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The original thread was locked before I could add my own 2 cents and stories of Firefox wreckage littering my desk.

First off, Firefox 3.5 on my Win 7 box is quite stable. crashes are so infrequent to be nonexistent.

The box running Arch Linux is another story entirely. not only does it crash far, far more than I cose it intentionally, it has on more than one occasion caused an actual kernel panic.

Changing from GNOME to LXDE (a very lightweight Openbox-based DE) didn't help. It still manages to crash without warning over and over again. Epiphany, the official GNOME browser does only a slightly better job, but it still crashes a fair amount.

I have to qualify all this with the stats about the box itself. It's second-hand all around. Only the NIC is new. The video card is a GeForce2 MX400 with 32MB memory. CPU is an Athlon XP 1600. RAM, just 768MB.

Just getting X to run at all was a chore. The proprietary Nvidia drivers would cause an instant segfault whenever I tried to start X. The drivers are for the oldest cards Nvidia still supplies drivers for, and there are known issues with them, to the point of not working at all. I had to use the generic nv drivers to get any X display up and running.

So after all that, my first question is this: would a version of Firefox compiled from source specifically for this box be any more or less stable than the stock binary package I could download from the Arch repositories?

Any other suggestions would be appreciated. I'm open to upgrading the video card at minimal cost if that might help.

>>>>>>Arch Linux
:smug:
First, please, for the love of zod, if you want to be all hardcore, use Gentoo.

Secondly, on topic. This has to go deeper than a web browser.
It could be a RAM issue, or even something to do with the kernel (Arch manually compiles, right?) Also, since you had problems with X previously, i might try there. I had to revert to 5.3 to solve a host of issues.

With a box that old, I chose Arch over Gentoo because I'd like to actually *use* it before I hit the century mark.

Arch generally uses pre-compiled kernels. I don't have to compile anything from source unless it's in the AUR as "unsupported" or I have to something funky, like patch the timing bug that plagued WoW players for a time.

Everything in the box is old and therefore suspect. The video card is nearly 10 years old itself. Acording to the Arch Wiki, the drivers for that vintage have documented issues, to the point of being unuseable in some cases. I don't know what issues those same cards have with the generic nv drivers.