Firefox updated

'Pon my word, but my PC at work has been feeling awfully sluggish. It's not an old machine and has a decent enough amount of memory, so why it takes so long to launch Explorer or pauses for a couple of seconds to refresh the screen every now and again is beyond me. I suspect part of it is because of all the cruft that the outsourced IT department installs to monitor and 'protect' the system. Even so, having my browser stop registering keystrokes for a few seconds every five words or so became too frustrating to bear. I reasoned that it can't just be my PC that is causing this and realising that I was on a Javascript-heavy site and still using a pretty old version of Firefox I considered that perhaps it was time to update the software.

I really should keep more of my software up-to-date. The OS I use and any software that uses automatic updates is kept current, and when I become aware of security issues in software I use I will update, but I have had the unfortunate tendency to keep using software as long as it works for me. But after seeing Safari 1.x struggle pitifully to load modern web pages, back last year when I was on my old G4 machine running Panther, I knew that I was probably running far-too-old a version of Firefox at work for my own good. I downloaded the latest version and, after backing up my profile, installed it.

The installation was clean, with my profile intact afterward, so I opened up the browser and had a poke around a few sites to try it out. It was immediately clear that the upgrade had helped significantly. No more were there struggles to load pages or unnecessary lags in the UI, everything was running smoothly again. Well, except for Explorer still taking too long to load.

Posted in Work |
Tags: browsers, firefox, internet, safari