I know that this isn't especially constructive for a first post (my apologies) here but I wanted to share this.
I am (well, was) a very long-time Iron user and big fan. I've started using it with v5.0.380 in mid-2010.
Since then I've installed it on every machine I've put my hands on, including dozens of friends' computers (I'm an IT guy so people tend to ask for help, I'm sure some of you know what I'm talking about), I've been advocating its use very strongly as safer and less intrusive than Chrome, I liked the "built in Germany" idea so much... hey, it means a lot in my country.
I *really* was this kind of guy:
etc.Today I've uninstalled v34.0.1850 from main main computer and put Chromium Portable instead.
This will be my last version of Iron. I can't take it anymore. I'm a heavy user with an average of 6-7 windows kept open and up to a dozen tabs per window. Iron has been slowly degradating over the past year or so up to a point it has become unusable for me.
I've hoped that these problems would get fixed release after release, but it's only been getting worse.
The main issues are:
- memory leaks: my 4G RAM machine (maxed out 32-bit Windows) slows down to a painful death within 2 days of Iron left running
- CPU hogging, especially when I restart Iron and it reopens all my Windows and tabs. I mean, after a while. Of course it's expected that it would use a lot of CPU when starting, but after a couple of minutes it *should* calm down. It doesn't, I can see the spinning icon remaining forever on several tabs and Iron processes eating up CPU. The only way to make this go away it to switch to the said tabs, do nothing and watch the spinning icon disappear. That's a pain.
- new tabs showing a blank page instead of the expected pages after Iron has been running for a while. Refreshing does nothing. Sometimes closing the tab and reopening it fixes it, sometimes not (this has appeared around the first v3x releases)
- slower and slower start up
- complete freezes starting to appear. Yesterday it started freezing completely when opening at tab to a Mediafire download page. After a while the flash plugin crash popup appeared but even agreeing to stop it as offered didn't ressucitate Iron. I had to kill every process by hand.
This was the fatal problem as far as I am concerned. The one I couldn' t take.
I know I'm running it on an obsolete machine (and old HP Notebook with a lowly AMD Turion II CPU and 4 Gb of RAM on Windows XP SP3 32 bits). This could well be part of why I'm having all these problems. Iron might not be tested much on Windows XP anymore, I guess. However I can't change as of now.
So long Iron and danke schoen to all the nice people who make it.