Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Something's fishy with Google...

It might be time to start lining my room with aluminium foil but something very strange has been happening relating to when I try to install Google software on my machine. This is a fairly new machine running Windows 7 Pro. I'm anything but a MS Fanboi but being a MS technology stack developer has paid the bills quite nicely over the years so who am I to start bitching. One thing I do not like is IE, so as soon as the system was up, I installed Firefox and uninstalled IE. This led to some rather annoying but laughable problems like when applications cannot seem to figure out that I don't have IE, they try launching HTML files in MS Word.

A while back I had a play with Chrome on the office laptop and decided to try it at home. All went well until I started noticing that my Firefox browser would hang, and then Windows 7 would completely hang just out of the blue when browsing. (Not using Chrome at the time) This started to get really annoying because task manager etc. didn't even respond. I started digging around and noticed a few other people having trouble with Chrome and Firefox playing nice together on Windows 7 / Vista. I uninstalled Chrome and the problem vanished. For the record I do not use any Google apps such as toolbar etc. either. I passed it off for some weird glitch between the two systems and something with Win 7 falling over after not figuring out how to resolve their differences. Disappointing to say the least, but I prefer Firefox as a browser to Chrome.

However, recently I decided to dust off my old Java books, install the latest Eclipse, and have a peek at the Android SDK. All was fine until I launched the Android SDK Manager then decided to do a bit of browsing while it was downloading my selected SDK versions and such. Within 10 min Firefox had hung again and the system went completely dead!

So really now, Google, What the Farq are you installing with your software that is getting completely shirty with Firefox and/or Windows 7?! My guess is that the SDK downloader is using netcode shared with Chrome that is in some way incompatible with whatever Firefox is using. Or is it something more sinister? While I have found some references of other people having similar problems I haven't seen anything that remotely looks like a solution or acknowledgement that there is a problem.

The question is, if I sacrifice my (relatively minor) preference for Firefox in favour of Chrome, will I be able to browse and utilize the Android SDK without having my machine lock up? And more importantly, will I wake up the next morning without finding a completely new preference shift from the soda I drink to the car I drive due to some form of wifi-induced subliminal suggestion? :)

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