Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#91

Post by mirkules » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:13 PM UTC

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…

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."

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).

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#92

Post by TheSOB88 » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:17 PM UTC

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…

So, I don't notice much bad with FF, so I don't know what I'm missing. What am I missing? What makes FF terrible and Chrome goodly?

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#93

Post by redthrowaway » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:18 PM UTC

fletchowns wrote: post #79

redthrowaway wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#94

Post by sova » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:18 PM UTC

The version of Firefox that is my favorite is actually pre-firefox. Phoenix was an amazing browser -- it was lightweight, incredibly fast, and the UI was simple and _very_ customizable.

Phoenix, in my opinion, is the original idea and message behind Firefox: a fast and friendly alternative to bloated browsers. Over the years, Firefox has become HUGE. Why make a Firefox 7, 8, 9 etc. if it just keeps adding more things instead of cutting through the glut with the sword of speediness and optimization? Really, all I want a browser to do is pass the acid3 test and be up and running as quickly as possible. Cut everything else out.

I think of Phoenix as like a pamphlet, Firebird (Firefox 1) as a novel, and current Firefox as an encyclopedia. Tucked somewhere within... on a select number of sheets in that amassed bramble of pages and thorns... in there is a browser we all know and love.

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free" ~ Michelangelo

Firefox+Mozilla: please don't stop carving. We appreciate all you do, but it's time to get back to basics.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#95

Post by nknight » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:18 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #71

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 us…

"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.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#96

Post by Raphael » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:21 PM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #60

rythie wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As mentioned in the article's comments, this appears to have been recently resolved. Here is the full thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025

Aha. Now here may be the root cause:

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.)

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#97

Post by mzarate06 » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:24 PM UTC

"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"

I'm suprised I don't see posts like this more often, specifically about the Linux version. I've been on Ubuntu since 7.04, and Firefox has always felt like beta software, especially when running any Flash media. I get far less crashes on Chrome, so I've started moving away from Firefox and find the Chrome experience much more reliable.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#98

Post by carussell » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:40 PM UTC

aphyr wrote: post #49

azakai wrote: post #38

> 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 netwo…

> 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]

1. Boris Zbarsky. "Performance vs. correctness tradeoffs". Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days. 2009 October 18. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#99

Post by sciurus » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:41 PM UTC

hoppipolla wrote: post #86

theshadow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, the browser plugins in use (e.g. adobe acrobat) have a huge impact.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#100

Post by caf » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 9:42 PM UTC

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…

It would be great if SQLlite could provide the option of "NOSYNC" tables that might lose recent updates after a crash. However, in order to ensure that the on-disk file is consistent it at least needs write ordering when it does decide to write to disk - "I don't care when this write gets to disk, as long as when it does, this other write has already gotten there too". There's no API to request that without also requesting data be flushed to permanent storage immediately - be it fsync, sync_file_range or O_DIRECT.