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Ask HN: When did Firefox become so broken?

17 points by martokus ↗ HN
I don't want to sound like a rant but that's the reality for me.

TL;DR Been using Firefox as my main browser since 2005. Refused to move to Chrome when a lot of people did. As of today both my home and work machines default to Chrome. So what happened?

Earlier this year the problem started on my personal laptop. I'm based in UK and Firefox suddenly decided it will start searching in google.com rather than google.co.uk. I made sure my Google preferences say UK, my PC location is set to UK, reinstalled Firefox, nothing. IE and Chrome still search in google.co.uk. After a month of struggling I gave up and switched to Chrome.

I kept Firefox as my brain browser on my work PC. It was still searching in google.co.uk so all good. All good until like 2 weeks ago when opening a Google Hangout in Firefox started resulting in the browser taking up to 900Mb of RAM with 3 tabs opened (gmail, hangouts, website) and crashing. We use Google Apps at work so I spend a lot of time in hangouts... Again I struggled for 2 weeks and gave up. As of today Chrome is my default browser on all PCs.

What went wrong with Firefox really? I could easily blame my PC setup but I don't think so. 2 very different issues on 2 machines, yet other browsers still function normally on both of them.

I'm even considering the ridiculous probability of Google subtly screwing with Firefox users on random bases just to get them unnerved and switch to Chrome.

Is anyone else experiencing such a degradation of their Firefox experience?

18 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] thread
arien
Both things you mention have to do with Google, who happens to own Chrome. Why do you think it is a ridiculous proposition? After all, you gave in and switched to Chrome...

I've actually done the opposite, switched back to Firefox after many years of using Chrome. Was a bit wary, but no issues at all, runs fine in both PC and Mac. Although I don't use hangouts on it.

robbyking
I recently switched back to Firefox, too, after almost 6 years with Chrome. In that time it felt like the two browsers switched roles, and now Firefox is lightweight and privacy minded, while Chrome is bloated and invasive.

I recently launched Chrome to see if an issue a website I was visiting was experiencing was Firefox specific (they weren't), and I was really taken back by how old Chrome felt†. It lacked the "crisp" feeling Firefox has††, and the UI (new tab screen especially) just felt stale. It was actually really surprising.

† I was updated to the current version.

†† I understand how caching works.

theandrewbailey
> It lacked the "crisp" feeling Firefox has††, and the UI (new tab screen especially) just felt stale.

> †† I understand how caching works.

I'm confused. Do you mean Chrome lacked Firefox's speed? Or you simply like Firefox's UI better?

robbyking
In my opinion, both. Chrome's new tab screen looks very out of date to me, and both the UI and page loading feels faster on Firefox.
throwaway6845
> now Firefox is lightweight and privacy minded

Yeah, I'm not so sold on that.

Go to https://somethingorother without a proper certificate (e.g. a private dev machine) and Chrome, while alerting me of the issue, gives me a straightforward way through - click "Advanced", click "Proceed".

Firefox gives me a lecture and a snarky comment about "if you understand the risks, you understand how to fix it".

Damn right I do. I fix it by using Chrome.

skrowl
I also upgraded (back) to Firefox after using Chrome. The bloat killed me. Soooooo much wasted memory.

Firefox Dev edition, x64 build on windows 8.1 with multi-process enabled runs twice as fast as Chrome ever did on my computer, while consuming less than 25% as much RAM.

justathrow2k
Isn't this question better suited for a FireFox dev/complaint forum?
jrm2k6
I have the same issue when it comes to the slowness. It crashes really easily, and takes up a lot of RAM. Chrome runs just fine with the same websites. Each time I switched to a new opened tab, it hangs, that is deeply annoying.

It might be better to open an issue on a forum/dev complaints board, but I feel like it is always the same answers. Do a reinstall/reset to factory settings or this kind of thing, which is not helpful as I have obviously done it.

jdlyga
Chrome just got a hell of a lot better and Firefox more or less stayed the same.
SixSigma
We call this "begging the question".

You have decided Firefox is broken. I have zero complaints about it, it is my default browser on Android, Windows and OpenBSD, all three of which I use daily without issue.

nautical
I disagree that its broken , have been using it on mac and linux both , works like a charm every time .
FooNull
Fwiw, by running the firefox nightly, I've seen far fewer memory issues, crashes, and general crappyness...
conradfr
I'm a bit in the same boat.

Firefox is better than before for me : it crashes less, less memory leak with better cleaning.

BUT I still have to restart it regularly. At some point during the day it becomes less responsive, closing a tab freeze the browser (during which Windows task manager indicates that FF uses 25% of the cpu for xx seconds, may be related to my quad core), etc.

I don't even have that much tabs (like 2/3 windows, ~20/30 tabs).

The worst offenders are GMail, Google Images (or even Imgur, lots of images seem to kill FF) and a forum page full of Youtube videos.

Removing Adblock helped a bit but other than that I haven't find an extension I could blame (Classic Theme Restorer was a problem though, it's fixed now).

inetsee
I've been using Firefox on Linux for quite some time. My default search engine is DuckDuckGo. I haven't had any problems with Firefox.

My wife uses Firefox on Windows 7 (she hated Windows 8, so we switched back to Windows 7) and she had been having some problems with Firefox (can't connect after auto-upgrade, Firefox using lots of CPU resources, etc). I finally figured out the connection problems (it was our Norton firewall needing to be told about the Firefox update), and doing a Firefox refresh (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...) seems to have solved the excess CPU usage problems.

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