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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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth