Trying NOT to Think of Firefox as Crap

I am desperately trying to continue lovin' Firefox, to not think of it as crappy software, but lately it just keeps a-crashin' and a-crashin' -- like, about once a day on both Mac OS X and Windows 7. Plus, it keeps lagging and having trouble displaying pages quickly. Slashdot is particularly bad, but Gmail ain't good either. On Mac, that freakin' annoyin' spinning beach ball has become the norm. I hate that damn thing.

And yesterday, something crappy and new happened: Tried to access Gmail through Firefox. It would not connect. Gave me the error msg: "The page isn't redirecting properly." Tried Gmail with Internet Explorer and got right through. Since I use Google for all manner of things -- from email to Picasa's online Web albums -- not being able to connect to it is a major issue.

I'm a longtime supporter of Firefox, dating from its very first release. And I've recommended it to numerous friends over the years. But this recent crappiness is driving me back to OS-native browsers -- Safari for Mac and Internet Explorer for Windows.

For the record, I'm using Firefox 3.5.3 on Mac 10.5.8 and Windows 7 release candidate. And I've tried disabling all extensions/add-ons/etc and clearing cookies and the cache. I've also Googled around a bit to see if I'm alone in my suffering. Not hardly. In fact, I found blog posts quite similar to my own!

"I Want To Love Firefox 3.5, But It Keeps Crashing On Me"

And this one, from David Rothman, sounds like it should have been written for the Crappy Software blog:

"Is Firefox 3.5 crap?"

Oh, how I hate it when good software goes bad!