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Firefox crash search queries

Since I wrote a quick post about Firefox crashes, it’s been one of the more frequent search term drivers of traffic to my blog .

So I ran a Google trends search on variations of “Firefox crash” and compared with similar searches for IE7 and Internet Explorer. Guess what? Looks like since the launch of Firefox 2.0 searches for information about it crashing have doubled.

Considering that Internet Explorer has much larger installed base, I think we can see that Firefox 2.0 may be causing a lot of people problems… roll on 2.1, I guess?

 

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Antony Mayfield

6 responses to “Firefox crash search queries”

  1. Sean Avatar
    Sean

    It seems that your stats are based on the search terms that people type in to google. Personally when I use windows I never search for fixes when programs crash, because I know that theres precious little I can do to fix it. The difference being that on linux using firefox because I’ve found an annoying bug, its fix will be online and I only have to search for it.
    People searching for a fix for a crash is really also determined by their technical ability as long as a desire to fix it, people with no technical ability generally don’t search for fixes for a browser crash.
    What your graph does show is how many people searched for the firefox ie7 and internet explorer, trying to extrapolate from that the number of crashes in the above programs is completely worthless.

  2. Antony Mayfield Avatar
    Antony Mayfield

    Completely? Surely not…

    There’s a spike in that graph around that search term. That’s a trend that suggests that something has changed for so many more people

    Potential explanations include be a news story about Firefox crashes in some interesting way, a major worldwide push by the communtiy to find conversations or information about Firefox crashes or – possibly – a surge in the number of crashes people are experiencing.

    But thanks, your comment wasn’t completely worthless.

  3. Robert Begnaud Avatar
    Robert Begnaud

    There is no question in my mind at all that Mozilla/fire fox 2.0 has a crash problem. With earlier versions 1, I had no problem as I am having now, the crashes are frequent and annoying to the extent that I have to reboot my computer. When I exit I find a non-responsive fire fox browser closing that I did not find to manually close in the program or processes tab of the task manager (XP Pro)
    I don’t want excuses, I want fixes or I am leaving fire fox.

  4. StalkerB Avatar
    StalkerB

    Yup,

    Firefox crashes 90% of the time I use the search function in Google Mail and intermittently otherwise.

    Never had a problem with it before.

    Search term “why does searching google mail crash firefox” got me here, just FYI.

  5. StalkerB Avatar
    StalkerB

    Obviously I’m a year late to this party, but it’s a problem again :)

  6. zedd Avatar
    zedd

    Since every PC has different hardware, instability may be a problem with your system. Furthermore, FireFox has a ton of thrid-party addons, which can cause instability of their own. The same can be said for all versions of IE, however – so it may not be the apps fault entirely.

    I prefer FireFox from a development standpoint, even over Safari (although I think Chrome may have something new to offer with WebKit / Safari’s open source rendering engine). FireFox simply has the most development friendly environment. It is built by developers for developers.

    I searched “Search FireFox crashes IE7” as that was my problem, but this article is interesting nevertheless. My Vista 64 can’t open mozilla.org/firefox nor getfirefox.com, but seems to find other sites and searches fine? I turned off the “phishing filter” but it still crashes. Microsoft trying to keep me from Firefox? Perhaps. More likely, my vista needs some patches as I’m having issues with everything from sound to video.

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