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?

[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]

>>>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?

[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]

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?

[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.

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.

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.

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."