stopwatch I've been using Firefox for a long time and have been (for the most part) loving it.  Having extensions to check my email, block ads, and quickly hit up Wikipedia is great.  However since 2.0 using Firefox has become a bit of a nuisance.  On Windows it seems to be the default choice for your recreational browsing, but for that reason I'm beginning to dislike it.  The main problem seems to be the memory leaks.  For instance - if I leave Firefox running for a couple hours (whether I just get up and walk away from my machine or I want my email up so I can check for new messages) I find that it has frozen.  When I say "a couple hours" I'm also being very generous.  Depending on what you're doing Firefox seems to crash quite a bit.  Whenever I'm at my machine I tend to have one tab with a podcast or something going in it, another tab with my email, and a third tab for just general browsing.  After 30 minutes or so of this I'll notice that the browser stops responding.  I'll try to change tabs and it will churn and churn until I bring up the task manager and notice, whoa!, Firefox is consuming a huge chunk of my system's resources.  Time to kill it and start over.

I'm also used to Safari on the Mac and in comparison Firefox seems dog slow.  I haven't tried out the beta of Firefox 3 but I'm just hoping that they've fixed the memory issues.  What I'd really like to see though would be a nice stripped-down no extension version of Firefox that is lightning fast and runs like a champ.  Even if they released it as a separate download (Firefox 3 basic or something) and then also allowed users to download the full version I'd be cool with it.  Alternatively they could just make Firefox 3 a solid release and they wouldn't have to worry about multiple versions.  It's gotten to the point that I've started to consider trying out Opera or the Windows version of Safari again to see if there has been improvement from either of those browsers.  Post a suggestion for a good browser (or just tell me why I'm nuts for starting to dislike Firefox) in the comments section and I'll try out whatever you have to offer.  Obviously this is really only an issue for my XP and Vista boxes so what I'm really looking for are Windows solutions but post whatever you'd like and I'll check it out.

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