Now that AdBlock Plus is fully functional in Chrome/Chromium, we've been moving all of our clients -- a few hundred individuals and businesses -- off of Firefox. So far, everybody's been a lot happier with that.
Firefox is terrible. It's embarrassing. And, I've completely lost interest in arguing over it anymore. The responses from Mozilla, Asa especially, have either been, "We don't think that's a problem", or sometimes, "go piss up a rope". Other people constantly chime in and say, "But I don't have that problem!", as if that somehow makes it better for the many many people who do have problems with Firefox.
Fortunately, this isn't quite Netscape versus Internet Explorer all over again; this time, we have a well-supported third option, too.
The responses from Mozilla, Asa especially, have either been, "We don't think that's a problem", or sometimes, "go piss up a rope".
I don't think this is very fair to the Mozilla folks. From the few people that I've met (and complained to about Android Firefox) the response has been "why don't you grab the latest version and see if that fixes the problems?" And if it doesn't, then the response is "file a bug."
I was referring partly to Mozilla's responses to the reaction from corporate support people over their forced-updates announcements. But, they've also had display bugs around for almost 10 years [1], and they've banned bug submitters over etiquette issues without actually addressing the bug in question [2].
And now for the part that will probably make me really unpopular here: if they fix major issues in an upcoming update, that's great. But, people have been complaining for years about performance problems, and IMO there should have been a show-stopping effort to fix it a long time ago, rather than the incremental efforts that, to many users' perceptions, have made little to no improvement.
The push towards rapid release cycles in many parts of the software industry seems to be leaving behind the principle of getting it right the first time.
Anyway, that's all the time I have for this nonsense, because I've got a couple of projects of my own with unresolved issues, and I don't want to be a hypocrite.
I think I'm one of those people. Performance of Firefox has always been completely unacceptable to me.
When Firefox came out I continued to use the Mozilla browser. (I wonder if anybody remembers that one.) At that point I couldn't understand why people were so excited about Firefox. To me it looked like the Mozilla browser with a new icon, half the features, double the bloat, and half the speed. I distinctly remember that when Firefox came out Mozilla was a much better browser!
We were also very tired arguing (on bugzilla) about Thunderbird issues that finally we wrote one of our most popular blog articles: Export messages and folders from Thunderbird to Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail: http://blog.nektra.com/main/2009/04/14/export-messages-and-f...
I do have Firefox occasionally choking, which annoys me as hell, but I'm on Firefox 8.
I do get frustrated, but criticizing a software package that you get for freaking free, especially one that you ow so much to, with such a harsh tone really is unwarranted.
And it really is free in a not-for-profit way. The Awesome bar that the article mentions really saves you from making useless round-trips to Google / being exposed to Google Ads, even if this hurts Mozilla's revenues; on the other hand Chrome's primary reason for being is Google's control on the web, ensuring that Google's search remains the default, which is one reason the Awesome bar will never make it into Chrome.
Also, AdBlock Plus in Chrome has known bugs and limitations because of Chrome, because while Firefox is a platform, Chrome is a product that treats its users like idiots.
Free doesn't play into it. Either something is good or it's not. One of the best aspects of OSS is that there are so many examples of products that are every bit as good, if not better than, their commercial competition. If I give you a free durian sandwich you are not obligated to like it or to hold back your criticism, you should be free to say "dude, this tastes like garbage water."
Indeed, that line of reasoning has even less standing in regard to browsers since the top 4 browsers are all free. Encouraging people to stiffle their very real complaints will only serve to lower the quality of firefox, who does that benefit?
"Chrome is a product that treats its users like idiots."
I found myself agreeing with some of your points, but that comment was unnecessary. It's just two different design philosophies: Firefox allows extension of the browser itself at the cost of completely-silent upgrades and sandboxing, while Chrome treats extensions like miniature web pages.
I agree that Chrome is a strategic move for Google, but it has made some definite contributions (like V8!) to free software. Not to mention it had a very unique interface when it was first launched (very well designed).
Chrome was part of the reason why Mozilla is hustling to improve Firefox. If anything, appreciate Chrome for giving people more options and placing pressure on Mozilla to innovate.
> which is one reason the Awesome bar will never make it into Chrome.
What does the AwesomeBar do that Chrome's address bar doesn't? Heck the Chrome address bar even does autocomplete of search terms when you have it set to use Bing…
When I first started using Chrome, the awesomebar is probably what I missed most from Firefox. On Firefox, I type a partial keyword or two, and pages from history show up which are very relevant. Do the same on Chrome, and I usually have to finish a list of keywords to search Google in order to get to the page I'm thinking of.
I ended up changing my address bar behavior on Chrome, but when I ran Firefox again for a while, I relearned my old behaviors by chance just by trying to search for stuff via the address bar, and instead finding the awesomebar offer what I was looking for with less effort. Once you get used to it, it really is inferior to how Chrome's address bar works. That said, Chrome has lots going for it as well.
I disagree heavily. Treating more and more people like they are idiots in all areas of life is the reason we've become a lethargic, consume-drunken shade of society. This needs to stop. We need to force people to think. Think for themselves. Teach a man to fish and all that.
"Free" projects lose that excuse when they start making money through third parties (Google pays Mozilla a ton of money to be the default search engine) and make concentrated marketing pushes.
I'm certainly going to treat them like I would any other ad-supported software, and that means treating them like any other commercial piece of software.
I switched from FF to Opera a few years ago and I'm still happy.
FF really behaves bad, even on fast computers -- my girlfriend uses it and I've seen locks described in the OP. I use Opera on the Windows computer from 2002 and on my Linux Core 2 computer and it's very responsive on both.
For a while the only reason I had Firefox installed was because of Firebug but the Chrome tools are getting to be just about as good and I've pretty much lost all interest in Firefox. I'll still have it around to make sure sites work in it but I certainly won't have it on all my machines.
Just to chip in with why I personally refuse to use Chrome:
-A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20
-Occasional Flash problems render the browser utterly useless for several minutes before it asks whether I am interested in continuing what I was doing
-Not visiting a tab for a while results in a ridiculous wait for it to load
My screen size makes having multiple rows of tabs simply take up too much screen space.
You might like Opera. It handles dozens of tabs beautifully, and you can group tabs into collapsible groups so you can both (a) navigate them and (b) see them all on the screen at once without having to scroll.
> -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20
Interesting. This is actually one of the big reasons why I prefer Chrome over FF. FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll" while Chrome resizes the tabs to fit.
What about Chrome's implementation do you find more unwieldy than Firefox's?
Tab Groups. For those of us who do lots of research and like to keep it organized it's a godsend.
Right now I have 159 tabs open -- I was curious so I decided to count. If I tried that in Chrome I'm pretty sure it would crash and burn hard, not to mention there would be no ability to keep it organized.
I know there are some research workflows that would allow me to do that as well, but I haven't really taken the time to dive into them after I found tab groups.
The only way to figure out that UI, including how to exit back to the browser, is through trial and error or Google. At least tabs/tab groups closed in there (seriously, who adds an "x" to an undo changes button that permanently deletes it instead?) go in "recently closed tabs" now!
http://i.imgur.com/WwnW8.png - a screenshot of Chrome with 20 tabs open. As you can see, determining what each tab contains is rather hard. I agree that scrolling the tab bar (using mousewheel, the UI buttons for that purpose are utterly useless) in Firefox is extremely unwieldy, so the only time I use it is to get to tabs I have at either end. "List all tabs" is an amazing feature, IMO.
It's not so much that Chrome is great, as that it doesn't seem to have the faults that Firefox does.
- The "hanging" issue: I literally just replaced a laptop because of this one. On my older laptop, Firefox became unusable, and got worse with each version, not better. I didn't have very many tabs open (~10?), and after about 6 hours or so, hovering the pointer over a link would give me the rainbow pinwheel, clicking a link would give me a rainbow pinwheel, opening a tab would give me a rainbow pinwheel, etc. This stalling issue has been widely reported by a huge number of people, and Firefox has been doing a lot of work on their memory management to fix it, but it doesn't seem to be helping. My girlfriend's newer Windows workstation had the same problem, but to a slightly lesser degree. In her case, Firefox became unusable after a day or two. People often point to extensions, but the only extension she had installed was AB+.
- Crashing. Just yesterday we had a client complaint where, according to them, about half the time they would go to launch Firefox, they would get the message that it was already running but not responding. We've had similar complaints from other clients, including a business client.
What makes this frustrating for me is that, like the OP, I'm pretty sure I remember when Firefox didn't have these problems. It smells like at some point they introduced some kind of terrible architectural change in the browser, and rather than address that directly, they keep trying to patch around it.
It's possible that the very newest version fixes all of these things. We made the decision to start switching off of it almost a month ago, after Mozilla firmly decided to go the frequent background updates route (and without also supporting older versions). If we have to choose to recommend one of two browsers, both of which do frequent updates, then we'll go with the one that seems to give people fewer headaches.
hitting on mozilla is trendy. thats all there is to it.
its funny to read how the horrible firefox is faster than chrome and more efficient in many ares too.
like type inference. like memory usage. like 2d acceleration.
in fact 99% judge ff on startup time. its mostly due to the ui toolkit xul.
I'm just taking what you said at face value. If you come on HN, act like an asshole, and go on to say you'd behave the same in person, then the inference is pretty obvious, isn't it?
Firefox is terrible. It's embarrassing. And, I've completely lost interest in arguing over it anymore. The responses from Mozilla, Asa especially, have either been, "We don't think that's a problem", or sometimes, "go piss up a rope". Other people constantly chime in and say, "But I don't have that problem!", as if that somehow makes it better for the many many people who do have problems with Firefox.
Fortunately, this isn't quite Netscape versus Internet Explorer all over again; this time, we have a well-supported third option, too.