace on the screen is paused. This isn't right.
In some situations in Firefox, a paused or loaded video will be on the screen and a gray box will appear asking permission for some crappy tracker to use some of my memory. I always click deny. Most of the time, the box reappears and asks again. Does it think I was kidding?
The worst part about this box, when it appears, is that the cursor completely disappears and I have to pound the control key to make the "where's the pointer" target appear. I have had to set this feature as a default for finding a missing cursor. So there it is, the circle, not the pointer. I guesstimate where the arrow might be and hammer on the deny button. One click finally takes and the box goes away.
This is bullcrap. The stupid box is clearly from Adobe, but the flashing cursor has something to do with Firefox, I bet. Not to let Adobe off the hook in all this, can I ask exactly why the company must update the Flash Player every few days? It's gotten to the point of where Real Player was before people rejected it out of hand. Do you remember those days? Real Player was a plague on the world of computing.
Curiously, the players are still around. I was looking for a specific clip and found it only as a Real Player clip. I tried to play it but, you guessed it, I had to update my Real Player software. Ack!
But back to Firefox. What is with all the crashes? Hardly a day goes by when something doesn't blow up the browser, taking with it all the open browsers and tabs. A sorry message tries to console me. It asks if I want to report it. Why? What good will that do?
I will give the Mozilla team credit keeping enough information in memory to recover all the pages and reconstruct the tabs after you try to re-light the browser. You do get a message that says, "This is embarrassing" and a list of the sites. Of course, if one or more of these had a video, it will often auto play, requiring you to jump from page to page to page to find it and kill it. How annoying.
With some versions of Windows (Vista), the browser creates some sort of memory leak because once or twice a day a message appears moaning that the system does not have enough memory due to the browser and suggesting I close something. If I shut down the browser and open one tab, this message still appears.
Right now, people are complaining about the sluggish performance and constant crashing of Firefox. Many even consider moving to Chrome. Safari seems to have been removed from the conversation and nobody wants to talk about Internet Explorer at all. Opera, probably the most innovative browser, never gets discussed either. The problem with Chrome is that nobody trusts Google enough to use it.
I think it is time for Mozilla to fork this project. The Firefox browser is the longest running open-source initiative I've ever seen that hasn't forked a few times by now. It seems that if there is disagreement in the developer contingent, people just walk off instead of walking with code and forking the product. Cripes, even OpenOffice has forked, giving us LibreOffice.
Something has to be done to fix all this and maybe it is time for something new. Fork it!
You can Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter @therealdvorak.
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