Rendering problems with iMac

I have had problems with FF rendering through version 4.x and into the beta for 5. I've been using FF for quite some time and even upgraded to 5 when it was first offered. However, I have had problems with rendering either causing FF to crash or just stopping rendering before completion - progress bar stops, rendering never finishes, even after letting it go for a couple hours a few times just to see what happened. Only the simplest filters seem to render within a reasonable amount of time, or at all.

I'm not generally rendering what I would consider huge images, e.g., I was just trying to render a "Whisp" filter image at 3000x2500 and it just would not complete. It goes through several iterations to about 3/4 done and just stops.

I think my iMac should be able to handle almost any, if not all, of the filters: I use a late 2014 iMac Retina 5K, 27" with a 4GHz Intel Core i7 and 24 GB of memory.

I love this piece of software, or at least the "idea" of it, but I have come to agree that the problem is with lack of commitment to the OS X product and inability or unwillingness to really tackle long-existing bugs in that version. I have read a lot of similar comments, though I have not posted before, primarily because I don't have the time or inclination to help troubleshoot a product I've already paid hundreds of $s for. To me, that's like getting paid for a design job, and having someone else do the work for $0 because I just don't want to work on it.

Sorry, I don't usually say much but I'm just frustrated with not being able to use what could be a great product. I know someone else will respond saying something like, "I've run FF on my iMac for 100 years and never had a problem," and that may be true, but this is just my experience.

Jeff Van Syckle