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While this is true i think the larger point is that their "big innovations" are just "me too!" copies of other's work.

What pisses me off is its pretty damned obvious that like a lot of FOSS projects the developers at Mozilla frankly don't give a shit what the users think. I don't know if its because its free software, if they think that gives them the right to just crap on the users, if its just bad attitudes or what, but I have noticed a lot of projects adopting this "We are going THIS way, get on board or go fuck yourself" attitude and it stinks. I think the numbers speak for themselves, FF was growing until they became all about the bling bling and ignoring the users and its been dropping steadily since.

Of course the sad part is this isn't a new thing for the Moz devs, it just wasn't as bad as it is now. Anybody remember how they swore up and down the memory leaks were all in the users heads, right up until they put out the release that basically said "Oh and we fixed the memory issues!"...wait, what? the memory issues you told us didn't exist, THOSE memory issues? And anybody whose taken a look at their roadmap lately...ugh...its fricking metro UI candy and appstores, yep, that's what we need, more candy coating and fricking appstores.

That is why I suggest those that don't want to go where Moz is heading to try Pale Moon if you wish to keep your FF extensions, as they have forked it as of V12 so they won't be going for the glossy bling bling of future FF, or if you're not wedded to FF extensions maybe try QTWeb which has support for flash and ABP and runs on all the major OSes, Linux, BSD, OSX, and Windows.

Because as someone who was a long time FF user and advocate I just don't like where Mozilla is going anymore. they used to seem to care about just making the best FF they could, but then Chrome came out and they seem to have lost their damned minds. But luckily for us there is a wealth of choices now, not only those above but opera, Safari, Chromium,Comodo Dragon which is becoming more and more my go to browser, just so many choices. Maybe if enough people choose something else Mozilla will start listening to their users again. I know its a long shot but I can dream, can't I?

Wow just....wow. For every one that says FF isn't a memory piggie all they have to do is look at that. There is over 23,000 users running an extension that dumps the browser and restarts so they can get the memory back...wow. BTW for all those FF users may i make a suggestion? Try Pale Moon as I've found that it doesn't seem to be QUITE as big a piggie and as a bonus it is compiled with the later SSE flags so it is snappier and as a BIG bonus they have forked away from FF because they have NO intention of going with the Metro UI look that FF is gonna be switching to. so for those that like the current look and just want it faster and less piggie, give pale moon a try.

As for TFA man i'd hate to see it go but sadly this is a problem with a browser being proprietary. with FF and Chromium if you don't like where a company is headed there is usually a fork because many feel the same way as you do, but with opera and presto there isn't a damned thing you can do but just stick with the old version. I know that is what my oldest boy will do rather than give up his opera but that isn't really the best move security wise, but with a locked down browser that is pretty much the only choice you have if you want to stick with it. maybe someone will cook up a Chromium version with the Opera UI?

Thanks and I too don't use either FF or Chrome. For my customers I offer a choice of Pale Moon which has forked away from Firefox specifically because they did not want to go with the whole metro UI change or Comodo Dragon which is what i personally use as its based on Chromium but with some nice extra security features and no phoning home to Google. Finally for those that need cross platform I would highly recommend QTWeb which runs on Linux, Apple,BSD or Windows, is fully portable so you can just run it on a flash, and has Flash support and Adblock.

But I was a BIG supporter of Mozilla, both when FF was still in beta and the Moz Suite before that, but frankly their devs might as well change the opening screen to someone giving the finger as that seems to be their attitude as of late. You would think seeing how their numbers climbed right up through FF V4 and then started nosediving and never recovered they would get the hint that the users don't like the current direction, but frankly they don't seem to give a shit. This is sad as FF had ONE killer feature, the same one that caused some of my customers to go to Seamonkey or Pale Moon rather than give up the Gecko engine, and that is the awesome extension framework. if they would quit pissing on the users with the UI and do something about the CPU spiking I would go running back to FF in a heartbeat but its pretty obvious from their roadmap that the ONLY users they want are those on Windows 8 using appstores and that just ain't me. So long FF and thanks for all the fish.

Palemoon. Both LTS versions of 3.6.x, and newer versions with the crap stripped out and the old UI restored.

Per my subject-line: They're both more highly optimized than std. builds of FireFox are (specifically for Windows OS) by using more "radical" optimization options than the std. builds of FF do!

Links for downloads:

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WATERFOX: (64-bit highly optimized FireFox)

http://waterfoxproj.sourceforge.net/

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PALEMOON: (32 & 64-bit highly optimized FireFox)

http://www.palemoon.org/

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* Enjoy - &, I hope that helps your issues with FireFox being "slow" etc/et al...

APK

P.S.=> I use WaterFox here myself on Windows 7 64-bit, & I even like it (although Opera's my fav. & in a 64-bit alpha build too no less) - it's my "2nd fav. browser" here in fact!

... apk

Uhhh...Bill? you can just go to Ninite and just use the latest flash you know. i've found it runs better than the built in chromium one anyway. with the chromium flash SD video is skippy and sucks more CPU on the Sempron nettop and it uses more power on the Brazos netbook but with the latest flash its smooth as butter and lower power usage. Frankly it wouldn't surprise me if it uses the Intel compiler but i also heard it uses GCC which frankly isn't much better so i honestly don't know who to believe on that one. why they don't just use the Open64 compiler which works great on intel AND AMD I don't know.

But I can tell you that it is NOT just the compiler because there is also Pale Moon which is a custom compiled FF with the SSE flags properly set and the choice of 32 or 64 bit and i can tell you even the 64 bit version gets stomped by dragon and Chromium. And FF 7 and 8 is NOT lighter, it just trades memory for CPU time which IMHO is worse as the RAM uses that same power regardless while the CPU spikes suck batteries dead. And frankly IE could be offered to me with $1000 hookers and I won't take it, got burned enough from IE6 not to mention look at the number of patches for IE holes VS everything else. By removing and blocking IE from my win 7 installs I went from over 1.9Gb to get RTM to current to barely 730Mb!

BTW one of the reasons i learned of ninite was because i got tired of dealing with badly out of date Adobe crap on the machines the local worst buy sells. i often get called and paid $65 a pop simply to restore to factory settings and "get rid of the crap" because of my rep when it comes to cleaning and optimizing mobile devices. Now I just run decrapify, set Windows to the non granny settings, run Ninite followed by my tweaks and finally coretemp and AllCPUMeter. makes it easier to control power usage IMHO but honestly my Asus EEE wasn't that badly crapped. it had Adobe crap and 2 startup apps i didn't need, that's it.

Oh if you see ballmer tell that fat bastard i'm STILL waiting for my apology and free copy of Windows 7 for being burnt by ME and Vista. Where is my apology you fat fucker? WinME was against the Geneva Convention!

The sad part is Joe and Sally average hasn't got a fricking clue about version numbers and have been bailing on FF because they don't like the lousy performance and crappy UI. I mean its bad when my nephew pops onto steam the other night and says "Help my PC is running REALLY slow!" and I say "Close Firefox, you''ve probably had it running more than a few hours' and sure enough he pops back on "Wow! Thanks!"

I have yet to have one of my customers say they like the new UI, in fact most want me to tell them how to get the old UI back, and if they use it constantly it seems to drag the whole OS down as the day wears on. I've seen this in XP, in Vista, and in win 7, I've seen this in customers that have plenty of extensions and some that have no extensions at all, its just a mess.

And before anybody starts trotting out benches i'd point out that the Geforce FX series originally showed up nicely on benches too, it just meant they were coding for the bench which isn't real life. I don't know if it is Gecko, something got screwy when they changed the UI, the flash container or what but when my customers go to the sites they always go to, FB to play their games, yahoo mail, Amazon, Google News, as the day wears on FF seems to drag the system down. they close it and suddenly the machine jumps back to life. again I've seen this on a wide variety of systems, on AMD and Intel, dual and quad, mobile and desktop.

So I wish they'd just get off the crazy number jumping and go back to trying to make the best damned browser instead of trying to ape chrome. its gotten bad enough I've just about switched all my customers over to Comodo dragon just so they'll quit griping about how slow everything is. When they switch it is like "Wow! that made a BIG difference, thanks!".

and this isn't some chome yay FF boo thing. I still have FF installed on my quad and my nettop and fire it up with each release hoping it'll get better, hoping it'll go back to being fast and nimble, but it just ain't been happening. While I've grown used to the chrome style interface of Dragon that doesn't keep me from missing the old FF UI nor even trying alternate builds like Pale Moon hoping to get my old FF back. sadly it reminds me of how OS/2 bragged "a better Windows than Windows" and instead everybody just went with windows. if i wanted Chrome I'd just use Chrome FF devs, I want FF back!

Just so you know you aren't alone and so someone doesn't say its a Win 7 issue, i've run into the same thing on XP Home SP3, Sempron 1.8Ghz, 1.5Gb of RAM, and I have even replaced the Windows shell with AstonShell. my addons are only flash, adblock plus, downloadhelper, and forecast fox, the same add ons I have in Dragon with the exception of downloadhelper. I have seen the same behavior on a customers Win2K pro machine, 2Ghz P4 with 2gb of RAM, and a customers Vista SP2 with an Athlon 7550 dual with 2gb of RAM.

In all of the cases including my XP sempron if left alone with NO activity FF will eventually make the entire machine unresponsive. Not a programmer so don't ask me why, I'm just telling what i saw with my own peepers. The same machines with Dragon, Chrome, or Opera? NO problems. In fact the gal with Vista switched to Opera full time and hasn't had a single issue with performance or the machine lagging since. Most of my other customers have either joined me in using Dragon or switched to Chrome, and these folks aren't the type to switch on a whim, it has to be REALLY slowing them down or causing them problems for them to switch. I only have a single customer that hasn't given me a single complaint since FF started spinning up in numbers and that is a guy on a tri-core AMD with 8Gb of RAM and Win 7 X64. Maybe FF can't see the third core and therefor doesn't slam it?

All I know was I was a die HARD Mozilla fan and didn't think anybody would get me to switch ever. I was using FF before it was even called that and the suite before that. But since FF 4 I've seen the performance and responsiveness of FF go right in the shitter, it got bad enough that I started trying other browsers just to see if it WAS an OS issue and found it was FF giving me the trouble. i have the same extensions in Dragon, no hangs or CPU slams.

But by FF 6 it got so bad on both my Sempron and my netbook that I went out and bought a third party video download program just so I wouldn't need FF for downloading videos anymore. After that I removed ALL extensions but frankly i couldn't see that it helped, in fact removing ABP made it that much slower since it now had to load ads.

This isn't some "yay chrome, boo FF" thing I still miss Moz sometimes, enough I downloaded Pale Moon hoping they may have been able to fix the problems in FF. It helped a little but sadly not enough. i truly hope they fix FF, I really do, as I do miss it sometimes. But ATM on anything short of my quad it just sucks too much CPU, is too slow to load pages, seems to become unresponsive WAY too easily, I don't know what they did but its a real shame as it just killed any love I had for FF as a day to day browser. I still keep it installed and updated though, and with each new version I fire it up and try it for an hour hoping its gotten better, but it just ain't.

If you're on Windows, Pale Moon ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) has a 64bit version. It's firefox with optimisations (and I mean actual optimisations, not "feature optimisations" which effectively mean bloat).

Try Palemoon 3.6 portable, it's the least crappy browser out there nowadays.

Try http://www.palemoon.org/

Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-3-theme-for-firefox/ and Winestripe Realfox 4 (makes Firefox 4+ look like Firefox 1.5) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/winestripe-realfox-4/ There's also Pale Moon http://www.palemoon.org/ , which keeps the status bar and tabs below location bar by default. Anyways, Firefox's 4+ GUI can be reverted almost totally to the old style with a few clicks.

Enterprises and users who don't like the fast release pace could try SeaMonkey http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

For anoyone who's still on Windows, try Palemoon, it's an optimized re-brand of Firefox.

Slightly smaller and faster than FF. It has become my Firefox of choice.

I'd suggest using palemoon it's a FF3/4 spinoff, but sadly it's windows only. But since that's all I use it works for me.

Already done, it's called palemoon.

Before the official release, I ran the various betas to check on my extensions, and virtually all of them worked in the final release, which was a pleasant surprise (and I have over 30+ extensions loaded). Also, I was using Palemoon as my main browser, and being able to run that, alongside the FF4 beta, helped, too. Of course, few extensions worked at first, but they were ported in the weeks up to the final release. The only major one which didn't work was Scrapbook Plus, but the original Scrapbook is still well-maintained (and working with FF4), and so I just went back to that.

For the lazy, you can check your addon compatibility here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/report

On Windows, to get the statusbar back install Pale Moon: http://www.palemoon.org/ Pale Moon 4 will probably be available a few days from now.

Alternatively, if you are using windows and have a recent processor, you might want to check out palemoon, which is a version of FF3.6.X highly optimized for newer processors. It's faster at the expense of older, slower processors (e.g., palemoon will not run on an Athlon XP and others). It does use a separate profile area, though. While there is a tool for copying an existing FF3 profile into palemoon, there is no way to keep the two synchronized.

My experiences are even worse than yours. FF4b9 crashes on me right at startup. I assume that one of the (few) extensions is causing this, but I'm too lazy to go into safe mode and debug it. It is a beta, after all, and so I'll just wait for the next beta (I did let FF send off, oh, maybe 20 crash reports).

In the meantime, I'll stick with pale moon, which is a version of FF3.6.X highly optimized for modern processors and Windows. It runs significantly faster than regular FF, since it doesn't have to support older processors (e.g., Athlon XP and others). If you have a newer processor and use Windows, check it out. It's still not as fast as chrome, but it's nicer than plain FF. (NOTE: it has its own profile location, which is different from FF's. While you can use a tool to import your existing FF profile into palemoon, note there is no way to keep them synchronized.)

Apparently there is a fork of Firefox called http://www.palemoon.org/ . They think the Windows build is not optimized thus slower than Linux versions, and they basically do a specific build of the code to make it faster. Oh no what will happen when this is combined with Windows Hardware acceleration!

I think I had the same problem with Fx. There's, at least, one bugzilla bug report regarding Fx's pauses, lags, jerkiness. Mozila folks are aware of the issue and they claim to be working on it. I haven't tried Fx 4, but I use Pale Moon plus some anti-lag tweaks I found on the web and now the lags while filling forms, etc. seem gone.