Netbeans crashing under Snow Leopard – possible fix

If you’re using Netbeans in Snow Leopard, and are noticing a lot of random crashes, help is on the way. Thanks to an idea by Keith Casey, I decided to upgrade the JVM/JDK/JRE that comes with Snow Leopard. The default version that ships is currently 1.6.0.15, I upgraded to the developer preview of 1.6.0_17 and I’m happy to report that Netbeans hasn’t crashed in 3 days. I got the developer release through my ADC membership, but I think you can also get it if you’re an iPhone developer, or a free member of the ADC. Netbeans is by far the best PHP IDE, free or non free for OS X. The intermittent crashes were getting very annoying, and making it unusable. I’m happy again.