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Why We Love Firefox, and Why We Hate It
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Conceivably Tech:
"Admit it. You are in a love-hate relationship with Firefox. Either Mozilla gets Firefox right and you are jumping up and down, or Mozilla screws up and you threaten to ditch the browser in favor Chrome. Mozilla's passionate user base keeps Firefox dangling between constant ups and downs, which is a good thing, as long as Mozilla is going up. Unfortunately, that is not the case right now. Mozilla's market share has been slipping again at a significant pace. There has been some discussion and finger-pointing, and it seems that the rapid release process has to take the blame this time. Are we right to blame the rapid release process?"
What do you find most annoying or gratifying about Firefox these days?
I don't love or hate Firefox. I just appreciate it for what it's done, what it's represented, and the fact that it's STILL relevant and sharping the web, even in the face of gigantic corporations like Google, Apple, and Microsoft trying to wring the web in their own directions.
As a browser, it's just one of the good ones.. which is exactly the way I like it. I like having multiple good browsers available, in case one of them can't do something. And Firefox is the all-rounder that does what I need it to when all the cooler new browsers fail.
Love: It can browse the web (yeah!). It's multiplatform. It's well maintained. It's up to date with the latest standards. The "3D View" feature in Inspect Element. The many good plugins.
Hate: A single tab can hang the whole browser. No convenient way to view an image with the wrong MIME type in the browser anyway. Too little and dumbed down settings. No more status bar. Still no good debugging tools, and the plugin Firebug is unhandy and annoying. The weird branding thing they do that caused Archlinux to not call it Firefox but various other lame names in the past (are they for open source or what?). No more innovation (why not try things like multiple tab groups or so instead of "innovating" by removing stuff from the interface?). The Android version sometimes crashes and once made the whole phone reboot after a crash.
I'm probably missing many things :)
Firefox fixed that problem ages ago.
Plus, Chrome's UI seems more set in stone. Firefox's did seem that way until some time after Google introduced their competing product, but then Mozilla thought it would be a brilliant idea to fuck with the UI to the point where not only the interface but now the release cycle tries to mimic Chrome as closely as possible. Mozilla's browser still feels like it's in a constant, never-ending state of flux, and Mozilla is still trying fucking with the UI, making me dread every new "version" of Firefox that is released.
The default UI yes, but if you have a customized UI, version updates will keep your customization from one release to another. I've been using this scheme for about one year on the nightly version which is automatically updated by firefox PPA channel. It also works on the current stable version.
This is the biggest problem Mozilla has. They listen to everybody and everything, and so they can't win because surprise, people don't agree.
People were pushing hard for Firefox to have a more minimalist UI like Chrome. Mozilla acquiesced. Then all the people who use their browser as a tool and not a lifestyle got a big surprise when the update came down the pipeline and got irritated about it.
People are pushing hard for Firefox to update more often - this was probably legitimate, since it was taking a year plus between releases. They did. Then another group of people got irate about rapid releases.
People were pushing hard for Firefox to reduce memory usage. Mozilla reduced Firefox's memory usage. Now people complain that Firefox is a bit slower and uses more CPU because less is cached in memory.
Bad form to reply to oneself, but I forgot my favorite:
More in the stop dicking around with the UI category, we have an idiot named Carlo Alberto Ferraris to thank for destroying standalone image viewing (when you open an image file directly, or via right-click and View Image). He was so very offended by that page having a white background that he felt it necessary to ruin a feature that's been standard in browsers for over a decade.
This isn't just an issue of changing something for the sake of change, it's a plain stupid idea in the first place. First, a dark background when most websites and images are very light is jarring. Second, centering the image makes it harder to click on for actions like saving or copying. And third, it destroys the usability of a very common entire class of images.
Open this image of waveforms in Firefox 13+ to see the problem. Transparent GIFs have the same issue. The solution? Yet another addon to fix stupid Firefox developer mistakes.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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