Bye bye Firefox

[Holden]

Firefox has now reached version 23 and as the version numbers have increased the operation of this browser got clunkier. This has never been a major problem for me - until now.

The latest issue has been going on for a while and has yet to be resolved by Mozilla. It concerns the use of flash players, particularly Adobe Flash. At the moment they cause FF to 'hang' and despite me searching for and applying a number of 'solutions', the problem has not been fixed.

It also appears to affect different computers in different ways. My tablet at work won't hang but I get frequent messages about 'activating Adobe Flash' which, if I want to watch short videos news clips for example I am obliged to do. It's only one click but I have to do this for every new page that I load. I don't have this problem at home, the pages simply stops running and a message box appears telling me about an unresponsive script - I already knew that!.

Looking at the other browsers I've decided to go with Chrome, mainly for speed and simplicity. IE is still to bloated for my liking and I want to see a separate box for Google search, not have to muck around with the URL address box to achieve the same thing.

[kishnevi]

I've found Opera to do everything Firefox did/does,  with no real problems.  However, I've not updated my version in some time, so perhaps newer iterations may have the problems you encountered with Firefox.  (I'm using version 11.51, don't know what the current version numbering is.)

About clicking for flash players to work--may be a good thing.  A little while back there was some malware problem running around which put Java based plug ins to work for nefarious purposes; the best defense was tell one's browser not to play plug ins unless you clicked on it specifically.  That's how I'm set now, and if nothing else it speeds up loading times and I don't encounter the freeze and hang ups you have.  At the very least, I suggest checking your tablet's settings to see how plug ins are/are not enabled.  It's possible "don't play unless I click" is the default option.

[DavidW]

I use Chrome on my workstation, good choice Holden.

I must admit I use Safari on my Mac even though I have Chrome installed.

[Karl Henning]

Chrome here, too. Well, at home, I mean.

[TheGSMoeller]

<---- iMac user that prefers Chrome. (Me, not the monkey)

[Daverz]

I go back and forth between Firefox and Chrome on Windows/Linux/OS X (I typically use each OS every day.)  Sometimes one or the other will have problems with certain Javascript-heavy sites (e.g. avclub.com).