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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

jasonlefkowitz.net

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Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#71

Post by bad_user »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #47

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 some…

     Firefox is terrible. It's embarrassing.
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.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#72

Post by timjahn »

Couldn't agree more. For the past year+, Firefox has been getting noticeably slower and slower, to the point that I would cringe when clicking that little fox planet and thinking of what I could do in the next 3 minutes while Firefox opened.

A few months ago, I finally switched to Chrome 100% and very rarely use the bloated software that is now Firefox.

I used to recommend Firefox as THE browser. Now I recommend people uninstall it.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#73

Post by dendory »

I have a few issues with the current Firefox, but I use it as my full time browser and I never see a crash.. I'm not sure it's fair to criticize Mozilla itself and not some other piece of the ecosystem like plugins or extensions.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#74

Post by jerhewet »

> totally kills the value of the Awesome Bar

I disable the (air quote) Awesome (end air quote) Bar every time I do a fresh install of Firefox.

I hate this damned feature with a passion (thank you, but I already know how to type, so get the hell out of my way!), and if the product doesn't have a switch to turn this damned feature off I'll find a competing product that does. Note that so many people loathed this feature that Mozilla added an option to turn the damned thing off.

And yes, I always do my Google searches by launching a bookmark that has their damned look-ahead feature disabled as well.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#75

Post by burgerbrain »

gcp wrote: post #29
jbk wrote: post #15

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…

And yet, at each release, it seems the focuses on UI changes are the more important... I've seen almost no UI changes in Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. All the change-logs were basically backend optimizations.

"I've seen almost no UI changes in Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9."

So.. in the past 2 weeks?

Seriously, that absurd numbering scheme needs to stop too.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#76

Post by weaksauce »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #64
weaksauce wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the latest version and my long running high count tab sessions slow down my system tremendously. OSX 8GB RAM.

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 prob…

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.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#77

Post by capnrefsmmat »

tytso wrote: post #70

The fundamental problem with Mozilla is that it is trying to do database queries in its UI loop, and it wants every single piece of state safely on disk after every single click. This results in a huge amount of disk space to get written to disk as you visit every single click. Now I don't know about you, but if my computer crashes, do I really care if everything up to the last click is safely on disk? I wouldn't car…

> The fundamental problem with Mozilla is that it is trying to do database queries in its UI loop, and it wants every single piece of state safely on disk after every single click

No, this is not true. Since Firefox 3.5 they have avoided this entirely:

https://autonome.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/front-end-performa...

This approach has been largely replaced with asynchronous queries off-the-main-thread, since the temporary tables were actually a performance problem:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552023

So they've already done what you've suggested. It turned out to cause problems, and was replaced. AFAIK, there's basically no database queries in the Mozilla UI loop.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#78

Post by burgerbrain »

wnight wrote: post #40
kemayo wrote: post #3

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. Seemed a bit like Stockholm Syndrome to me.

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?

See, the problem here is that I do that with Opera on my EEEpc too, except I only have a gig of ram, no swap, and I don't have to kill it every week.

Firefox just doesn't cut it.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#79

Post by fletchowns »

redthrowaway wrote: post #34
fletchowns wrote: post #20

At least with Firefox you don't have to deal with things like this: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467 When Firefox dropped http:// at least they gave you the ability to turn it back on!

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?

That's not the point, the point is that Firefox still gives you the choice, while Chrome devs don't think you should have a choice.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#80

Post by runningdogx »

dhimes wrote: post #65
mpk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has Chrome implemented mathML yet? I user firefox for that.

  http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=firefox+7&b2=chrome+16
  https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3251
  http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606
No, Chrome still does not have mathml.
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