Microsoft vs. Mozilla
In the last week or so I have started having a lot of crashes, lockups, and blue screens of death on my system. I had been trying to figure things out and had looked at several things. The error reporting kept suggesting it was a problem with an out of date USB device driver, but that was not the case. Everything was up to date, which was another it suggested might be the problem. I was grasping at seeming straws to find a solution.
After some scratching of my head and still not having really figured out anything I was continuing to work along with much saving to make sure I found myself testing some stuff on the web. As is typical, I test things in general on both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. This particular testing, I had recent rebooted the computer and fired up IE and went to it. Ran through things and had no problems. Got sidetracked and continued doing things using IE for sometime and never did have a crash.
Much later, by several hours, I finally got around to firing up Firefox and running the testing. About half way through the testing I got a blue-screen of death. At the time I did not think much about it. I fired things back up and got locked up again before I finished things. It started to kindle a thought at this point.
So, in the past twenty-four hours I have ran Internet Explorer exclusively, aside from one short popping up Mozilla to verify the version I was running and then closing it. Guess when the only crash I have had in the 24 hours actually occurred? Yep, with in about 2 minutes of having popped up Mozilla.
Makes me wonder if there is just something about my system that Firefox is not liking and hence constantly causing problems. Or, taking a more sinister view on things, maybe Microsoft has implemented something that crashes systems that heavily run Mozilla instead of IE?
For the record, I had a similar issue back with Mozilla Firefox 3.03, but the rapidness of the update to 3.04, where the problem seemed to have been fixed made me not hardly think on the issue at all. However, this current round of locks and crashes did not correlate to an update to the current 3.10 version – rather coming several weeks after the fact. And while it did not start happening at the exact same time I upgraded the system to IE 8, it was much closer to that install date that I started having the problems.
Anyway, I am looking for patches/updats to both to be available in the near future and hopefully it will be resolved, but in the meantime I guess I am using Firefox in my Ubuntu system and IE on Windows. And so everyone will know I am running a Lenovo T500 with all the bells and whistles and over maxed on what was available at the time. It is running Windows XP Pro with all the latest patches and service packs applied.
January 10th, 2010 at 12:40 am
I’ve been considering this in the last few days, and I suppose it’s one of those things that the majority of people ought to be focusing on. People can’t expect to get anywhere if we merely keep our heads buried in the ground.