Slashdot Mirror
Firefox: In With the New, Out With the Compatibility
snydeq writes "Mozilla's 'endless parade' of Firefox updates adds no visible benefit to users but breaks common functions, as numerous add-ons, including the popular open source TinyMCE editor, continually suffer compatibility issues, thanks to Firefox's newly adopted auto-update cycle, writes InfoWorld's Galen Gruman. 'Firefox is a Web browser, and by its very nature the Web is a heterogeneous, uncontrolled collection of resources. Expecting every website that uses TinyMCE to update it whenever an incremental rev comes out is silly and unrealistic, and certainly not just because Mozilla decided compatibility in its parade of new Firefox releases was everyone else's problem. The Web must handle such variablility — especially the browsers used to access it.'"
I edit the add-on package (they are easy to download and are just renamed zip files) and change the version number manually and hope that there wasn't some fundamental code change in Firefox that breaks it. Maybe Add-on writers should push it up a few versions and hope it works? I dunno.
There Can Be Only One...
I stuck with Mozilla starting with V1.0 in July 2002 but about a month ago the bloat and crashes from Firefox 11.0 got too much for me and I gave Chrome a try.
Chrome is faster with no crashes.
I don't know where Firefox went wrong but I'm not going back.
Ponca City, We Love You
This is /thread right here. I just want my browser to be fast, efficient and mostly stay out of my way. IE8 infuriates me with all the bullshit they want you to setup before you can actually use the damn thing.
Good-bye
It's not so much about processing speed - It's about memory hogging. I don't have much of a problem with that concerning Chrome or FF, but depending on what you have open using just a few tabs under IE can quickly eat a half-gig of RAM. With a couple of GB in the computer that may or may not be an issue, but it seems rude and makes me feel a little violated and dirty...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
That's because chrome wasn't doing any hardware acceleration. I don't want Firefox not using a feature just because your video drivers are buggy. The problem is definately in them. I don't care what calls you make to the video driver, it still should not bsod. Ati is just being stupid. Sorry you are stuck with them, but it's not surprising. It's been very well known that the ati drivers are terrible.
From an add-on developer perspective, Firefox's frantic updates are a pain. I have the same add-on for Firefox and Google Chrome. Most of the code is common. On the Firefox side, I have work-arounds for two bugs in Firefox, and they've been open bug reports in Bugzilla for many months. There's a new bug this week because the last update to the Mozilla add-on SDK broke something in message passing. That's supposedly fixed in the next version of the SDK being released today. Now I have to rebuild, update and test my add-on, then run it through the Mozilla approval bureaucracy again. (Yes, the AMO web site says this happens automatically. That's only true if you let them host the source code.)
Over on Google Chrome, it just works. No workarounds needed. A stable API. No updates needed from my side.
I get far more downloads of the Firefox version, though.
What, like Opera? Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, speed dial, several other things that later browsers copied. Those only became features once someone created an extension for them in Firefox, right?
Have you looked at a vanilla install of Firefox? Compare that with Opera and the number of features in Firefox is pretty much approaching zero.
If the only thing you want to compare is plugins or add-ons, instead of actual browser features, then you should look at things like this, this, and this to avoid making yourself appear uninformed in the future.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
What features would those be? i thought I'd miss features when I switched to Comodo Dragon, but it has ALL my extensions, hell it has even better security features than FF, such as support for Low Rights Mode, the option of using Comodo SecureDNS for malware and phishing protection, and it uses less CPU and memory and unlike FF when i close tabs my memory actually goes down.
Now I keep Pale Moon on hand for when i run into one of the VERY few sites that don't play nice with Chromium browsers and the rest of the time i'm in Dragon. I still keep a copy of FF, ESR on my old XP box and the latest on my 6 core, and i keep them updated and try them every time a new version comes out HOPING things will change, that FF will become light and nimble even on netbooks and nettops like it USED to be. Sadly though IMHO when Chrome came out it was like the Moz devs lost their damned minds and became so focused on Chrome they forgot what mattered was making the best FIREFOX and not a Chrome ripoff. in a way it reminds me of MSFT who lost THEIR damned minds when the iPad came out and have now deluded themselves that everyone from stock brokers to sally homemaker is gonna go pay triple the price for a touchscreen monitor so they can "experience the wonder" of having a cell phone on the desktop.
Its damned sad to see a company become so target locked on a competitor they can't see the forests for the trees but frankly ever since Chrome starting gaining share its been all downhill for FF.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As I responded to people above. I have 32gb of ram on my workstation, that enough? When 64bit FF uses 6gb of ram performance nose dives into the ground at that point ... but that's about double the ram of 32bit before its useless. So no, ram isn't the issue, the memory bloat is a side affect of whatever the hell kills performance, it isn't the direct cause. I've still got 20 gigs of memory free.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.