Case In Point: Multi Browser Man, Editorial By Loyd Case

But the real problem I don’t use Firefox exclusively is that it has now become unstable. As of 3.5.2, Firefox will mysteriously shut down, for no apparent reason. Sometimes I’m actually working in the browser. Sometimes I’m working on something else, only to watch in dismay as all Firefox instances and tabs disappear. (I’m using Windows 7 64-bit RTM as my production OS.)

Note the little message above Windows 7 conveniently sent me about the 14 Firefox crashes.

Another annoying problem is that the Firefox kernel will “stick” in memory. Sometimes I’ll shut the browser down. When I restart it, I get an error:

"Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system."

Finally, Firefox seems to hammer system memory. It’s not as bad as Firefox 2 in terms of memory footprint, but when I load a bunch of tabs into Firefox, Windows comes to a grinding halt as it’s all loading. I look at my CPU meter, and not much is happening. I can’t figure out what’s going on, but the good news is that this seems to happen only when I first launch Firefox after booting up the system.  Memory leak perhaps, Mozilla?