(1) I agree that a lot of the libs out there are eye candy. Unfortunately I have the feeling they are developed with only one open browser tab in mind. Same applies to the applications we see. This feature centric point of view in development is emberrassing and in fact it is the reason for so many crashes.

(2) I maintain an asynchronous lib – its all about continuations, but a tad heavier than the code sample presented here lately. Handling browsers resources ( rendering, requesting and processing management ) in my eyes is essential to successfully code heavy apps. So far I have yet to see an application that is built on resource management principles. If you know one, please give me a hint.

(3) I spend the last 2 weeks refactorizing 200 lines of code in my lib. It is obvious to me that no company is willing to spend that money on improving their product at a point where nobody can see it – simply because there is no financial need to do so. We all live with those crashes, and happily keep on using the applications. So why?

The point in it is: we will keep seeing these crashes, because we jump on eye candy. And we trade eye candy for stability and we are happy with it. So we get what most of us desire ( a marketing principle ) and live with the consequences ( a coding principle ).

Which Linux dist. and FF version did you run when it crashed last time?

Something’s wrong with your computer.

I don’t bother keeping multiple web-mail sites open all day (just Google Reader), but I almost never have crashes with Firefox in WinXP or OS X.

@Eric – Sorry, you Fail. Completely. Hop aboard the failboat. There’s not something wrong with his computer. Perhaps if you used some real Ajax applications or did some real heavy ajax development for long periods of time you’d notice this happening. Everybody at my workplace experiences it, I expereince it, by the looks of this thread many others experience it.

Which leaves the only options to be that you are a superman with a supercomputer with superpowers, OR, you are a novice who doesnt have heavy enough usage to push your browser to its limits.

However, every technology goes through it’s adolescence, where widespread adoption leads to lots of bug discoveries, quick fixes are made, and then the foundation of the product is improved. This is a product lifecycle.

No one is going to abandon teh intertubes, or its flashy, new, cool apps that make users feel cool, and make investors sign checks; the browser and ECMAScript are not dead; and yes, users are used to and will tolerate crashing in order to run the cool stuff they like. See Myspace, for example. Running out of time?? I’m running out of time writing this post when I should be writing the next Google.

Give me a break… No specifics.. just rubbish. While I have certainly experienced browser crashes, it is certainly within the realm of all other applications where I open/close/ interact with on a constant basis.

To speak of specific issues such as threading or memory usage/leakage make sense (and indeed appear here often), but to go on some diatribe of doom really causes you to lose all credibility. Just like everything else in the computer era, things will adapt and improve. It is that simple. Just as that have with countless other things, including the browser itself…

Finally, think back to the original dial-up access to the Internet.. or the horrible experience of Netscape or Internet Explorer 3 compared to the now… Given your doom based outlook, I am shocked that anyone even uses the Internet given the horrible experience.

This thread seems to be requesting that browsers to perform reliably, on a site dedicated to programming your browser to do new and unpredictable things.

Anyone who reads this site is in a position where they want the browser to be an OS. The browser ain’t an OS, or at least it isn’t a robust multithreaded one that can deal with crashes. No one (except Marat) has grasped the value of an OS, which is that IT CAN RUN BAD APPLICATIONS without itself crashing. This is the request buried in the original post.

@Kyran:
Yes, i used to develop with the Opera’s Developer Console. It’s cool, however, Firebug is a better choice, IMHO; i think on this way because of things like disable one CSS declaration by a simple click on it’s left side, type JavaScript commands which run immediately on console, among other reasons that makes FB more suitable for my projects.

And, above all, i don’t have any additional tab with Firebug :)
(Oh my God, i have typed all this comment on IE7… call me “heretic” :P)

In the late 90s, our designs became too top-heavy and unmaintainable, then CSS took off and we reeled that sucker back in (half-way anyway).

Now we’re seeing Javascript and AJAX techniques hit a similar point of complexity where really really cool stuff is being done on a daily basis, but the whole mess is a bit convoluted and unmaintainable. These problems are being addressed in an organic fashion from all corners of the market, but open platforms take time to evolve. Considering gmail was released just 3.5 years ago, I think progress is actually pretty rapid.

Anyway the difference between opera 9.24 and opera 9.5b is so huge that i would recommend the beta over 9.24

VMs, especially stack-based ones, have been commonplace for dynamic languages for quite a while — the only notable language I know whose main implementation doesn’t use one is Ruby, but this will be addressed on version 1.9, which should be released next month. The big difference for Tamarin is that it includes JITting. This will mostly affect JavaScript 2.0, but I guess they will also perform some sort of runtime type-guessing on typeless variables, similar to what Psyco does to Python.

… If you have Firefox 1.6, you should visit my website …

mootools rox!