I’ve been using my MacBook for nearly three months now, and, overall, it has been a great experience.  However, there is something horribly wrong when you put Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2 and Mac OS 10.5.3 together.  To put it simply, the combination of Mozilla products and Mac OS X is wrecking havoc on my recently purchased MacBook.

Over the past week, I have experienced 30 or more program crashes, 2 program freezes that could not be terminated, 2 times when I couldn’t shut down my computer by usual means (this as a result of the programs that could not be terminated), and 1 time when the operating system would not respond (even after waiting 10 minutes).

I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t believe Firefox had any involvement in it, until now.

Come to think of it, I’ve been experiencing random crashes at an increasing rate for the past two months. Interestingly, the Firefox 3 betas have been continually patched during this same time-frame—it all seems to be parallel. As new versions of Firefox 3 have been released, my system reliability has decreased.  Now, I can’t be certain if Firefox was a factor for many of these crashes, but, with time, it has become obvious that a Firefox and Mac OS X combination is not ideal.

My assumptions were made valid when David Chartier of Ars Technica wrote a piece about how Mozilla and OS X are having issues after the recent 10.5.3 update for Mac OS X.  Unsurprisingly, the symptoms are similar.

The Solution

Since regularly computing without Firefox—opting, instead, for Safari as the main internet browser—over the previous 24 hours, only one application has crashed.  The application in question, a development version of WriteRoom, has already been unstable, and I believe the crash to be an isolated incident. It seems that overall system performance has improved as well (i.e. unresponsiveness decreased).

I now believe that Firefox 3 is too unstable for use within a production environment on Mac OS X.  As a result, if you have had any application crashes or system instability while using Firefox 3, I think you should consider assisting by sending in crash reports or migrating to another browser like Safari or Camino until reliability improves.

I hope that Apple and Mozilla can quickly resolve this issue—I am already missing the Firefox experience.

[Update: Firefox has addressed the issue. Also, Firefox 3 is now available!]