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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.
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?
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...
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."