The problem is probably in Windows and not FF. I used FF on both PC and Mac (I have a school district issued laptop that I put Firefox on because they tried to make me use IE) with no crashes or very little.

Safari is my back-up browser.

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K. Joel Gilliard
Theologically Correct dot Com
http://www.theologicallycorrect.com
Sunday School Teacher (Elementary 2), Gaithersburg Community Church (EFCA)
http://www.gchurch.org
The Blog: THINK! - Wrestlin' With Wordz -N- Ideaz
The Upcoming CD: The Definition

LOL! Maybe its divine amnesia!

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Dan
Member, Soaring Oaks Presbyterian (PCA)
www.soaringoaks.org
Northern California
The duty of a theologian is, not to please the ear with empty sounds, but to confirm the conscience by teaching things which are true, certain and profitable.
John Calvin, 1559

Well....there's the $79 option of installing Parallels (which enables you to seamlessly run Windows and Mac OS X at the same time). On top of it, Mac OS 10.5 comes with Bootcamp, which enables you to boot to Windows if you really like to torture yourself like Martin Luth....er......a.....if you really need to. Bootcamp comes free.

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K. Joel Gilliard
Theologically Correct dot Com
http://www.theologicallycorrect.com
Sunday School Teacher (Elementary 2), Gaithersburg Community Church (EFCA)
http://www.gchurch.org
The Blog: THINK! - Wrestlin' With Wordz -N- Ideaz
The Upcoming CD: The Definition

This info or rather opinions may be of interest along with this topic...

The 5 most annoying programs on your PC - Download Squad

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Richard H. King
Providence PCA
Lubbock, Texas
"No matter how far a man goes, he eventually finds out God's already there." John Wayne - the last line in "Chisum"

I don't have any experience with I Tunes but definitely agree with him on the other programs.

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Chris
OPC member
Now attending Grace Community Baptist Church
Mandeville, LA

"Faith alone saves, but it is a faith that works." - S. Lewis Johnson

The latest version of Acrobat (not Reader) is very good and quick. Still takes up a lot of disk space (2GB), but in the days of cheap HDs, who cares?

Real Player is so bad that I have not even bothered to listen to .ram files for years. I refuse to ever have any version of Real Player on my system.

iTunes is typical Apple. Looks cute, is a huge hog, is nearly impossible to customize, cannot be backed up, does not work well with other programs, etc. If I did not like my iPod, I would never even look at an iTunes website. Ugh. If you really want to see how bad this is, go to Apple's own support forum and look at the "advice" that you are given as options for basic things like "back up my library" "transfer my library to a new external hard drive." You have a better chance of converting Iran than getting iTunes to play nice.

I haven't used IE for years either. Now with an IE tab view extension in FF, I never have to for anything, even MS sites.

Outlook is the one program that I can't live without. It works fine for me. I need it because I have so much productivity software that works with it - a great search engine (X1), GTD addin, Calendar print add in, addin for my phone PBx, etc. You need to customize and massage it - keeping your main PST file small (archiving) and compacting after deleting big emails, but it can run pretty smooth. There is also a tool (scanpst.exe) that helps to keep it on track.

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Fredrick T. Greco
Senior Pastor, Christ Church PCA (Katy, TX)
Christ Church Blog

"The heart is the main thing in true religion...It is the hinge and turning-point in the condition of man's soul. If the heart is alive to God and quickened by the Spirit, the man is a living Christian. If the heart is dead and has not the Spirit, the man is dead before God." (J.C. Ryle)

Be nice about Apple Fred or I will keep emailing you with my iPhone! Steve thought it was funny.

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~etexas~

No worries! I'll just take comfort in the nice steak dinner and bluetooth headset that I can buy with the difference in price between an iPhone and my Blackberry!

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Fredrick T. Greco
Senior Pastor, Christ Church PCA (Katy, TX)
Christ Church Blog

"The heart is the main thing in true religion...It is the hinge and turning-point in the condition of man's soul. If the heart is alive to God and quickened by the Spirit, the man is a living Christian. If the heart is dead and has not the Spirit, the man is dead before God." (J.C. Ryle)

just downloaded and installed it. I like it so far.

rsc

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R. Scott Clark, D.Phil
Professor of Church History and Historical Theology

"For Christ, His Gospel, and His Church"
Associate Pastor
Oceanside URC
The Heidelblog

Works faster than Firefox on OS X -- at least that's my experience with it. Glad you like it so far!

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Casey Bessette
Westminster OPC • West Suburbs of Chicago • My Blog: Paradise Regained

"It is part of the calling of the ekklesia to learn to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge and also to make known within the world of science 'the manifold wisdom of God' in order that the final end of theology, as of all things, may be that the name of the Lord is glorified. Theology and dogmatics, too, exist for the Lord's sake." — Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, p. 46

This is interesting. With my old XP machine, FF was more stable than IE7. With this new Vista machine, the exact opposite is true. I have zero problems with IE now. In fact, dare I say it, I've become a fan of IE!

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I installed Opera for the first time recently on my new Vista PC, and have found it to work very well - it seems to use perhaps 25% less memory than Firefox. I should have installed it on my previous PC, which was always freezing due to lack of memory.

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T W Hopper
Member, Presbyterian Reformed Church
Currently between churches since PRC closed here - attending Crossroads Christian Church.
Canberra, Australia.

I would not put it past them -- MS has done this kind of thing before -- purposefully making competing software perform bad on their operating system. I know it sounds conspiracy-like, but . . .

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Casey Bessette
Westminster OPC • West Suburbs of Chicago • My Blog: Paradise Regained

"It is part of the calling of the ekklesia to learn to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge and also to make known within the world of science 'the manifold wisdom of God' in order that the final end of theology, as of all things, may be that the name of the Lord is glorified. Theology and dogmatics, too, exist for the Lord's sake." — Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1, p. 46

Done it before? That's their business model and the reason for the huge fines in Europe! I got tired of Micro$oft dictating what worked on my computer and what didn't, plus charging me handsomely for the privilege. That's why I switched to Linux and haven't looked back.

Here's just one example. On Linux, no one can install or update software without my explicit permission, period. Micro$oft was caught last year secretly updating its Windows Desktop Search and Windows Update software on WinXP and Vista, which caused seemingly random demands for the user's computer to be rebooted. Those mandatory reboots were the only clue that the system had been tampered with. It took a while for the pros to to sort it out, but in the end MS's excuse had to do with obscure system administration settings that almost no users and few experts even knew existed. As a result, MS was "secretly" updating users' computers with software they didn't want and then requiring the user to reboot even in the middle of their work. No thanks. (don't miss the links above, which in turn link to further background)

To be clear, until shortly before Vista's release I was a Micro$oft fan, but I'd finally had enough. Changing over to Linux was significantly less painful for me than "updating" to Vista was for almost everyone that I know who did so. Ubuntu isn't perfect, but IMO is way better than Vista. Plus, it's free!

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Bob Mattes
Ruling Elder, Christ Church of Arlington (PCA), Arlington, VA
Reformed Musings Blog

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke
"We old folks have to find our cushions and pillows in our tankards. Strong beer is the milk of the old." -Martin Luther

Actually, I wasn't accusing MS of anything. I was simply declaring my support for IE7. I won't bother fussing with anything else anymore.

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I've found the exact oppisite to be true. I install Linux on one of my machines and that turned out to be a headache I gave up on. I eventually reinstalled XP and now it runs fine as a secondary machine.

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I guess it depends on your hardware and the distribution of Linux that you choose to try. Reinstalling XP is way different than trying to get Vista to work with your existing hardware and software, though.

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Bob Mattes
Ruling Elder, Christ Church of Arlington (PCA), Arlington, VA
Reformed Musings Blog

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke
"We old folks have to find our cushions and pillows in our tankards. Strong beer is the milk of the old." -Martin Luther

I'm sympathetic to the Ubuntu thing. And I have looked at it a bit. But what do you do with programs that are written to work in Windows? Specifically, we have a church database and financial software that is designed for Windows. I don't think it would work in something like Ubuntu...

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I have over $1,000 worth of references in Logos Bible Software, which only runs in Windows. I also do my finances in Quicken, for which I haven't found an adequate Linux replacement. I get around this by running a WinXP virtual machine under Linux using VMware's VMWorkstation. There are other virtual machine solutions available as well, some free. This approach has worked very well for me. Since I can limit what access the VM has to the host computer and the outside world, I can easily compensate for Windows' security shortfalls.

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Bob Mattes
Ruling Elder, Christ Church of Arlington (PCA), Arlington, VA
Reformed Musings Blog

"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke
"We old folks have to find our cushions and pillows in our tankards. Strong beer is the milk of the old." -Martin Luther