I have installed FF 3.6.3 on my 16GB USB drive. Within the last week, I have noticed random errors that have caused FF to crash. There is no common thread uniting these errors, with the exception that using Firefox will rapidly cause the free space on my USB drive to decrease until the drive is reported as full. When I start a session in Firefox, both Windows and the PortableApps menu report that I have 11.1 GB of free space. Within a couple hours' usage, my free space decreases to zero. Neither of the disk utilities that I have installed--WinDirStat or Disk Space Fan--can give clues as to what exactly is taking up the space; WinDirStat simply reports it as "unknown." Clearing Firefox cache does not get rid of the extra files. Instead, I have to eject the USB drive and reinsert it in order to get back to the correct 11.1 GB of free space.
Here are the necessary stats:
-PC is running Windows XP SP3
-Extensions used in FF include Adblock Plus 1.2, Better Flickr 0.4.1, Better Gmail2 1.1.1, Better GReader 0.8.3, Contacts 0.3.2, Coral IE Tab 1.85.20100407, DTA! 1.1.9, Gmail Notifier 0.6.4.1, Google Reader Watcher 1.1, Greasefire 1.0.4, Greasemonkey 0.8.20100408.6, ScrapBook Plus 1.8.17.30, ShortenURL 0.3.6, Xmarks 3.6.14.
I have had issues with Xmarks giving an "unknown error(3)," and I followed the recommended solution of forcing a bookmarks upload, followed by a bookmarks download. The error with Xmarks went away, but it did not have any effect on the consumption of my free space. Beyond that, there have been no other issues with Firefox extensions. Any ideas?
I don't think it has to do with extensions but with broken memory management. If you think it has to do with an extension then just try to work with Firefox in safe mode (so all extensions are disabled) and see what happens then.
Typically on my computer it crashes 3 times per hour but only with (too) many open tabs.
Just a suggestion: ditch it and proceed to another version (may be 3.7 or so).
Apparently memory management is somewhat broken, the more open tabs the higher the chance on crashes.
Note: I'm definitely not saying that it has to do with the efforts of the portableapps project. Probably the same issues emerge in the so called "regular" Firefox software. I just don't know that because I'm using the portable version and I'm not planning to use the regular version.
Unfortunately the latest stable version is 3.6.3 (3.6.4 with out-of-process plugins will arrive shortly, but separating out the processes has its own memory overhead).