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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?
The problem is not rapid release unless Mozilla is forcing upgrades upon users.
Get separate processes already.
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.
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.
I don't love or hate Firefox. I just appreciate it for what it's done, what it's represented, and the fact that it's STILL relevant and sharping the web, even in the face of gigantic corporations like Google, Apple, and Microsoft trying to wring the web in their own directions.
As a browser, it's just one of the good ones.. which is exactly the way I like it. I like having multiple good browsers available, in case one of them can't do something. And Firefox is the all-rounder that does what I need it to when all the cooler new browsers fail.
Love: It can browse the web (yeah!). It's multiplatform. It's well maintained. It's up to date with the latest standards. The "3D View" feature in Inspect Element. The many good plugins.
Hate: A single tab can hang the whole browser. No convenient way to view an image with the wrong MIME type in the browser anyway. Too little and dumbed down settings. No more status bar. Still no good debugging tools, and the plugin Firebug is unhandy and annoying. The weird branding thing they do that caused Archlinux to not call it Firefox but various other lame names in the past (are they for open source or what?). No more innovation (why not try things like multiple tab groups or so instead of "innovating" by removing stuff from the interface?). The Android version sometimes crashes and once made the whole phone reboot after a crash.
I'm probably missing many things :)
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?
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... 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 have never felt those leaks everyone seems to get, but regardless the recent (10+) versions of Firefox have been removing most of the leaks. And many of them weren't happening in the core any more, they were in poorly coded extensions.
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.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
Firefox is the greatest browser, with advanced features to benefit every user at a profound spiritual level:
* Its memory bloat teaches us to be mindful of our resources, both within the computer, and our use of our resources in everyday outer life.
* Its slowness helps teach us patience.
* When the whole browser freezes up from a bit of incompetent CPU-thrashing javascript code running in one tab, it teaches us to be responsible for our own coding decisions and how they affect others.
* Its slow startup teaches us that wonderful things don't happen instantly, and that we need to lose our attachment to time
Stay away from Chrome - it feeds the ego by promoting our addiction to instant gratification
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
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.
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."
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.
having the NoScript add-on in firefox makes it amazing
The last two months Firefox's browser share has increased according to netmarketshare.com. Now this article uses StatCounter stats and eyeballing the chart it looks like Firefox's share has been mostly flat since January according to StatCounter. The point being is the slide I believe has stopped or at the worse lessened to next to nothing. The article talks blames the slide on communication and execution. The author likely has a point there, but I think things are no longer as dire as he makes them out to be. Another reason for the slide is Google advertising the Chrome Browser. I think that also has hurt Firefox and there is not much they can do about it. I believe the slide has ended or is ending.
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
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Firefox suffers from an antiquated code base. It's single-thread, and the project to make it multi-thread failed. There are two interpretive systems inside - Javascript and XUL - and they aren't on good speaking terms. There are two plug-in systems, "classic" and "Jetpack", and the teams for those sometimes don't seem to be on speaking terms. The number of open bugs keeps creeping up, and much bug-closing is "developer in denial", not an actual fix. Startup is slow, and, at times, shutdown is even slower.
Then came the frantic release cycle, which didn't help.
When debugging a web page, there's nothing I like better than the Firebug plugin.
It's not just about features, it's just that it feels like Google properly thought about every aspect of functionality of their chrome for the browser. For example, it took ages for Firefox to implement that tabs don't resize themselves after closing until after you move the mouse away. And even now, the drag handle for the Firefox window is only on the window title area and you still can't use the unused tab area as a window drag handle, where on Chrome it works fine. It's these tiny little details that I really appreciate about Chrome.
That being said, I still love Firefox's awesome bar, works better than Chrome's default address bar by a long shot, if I recall there is a Chrome extension which works the same, I may look into that, but it's not a deal breaker for me.
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,
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."
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.
Firefox itself seems pretty decent these days. The biggest and ugliest problem is the extreme sluggishness of its most popular add-ons. I don't think I'd want to live without Firebug and AdBlock, but these two are huge performance hogs and I almost think they should be absorbed into the main codebase, rather than being sandboxed and crippled in their current incarnation.
A clean install of Firefox loads instantly, just like Chrome and IE9. As soon as I load those two add-ons, it starts taking 2-3 seconds to launch, pages often freeze up due to the repetitive and redundant DOM swizzling. This over-reliance on Javascript-based functionality leads to really sloppy performance and sometimes massive memory leaks. Right this second, with only two tabs open, Firefox is guzzling 450mb of memory. Chrome uses 1/10th of that to display the same content, with the same add-on functionality.
I've been holding out for a long time, but Chrome is starting to lure me over. I don't like being at the mercy of Google's totalitarian whims, but Firefox' idealism is wearing thin unless some real programmers get in there and clean things up. For the average user, Chrome is a clear winner simply because it's faster.
-Billco, Fnarg.com