The first time I mentioned Firefox on this website was because it had crashed and I had lost a post that I had written. Indeed, looking back at what I have previously written, it is clear that Firefox often only enters the picture when it is misbehaving.
This does not mean that I do not like Firefox. While it seems to have become cool in some of the circles I run with to prefer Opera, because of its speed, I think Firefox's extensions, open bug tracker, and other features are a more compelling featureset.
Still, Firefox sometimes crashes. In its developers' defense, this is almost never the fault of Firefox, but is because my settings profile became corrupted, or I installed a misbehaving Greasemonkey script, or (most recently) because I was using an unstable nightly build.
This evening, I was writing a response to someone's problem with compression on the Gregarius forums when I made the mistake of opening an InformationWeek article. For some reason (maybe connected to their advertising?), all InformationWeek articles - including one lambasting Firefox for memory problems - cause a crash:
Luckily, the Firefox build that I am using includes support for restoring sessions. I had assumed that Firefox just gathered information on the URL open in each browser tab and restored this after a lost session. But no! My form data was stored as well, allowing me to continue my response where I have left off. Brilliant!
It has been said that Firefox 2 does not include features that will allow it to continue gaining market share after Internet Explorer 7 is released.[1] While the inclusion of tabs in IE7 might cause some people to decide not to switch to Firefox, new world-changing features like session restoration will continue to attract users, especially as the Internet becomes even more integrated into desktop technology.
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[1] I cannot find the article I am specifically referencing here, and the only piece that comes close to the anti-Firefox vitriol of the original is from InformationWeek. Personally, I think my browser has crashed enough tonight.
Hate to say it, but Opera has had it's own version of session restore for a long time.
Not to be an Opera fan; actually, that was just my main hurdle convincing some of my friends that Firefox was okay, once they saw the Firefox extentions for mouse gestures and session restoring they came over, since Firefox does both more robustly. But Opera definitely had them first as far as I know.
From what I've seen, Firefox 2 is just 1.5 with half of the "Tab Mix Plus" extension built-in. And the loss of most other extension support.