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Firefox Is Lagging Behind, Its Co-Founder Says
sopssa writes "Firefox's co-founder Blake Ross is skeptical about the future of Firefox. He says that 'the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive, and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly.' Within the past year Chrome has been steadily increasing its market share, along with the other WebKit-based browsers like Safari. Meanwhile Mozilla's (outgoing) CEO says that while Firefox is more competitive than ever, they're looking forward to their mobile version of Firefox. 'Clearly, both are annoyed at what has happened to their former renegade web browser. But, by many accounts, Firefox is no longer considered to be the light, open alternative it once was.'"
I downloaded mosaic when the web was new and being a Linux user, Netscape was the only game in town and I suffered through the horrible Motif widgets because the browser and email client were the best of a poor set.
Firefox was wonderful when it came out and delivered a great shock to the system. IE 6 was bullocks and once people got used to downloading a browser, it opened the door wider for Opera and eventually Chrome. I don't know at what point they lost their way, but my Firefox nee IceWeasel got slower and slower and slower. The bickering over the trademark and the increasing performance problems lost me. Once I had to kill the browser every time I went to shut it down, I put Chrome in my sources.list and never looked back. Too bad, really.
My God! It's full of Voids!
The better question is: how much time have you spent arguing with firefox developers over completely trivial bugs that they refuse to fix?
How we know is more important than what we know.
So you've posed the question about 8 possible things that could irritate people about Firefox. Looking down the list quite a few of them hit the mark. But your proposed solutions? Several points you have blamed the user's hardware, several are being addressed, oh and lets wait for the next version too because feature xxx may be implemented at within an unknown number of months.
So compare it to the alternative of just using another program which the GP alludes to fixing all of his issues save for a specific requirement causing him to (possibly temporarily) stay with Firefox.
You're not really helping convince anyone to stick with Firefox with the "stick with it, it may get better" line of preaching. I have to agree Firefox is one hell of a bloated dog. For an 8mb program it sure does a lot for 3 slashdot pages to be taking up 150MB of RAM. Compared to loading the same 3 tabs in Chrome (which loads much faster) and only comes in at 60MB. Colour Management is the only reason I am using Firefox, as soon as it's supported by Chrome Firefox can go into another long list of applications I once used which lost touch.