Is Firefox Becoming More Crash-Prone with Each Release?

Whenever a new version of your favorite software gets released, there’s usually good reason to get a little excited. After all, minor version upgrades usually mean important bug fixes, and major upgrades are a combination of that and feature updates. Firefox 3.5 was no exception to the rule, and along with a slew of bug fixes, many notable features were also introduced, which made the upgrade decision a no-brainer.

For me personally, though, each new major version update gives me hope that what I’ll download will be a much more stable browser. I’ve been using Firefox since it went by the Firebird moniker, and the reason I came to love it so much is that in the beginning, the browser was rock-solid. Fast, simple, and stable. Since then, though, and especially since 2.x, I have found Firefox to become buggier than ever, and far more crash-prone.

Since I run Linux as a primary OS, I usually blame other factors when Firefox crashes. Prior to Adobe’s releasing of an official 64-bit Flash plugin for Linux, most crashes usually could be attributed to that, but I don’t think that plugin today is as guilty in the same high percentage of crashes as it used to be. I mainly come to this conclusion, only because, as of Firefox 3.5, I have found the crashes to become more frequent. And with each crash, my love for the browser diminishes just a wee bit further.

I took some comfort in seeing I wasn’t alone, though, as Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch is apparently suffering the same issue, and judging by the screenshot, he’s running Mac OS X. Many will be quick to blame the extensions being used, and that’s understandable. But realize that the extensions scheme of things is what made Firefox so popular in the first place. It’s a major feature. Of the three extensions I currently run, none are noted to cause issues (Compete, Forecast Fox, Web Developer), so I still tend to blame the browser itself more than anything.

If you’re a Firefox 3.5 user, how has your experience been so far? Have you seen as many screens like the one below as I have?

Without basic stability, none of the other great features or add-ons really matter much. Mozilla needs to fix this issue fast because Firefox 3.5 is already gaining a lot of traction. Net Applications has it at a 4.5 percent market share at the end of July, while StatCounter has it at 9.4 percent as of today. People are using this as their main browser, despite the beta label, and there are plenty of other powerful choices out there from Safari to Chrome to, yes, even IE8.