Just the other day I decided to finally try out Netbeans 6 for real. I've tried out the various betas and release candidates for V6 over the past year or so, but each one has had some major flaw that severely limited by productivity. I figured that by 6.1 the IDE would be stable enough, but alas it is not.
Randomly, the UI will freeze up. It can happen 2 minutes into using the IDE or 6 hours into use. Sometimes it happens when I click on something, other times it happens without my input at all. In all cases, the IDE becomes non-responsive to input, but apparently still responsive enough to not show up as non-responsive in Activity Monitor. I've tried letting the IDE sit for up to 30 minutes to work itself out, but that did not help. I just end up force-quitting randomly throughout the day. Extremely frustrating.
I'm tempted to pull a Windows and revert to Netbeans 5.5, except that I put a great deal of time into customizing Netbeans indentation, syntax highlighting, etc when first setting up 6.1 and I don't want to lose those changes.
Sure, even Netbeans 5.5 was slow at times, but on the whole I find the UI of 6.1 to be far more sluggish and delayed. Ah!
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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4 comments:
Eclipse is notorious for that... I usually have to restart 3 or 4 times a day. I'm currently using Netbeans 5.5 for a project, and after reading your review, I won't be upgrading any time soon.
You would think that IDEs would be the most well-built open source projects out there....
I've used Eclipse before, back in college, but not recently at all. I use Flex Builder, which is built on eclipse, quite a bit and I don't have problems with that though. I've talked to people who are don't have the freezing problem with Netbeans 6.1, but for seem reason mine is shitty, even though I've clean installed it a couple times (without importing preferences). There are some sweet improvements in Netbeans 6 (most notably, JavaScript syntax highlighting), so it might be worth looking into. But, if you do, and it freezes, probably just drop it without giving it 50 more chances. In my experience, the problem just doesn't go away. Too bad.... and yeah, you'd think IDE's would be on the top of the list.... but then again, we're talking about free here, so maybe it's not that surprising?
I wish I'd see this blog entry before I started using 6.1 heavily. Periodically something goes wrong with the project structure and/or something in the source code causes the GUI to freeze while scanning (for intellisense, as a result of clicking "fix imports", etc.) For me the freezes are not random; a project that has hit the "freeze problem" will freeze repeatedly.
I had loads of problems with 6.1, but I've recently upgraded to 6.5 and haven't had any problems yet, going on a month. So, give 6.5 a shot.
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