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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 know it's Adobe's fail, but Flash is still everywhere. When the browser locks up on Flash sites, it is annoying.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
Funny thing is, most people who ditch Firefox move on to Chrome, which has a rapid release cycle with automatic and hidden updates.
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... 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.
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.
Can I light a sig ?
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.
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.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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:
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).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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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.
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.