lousy browsers
Browsers are still so much the weak link in the Linux chain.
I use Debian woody, with X11 4.1. Kernel 2.4.18, hand-compiled. I have
Galeon, Mozilla and Opera installed and I keep hopping from one to the
other hoping to find one that will sort of basically work most of the
time.
I've been using Galeon for a while. It sort of basically works most of
the time, and it looked nice to begin with, but over the long haul you
find out that it's flakey. Too often, it just quits and disappears
without warning (especially in the middle of tasks like printing or
calling acroread). That's annoying, but it's not as bad as when it
just locks the system, like tonight (the third time this has happened).
I was trying to buy something; I updated the `shopping cart', and
everything froze. Galeon froze, and the X server froze. No response to
keyboard input, no response to mouse events, no nothing. Ctl-Alt-Fn
did not bring me to virtual terminal n; Ctl-Alt-Del did not kill the X
server. Ctl-Alt-Backspace did nothing. Nothing, in short, did
anything. Switching the monitor off and on just brought me back to
where I had been.
But the machine was not dead. I was able to connect to it from my
laptop by way of a Netgear hub, DHCP, and ssh. From there, you would
have thought everything was fine. I killed every process in sight,
hoping I would regain access to the console and the keyboard. I killed
Galeon, killed all the other X apps that had been running, finally
killed the X server .... all useless. The monitor, the keyboard and
the mouse were all locked hard and unresponsive. I switched the
monitor off and on again; the same frozen scene greeted me.
But there was nothing in the logs to indicate a problem of any kind.
Nothing even said `An error has occurred.' Eventually I gave up and
rebooted the system remotely from the laptop. If I hadn't been able to
connect from the laptop, I would have had to just switch the thing
off.
This is more of a moan than a question, but my questions (such as they
are), I suppose, are these:
. are there any other tricks I could have pulled to regain access to
the console and the keyboard, short of the Windows-like last resort
of rebooting? Happily, there were no other users on at the time,
but that was pure luck.
. are there any browsers out there that don't give rise to this sort
of problem? I maintain 6 Debian machines here (about to add a
seventh) and ill-behaved browsers are the source of most of the
problems, complaints and lockups I have to deal with.
Jim
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