Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#11

Post by epc » Wed, May 25, 2011, 11:29 PM UTC

Firefox was my core browser for years when I split my time working on a Windows laptop and a Mac desktop. When I switched over to a Mac for 99% of my work I started using Safari more and eventually stopped using Firefox (this was in the v2-v3 timeframe). I now mostly use Safari & Chrome but have been using Firefox more now since 4.0.1 came out.

I use almost no plugins/extensions on any of the browsers, found they just slowed down the browser too much.

So: less passion, yes. Lost interest previously but we've made up.

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#12

Post by technomancy » Wed, May 25, 2011, 11:30 PM UTC

I was wooed away by Chrome's speed around a year ago, but after using it a few months I naturally was looking at extending it. It's night and day compared to Mozilla. All the interesting UI bits (tab switcher, menu, location bar) are hard-coded in C++; none of it's extensible via JS.

Once I realized this the magic was gone and Chrome held zero appeal to me. Luckily that was right around when the improved JIT in FF4 started getting usable with Conkeror, (http://conkeror.org) so I was able to switch back to the Moz without a noticeable speed hit. And what an amazing difference in flexibility... I don't know what I was thinking.

This is not so much about Firefox itself; as an application it's pretty meh, but as a platform it's excellent. It's the only thing I've ever seen that comes close to Emacs in terms of hackability.

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#13

Post by Geee » Wed, May 25, 2011, 11:36 PM UTC

rick888 wrote: post #2

mine started crashing on me at least 3 or 4 times a day. I eventually completely switched to chrome. The only thing really keeping me is firbug.

Firebug Lite is now available for Chrome. http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/chrome/

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#14

Post by eiji » Wed, May 25, 2011, 11:45 PM UTC

I still believe Firefox is well on track on the desktop, however, I'm becoming frustrated with it's performance on mobile devices (in my case Android 2.2 Galaxy Tab). And I'm wondering if this is a strategic failure. Firefox is not available on all Android devices, and in my case, it does install, but is unusable. My none-tech opinion: I don't care what processor my phone or tablet has, when I go into the Android Marketplace, I expect to find Firefox, no matter what device and what Android version. There is a browser preinstalled (I guess some chrome/webkit thing), so it's not rocket science. I'm more and more tempted to play around with other browsers to share bookmarks and stuff between desktop and mobile, and Firefox is falling short.

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#15

Post by ameasure » Wed, May 25, 2011, 11:48 PM UTC

I started splitting my time between Chrome and Firefox maybe a year ago. After I read about how difficult Chrome is to hack I started using it more faithfully. My only complaint is that it tends to crash a lot more than Firefox. Not sure why that is.

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#16

Post by TeHCrAzY » Wed, May 25, 2011, 11:51 PM UTC

Geee wrote: post #13

rick888 wrote: post #2

mine started crashing on me at least 3 or 4 times a day. I eventually completely switched to chrome. The only thing really keeping me is firbug.

Firebug Lite is now available for Chrome. http://getfirebug.com/releases/lite/chrome/

The built in dev tools are comparable (and personally, better) than the full firebug plugin. firebug lite doesn't quite cut it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#17

Post by whichdan » Wed, May 25, 2011, 11:55 PM UTC

I switched to Chrome initially when I upgraded to Fx4 and had some stability issues - it was a good excuse to try it fulltime. I've been using it since then. The only feature I find myself missing is the AwesomeBar, but that's on the Chrome roadmap, so I can't complain just yet.

Chrome feels a little lighter/faster, and I also like that themes don't take over the entire browser. A lot of nice FireFox themes absolutely destroy readability in certain places like the page title, and FireFox's chrome by default doesn't look as nice as Chrome's.

For what it's worth, I'd love to give Opera a fair chance again, but it doesn't play nicely with inertial scrolling on Mac.

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#18

Post by fjabre » Thu, May 26, 2011, 12:21 AM UTC

Using the URL bar as search was F'ing brilliant! It single-handedly changed the way I browse the web in much the same way FF did when it released tabbed browsing.

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#19

Post by dfeng » Thu, May 26, 2011, 12:53 AM UTC

the only thing keeping me from moving completely from Firefox to Chrome is Pentadactyl (http://dactyl.sourceforge.net/pentadactyl/), and better greasemonkeyscript-ability. Firefox on Mac has always had memory hogging issues, but I really can't live without my vim overlay (I've tried the Chrome alternatives, like vimium, but they pale in comparison)

As people have said about Firefox's hackability, I don't think there will be a Chrome extension as good as Pentadactyl.

Re: Ask HN: Have you lost your passion for Mozilla Firefox?

#20

Post by beatpanda » Thu, May 26, 2011, 1:24 AM UTC

When I click on the Firefox icon in my dock, it may take up to 2 minutes for Firefox to load and be usable. Chrome feels almost instant. I want badly to use Firefox more, but I can't justify it when it's so slow (and I'm using 4.0).