Lifehacker: Free Software To Be Thankful For

November 29, 2008 / 1:02 pm • By Dr. Melissa Clouthier

Lifehacker: Free Software To Be Thankful For
Firefox is #1. And I am very thankful for Firefox.

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  • Paul Gordon

    I got onto Firefox in the first place because a blogger noted that it wasn’t the resource hog that Internet Explorer was. And, that turned out to be the case.

    But, when I updated to the latest version (3.0.4) I started getting frequent occurrences of the program just freezing up.

    I run Firefox on Windows XP, with Norton Antivirus and Norton Firewall.

    With with the earlier version (3.0.3), the few times it seemed to freeze up, bringing up the performance meter showed CPU activity pegged at 100%. Disabling the firewall helped to unfreeze things, showing a significant drop in cpu activity.

    So, when visiting a lot of sites and using multiple tabs, I would leave the firewall disabled and just depend on the anti-virus for protection. Almost never had freezing problems this way.

    With 3.0.4, even with the firewall disabled, that meter would often peg at 100%, and freezing would occur.

    The 3.0.4 release notes mention addressing some security issues; maybe it’s trying to do the same checking that the firewall did.

    For whatever reason, 3.0.4 seems to be the resource hog that its’ chief competitor is, so I will probably stay with 3.0.3 for the foreseeable future.

    If you have already updated to 3.0.4, and wish to go back to 3.0.3, the only place I found to download that version is at Filehippo
    ( http://www.filehippo.com )

    The specific page for that version is at
    http://www.filehippo.com/download_firefox/4708/

    (There may be, and probably ARE other sources, but THAT is the one I found.)

    FYI – FWIW – I still like it.
    -

  • Trish

    Thanks for posting that link, Paul. I’ve got the same setup as you do, so I’ll probably get the revert.