14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla figured it was time for a little pat on the back for itself and released some interesting statistics relating to crashes in Firefox. The organization says that Firefox is now 40 percent more stable than it was just five months ago. The big accomplishment, Mozilla says, is due to a focused effort on part of the development team to bringing down the number of instabilities.
"How did we calculate that 40% improvement? We took a look at the Crash Reports data, along with an estimated ratio of daily crash instances to active daily users of Firefox. With that data in hand, we first wanted to know how the number of daily crash instances has been trending by major version[s] of Firefox, e.g., is Fx3.6 particularly more stable than previous releases and what does its trending look like," Mozilla's Ken Kovash explained.
Mozilla has provided a chart showing the estimated number of crashes across the major versions currently in use. The most interesting part is that Firefox 3.5 has been significantly more crash-prone than its predecessor, Firefox 3.0. In fact, only very recently has it managed to become as stable as the previous version. Firefox 3.6, on the other hand, proved a lot more solid and is now the most stable browser of the bunch, by a significant margin.
New releases sometimes tend to be more buggy than tried-and-tested, older versions, but the gap was quite significant. Mozilla's Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, provides the answer. He says that the cause for the crashes, in most cases, were third-party apps that were built for Firefox 3.0. When people started moving to Firefox 3.5, the apps weren't updated to keep up with the changes. Beltzner says that much of the recent effort has been focused on fixing these particular problems and it seems to be paying off
When adding up all the 3.x versions, Firefox is looking a lot better than it did just a few months ago. The number of daily crashes has gone down from around six per 100 users to three per 100 users, though the percentage varies depending on the day of the week. Firefox is about to become even more stable with the addition of out-of-process plugins. The feature, now previewed in the Firefox 3.6.4 beta, moves all third-party plugins, Flash, Java, to a separate thread. This way, when one of them crashes, they don't bring down the entire browser.
