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40oz

My Internet browser sucks

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I've been having a bit of a struggle with using internet browsers. When I first got this computer, I immediately used Internet Explorer to download Firefox. I used Firefox for a few months before it started crashing on me unexpectedly. From there I decided to use Google Chrome, which started doing the same thing, except instead of crashing I kept receiving indecipherable error messages. Then I switched to Opera, which was cool for a while, but I couldn't open it from the shortcut unless I clicked on a hyperlink that opera could open. As of late Opera has been going really slowly, so now I'm giving Firefox another shot since it's been updated a lot since the last time I used it. It doesn't crash anymore but its still as fucking slow as opera has gotten. Also sometimes when I type in URLs or click on links it wont do anything unless I click on them or refresh the page a thousand times. Usually if I disconnect from my internet and reconnect it fixes it temporarily.

As of now I'm using Firefox again, but looking at photos on facebook and browsing doomworld threads and doing google searches is a real pain in the ass. It takes me about 9 minutes to load about 1 minute of a youtube video. I've started to get in the habit of opening multiple youtube videos in different tabs so that they would all load together, and then watch a few seconds of each one in sequence. Is that sad or what?

I thought this was a problem with my internet service provider lowballing us by providing us with fast internet at first, and then cranking down the speed later on. But my brother's computer runs everything fine. I was also very surprised to find that when I was playing Odamex last saturday, my ping was about 50-100, which is pretty good. So I'm finding that it's not my internet service. It just seems to be my internet browsers that are affected. Are these warning signs for a virus or spyware or whatever?

BTW I had to refresh the Everything Else page like 10 times for it to load all the available topics so I could finally scroll all the way down to where it says "Post New Thread" so i could post this thread.

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Do you have some feature on your anti-virus software which is checking web pages before they load? Have you manually ran said anti-virus to check for malware? Scanned hard drive for errors? Swapped the ethernet cable if you're using one, or double checked your wireless settings if you're not? Forgot that you're using some P2P software which is hogging your internets? Phoned tech support at your ISP if only to see if they have some suggestions?

Alternatively, try waiting a while for the problem to fix itself. Sometimes they do.

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Does your browser appear in the Windows Firewall exceptions list? If not - add and tick it.

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A problem in some web browsers (and especially with Firefox) that I've experienced in the past is that, while only one window remains open, the process "firefox.exe" (etc.) would appear three or four times under processes and swallow up a lot of computer memory. This slowed everything way the fuck down.

Also, make sure your internet is secure. Could be someone around your area ganking your connection, which could cause things to start dragging.

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I stopped using Opera when it started interrupting me with offers to speed up my "slow connection" (uncapped ADSL).

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40oz said:

I used Firefox for a few months before it started crashing on me unexpectedly.

I've never had a stable build of Firefox crash on me regularly without tracing it back to a specific plugin, or because I had too many of them enabled.

40oz said:

From there I decided to use Google Chrome, which started doing the same thing, except instead of crashing I kept receiving indecipherable error messages.

Isn't there some type of debug console for these browsers?

40oz said:

It doesn't crash anymore but its still as fucking slow as opera has gotten. Also sometimes when I type in URLs or click on links it wont do anything unless I click on them or refresh the page a thousand times. Usually if I disconnect from my internet and reconnect it fixes it temporarily.

You sure this isn't a proxy, or DNS error of some sort? Have you attempted to reset your router to the factory settings?

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Why has noone mentioned Waterfox yet? It's 64x Firefox and it runs SO good. Haven't had in issue in my (almost) a year of using it. And it's fast, but stable.

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What about Blackbird? The world's #1 internet browser for African-Americans.

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Another way to troubleshoot if it's your OS, or browser settings, vs the router settings would be to try out another OS on the same PC. Maybe you need a reformat, and reinstall of Windows...?

Create a live Linux cd-rom, or usb, to test out the same browsers.

Something like Slax, Porteus, or Puppy should do the trick.

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Why the FUCK does Opera use about 530 MB of RAM? WHY? It's just a browser with a few websites open! What's all that bloat for? Looks stupid. Do other browsers use memory more efficiently?

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So it's just caching? I guess that might be configurable. But then it might start eating my band usage which happens to be limited here... A tradeoff.

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printz said:

So it's just caching? I guess that might be configurable. But then it might start eating my band usage which happcens to be limited here..Tha. A tradeoff.


Not that kind of caching in this case. The cache you can adjust is storing copies of the files retrieved from webservers in the hope they won't need to be redownloaded, but think about all the stuff you have to store when displaying web pages: DOM, framebuffers, the state of all the scripts, the state of any form fields (this can grow hugely with lots of hidden inputs storing page state), plugin instances, etc. If this was all being dumped somewhere on your disk every time you switched tabs your browser would be slow as molasses and you'd be complaining about that.

If you have tons of RAM to use then your browser is going to use it. The same goes for many other applications and even Windows. Windows 7 will happily run on 1 gig, but if you have 8 gigs then it will cache copies of all your frequently-used programs in RAM on bootup so they load quickly when you open them. It probably goes out of its way to ensure this is almost always true of MS programs. I'm sure you can disable that behaviour somehow, but I'm not sure the results would alwaya be what you expect.

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Mr. T said:

Firefox FTFW, you're comp sucks 40oz


FTFY

And suggesting Firefox for memory hogging/slow performance problems sounds like a fucking joke. Other than using shit-old IE6, if you really care about CPU and memory efficiency Chrome is the way to go, at least currently.

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Aliotroph? said:

Windows 7 will happily run on 1 gig, but if you have 8 gigs then it will cache copies of all your frequently-used programs in RAM on bootup so they load quickly when you open them. It probably goes out of its way to ensure this is almost always true of MS programs. I'm sure you can disable that behaviour somehow, but I'm not sure the results would alwaya be what you expect.

Ran like molasses on my laptop until I doubled the RAM to 4 Gig. SuperFetch insisted on filling every available byte with unknown random crap (hogging the hard drive while doing so) and left me with a very poor first impression of Windows 7.

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GreyGhost said:

Ran like molasses on my laptop until I doubled the RAM to 4 Gig. SuperFetch insisted on filling every available byte with unknown random crap (hogging the hard drive while doing so) and left me with a very poor first impression of Windows 7.

Why would anyone run Win7 on anything less than 4GiB? I'd use XP before that. Seven is a modern bloatware Windows after all, and was designed more for the growing Quad-Core(+), 4GiB(+), market

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E.J. said:

Why would anyone run Win7 on anything less than 4GiB? I'd use XP before that. Seven is a modern bloatware Windows after all, and was designed more for the growing Quad-Core(+), 4GiB(+), market


No way! A totally trustworthy Microsoft Affiliate (TM) told me that it runs better* than XP on equal hardware**!

Spoiler

* There was a bunch of fine print over what "better" means in this context. But hey, he IS in Microsoft, so he knows better, right? And who reads the fine print anyway? I bet it's bullshit!

** In particular if XP didn't have good drivers or support for said hardware. I mean, it's not like he didn't tell me the whole truth or anything, right?

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E.J. said:

Why would anyone run Win7 on anything less than 4GiB?

In my case - because that's how the laptop was configured before leaving the factory. I've no doubt the manufacturer's aware that their entry-level hardware's less than ideal for the OS it's bundled with, but so long as their competitors are doing likewise nothing's going to change.

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Maes said:

FTFY

And suggesting Firefox for memory hogging/slow performance problems sounds like a fucking joke. Other than using shit-old IE6, if you really care about CPU and memory efficiency Chrome is the way to go, at least currently.


Eh FF's current nightly build is FAST. It is a RAM hog, but what browser isn't these days? To see FF be competitive again is quite heartening, because I've been finding myself using Safari more and more (think Chrome but optimized for OSX.)

Also I can't tell if you're joking or not with that FTFY. lol

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E.J. said:

Why would anyone run Win7 on anything less than 4GiB? I'd use XP before that. Seven is a modern bloatware Windows after all, and was designed more for the growing Quad-Core(+), 4GiB(+), market

I run Win7 on 2.5 GB, and it's never seemed any slower than XP on the same machine.

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E.J. said:

Why would anyone run Win7 on anything less than 4GiB?

On my main computer I still have Win7 on 2GiB. I'm not motivated enough to buy an extra memory card, especially after the unfortunate experience of doing something similar with my older desktop, when I didn't get any performance boost. I think I am getting some swap-like episodes in my current desktop, but they aren't time consuming.

On my laptop however, I have WinXP and Mac with seemingly less than 1 GiB (damaged blocks?), which sucks and causes huge swap episodes, more so on Mac, but surely on Windows too (by the way, WinXP seems to consume more power, whereas Mac OSX seems to consume more RAM). I should probably buy RAM to put it up to date, but I'm on a budget now, and I'd rather not pay for not too necessary (or expected of me) stuff.

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E.J. said:

Why would anyone run Win7 on anything less than 4GiB? I'd use XP before that. Seven is a modern bloatware Windows after all, and was designed more for the growing Quad-Core(+), 4GiB(+), market

Win7 has vastly superior features and management of resources than XP. If you have an electronic timer, you might notice that the XP window manager is a few milliseconds faster than 7's, and the kernel is slightly leaner. But XP Service Pack 3 being what it is (much more loaded down with patches and updates, and therefore not even slightly usable with the minimum requirements stated back in 2001), Win7 is almost always the superior choice. A rule of thumb: if you have more than 1GB, use 7. If you have less, use Win2k.

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