Firefox and Ancestry

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dawn Evans Stringer on August 20, 2009 at 7:42am

I had this happen to me the last time Firefox updated. I chose to not update Firefox. A couple of weeks later (or maybe less) the Ancestry Viewer was compatible and I was able to update. I am just waiting to do this update also.

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Permalink Reply by Ron Ferguson on August 20, 2009 at 8:25am

Thanks, Dawn, that is what I am doing now. I am becoming less happy with Firefox for various reasons and I very much dislike not being able to install a "security important" update. It is beginning to give more worries than IE8

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Permalink Reply by Lisa B. Lee on August 20, 2009 at 10:40am

I have two Ancestry accounts: Ancestry.com (which I use with Safari) and Ancestry.ca (which I use with Firefox). I'm a Mac user, have no idea if that matters or not, but I did the Firefox upgrade a while ago and my ancestry.ca viewer works just as well as before.

My two cents.

- Lisa
Oakland, CA

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Permalink Reply by Joseph P. Jennings on August 20, 2009 at 5:55pm

Using Firefox 3.5.2, I just tried both census viewers, the one for 1870 and the regular advanced viewer for the other census years with no problem.

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Permalink Reply by Ron Ferguson on August 20, 2009 at 6:18pm

Lisa & Joseph

Many thanks will upgrade now! Frankly Firefox is beginning to loose its appeal for me since it is begining to use up what I consider to be rather too much RAM, and getting rather slow. I have used it for a long time for developing my websites due to its better compliance with web standards and its web development utilities, however IE8 is a much improved version of IE and has much improved standards of compliance.

Maybe I will start paying more attention to Opera, instead of just using it for testing.

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Permalink Reply by Sarah MacLean on August 21, 2009 at 12:35am

I found Firefox was taking up loads of RAM too. I did a bit of playing around and I found a way to make it a little smaller (in my case it was half the size at first which was brilliant!). If you go into 'Tools' and then 'add ons' look and see what add ons you have. My disabling and uninstalling any that you realise you don't need it will help tremendously.

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Permalink Reply by Ron Ferguson on August 21, 2009 at 5:05am

Firstly, I did update FF but had to reinstall the Ancestry Image Viewer. Anyhow it works, thanks to all for the comments.

Sarah, I do keep my add-ons to a minimum, but because of the variety of functions I use I'm afraid I do have to use a fair number. The main problem seems to be a continual increase in the memory used during the day, it does not seem to be releasing memory which is no longer required after exiting pages - cannot be certain, but I'm watching it - Guess I'm getting off topic (genealogy) here :-)

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Permalink Reply by Fionnghal NicPhadraig on August 22, 2009 at 2:33pm

is it possible not to use A's advanced viewer?

le durachd
Fionnghal

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Permalink Reply by Ron Ferguson on August 25, 2009 at 12:19am

That used to be the case, and probably still is, but I actually don't know about the current position, especially with FF

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Permalink Reply by Sesen on August 25, 2009 at 4:06am

I got the same message but had no trouble getting the viewer to load .. only problem was in going backwards if you try to go too fast Firefox crashes! ... maybe that is just my impatience though.

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Permalink Reply by Sarah Coles on September 6, 2009 at 5:29pm

I have FF and no problems with the viewer but I had the same deal when you go back too fast and then goodbye FF. I have no patience for that either. Otherwise, the viewer seems fine. I've never had any issues in using FF with Ancestry. No way would I use I.E. for anything! Now there's where you get hung up!

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Permalink Reply by Fionnghal NicPhadraig on September 7, 2009 at 5:14am

Thanks folks, Since this issue has been raised, i've visited Ancestry a few times and have no trouble viewing or downloading in spite of FF upgrading itself periodically. In fact it's great now. FF has given me a few bad moments for other reasons, but infinitely preferable to IE. I have kicked out a lot of add-ons and only kept those which i reckon are of real value, ie: WOT, Adblock plus; Interclue and of course, Ancestry's Advanced viewer. There were a number of others which had crept in but were using up far to much memory without any real benefit.
Saving the images also takes up a lot of room/memory in the computer, more i suspect than we realise. i found the laptop speeded up significantly since i removed a load of them. I'm fortunate that i have an old PC which has become my image bank. I could print them out, but once ones tree reaches the 10s of 1000s there are just far too many to hold as hard copies + if they are filed carefully, digital images are easier to pull up than their hard copy equivalents. It also means that when i chuck a membership, i don't lose access to the images i got through their organisation as i have them stored.

The only complaint i have at the moment is the slow raising of FMP images. I had their djvu viewer but i started getting totally blank white images which FMP didn't seem to think were a problem - i haven't found them a very helpful organisation when things go wrong - so i thought I'd try their other viewer, the one you're supposed to turn to if accessing an image appeared to be taking too long. However, it is slower, much much slower. I've had to get used to it though as, in spite of reinstalling djvu, i have failed completely to be able to utilise it. No idea why. I've just had to accept the snail way.

I'd be delighted to hear if anyone has experienced and solved that particular problem

le durachd
Fionnghal

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