July 24

Opera (the browser)

I generally use firefox for my GUI browser but lately it has been segfaulting with the following error:
The program 'Gecko' received an X Window System error. This probably reflects a bug in the program. The error was 'BadShmSeg (invalid shared segment parameter)'. (Details: serial 27 error_code 170 request_code 148 minor_code 2) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.) zsh: exit 1 firefox
This is inconvenient and I don't even know if it is a firefox bug or an Xorg bug or something in between. The other major issue with firefox that I have is its scrolling , to me at least, is horrible. The memory use and CPU use soars and the everything seems to grind to a halt trying to scroll a web page. This may not be firebox's fault entirely, perhaps its bad markup doing this, but other browsers, like Opera for example can handle the same page with ease. For example try scrolling drawn.ca in firefox and then in opera (if you have both installed) or in safari and compare.

I generally like firefox, its features are pretty much all I need, it is Free Software and actively developed, and I don't like complaining about something someone has worked so hard to provide to me for free, but I worry that if firefox continues to lose the rendering war, it will lose users as fast as it collected them when the project really took of a couple of years ago. I hope its something the developers are aware of and can address.

Posted by æc♥ | Permanent Link