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?

Comments

Forced Upgrades?

[schwit1]

The problem is not rapid release unless Mozilla is forcing upgrades upon users.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[Nemyst]

Funny thing is, most people who ditch Firefox move on to Chrome, which has a rapid release cycle with automatic and hidden updates.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[Volante3192]

You mean like how Chrome is currently at version 21? Did you even know Chrome updated?

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[ClioCJS]

The main difference being that those updates don't tend to kill your plugins like they do in firefox.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[ClioCJS]

It wasn't fixed when I left for Chrome about 6 months ago. I guess I'm not sure how long "ages" is for you.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[equex]

I'm pretty sure the word 'age' in IT measures the time from when someone switched from something to something else and then notifying you about it. Some sort of temporal penis length.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[UltraZelda64]

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.

Although I didn't really care for Chrome's interface to begin with (and still don't), at least it's stable and not in a constant state of change, so I've been contemplating switching to it. The problem is, I will be missing out on a lot of things I'm used to, especially many of Firefox's extensions.

Now we've got Google's Chrome which is catching up on the deal-breaking extensions it still somewhat lacks but seemingly faster at handling javascript-heavy pages, and Mozilla's Chrome wannabe tripping all over itself to be even more like the real thing. AdBlock Plus is now working (as a testing release) for Chrome, so that's one major thing not holding me back any longer. I have no idea what the status of NoScript on Chrome is, but that's the other major thing holding me back.

I also don't like how in Chrome to access the bookmarks menu you have to click a button all the way over to the right, makes a mess when you start going through your nested menus having to move the mouse right, left, right just to navigate, but oh well... Mozilla has done a hell of a lot to make their browser a miserable pain in the ass to work with while making it probably more bloated than the Mozilla Suite before it (its whole reason for existence to begin with), so they're even.

As Chrome continues to improve and Mozilla's morphing rip-off continues to struggle with its identity by copying Chrome poorly, I imagine a time that I might switch completely. Never would've expected to say this back when Firefox was itself, after all, I hated the Chrome layout. But now... that's all changed. Now I'm just waiting for a good time to jump ship, when it's good and ready.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[ThePhilips]

Did you even know Chrome updated?

No I didn't. That's kind of the point.

It's so feature-poor that frankly I do not think anybody can notice anything.

I think the Google's R&D could even take a sabbatical and let a cron job running in the background, bumping major/minor version numbers randomly and pushing them to users. And I'm pretty sure no soul would suspect anything for a very very long time.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[cpu6502]

I hate Chrome. Every time I open a tab, it open 1 or 2 more processes. Pretty soon all these processes are fighting with one another to get HDD access, and the whole think freezes up 1 minute each time.

Firefox runs better.
And yes it's annoying that Firefox (and IE) is trying to copy chome UI. Firefox (and IE) should have its own personality, not clone somebody else.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[sumdumass]

I second this. Even updates change the UI when the user can change it back to something remotely similar to what they had. It's just apain in the ass when you want to be productive and all the sudden everything is different because of an update then you have to hunt down how to find everything and put it back into place.

After suffering this for a while and hearing that Firefox was trying to be Google's Chrome, I bit the bullet and downloaded Chrome. Chrome seems to run cleaner and faster on some sites so I use both most of the time. It isn't the release cycles, it's Firefox demanding that my UI be different- that it be a clone of something else, that made me look at something else.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[AngryDeuce]

As opposed to always knowing precisely when Firefox updated because it broke 2/3 of your fucking plug-ins? Chrome's got all of the same damn plugins now and they don't get busted like they do (did) on Firefox.

Whether they fixed the issue in Firefox since those days is immaterial; the fact that it was like that for long enough to build a reputation for that fucking issue is all the explanation you need for why so many people have said "fuck Firefox" since Chrome came out. They had their chance, and I got tired of waking up to that shit. If you depend on those plugins it was almost like waking up to a BSoD in terms of how it fucked up your morning.

Chrome didn't lure me away, Firefox drove me to Chrome. I'm betting that's true for a lot of people out there.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[cpu6502]

>>>Silent and forced updating like Chrome does really is the best way to keep the web moving forward

You like programs that update without telling you? Not me. Too many times things break after an update. How many times have we read on /. about an antivirus program or browser updating, and suddenly the program never loads. Or worse: The PC won't boot because it's hosed. NOT telling the user about an update is the obnoxious part.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[fm6]

They do force upgrades, by withdrawing support for old versions. Corporate IT departments need to be able to work with Mozilla to deal with bugs and feature requests. They can't do that if they're running an old version.

Also, suppose an upgrade contains an important security fix? Not upgrading is simply not an option.

When a new version comes out, IT has to be ready to support it. Doing so every couple of months costs. Mozilla's attitude has been "if you can't keep up with us, we don't need you as users." Not a good way to maintain browser market share.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[cpu6502]

This is why Firefox now has LTS. It sits at version 10 for about two years, and then upgrades to 18. That way you can have a stable browser and not worry about broken plugins. In this respect FF is better than Chrome.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[nmb3000]

The problem is actually that Mozilla isn't forcing their updates upon users. Someone who doesn't check it "about Firefox" box in a while easily gets 6 versions behind in no time.

Silent and forced updating like Chrome does really is the best way to keep the web moving forward without being obnoxious about it towards your users.

This hasn't been true since version 12. In that release they added an auto-updating service that runs in the background and handles installing updates without the user's permission.

I had Firefox 13 set to "Check for updates, but let me choose when to install" when version 14 was released. It bugged me a couple of times to install 14 and I said no each time. Then, one morning I open Firefox to see 14 has been installed, completely without permission. I checked the update settings and it was still set to "ask me". Looking at the update log showed that 14.0.1 had been installed as a "security update".

Few things piss me off more than software doing things I've explicitly told it not to. Firefox auto-updating wouldn't be so bad if the moronic development leads would:

• Stop dicking around with the user interface. At this point they're only changing it just to change it because they can (new toolbar buttons are just white on Aero glass? What kind of idiots are running this show again?).
• Stop dicking around with the basics. In 14 they changed the mouse-wheel scroll timing because some dev retard though it should be "smoother". The "scroll time" was doubled, making mouse scrolling like walking through freezing molasses. Thank frak there's an about:config setting for it (general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS should be ~200), or I'd have ditched Firefox same-day.
• Stop changing performance settings to satisfy memory "leak" morons. Just because a web browser is using 1GB of memory (on your 8GB system) doesn't mean it has a memory leak. It means that web pages are filled with images, and decoded images are big. Throwing away that memory every time you switch tabs means that all those images have to be re-decoded when you switch back. But what the hell -- now they can claim "OMG, Firefox 13 uses less memories than Chrome!!11!". Stupid.

Just a few of the things I hate about the new Firefox system. The ONLY reason to stick with Firefox is the addons. Mozilla is betting the entire farm against the Firefox addon ecosystem -- if (or rather, as soon as) Chrome catches up, people (including a lot of "power" users) will start leaving in droves.

Firefox has been taken over by the same kinds of people that have poisoned GNOME for years. They think dictating to users what they do and do not like and what they will and will not do is the correct way to design software. They are dead wrong, something the failure of GNOME 3 should have taught them, but just hasn't managed to sink in yet (if it ever does).

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[SomePgmr]

I don't feel like it's quite so dramatic... virtually nobody even knows who Mozilla is, and even fewer have any feedback to offer on the workings of their browser. It's just that switching browsers now isn't quite the radical thing it used to be. Aside from making sure you have your bookmarks and maybe two plugins, there's little difference for most people. The days of websites being written with IE-colored glasses on are over, thank christ. I think everyone can thank Firefox (and probably Apple, a bit) for that.

So people see Chrome ads every 30 seconds, all day, every day. It's fast and intuitive enough, and it's Google, so people use it. The only big, must-have plugins (for those who care) all exist for it. So switching isn't a big deal. Bajillions of people use Safari on iOS because it's what's on their iDevice. The sky doesn't fall in on anyone.

The funny thing is, a few (most would say very minor) bugs in Chrome that really aggravate me have been there for well over a year now, so I started switching a few machines back to Firefox. It's not the dog it used to be and I don't mind getting updates (maybe I've been conditioned by phone apps). And who knows, maybe I'll be on something else in a year or two. I don't know, and I don't really have to care anymore. That's pretty cool.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has been taken over by the same kinds of people that have poisoned GNOME for years.

THIS. EXACTLY THIS.

This is just my perception, but I have this feeling that Firefox and GNOME projects have had an influx of people who want to help out on the projects but can't add value by doing real software engineering or fixing bugs... so they just fuck around with the UI, "fix" things that aren't broken, modify things that don't need to be modified, etc. That (and this is my big beef with where GNOME ended up) or they are too inexperienced to use old, well-tested, existing code, so they throw it all out and start over, incorrectly thinking that "we'll do it right this time around". Wrong. Fool!

I call these people "UI developers" and I believe them to be the plague of both GNOME and FF projects. Both were once great pieces of software. Unfortunately that is no longer the case.

Good UI is hard to do right, so here's a hint to these so-called "UI developers" - IF YOUR CHANGES MAKE USERS LEAVE, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hrm - sounds good but I think you mised the point. Nobody complains about a upgrade from 3.6.0 to 3.6.1 that leaves all plugins intact and just fixes bugs or adds new features. Unfortunately this is not what Mozilla is doing. Every new "major" release offers less new stuff than the previous one and to be honest, when I went from 12 to 15, I really couldn't put my finger on a single thing that the new version did better. Some things were different - but different is not better if it doesn't bring you benefits.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[Zantetsuken]

Seems like somebody should try and actually make their response to this... actually useful and constructive?

The separate processes for each tab is EXACTLY what makes Chrome superior.

While my desktop is a 4x core Phenom 2 w/ 4GB of RAM, my laptop that mostly sits around (as I have not needed to refresh it since I don't really need a laptop right now) is a Gateway ultra-light from 2006 - Core Solo ULV (1st gen Core series, single core, 1.3GHz) w/ 1GB of RAM.

I have a minimalist Debian installation on it running Openbox, WICD, and Chrome - not much else, so that it keeps resources free for actually using it. Chrome runs great, the only thing that chokes it up is if I try to load anything with Flash video (Youtube, etc) and generally I can open as many tabs as I want. And when it does freeze, the browser GUI is still useable to close whatever page does have a flash video loaded.

Firefox 3.x (that was the last time I had Firefox on that system, about 1.5 years ago?) would choke up just from loading 5 or more tabs - without flash on them. Whats worse, is that on Firefox, when it did freeze, it took the whole interface down with it. There are reasons that Firefox and everybody else is trying to play catch-up to Chrome and include process isolation.

Also, most web-browsers tend to access web-pages - on the internet... the HDD is really only used for caching pages (and images, etc on them) locally. Why would you think that

...all these processes are fighting with one another to get HDD access

need massive amounts of HDD I/O at all? And how did this even get marked "insightful"?

I see so many comments on articles about Chrome (not just on this one article either) about "I'm not going to switch just to jump on the Chrome bandwagon!" - its not about jumping on any bandwagon, its that at the moment (and for the past few years now) Chrome really is a better experience.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[Em Adespoton]

The big problem is that Firefox's feature releases, UI changes, bug fixes and security updates all go out in the same constant release cycle... so every time it gets updated, plugins break, new security holes are opened, UI elements change/vanish/are moved around etc.

So for anyone wanting to just get stuff done, Firefox has become a royal pain. For enterprise environments wanting to use it, it just can't be trusted to continuously function as expected anymore. The versions that have the features that work with the enterprise workflow don't have the security patches required to keep it secure.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[jlebar]

If you are on Windows try Pale Moon [palemoon.org] which has forked away from FF as of V12 because they too grew tired of UI changes.

Firefox is currently at version 14. If you're using Firefox 12, you're using software with known security vulnerabilities.

It's not clear to me that the Pale Moon guys have actually forked Firefox at version 12; it may just be that they haven't upgraded to the latest version yet. But I seriously doubt that Pale Moon has backported every security fix from FF13 and FF14, and if not, it's insecure.

If you don't like the possibility of getting UI changes every six weeks, use Firefox ESR, or, for that matter, use IE. But you're not doing yourself any favors by running an insecure web browser.

it also has the SSE flags set at compile so its snappier than FF

I can't find the benchmarks on the Pale Moon site anymore, but I looked at them some time ago, and didn't observe that it offered any significant performance improvements. I doubt you'll be able to observe a performance difference due to anything other than the placebo effect.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[icebike]

Firefox fixed that problem ages ago.

No, they didn't.
They just made it easier to blame the plugin writers due to Mozilla's incessant API tweaking.

One crashed tab taking down the whole browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Get separate processes already.

Flash

[Naatach]

I know it's Adobe's fail, but Flash is still everywhere. When the browser locks up on Flash sites, it is annoying.

So called "UI developers"

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Mozilla back when Mozilla was a browser.

Then Phoenix came along, and I started using that. Much more lightweight. At some point it got renamed to Firebird. Later on, it became Firefox. All was well. It was a great browser.

Then at some point in the past, I dunno, 3 years, these UI people (who probably know fuckall about software engineering) got their grubby fingers into the project and started rearranging the entire user interface. A user interface that had looked THE EXACT SAME FOR THE BETTER PART OF A DECADE.

Then I entered this painful stage of Firefox use, where every time I'd upgrade it, I'd have to fuck around trying to get it to look and act like the browser I'd been using for years. Eventually I realized that they were trying to make it look like Chrome. Then it started wanting me to upgrade it every week. Fuck that. I use a browser to do work, I know for a lot of people the browser is mostly a toy. But I need my tools to be stable, reliable, and behave consistently and predictably.

So I switched to Chrome. Haven't looked back.

Re:So called "UI developers"

[Anonymous Coward]

You notice on failfox because half of your add-ons have been randomly broken and the UI is completely different again.

Windows-centric upgrades

[hobarrera]

Plenty of upgrades have had pure windows-centric upgrades. For example, background updating of the user profile, an update service for windows, windows-specific UI, a plenty of others.

I find it annoying that there's some versions bring almost no changes to the browser itself, but bring plenty to windows-integrations, sometimes even to compensate for the OS's lackings. Meanwhile, I have an OS that has already solved many of those issues, and to me, firefox X.Y has not a single change.

Admit it...

[artor3]

Admit it... you hate when articles start with "admit it", as if all potential readers are of one mind. I frankly don't love Firefox, or hate it, or even think about it. Browser's are about as valuable to me as a hammer or a chair. One is pretty much like another. I'll use the one that feels most comfortable to me, and waste no further thought on it.

Re:Admit it...

[Austerity Empowers]

Most importantly, going back 10 years, the fact that we CAN drop our web browser and just fire up a different vendor's browser, and have it render up web pages every bit as well is a huge improvement.

10 years ago we were bitching that IE6 sucked, but we have no choice, people were designing to it and Netscape couldn't handle that content. Now we're complaining that Firefox has fallen behind, but there's Chrome, Safari and (if you're desparate) IE9. I assume that Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple pay a lot of attention to the usage of their browser, and looking at the shift in market. They will correct issues, while we, the users, can choose the browser that works best.

This "all or nothing" mentality is absolutely insane. We see it with the tablet/smartphone market, people think there's no room for PCs anymore (as if). We're bitching about Firefox because it's fallen into momentary disarray, so it must be about to combust. No, assuming Mozilla wants to keep firefox dominant, they will fix it. It may take a couple years, but they'll fix it. In the mean time we can hop on Chrome or Safari or whatever is happening now, be happy, and this is all good.

Memory hog?

[overshoot]

I don't get it. Restart Firefox every few hours?

I run mine for weeks at a stretch with seven or eight windows each with a bunch of tabs. Currently using about 840 MB.

I have my complaints (the idiot release cycle being high on the list) but memory hogging isn't anywhere near the top.

Keeps improving over time

[heypete]

I've been using Firefox for years and I've seen it steadily improve. Sure, there's been some odd UI decisions (FF2 had the URL bar on SSL-secured sites colored yellow which made it obvious when one was visiting a secured site. The next version didn't. Up until recently, SSL-secured sites had a blue "secured" indicator to the left of the URL bar while EV sites had a green indicator. The blue indicator has been removed in FF14 and the green one is less distinct.), but overall the browser has improved.

At first, the rapid release cycle was annoying but that was mostly because the browser required admin rights on Windows to update. Chrome avoids this by having the update process run under the system account in the background. Newer versions of FF do this as well so updates are considerably less obnoxious and my concerns with the rapid release cycle are eliminated (though I still think the numbering scheme is a bit annoying).

I've found Firefox to be the most consistently-good browser out there. Recent improvements in JavaScript processing have made Firefox just as fast (if not faster) than Chrome on my system, plug-ins work consistently better than Chrome, and memory usage has gone down significantly in more recent versions.

Sure, the other browsers (Chrome, Opera, etc.) are pretty good and I really don't have any major complaints about them (though the lack of x.509 client certificate generation in Chrome is problematic; Firefox/NSS has supported this for eons.), but I continue to use Firefox as my primary browser and don't really see any reason to change at this point.

Google = Surveillance, MS = Evil. What's left?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome installs invisible shit whenever it wants, watches and records my every move and reports its finding back to the mother ship. Anybody who accepts that kind of thing has had a virtual lobotomy.

Internet Explorer is and always will be for people who don't mind being manipulated by a giant mega-corp currently run by a fat retard who throws chairs when he doesn't get his way.

Opera may be great, but I've never needed to bother to try it out, and aren't you supposed to pay for it?

Firefox runs well, it's free, it has lots of cool bits I can add to personalize it and it's not watching me. What else is there? I don't love it or hate it, but I sure do find it useful without feeling like I'm being used.

So try this:

"Admit it, anybody using Chrome or IE has given up thinking or having any self-respect and just does what the machine says like good little bovines."

Not the rapid release cycle, but

[FlyveHest]

I am a long time FF user, and have done a few extensions as well, and its not really the rapid release cycle that annoys me.

No, the constant change of the user interface, and decisions chosen by people who don't know anything about me or how I like to use my browser.

I cannot fathom why, when they change UI, they don't keep the "old" look in, and let existing users change to it, if they like, or stay in the old look, if they like that.

One of the largest bullet points in FireFox is that you can tailor the browser to your needs, via extensions, but somehow this doesn't extend to the most important part of the browser, or, any program for that sake, namely the UI.

THIS annoys me to no end.

noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

having the NoScript add-on in firefox makes it amazing

I did ditch for Chrome

[Dynedain]

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.

Or I already did switch to chrome.

1) Rapid releases... Firefox should have just done rapid releases, or not. Their half-assed approach to "transitioning" towards rapid releases pissed off a lot of their user bases. And they still make a big show about the fact they're updating. Chrome has a simple little indicator that goes away as soon as you restart the browser.

2) Memory... FF memory bloat was a big deal for a long time. At least where Chrome had memory bloat and windows crashed, it didn't take down the whole browser. Again, FF waited too long to try to implement this.

3) Dev tools.... Firebug is great. Chrome's built-in tool is just as good. FF's new native inspector is a PITA and it fights with Firebug.

4) Synchronized Profiles.... Yes FF had it first, but Chrome makes it damn easy to setup and manage.

5) Security.... Why can't I temporarily accept an a self-signed ssl cert? Why do I have to go through multiple steps to "permanently allow this acception"? Compare this to Chrome's red warning screen with a single click for "I understand the risks".

6) HTML5 video..... FF's insistance on not doing any video other than Ogg was stupid and shortsided. If you're not going to bundle the codecs, offload the rendering to the OS. That's what the OS is there for after all. Most web video player packages out there will now auto-switch, giving Webkit HTML5 videos whereas FF still gets Flash players.

7) Retina Display..... I was seriously considering dropping Chrome as my primary browser on my new Mac because of this. The beta channel of Chrome did support it (but that brought other problems). However, the latest release of Chrome stable brings Retina Display support for my everyday browsing. Too bad FF.

8) Integrated search/address bar...... I know most /.ers hate this, but truthfully I've gotten very very used to it and as a result, I get pissed when I use a mobile browser and forget to use the correct input field to conduct a web search. You're telling the browser to go somewhere. Why do you need multiple always-on inputs to do that? Do you really need the extra input field just so you can specify which underlying destination identification process gets used to handle your request? No. The computer's smarter than that, and simpler UI is better here. This is why so many people type URLs into the Google homepage search field. They don't know why they would use the multiple input fields they're being presented with. Give them 1 field that's smart enough to do both use cases and you make it an easier experience.

9) Tabs..... Contrary to what /.ers moaned about... if the content of the field changes with the click of a tab, then the field should be within the tab, not outside of it. This is UI 101. FF fought against this and /.ers screamed bloody murder when they finally switched behaviors. Safari "solves" this by drawing their tabs inverted so that the address bar is within the tab and the viewing window is sperate. IE puts a tiny address bar next to the tab strip. Chrome is by far the right UI here.

10) Speaking of tabs.... And the dragging tabs off into new windows is still kludgy from a UI standpoint. Look at how Chrome does this compared to FF. As soon as my cursor moves the tab away from the strip, I get a new window. FF waits until I drop the tab, giving me a preview instead that looks like I'm dragging an image out of the browser, not moving a tab to a window.

Firefox was great. Mozilla offered a superior product for quite some time. They reminded everyone that there was still a lot of room for growth and improvement in the browser market. They forced MS to begin seriously developing IE again. Competition is a good thing in that it challenges all players to do better. But today? Meh... the Mozilla team is no longer top

Firebug!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the only reason i still use FF. I loved it for years, now it's just a web development tool, namely a window where I can hit F12 and firebug, the eighth wonder of the world, can do its magic.

What do I love? Firebug

[John Jorsett]

When debugging a web page, there's nothing I like better than the Firebug plugin.

Yes

[RKBA]

"Are we right to blame the rapid release process?"

Yes.