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

Annoyances

[girlintraining]

What I find annoying about Firefox is that it has massive memory leaks and needs to be force-killed every few hours of use because it balloons to such a size that it starts killing the system it's running on. And that's pretty much a show stopper right there. There's no reason for a web browser to eat up 2GB of memory during regular use.

Re:Annoyances

[b4dc0d3r]

We've had this discussion already. FireFox developers denied there were problems, then admitted, then introduced numerous fixes. Memshrink began June 2011 and has shown progress almost every week for over a year.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink

I left it for a while, then got irritated by Chrome's anemic script-blocking (nothing is temporary). Coming back, I haven't had any problem with memory.

Because I have script blocking, and settings are stored in a script file, it sometimes fails to restore tabs or browsing sessions if I kill it (for the sole purpose of saving tabs while I reboot or know I won't be browsing for a while). That's mostly user-error, and partly interference from a 3rd-party plugin.

Re:Annoyances

[b4dc0d3r]

YouTube is also very script-heavy. Given that much of the MemShrink progress has been in the area of JavaScript allocation and garbage collection, I thik scripts are the real culprit.

Badly written scripts, which rely on GC to destroy objects, and "just know" when a reference won't be used again. Several blog posts have mentioned simple fixes, indirectly. As an example,

window.my_popup = window.open('http://mozilla.org');
window.my_popup.close();

Now there is a window which stays around until the page sets "window.my_popup = null;" or the tab closes.

Since the web is moving towards JavaScript, it's time we teach people about memory management again. The same lesson we keep having to teach over and over. Even in C# I use functions as a way to scope variables, or "using" statements for smaller blocks that don't need re-factored. When I write script, I think of these things, and try to keep objects to a minimum.

Try using NoScript, whitelisting only the sites you need to, and definitely close your browser once in a while. You're not fixing browser problems so much as fixing scripting, add-on, and other third-party issues. And I'm on FF 14.0.1, so maybe an update is in order for you.

If you object to NoScript, consider this - do you want any website to run whatever it wants to on your system, without you knowing what it's doing? I don't. Should the average user have to worry about such things? I believe this is the minimum information a user has to have, similar to "don't put metal things in an electrical outlet."

As many people consider their computer an appliance and treat it as such, it is fair to expect them to follow simple care and maintenance tasks like "clean your dryer filter" and "don't put metal objects in the microwave."

Why are user numbers so different?

[mkraft]

This article states that Firefox's user base is shrinking by "significant" numbers and that there are more Chrome users than Firefox users.

The following article claims Firefox's user base is growing and that there are more Firefox users than Chrome users:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/firefox-continues-to-gain-as-internet-explorer-chrome-slide/

How can both be right?

I love Firefox, but

[Compaqt]

I don't use it.

I was using NCSA Mosaic on Unix machines and loving it.

Later, I was using Netscape.

Then I was using IE when it was the only stable browser around.

At about that time, I started using the Firefox alphas (wasn't called Firefox then). It crashed early and often.

Later, when it became stable, it was really stable. It was the only browser I used on XP, other than testing in IE.

Of course, I'll always continue to love it. But these days, it's just too slow. It "greys" out all the time. Chrome never does that. And launching a new window is instantaneous in Chrome. Not so for FF. Not to mention always show "Well, this is a little embarrassing, we can't load all your tabs" when it restarts.

This is on the latest Ubuntu on a late-model laptop. YMMV esp. on Windows.

The point being Chrome is the most used browser (for me), and Firefox is the browser emeritus.

Re:Upgrade to Internet Explorer!

[openfrog]

After years of running Firefox on Linux I finally got a job and upgraded to Internet Eplorer running on Windows.

It's so much better! Thank you Bill!

After years of running Firefox on Linux I finally got a job and upgraded to Safari running on OS X.

It's so much better! Thank you Steve!

See the alternate picture here, that could have been a reality, or that could come back? I am very grateful to Firefox, an open source/collective, and a very successful, effort to get rid of a Microsoft monopoly, and of the horrid experience that IE6 was. We have yet to appreciate the magnitude and the significance of this, even though we all think we understand it.

For this reason, I am very loyal to Firefox and ready to be patient with minor misdirections.

Firefox usage might have declined somewhat, but Chrome has speeded up the decline of those who think nothing of public standards, and it is a good thing, provided that Firefox remains strong.

On the website I manage at the University of Cambridge (granted, those are pretty well educated users), Explorer, all versions confounded, is down to around 25%. I have watched the steady decline of this number month after month over the past few years, with the same contentment every time.

Evil is not all powerful.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[thsths]

> Firefox fixed that problem ages ago.

No, unfortunately not. They applied some kind of ugly clutch, but not a proper fix (such as a stable properly versioned API)...

I left because of the all the versions

[BlueCoder]

I write software myself. But the web browser is too much like an operating system. I use it too much. It should do what it does and do it well. I felt like I was drowning in version numbers. What broke the camels back is when they defaulted to a chrome style UI. Too much change in the primary interface. I don't remember there being a choice on the installation screen or there being a couple year transition. It actually motivated me to use chrome since it seemed to change less. I already had it installed, I just felt more motivated to move on.

The problem with Mozilla is that they are focusing on one product "Firefox" for web browsing too much. I liked it when they started gutting Firefox and putting things into extensions and addons. But that was mostly behind the scenes. When it came to changing the UI they should have forked the product.

My opinion is the Mozilla foundation should be developing multiple backends and multiple frontends and half a dozen browsers. They should have competing visions. It's open source and there is no one right answer for everyone. Some people like lots of change and a faster pace and others just want it to work and to get work done. It shouldn't be one product. The reality is they can do both and people can install both. And let me be specific, I don't want "stable" releases, I want actual different products. I don't want versions, I want vision, direction, and philosophy. And then I want to choose what works for me.

Re:Forced Upgrades?

[ShieldW0lf]

As far as I'm concerned, Firefox has a one-two punch that still makes it the best browser despite a series of dumb changes, like that "awesomebar" crap. But Firebug and its family of extensions are better than anything else for testing your web development, and AdBlock for Firefox has no equal, and those two pieces of functionality mean an awful lot.

As long as these things remai true, the sites I build will always work and look best in Firefox.