Orca crashes, hangs, or partially hangs quite often (XP SP3)

[mbrazil]

I switched to Orca from Avant several months ago, primarily because my ISP, WildBlue satellite, made some kind of arrangement with Mozilla that is supposed to improve browser speed over satellite. Orca doesn't seem much, if any, faster than Avant, but I wanted to stick with it because of some of the Firefox plugins that work with Orca (it's too bad so many of them don't work).

Unfortunately, I've found that Orca crashes (terminates) fairly often when attempting to load certain websites. If this was just one or two sites, I'd report it as a bug with specific site information, but it's more widespread than that. When this happens, if I really need to get to the site causing the problem, I just open Avant and load it there, but it indicates that there might be some bug or deficiency in Orca that doesn't exist in Avant.

In addition to the outright crashes, I've found that, after sitting idle for some time (the amount of time is variable, but it's a matter of at least a couple of hours), when I come back to it, it is either completely non-responsive or partially non-responsive (hangs and partial hangs). By partially non-responsive, I mean that I can switch from tab to tab and the toolbar buttons appear to function, but none of the links on any of the open tabs function, and although the buttons appear to work (they look like they're responding to the mouse), they have no effect whatsoever. Also, if I click on a link in my bookmarks, a new tab opens, but the site never even starts to load. Frequently, in either kind of hang, I can't shut Orca down using the tray icon, and I have to terminate it with Task Manager.

Another thing I've noticed is what appears to be another type of partial hang where you click on something, (pretty much anything) either in a tab or in some part of the UI, like a toolbar, and Orca seems to just "go away" for a while (in the neighborhood of 30 seconds to over a minute). By "go away" I mean nothing happens, and if you click anywhere at all in the Orca window, even the title bar or the status bar, you get a busy cursor until it gets done doing whatever it's doing. This can happen even if nothing else is actively going on. In other words, there are open tabs, but there is no video playing or anything like that, and nothing else is happening, such as another site loading or refreshing in one of the tabs. My PC has a quad core CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB drive, so it's not a resource problem, and I don't see anything even remotely similar in any other apps.

I've uninstalled and reinstalled a few times and have made sure I'm using the most current version, so I'm convinced the problems are within Orca. I haven't tried using Firefox other than very briefly to try to isolate the problems to either the Gecko engine or the Orca UI, because I don't have enough patience to live with the Firefox UI for very long at all.

I'm posting this here, because it doesn't really qualify as a a bug report, and I'm not asking for help, since I don't think there's anything that can be done on my end. I've used a lot of browsers over the years and am quite knowledgeable about PCs in general and Windows (except 7, which I'm just starting to play with). I'm hoping that Anderson will take note and look into why Orca is so fragile.

[kudos]

When you (re)installed, did you delete Orca's settings (stored in the user profile folder)?

[mbrazil]

I deleted the entire folder.

I'm really getting pretty fed up with this. Today, it crashed for no apparent reason, and when I restarted it, all my settings and extensions were gone -- AGAIN!

The only reason I've been sticking with Orca is that I really like the configurability of the UI, but my patience is getting pretty thin. I'm going to try to stick it out until the next update, but it seems as though Orca doesn't get much attention, and it's been a long time since we've seen a bug-fix update.

[kudos]

Which folder did you delete? I mentioned the settings folder. That is in the user profiles folder as I stated. It can be located by typing "%appdata%\Orca Profiles\.default\" into the Windows "Run" box. If you delete that then it is not surprising that you lost everything because that is where all settings are stored(**). If you are having these data loss issues then I recommend to back-up that folder when things are working correctly.

(**)Unless you are using the USB version, in which case the settings folder is named .default and is stored in the same folder as the Orca.exe file.

You mentioned extensions. Which ones are you using? Not all Mozilla extensions are compatible with Orca and some can have adverse effects. Can you supply a list of all extensions and plugins listed in the addons pages.

As far as stability goes, I use Orca every single day - it is my main browser - and I have never had an issue. Hence why I am puzzled and probing for answers. Do you have issues with any other software running on your computer? It may be that something else is interfering.

Yes, Orca has not been getting much attention at all lately. The reason is that Orca is currently stable and development has been focused on Avant and the new base code. This base code is shared between Avant and Orca. Once that is stable then Orca will be updated and we shall start enjoying the benefits of all that work (including the latest Gecko engine). Also, there will be included a feature to backup and restore all settings in case it ever happens again.