Posted on 29th April, 2008 by TW
Are there any other Firefox users who have Gmail (Google Mail) accounts? If so, please put me out of my misery. Does your copy of firefox crash every single time you try and do something with your mailbox?
I am using Firefox 2.0.0.14, which as far as I can tell is the most up to date version. I have tried updating it and I have tried updating various other components on my computer. All to no avail.
Without fail, every time I go into Gmail the countdown to a crash begins. I can view all manner of other pages, have twenty tabs open and be downloading huge files. All fine. Try to click on a folder in Gmail and it is game over. I have sort of narrowed it down to something in the scripts on Gmail causing the crash but I am not totally sure (yet).
Recent examples: I tried to create a new filter… crash. I tried to view all starred mail… crash. I tried to view all emails with a given tag… crash. I tried to send an email… crash.
The only saving grace is I can read emails and, despite FF crashing on me it actually manages to send the emails. It is, in a nutshell, a nightmare. Fortunately Internet Explorer is perfectly functional with Gmail, but this makes it all the more annoying. During a given day, I wouldn’t have any reason to open IE if it wasn’t for bloody Gmail.
As far as I can tell, this is recent. I cant remember when it began but it must be less than a month ago.
Is it just my computer? Am I alone with this madness? Do Firefox developers get to see the 30 - 40 error messages my machine sends out each day?
Popularity: 37% [?]
Popularity: 37% [?]
This post has been tagged with: browsers, Client side scripts, Crash, email, FF, Firefox, gmail, google, Google Mail, IE, Internet-Explorer, Rant, Scripts, Tech Nightmares and Technology.
You can read related articles in the Rants or Technology categories - this post currently has 14 comments »
Posted on 8th July, 2007 by TW
Interestingly, I have been looking through the visitor logs for this site today and have discovered some interesting things. Lot of people who visit this blog have a User Agent (UA) string which identifies a bit of spyware or possible hack attack.
Two of the most common strings are:
SIMBAR - this appears to be involved in a “Team Evil” hack, while it is not clear to me what adds the SIMBAR to the string, it has also been discussed on TaoSecurity. The most recent visitor with this UA string was from London and the string read:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1;SIMBAR Enabled; SIMBAR={0611EF31-5377-41a3-A9BB-228547113477};SIMBAR=0; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
HOTBAR - there are quite a few hits from this “semi-non-consensual” browser add on, and I have no idea if it is bad software or not (Wiki has a debate on it if you are interested). The most recent visitors we have had was an NTL broadband user (connected via Harrogate area) with the following UA string:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; V1; Hotbar 4.5.1.0)
It is not really surprising this are IE based strings showing signs of oddness, and over the last few months there have been lots of hits from this two UAs, as well as other “suspicious” strings. I will pay more attention in future and see if there are any patterns to be discerned.
In a nutshell though, I would strongly suggest everyone gets a good anti-virus package (AVG is free) and some reliable anti-spyware packages.
[tags]Spyware, browsers, technology, websites, statistics[/tags]
Popularity: 15% [?]
Popularity: 15% [?]
