Massless

I like torturing Firefox.

Poor little browsers.

At work we often approach, and occasionally shove past, the limits of what browsers can handle. On my home laptop it appears that Firefox has crashed around 220 times and that 37 of these crashes occured in March of this year alone. I've had several different OSes and machines while at Google (including, thankfully, a new Macbook Pro as of yesterday) so the number of crashes that occur during my normal work day aren't easily retrievable, which is too bad since that'd likely be a higher total.

Mihai pointed out to me that the crash log is just a text file, so the following command with the correct username used should retrieve the number of Firefox crashes for most Macs:

grep "Command: " /Users/[your username]/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/firefox-bin.crash.log | wc -l

I'm thinking of starting an advocacy and protection group: People for the Ethical Treatment of Browsers. It would decry the inhumane level of browser testing that results in the deaths of millions of processes and threads every year. Of course, the other side (our side, really) will haughtily note good intentions, a desire to prevent further surf stoppage, and the benefits that You People enjoy thanks to the sacrifices made by software in cubicle farms all across the world.

Little-known fact: If you lean in close to your computer's speaker when a browser crashes you can hear its reedy last breath. Some say it's like a little scream.

I say it's like music. Sing!

posted at March 29, 2007, 10:15 AM