I’ve been using Ubuntu at home on one of my computers for close to a year now. I’ve been pretty happy with it, although Gnome struggled on my computer (a circa 2003 Athlon). Switching to Xfce fixed that, and my one remaining problem was Firefox.
For those who haven’t tried Firefox 2 on Linux, it’s pretty bad. If leave a Javascript heavy site (eg GMail) open the browser will slowly grind to a halt over a course of a few hours.
I recently upgraded to Firefox 3 (see this video for how to do that), and it’s made a HUGE difference. The one issue I had was that I could get it to start – I hadn’t realized that the executable was now firefox-3.0 instead of firefox. Makes sense, though.
I use Google for everything (gmail, ig, google apps etc…) and I have not had any problems with Firefox on Linux. For the past year I have been using Linux Mint almost exclusively. Could it be your Linux version?
Gentlemen, I believe that I am stuck between the author and Pete above. I have had occasional crashes with firefox on Mint, both being upgraded to their most recent release versions. Overall, though, I have been very happy with Mint and Firefox.
Hello. I have a similar problem, but with firefox 3.0 (the beta, of course..), on Xubuntu 8.04. It gets stuck from the beginning, and I can’t do anything. I waited a few minutes but it didn’t recover. Is there a way to make it go in a safe mode or something? I presume the problem might be created by a weather extension I installed. Maybe it’s not fully compatible…