March 17, 2005
Firefox behavioral mystery solved
Posted by bopuc at March 17, 2005 04:13 PM
So, I had mentioned a while back that I was seemingly unable to get Firefox to run on my system. I had tried everything and basically given up.
Then, "miraculously", one day, it worked. Now, I haven't switched from Saf "Memory Hog from Hell" Ari, mainly for little User Experience things I've come to take for granted, not to mention my large URL autocomplete history and reeeaaams of passwords/cookies...
I found the culprit. I had been running CodeTek's excellent Virtual Desktop app for a long time. Without some sort of virtual desktop, I would surely kill myself. For some reason, at some point a few weeks/months back, I switched to "Desktop Manager". It seemed smaller and quicker. It was missing a few features which I was starting to really get annoyed at the lack of, so just now I decided to switch back to Virtual Desktop. Bam. Firefox started chocking again. "No frikkin' way" sez I.
"Yes frikkin' way" sez Google.
if you are a fan of Mozilla's Firefox browser and/or Thunderbird email client, you should know that versions 0.8-1.0 of both are incompatible with CodeTek Virtual Desktop 3.1. I've heard mixed reports about other windows managers, but it appears that Firefox works fine in many window managers other than CTVD. The problems include an inability to type text in the Firefox windows, focus on the windows, or use Firefox in any way. For quite a while CodeTek will not even reply to emails on the topic, but it appears they have had a change of heart and now say they are testing a fix and hope to release new version (3.2) by early March.
I can only hope CodeTek keeps it's promise and releases 3.2 soon so I can get back to using VirtualDesktop, which I paid for, and who's drag between screens and easy "dammit which desktop is that window in again? Oh right there it is!" features make it a lifesaver...
Comments
I heard if you use keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse Safari won't freeze up as much, especially when closing tabs. Also, after a few hours of use Safari decides to act funny and needs to be restarted often.
Posted by: Jessica at March 23, 2005 07:46 PM
Uh, if you're going to quote my web page, you should at least provide a link or reference (I am not Google).
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bclee/apple/
It's now almost April and I still haven't heard anything more from CodeTek. I use Firefox on everything but laptop (iBook) now, I really wish either CodeTek or Firefox would come up with a fix.
Posted by: Brian Lee at March 28, 2005 07:46 PM
Whoops! Sorry about that Brian. Got carried away in the excitement of finally finding out what the problem was. ;)
Posted by: Boris Anthony at March 29, 2005 01:51 AM