It's not just bookmarks. It's history and the location bar. He mentions that one of the things which triggers his crashes is using the back button, which is a feature that I think a reasonable number of people use.
(I can't say that I've seen such issues myself... but it's been quite a while since I used Firefox under Linux.)
Looks great, but I'm happy with what I have now so I'm not too pushed about spending money on a service. I'm also old enough to worry about trusting a site to hang around for 10 years with my data. (and by old enough, read: stuck in my ways enough) Must look into the migration effort though. And browser addon support. Its definitely a sweet looking service.
If you go for the premium service, a bargain $25 a month you get the ability to have it scrape and download every site you bookmark. So even if the site you bookmarked goes down, you retain the content.
Pinboard also has good APIs so you can backup your data. No lock-in.
I'd say I do too, even for stuff I have bookmarked. In fact 80% of my bookmarks provide nothing other than peace of mind for a person with a terrible memory. :)
I haven't used the built-in bookmarks feature for years. I checked just now, and I have 10 bookmarks stored (all of them used for quick searching in FF). I still use the concept though, I just offload them to Delicious where they can be properly tagged and shared.
I have roughly a dozen sites I go to. Most of them happen to have different first characters, so I type "f" and Chrome autocompletes http://fark.com/ and off I go. No bookmarks other than the shared history Google keeps for me.
I remember one of my co-workers telling me that Firefox was running great for him now that he'd upgraded from 4GB of RAM to 8GB. It finally wasn't slowly grinding to a halt any time he had more than a handful of tabs open for more than an hour or two.
I have memory-hemorrhaging problems under various versions of Windows as well. I need to restart at least once a day (I typically have ~8 tabs in use).
But the clincher that made me switch to Chrome a couple weeks ago was that every couple of hours it would decide of its own accord to tear off a tab into a new window, and then hang. This solved the memory leakage, but not in a useful way.
I'm pretty sure that my problems are related to badly-behaving addins. But Firefox doesn't provide any good way to troubleshoot addins (compare to Chrome), and it seemed to me that the process to track down the culprit given that the problem is nondeterministic and takes a couple of hours to manifest would be more difficult than the switch to Chrome.
That said, I'm having some compatibility problems with Chrome. Like, last night the CAPTCHA in the free annual credit report site wouldn't work.
Yeah. I had the same problem with chrome as well. Same setup. Maybe web browsers can't handle how I work with them at the moment. Maybe I'll go down the rabbit hole and try to fix some of the bugs myself.
I've got an Asus EEEpc with 2GB of RAM and 4GB swap and I always have Firefox open with 80+ tabs in 4+ windows. After a week or so it'll get really slow when loading and would crash in a day or two if usage continued, so I just kill it and it reloads everything.
This "more than a few tabs" or "more than an hour or two" is craziness? What is your friend running?
I'm running Firefox 7.01 on a 4 year old machine with Ubuntu 11.04. I routinely have 30+ tabs open an never had a problem with speed. Maybe your friend's computer has other woes
These "I have X tabs open" comparisons are very unhelpful. Different sites take hugely different amounts of memory in just the same way that different desktop applications do.
If you want to make a even-slightly quantitative comparison you need to at least start by loading the same set of sites. Then you need to worry about them sending different content (e.g. different adverts) to different browsers.
In the end most people go by metrics like "how responsive does the UI feel", which is fine, although since it's a perception thing it can be influenced by factors other than the actual speed e.g. preconceived notions set by marketing.
I have a different problem. Firefox now aggressively trims memory usage - over-aggressively trims it, to the point that switching tabs incurs a 0.5 second pause as it reallocates memory it had thrown away. This is Firefox 7, and is most noticeable in image-heavy websites.
I've completely given up on Firefox on my MBP (3.06 Core2, 8GB, 480GB SSD). Between the egregious javascript memory leak and constantly increasing resource utilization it's just unusable. And my fans are running full tilt within 60 seconds of starting it.
My FF, fully updated, works fine. I use Bookmarks extensively. What seems to occasionally crash it are things out of Mozilla's current control: poorly written extensions or Adobe Flash hangs.
Never even heard of needing to vaccuum the sqlite dbs.
FF is a fine browser. So, basically we have one anecdote for and one against, and neither is enough to pass judgement on a full and popular browser like FF.
What happened to Firefox focusing on Linux responsiveness? They even acknowledged it as an issue and promised to work on it, but I've yet to see that occur at all.
I dropped FF b/c of the memory leak. As a test, on a spare mac I wrote a script that launched FF and Chrome simultaneously and visited 10 websites I frequent. They both had similar clean profiles. After roughly two days of continuous refresh/load cycles, Chrome's memory was at 148MB, FF was 988MB.
I am a bit in the same situation as the author, using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, on all platforms and advocating it very widely.
But, it is hard to go on advocating it. True, they fixed many issues on JS speed and memory with the latest releases (after denying the issues for a loooong time).
However, the slowness of the SQlite backend is quite annoying, as mentioned on the article. The SSL management is beyond ridiculous, especially when the whole model of Certificate Authorities is broken, as the news showed us. The breakage of extensions at each update is abnormal. The Linux integration is abysmal... And yet, at each release, it seems the focuses on UI changes are the more important...
IE9 is now decent, Chrome is really good and Opera too.
All most of my developers friends have moved to Chrome...
No, actually I didn't know that. I no longer use firefox, and their scheme honestly makes no sense to me. I am convinced they only adopted it so that Mozilla supporters can shoot down any criticism from people who abandoned it more than a few weeks ago by saying "well your criticism is hardly relevant, we're several version numbers past what you were using now!" Notice several examples of this tactic in this very discussion...
But anyway, are they bumping the version number every 1.2 months then? Is that supposed to be obvious?
PS: I would also like to add that "There hasn't been a major UI change in 6 months" is anything but a strong refutation of the original assertion that Mozilla changes up the UI too much. This is another example of redefining "major release" to silence valid criticism.
I am convinced they only adopted it so that Mozilla supporters can shoot down any criticism from people who abandoned it more than a few weeks ago by saying "well your criticism is hardly relevant, we're several version numbers past what you were using now!" Notice several examples of this tactic in this very discussion...
Increasing the version number doesn't fix bugs, but pretty much every time it has been pointed out in this topic, it was "we fixed some issues in that area, please try a newer version".
I don't understand the argument here. You're saying Mozilla is rapidly addressing the issues users are complaining about, and that is somehow a bad thing?
But anyway, are they bumping the version number every 1.2 months then? Is that supposed to be obvious?
The 6 week schedule has been pointed out in every HN thread about FF, and many public announcements before the rapid release system started, and the last 3 releases (not counting Beta and Aurora) have exactly been 6 weeks apart. So yes, it's supposed to be quite obvious by now. Don't ask me where your "2 weeks" figure comes from.
2 weeks was obviously a sarcastic exaggeration, I am not asking you where it came from. This is however the first I've heard that 6 weeks is the new version scheme..
"I don't understand the argument here. You're saying Mozilla is rapidly addressing the issues users are complaining about, and that is somehow a bad thing?"
If that was what Mozilla was actually doing, I wouldn't have issues. In practice nothing ever really seems to change.
No, my point is that there seems to be a bizarre attitude among Mozilla supporters that in order to have the "right" to criticize firefox, you have to continue to subject yourself to its abuse.
Well I've had enough abuse. I've given them the benefit of the doubt time and time again for damn near half a decade now. They now need to make a sincere and dramatic effort to win back my trust. And no, "I've changed, I promise I won't hit you anymore baby.." won't do it this time. Fool me once...
I've moved on to greener pastures, but I will continue to point out what shit firefox is until I see that Mozilla finally has recognized what their users have been saying for years, admits that they were wrong, apologizes, and details (no hand-waving) their recovery plan. Mozilla needs to get on the 12 steps program for bad software development and user relations.
Cross-browser bookmarks compatibility is the one reason I'm having hard time giving up on Firefox, otherwise, Chrome is certainly faster and better overall. The other issue is that bookmarks are not easily portable on cloud (don't talk to me about delicious or xmarks - I prefer to keep my bookmarks to myself). What if I use Chrome most of the time at home but can't if I'm using library or work computer? There are issues which are still unresolved in the browser world.
This longstanding bug has been found and fixed in the past few weeks. There’s a workaround as well (use the Places Maintenance addon to properly index your Places database).
The new rapid release development cycle has bit Mozilla in the rear. For example, FF 7.0.1 on Vista needs to be run as Administrator. I didn't find this out until it just stopped working on my wife's laptop.
The automatic updates have to ask for admin rights, is that what you are seeing? You can deny admin rights and it will run fine (without updating). And they know it's not optimal, they're fixing that in the next version.
I'm impressed by the passion with which people want http:// back in their URLs. Perhaps it's tangential to the original thread, but why's it such a big deal?
It gets in my way doing copy-paste. I don't entirely understand it - it seems to have something to do with whether Firefox is busy or not - but it's easy for a copied URL to simply not have the prefix, which breaks subsequent use pretty frequently (eg. 'google.com' is not a useful Markdown link while 'http://google.com is).
Because people copy&paste URLs all the time, and without the http:// they dont work where pasted. Not having http:// when youre copy-pasting feels like a part of your URL is missing.
What I dont know is for whom they are hiding http://? I'd guess there are 2 types of users, those who need the URL, then they need it complete, including the http://, and those who dont need the URL to be visible at all (except maybe the domain name), like they dont need the current path in Explorer. But who exactly needs half an URL which is then only magically completed upon C&P-ing? And those who allegedly dont need http://, why do they need the part after the TLD? From their POV, the arguments part is even more useless than http://.
Lack of a superfluous http:// is one of the things that I love about Chrome. And, for the record, it is included when you copy from the URL bar in every version I've seen on Windows.
> for the record, it is included when you copy from the URL bar
Yes, but this is part of what makes the "feature" so annoying for usability obsessives such as myself. It makes copy & paste work differently in the URL bar than they do everywhere else and in every other application. Normally copy only copies the text you select. Now when you paste you not only paste the text you selected, but some extra, previously unseen text as well.
I know that once you hide the "http:// you pretty much have to do copy & paste this way, to avoid people pasting incomplete URLs, but it still feels weird, at least to me...
Because https is still included. It needs to be, so that users know it's a secure connection. This makes https URLs appear more crufty than http URLs. This, in turn, can be used as an excuse to be insecure.
Who cares? The only use case people were complaining about was copy/paste not inserting the http://, which it does now. What, exactly, is the issue, and why are people still whining about it?
Chrome's FOSS, but it's not driven by the FOSS mentality like FF is. Choice is great, but when it interferes with UX one or the other has to go. Google is a consumer app company, so they went with simplicity and a clean interface. That's their right.
We aren't living in the MS EEE days anymore. You always have the choice to use a different browser. Hell, if you care that much, you can download the source, re-enable the http:// display, and compile it yourself. I really fail to see the problem, here.
Your complaint is that there's no practical difference whatsoever, but that you want to have the choice. That seems to be a pretty minor thing to be kvetching about.
I see lots of unfair complaining here. I'm still running FF even on machines with 1GB of RAM, and I actually had troubles with memory leaks on Mac, that were mostly related to some extensions.
I'm excited for Ubuntu 11.10 if only because it means I can flatten and reinstall, thus relieving me of Firefox's performance woes for another few months. It's really crazy the amount of memory it uses and the slowdowns that happen when you keep it open for more than a few hours.
Yep, same problem. Firefox hangs whenever I try to do anything "intensive" with Places, such as selectively deleting stuff from the history or reorganizing a large number of bookmarks. It's gotten much better than before, though.
Weird thing is, Firefox is still faster than Chrome on my computer (Win7x64). I don't know what's wrong with my computer, but Chrome is noticeably slower than Firefox in day-to-day use. This only happens on this particular computer. Chrome is indeed faster in every other computer I've tried. Very strange.
I share the same feeling. It is becoming a pain. If I keep it open for few hours, it inevitably crashes and needs a restart. I started using firefox few years back only because it won't crash and is stable. Not anymore I guess!
Yeah, I have to restart it at least once a day. In addition to "Clear Recent History", how about a "Clear Older History", where I can delete everything older than a month or a week? That would clean out probably more than 95% of the cruft possibly speeding things up. I'm sure there's a way to do this, but how about an easy way for the average user?
> Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched — three years ago.
This is an odd statement, considering that many Firefox devs run Linux. I'm running Firefox on Linux right now, and it works great.
I guess the author of the article is hitting a specific bug. It isn't a general issue that affects all users of Firefox on Linux.
Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness.
I haven't looked back since switching to Chrome. FF ignored obvious bugs for years. X pixmap freeing? Open since 2004. [1] I waited for six years, having to restart my browser every few hours, because it would leak over 2 GB from having a network graphs page open. Startup time? Last time I opened it, six months ago, FF took over 10 seconds to start, cold. Chromium snaps open in under a quarter second.
Then there's developer friendliness. Writing extensions is a complete mess, especially compared to Chrome. Configuration structure is haphazard at best. Profile corruption is a thing. I don't understand how a multi-million dollar foundation can tolerate this kind of experience.
> Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness.
I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. Assuming not, then since Firefox's development is done in the open, I assume you have some evidence for this - meeting notes or such that show that? Or some other evidence?
The evidence to the contrary seems overwhelming. Firefox's main focus in 4.0 was on performance, see arewefastyet.com for JS, and the major rewrite of the graphics system (Layers) that lets it use things like Direct2D on Windows as just two examples. And as a consequence of those huge efforts, Firefox just won Toms Hardware's speed test, beating Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari,
He made a valid and extended argument, one can read and agree or disagree with.
You isolate just a phrase from it and call him on "trolling"?
In general, internet discussions would be much much better if "troll" and "FUD" weren't used to disqualify arguments we don't like (or, maybe weren't used, period).
To throw around comments like "but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness" - that's textbook flamebait. It's a direct insult to Firefox developers and fans, and its only result will be to start an argument. So it's a natural suspicion that he might be trolling.
In any case, I gave a reasoned response, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he isn't trolling. But if he was, I guess I was wasting my time.
I do agree with you: Internet discussions would be much better if we did not use "troll", "FUD", "flamebait", etc., but also if people did not act in those ways.
> To throw around comments like "but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness" - that's textbook flamebait.
Sure, but it can also be his honest opinion, that he came to by comparing, say, the minimal changes between Chrome versions and the more evolved FF updates. What I'm saying is, the entirety of his comment matters to see if it's "trolling" or not, not just a juicy quote.
You're right, the rest of the comment was not so bad, and that's in his favor. He could have avoided the flamebait sentence and I would have politely disagreed but had no issue with his comment.
First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010, and it's clear the FF team has moved to improve performance since then. Perhaps my impressions from that time frame are no longer valid, but the issues I checked in Bugzilla while writing my post seemed largely unresolved.
"This is an easily-demonstrated bug that "renders" (so to
speak) many pages unusable, or forces designers to impose
kludgey Javascript 'fixes' for Firefox users. This bug has
been around for many versions, and has been mentioned many
times.
Please, please someone on the Firefox team -- take on this project."
It's not just FF: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12916 is still unresolved, after eleven years, despite a hundred dollar bounty. Bugzilla is full of wontfix/worksforme legal wrangling where users unable to write the patches themselves (and having dealt some with FF's internals, I understand why) are told that their bugs don't matter.
Meanwhile, FF expanded from its stripped-down, single-purpose origins into a memory-consuming beast. On my Linux machines, it crashed daily. I would much rather see crashes, leaks, and slowdowns addressed before building new systems like the Awesomebar, tabs-in-titlebar, phishing prevention, and so forth.
Every developer I know has switched to Chrome. When I ask about it, I hear common rationales: speed, robustness, parsimony.
Does that clarify my criticism? There's a lot of great code in Firefox, but I don't think we should paper over the holes in the software or its development culture.
> First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010
Oh, ok. The last year was a big year for FF performance: There have been huge gains in speed and reductions in memory usage. FF4 began that, and FF7, 8 and 9 take it even further.
Given that you are talking about the time period before that, I can understand more where you are coming from - performance was a lesser priority then compared to other features. Thanks for clarifying that.
They now fire `load` events on stylesheet loads? Awesome! Shameful it’s been that way for so long. I’ve seen terrible work-arounds like always just firing a faux-load event 100ms after the stylesheet was added to the page, in the wild.
Aphyr, every single browser engine has longstanding bugs; it's just a matter of priorities.
WebKit doesn't have load events for stylesheets either, for example. It has buggy CSS selector matching, on purpose (doing the right thing was deemed too slow). There are multi-year-open bugs in V8 and Chrome, and that whole project hasn't even had an open bug database for more than a few years.
So I'm not sure the development culture is any different. You just haven't had a chance yet to file a bug and get it ignored by the WebKit folks for a few years. It happens all the time....
You're absolutely right; I've been bitten by chrome/webkit bugs as well, some of which remain unpatched. And Chrome's relative youth means the browser code hasn't acquired the same level of cruft--so I can't strongly infer a difference in process.
Old, unresolved, open bugs are an important characteristic of a healthy project. It means that there is far more interest in the project than people contributing to it with code can keep up with.
You also seem to be assuming that the same people who build new features can also fix your pet peeves. While there is an opportunity cost, agreed, it doesn't mean that
- the same people can do both
- it's actually worth doing both in the first place. The opportunity cost of trying to make software perfect is too enormous for anyone but NASA and the like.
edit: Well, looks like I've been hellbanned. Goodbye, Hacker News. It wasn't entirely nice knowing you.
> the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness.
:
> I've recently been running into a number of "benchmarks" where some rendering engines achieve better performance by simply doing the wrong thing because the right one would be "too slow". […] This is not exactly an isolated incident; a number of the performance issues I've run into recently in Gecko have had to do with correctly handling edge cases that this particular open-source engine happens to just not handle.[1]
Well that's nice for you that it works, usually works for me at home.
I run about 200 desktop linux machines and sqlite locking is a common problem on firefox. Users are often completely unaware of how to fix even though they are quite technical.
The problem here is that Places (along with lots of other places in our code) still creates and uses synchronous database statements. SQLite is only threadsafe because it serializes all access to a database connection (this is unlikely to change any time soon).
To make this problem worse, every time we "fix" an area that does this, we end up putting more work on the background thread, which increases the likelihood that the remaining places that need to acquire the mutex on the main thread will encounter contention for the mutex.
Some of you might recall we hit this problem in the run-up to Firefox 4 as well (November/December of last year), and it caused Marco and I to have to reachitect a bunch of stuff in Places for a few months in order to work around it. Until Firefox removes all uses of the synchronous Storage API from the main thread, this issue will keep rearing it's head. (When that happens we can actually use SQLite in a way that stops using mutexs and will likely speed it up too.)
Hmm, from reading the thread it does not appear to have been solved, at least not the underlying problems. What was solved was the removal of a couple of synchronous calls. The fact that there are slow queries on some profiles seems to have been caused by the fact that ANALYZE does not run for some people[1], and this does seem like it has been fixed yet. I should check this for my Firefox profile at work to see if old stats are the reason for it hanging.
So what needs to be fixed ,if I follow that thread, is the removal of all synchronous calls and some solution to either not have to run ANALYZE or run it more often.
I run FF on linux for dev work (not on FF itself, but for JS heavy web apps). Actually, I run a whole bunch of different FF versions with different profiles for testing a huge variety of things.
My main gripe is that some of the extensions (NoScript, Firebug and friends) sometimes break things, hog the CPU in one way or another or just plain eat up the heap.
I am fine with this. These are extensions, after all and it's for dev stuff, which I judge by a slightly different standard than 'normal user' stuff.
The latest FF releases especially make me happy because they're adding modern web features and working on UX and performance. And it shows and feels.
I don't care about bookmarks because I don't bother storing those in the browser anymore. Was the choice for storing 'stuff' in SQLite a good one? Yes of course it was. It's the best cross-platform way to store structured data on disk, which is why everybody and his/her dog has made the same choice. Are there inefficient ways in which it is being used? Maybe. Probably? I haven't looked into this, but this is hardly an insurmountable problem.
Sure it felt like FF was lagging behind once the WebKit browsers started coming out (with better JS engines) but the Mozilla Team is back in the game with its new release cycles and updates.
Perhaps FF devs have super-beefed-up machines (required to compile FF) that average users don't, and therefore don't see many of the performance problems that average users do?
I run Firefox on Arch Linux on an old Atom-based netbook and on LMDE an old AMD 3200+. Neither have had issues, so it's not the case that Firefox is generically broken on all of Linux.
I was going to say that Firefox's lack of innovation and quality in the last couple of years, as compared to Chrome, could be due to lack of funding. But it turns out their revenue is well over $100 million annually, which should be enough to fix bugs. http://goo.gl/g5Upc
Still a good browser, but there's no question they've lost quite a bit of mojo.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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 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!
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?
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.
> -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.
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.
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 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.
I switched to Phoenix, because it was a relief from the bloat of Netscape 6. It's been a long time since then, and running a modern Firefox tends to seem like Netscape 6 bloat.
So I use Chrome. I am agnostic about my browsers. I like speed, speed, speed.
Jason, we’ve been working on this. There were some big performance improvements in Firefox 6 and 7 and we’ve got a big hang fix that’s just about to hit in Firefox 8.
Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?
I suffer quite a lot from Firefox performance issues since I need to run two instances on one machine, and Firefox 7 fixed ALL my hanging/swapping issues. Great job on that and I definitely urge everybody to upgrade.
While I'm here I'll add my usual "Dump Firefox? You can pry Tree Style Tab out of my cold dead hands" comment.
That said, I have also experienced the "we are not doing it cause we don't like it no matter how insanely useful it is to corporate users" attitude, eg. the perennial refusal to add overstrike:
"If I stop using the dev version, and switch to beta or (shudder) released, and turn off updating, will that give me the tabs back, or is it too late?"
Another satisfied Tree Style Tabs user here. After the AwesomeBar, that's the number two thing keeping me on FireFox. Especially now that version 7 cut its memory footprint in half.
210 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] thread(I can't say that I've seen such issues myself... but it's been quite a while since I used Firefox under Linux.)
Pinboard also has good APIs so you can backup your data. No lock-in.
Seemed a bit like Stockholm Syndrome to me.
I had 40 tabs open for the better part of last week and didn't notice a performance hit; and I've only got 2Gb RAM.
But the clincher that made me switch to Chrome a couple weeks ago was that every couple of hours it would decide of its own accord to tear off a tab into a new window, and then hang. This solved the memory leakage, but not in a useful way.
I'm pretty sure that my problems are related to badly-behaving addins. But Firefox doesn't provide any good way to troubleshoot addins (compare to Chrome), and it seemed to me that the process to track down the culprit given that the problem is nondeterministic and takes a couple of hours to manifest would be more difficult than the switch to Chrome.
That said, I'm having some compatibility problems with Chrome. Like, last night the CAPTCHA in the free annual credit report site wouldn't work.
This "more than a few tabs" or "more than an hour or two" is craziness? What is your friend running?
Firefox just doesn't cut it.
What OS are you in? How long do you keep it running like this? Sounds good.
^ with Awesome WM, not those gnome/unity/kde memory pigs ;)
If you want to make a even-slightly quantitative comparison you need to at least start by loading the same set of sites. Then you need to worry about them sending different content (e.g. different adverts) to different browsers.
In the end most people go by metrics like "how responsive does the UI feel", which is fine, although since it's a perception thing it can be influenced by factors other than the actual speed e.g. preconceived notions set by marketing.
There is work ongoing to limit the redecoding to only the things that are visible in the viewport to alleviate this problem.
Though it's having both IceWeasel and Chromium that's pigging my box.
But yes, with aggressive browsing habits, 4GB simply wasn't enough memory.
40 tabs is a pretty low count for me.
I rebuilt a laptop recently. After loading it up with software, it was a good 3 weeks before I even noticed that I didn't have FF installed.
That said, I still far prefer Chrome as a browser.
I've completely given up on Firefox on my MBP (3.06 Core2, 8GB, 480GB SSD). Between the egregious javascript memory leak and constantly increasing resource utilization it's just unusable. And my fans are running full tilt within 60 seconds of starting it.
Never even heard of needing to vaccuum the sqlite dbs.
FF is a fine browser. So, basically we have one anecdote for and one against, and neither is enough to pass judgement on a full and popular browser like FF.
But, it is hard to go on advocating it. True, they fixed many issues on JS speed and memory with the latest releases (after denying the issues for a loooong time).
However, the slowness of the SQlite backend is quite annoying, as mentioned on the article. The SSL management is beyond ridiculous, especially when the whole model of Certificate Authorities is broken, as the news showed us. The breakage of extensions at each update is abnormal. The Linux integration is abysmal... And yet, at each release, it seems the focuses on UI changes are the more important...
IE9 is now decent, Chrome is really good and Opera too. All most of my developers friends have moved to Chrome...
I've seen almost no UI changes in Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. All the change-logs were basically backend optimizations.
So.. in the past 2 weeks?
Seriously, that absurd numbering scheme needs to stop too.
But anyway, are they bumping the version number every 1.2 months then? Is that supposed to be obvious?
PS: I would also like to add that "There hasn't been a major UI change in 6 months" is anything but a strong refutation of the original assertion that Mozilla changes up the UI too much. This is another example of redefining "major release" to silence valid criticism.
Increasing the version number doesn't fix bugs, but pretty much every time it has been pointed out in this topic, it was "we fixed some issues in that area, please try a newer version".
I don't understand the argument here. You're saying Mozilla is rapidly addressing the issues users are complaining about, and that is somehow a bad thing?
But anyway, are they bumping the version number every 1.2 months then? Is that supposed to be obvious?
The 6 week schedule has been pointed out in every HN thread about FF, and many public announcements before the rapid release system started, and the last 3 releases (not counting Beta and Aurora) have exactly been 6 weeks apart. So yes, it's supposed to be quite obvious by now. Don't ask me where your "2 weeks" figure comes from.
"I don't understand the argument here. You're saying Mozilla is rapidly addressing the issues users are complaining about, and that is somehow a bad thing?"
If that was what Mozilla was actually doing, I wouldn't have issues. In practice nothing ever really seems to change.
No, my point is that there seems to be a bizarre attitude among Mozilla supporters that in order to have the "right" to criticize firefox, you have to continue to subject yourself to its abuse.
Well I've had enough abuse. I've given them the benefit of the doubt time and time again for damn near half a decade now. They now need to make a sincere and dramatic effort to win back my trust. And no, "I've changed, I promise I won't hit you anymore baby.." won't do it this time. Fool me once...
I've moved on to greener pastures, but I will continue to point out what shit firefox is until I see that Mozilla finally has recognized what their users have been saying for years, admits that they were wrong, apologizes, and details (no hand-waving) their recovery plan. Mozilla needs to get on the 12 steps program for bad software development and user relations.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025
When Firefox dropped http:// at least they gave you the ability to turn it back on!
Because people copy&paste URLs all the time, and without the http:// they dont work where pasted. Not having http:// when youre copy-pasting feels like a part of your URL is missing.
What I dont know is for whom they are hiding http://? I'd guess there are 2 types of users, those who need the URL, then they need it complete, including the http://, and those who dont need the URL to be visible at all (except maybe the domain name), like they dont need the current path in Explorer. But who exactly needs half an URL which is then only magically completed upon C&P-ing? And those who allegedly dont need http://, why do they need the part after the TLD? From their POV, the arguments part is even more useless than http://.
Yes, but this is part of what makes the "feature" so annoying for usability obsessives such as myself. It makes copy & paste work differently in the URL bar than they do everywhere else and in every other application. Normally copy only copies the text you select. Now when you paste you not only paste the text you selected, but some extra, previously unseen text as well.
I know that once you hide the "http:// you pretty much have to do copy & paste this way, to avoid people pasting incomplete URLs, but it still feels weird, at least to me...
The fewer such excuses there are, the better.
We aren't living in the MS EEE days anymore. You always have the choice to use a different browser. Hell, if you care that much, you can download the source, re-enable the http:// display, and compile it yourself. I really fail to see the problem, here.
Your complaint is that there's no practical difference whatsoever, but that you want to have the choice. That seems to be a pretty minor thing to be kvetching about.
Weird thing is, Firefox is still faster than Chrome on my computer (Win7x64). I don't know what's wrong with my computer, but Chrome is noticeably slower than Firefox in day-to-day use. This only happens on this particular computer. Chrome is indeed faster in every other computer I've tried. Very strange.
http://shaver.off.net/diary/2008/05/25/fsyncers-and-curvebal...
This is an odd statement, considering that many Firefox devs run Linux. I'm running Firefox on Linux right now, and it works great.
I guess the author of the article is hitting a specific bug. It isn't a general issue that affects all users of Firefox on Linux.
I haven't looked back since switching to Chrome. FF ignored obvious bugs for years. X pixmap freeing? Open since 2004. [1] I waited for six years, having to restart my browser every few hours, because it would leak over 2 GB from having a network graphs page open. Startup time? Last time I opened it, six months ago, FF took over 10 seconds to start, cold. Chromium snaps open in under a quarter second.
Then there's developer friendliness. Writing extensions is a complete mess, especially compared to Chrome. Configuration structure is haphazard at best. Profile corruption is a thing. I don't understand how a multi-million dollar foundation can tolerate this kind of experience.
Don't get me started on the rendering bugs. :-/
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259672
I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. Assuming not, then since Firefox's development is done in the open, I assume you have some evidence for this - meeting notes or such that show that? Or some other evidence?
The evidence to the contrary seems overwhelming. Firefox's main focus in 4.0 was on performance, see arewefastyet.com for JS, and the major rewrite of the graphics system (Layers) that lets it use things like Direct2D on Windows as just two examples. And as a consequence of those huge efforts, Firefox just won Toms Hardware's speed test, beating Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari,
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,30...
Edit: Looks like I'm being downvoted. Please tell me hacker news isn't deteriorating into reddit, where opposing opinions are downvoted by reflex...
He made a valid and extended argument, one can read and agree or disagree with.
You isolate just a phrase from it and call him on "trolling"?
In general, internet discussions would be much much better if "troll" and "FUD" weren't used to disqualify arguments we don't like (or, maybe weren't used, period).
In any case, I gave a reasoned response, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he isn't trolling. But if he was, I guess I was wasting my time.
I do agree with you: Internet discussions would be much better if we did not use "troll", "FUD", "flamebait", etc., but also if people did not act in those ways.
Sure, but it can also be his honest opinion, that he came to by comparing, say, the minimal changes between Chrome versions and the more evolved FF updates. What I'm saying is, the entirety of his comment matters to see if it's "trolling" or not, not just a juicy quote.
First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010, and it's clear the FF team has moved to improve performance since then. Perhaps my impressions from that time frame are no longer valid, but the issues I checked in Bugzilla while writing my post seemed largely unresolved.
I said "gestalt" to criticize not Firefox's actual development process, but the impression one might get as a longterm user (e.g. me.) Things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=474718, which stood unresolved for roughly two years. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185236 went unresolved for almost NINE years--was just fixed last week. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279048: five years.
It's not just FF: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12916 is still unresolved, after eleven years, despite a hundred dollar bounty. Bugzilla is full of wontfix/worksforme legal wrangling where users unable to write the patches themselves (and having dealt some with FF's internals, I understand why) are told that their bugs don't matter.Meanwhile, FF expanded from its stripped-down, single-purpose origins into a memory-consuming beast. On my Linux machines, it crashed daily. I would much rather see crashes, leaks, and slowdowns addressed before building new systems like the Awesomebar, tabs-in-titlebar, phishing prevention, and so forth.
Every developer I know has switched to Chrome. When I ask about it, I hear common rationales: speed, robustness, parsimony.
Does that clarify my criticism? There's a lot of great code in Firefox, but I don't think we should paper over the holes in the software or its development culture.
Oh, ok. The last year was a big year for FF performance: There have been huge gains in speed and reductions in memory usage. FF4 began that, and FF7, 8 and 9 take it even further.
Given that you are talking about the time period before that, I can understand more where you are coming from - performance was a lesser priority then compared to other features. Thanks for clarifying that.
WebKit doesn't have load events for stylesheets either, for example. It has buggy CSS selector matching, on purpose (doing the right thing was deemed too slow). There are multi-year-open bugs in V8 and Chrome, and that whole project hasn't even had an open bug database for more than a few years.
So I'm not sure the development culture is any different. You just haven't had a chance yet to file a bug and get it ignored by the WebKit folks for a few years. It happens all the time....
Can you substantiate this? (both the buggy selector(s) and the reasoning)
I have no role in any of this; I'm merely interested in the bugs.
You also seem to be assuming that the same people who build new features can also fix your pet peeves. While there is an opportunity cost, agreed, it doesn't mean that
- the same people can do both
- it's actually worth doing both in the first place. The opportunity cost of trying to make software perfect is too enormous for anyone but NASA and the like.
edit: Well, looks like I've been hellbanned. Goodbye, Hacker News. It wasn't entirely nice knowing you.
:
> I've recently been running into a number of "benchmarks" where some rendering engines achieve better performance by simply doing the wrong thing because the right one would be "too slow". […] This is not exactly an isolated incident; a number of the performance issues I've run into recently in Gecko have had to do with correctly handling edge cases that this particular open-source engine happens to just not handle.[1]
1. Boris Zbarsky. "Performance vs. correctness tradeoffs". Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days. 2009 October 18. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html
I run about 200 desktop linux machines and sqlite locking is a common problem on firefox. Users are often completely unaware of how to fix even though they are quite technical.
Here is the full thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025
Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh 2011-09-18 12:33:22 PDT
The problem here is that Places (along with lots of other places in our code) still creates and uses synchronous database statements. SQLite is only threadsafe because it serializes all access to a database connection (this is unlikely to change any time soon).
To make this problem worse, every time we "fix" an area that does this, we end up putting more work on the background thread, which increases the likelihood that the remaining places that need to acquire the mutex on the main thread will encounter contention for the mutex.
Some of you might recall we hit this problem in the run-up to Firefox 4 as well (November/December of last year), and it caused Marco and I to have to reachitect a bunch of stuff in Places for a few months in order to work around it. Until Firefox removes all uses of the synchronous Storage API from the main thread, this issue will keep rearing it's head. (When that happens we can actually use SQLite in a way that stops using mutexs and will likely speed it up too.)
So what needs to be fixed ,if I follow that thread, is the removal of all synchronous calls and some solution to either not have to run ANALYZE or run it more often.
1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025#c89
My main gripe is that some of the extensions (NoScript, Firebug and friends) sometimes break things, hog the CPU in one way or another or just plain eat up the heap.
I am fine with this. These are extensions, after all and it's for dev stuff, which I judge by a slightly different standard than 'normal user' stuff.
The latest FF releases especially make me happy because they're adding modern web features and working on UX and performance. And it shows and feels.
I don't care about bookmarks because I don't bother storing those in the browser anymore. Was the choice for storing 'stuff' in SQLite a good one? Yes of course it was. It's the best cross-platform way to store structured data on disk, which is why everybody and his/her dog has made the same choice. Are there inefficient ways in which it is being used? Maybe. Probably? I haven't looked into this, but this is hardly an insurmountable problem.
Sure it felt like FF was lagging behind once the WebKit browsers started coming out (with better JS engines) but the Mozilla Team is back in the game with its new release cycles and updates.
And this makes me very happy.
Still a good browser, but there's no question they've lost quite a bit of mojo.
Good Luck!
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.
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.
Many, many products do that these days.
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?
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.
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.
It's free as in speech, not beer.
Though there's a Free Software implementation of Chrome as well: Chromium.
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…
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 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."
While I don't have any personal experience with Asa, he has responded to this article with exactly the same response (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3108498).
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.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157846, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289384, others.
[2]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668655#c1, more discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741660
But that bug has been addressed, and however valid your bug might be, you will be banned if you persist in being toxic.
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!
A bit more civility might help you avoid a repeat of that.
-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.
Honestly, I just haven't had any complaints with firefox (beta channel) apart from the recent interesting decision to change dragging tabs to bookmarks to require hitting ctrl - https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/bro...
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?
I don't think it is possible with chrome extensions either.
about:flags -> Enable Side Tabs
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.
Hmm, new "Tab Groups" button. Wonder what it does!
http://i.imgur.com/x36TA.png
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!
FYI, you can use the mousewheel to scroll the tabs.. without, it would be horrible
http://i.imgur.com/XuMkx.png
- 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.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:...
in fact 99% judge ff on startup time. its mostly due to the ui toolkit xul.
I switched to Phoenix, because it was a relief from the bloat of Netscape 6. It's been a long time since then, and running a modern Firefox tends to seem like Netscape 6 bloat.
So I use Chrome. I am agnostic about my browsers. I like speed, speed, speed.
Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?
While I'm here I'll add my usual "Dump Firefox? You can pry Tree Style Tab out of my cold dead hands" comment.
That said, I have also experienced the "we are not doing it cause we don't like it no matter how insanely useful it is to corporate users" attitude, eg. the perennial refusal to add overstrike:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38415
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=99332&...
"If I stop using the dev version, and switch to beta or (shudder) released, and turn off updating, will that give me the tabs back, or is it too late?"