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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

jasonlefkowitz.net

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Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#121

Post by thaumaturgy »

TheSOB88 wrote: post #92
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?

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.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#122

Post by diolpah »

philwelch wrote: post #119
diolpah wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of the "civility" standard is whether I would say it in person. My comments do pass this test.

That's more of a guideline aimed at people who aren't assholes in person.

Brilliant judgement you've made of someone you don't know. I'm sure this particular instance of incivility will garner you plenty of upvotes, however.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#123

Post by capnrefsmmat »

tytso wrote: post #85
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tempor…

They are using asynchronous queries still, and the problem is that they aren't always asynchronous if there are any long-running queries happening in the background. That's the reason for the hang per the most recent bug. If temp tables were causing problem, then there's something seriously wrong with SQLlite's in-memory temporary tables (or how they are being used). By definition they shouldn't be blocking...

Firefox was creating memory-backed temporary tables and syncing them to disk; however, the process of regularly syncing to disk while using the browser caused issues. It also added to start-up time requirements.

For example, if you don't want to hold the entire history in memory but only the most recent changes, you have to create a view spanning the temporary table and the on-disk table to do history queries (so the Awesomebar returns results from pages you just visited, as well as ones already written to disk) and things get complicated.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#124

Post by Permit »

gwern wrote: post #39
Permit wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

As mentioned, when you copy from the URL bar, you get the http:// prefix so this is a non-issue.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#125

Post by thaumaturgy »

mirkules wrote: post #91
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 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.

[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

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#126

Post by plasma »

I use to be a fan of firefox, but switched to chrome because:

1) it became slow to open. FF use to open within a few seconds, it now opened in no less than 30 seconds.

Strike 1.

1) I then noticed during the 30 seconds that ff was accessing my dish access was crazy. A bug report said it was "working as intended" because it was needing to derive encryption keys for ssl by reading my temp data files on disk.

So 30 sec load time from hdd access at startup is working as intended? Strike 2.

3) ff updates brick extensions. They aren't usable after an update. Just annoying to experience each update.

3) I switched my mums pc to chrome after the resent few ff updates. Too much mental energy and effort to click next/yes to each update wizard step, to then see the plugins out of date too etc, just silly.

She asks "whats this" each time ff asked about updates, after doing it a few times recently and teaching her it was ok to say yes to, I sill just replaced it with chrome that eliminated the support overhead for me.

So I had switched to chrome and it opens fast. No crazy disk access.

It doesn't pester me at all about updates, or break things due to new versions. It just works and gets out of my way.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#127

Post by pjriot »

AdamGibbins wrote: post #110
pjriot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Jeez, did not know that. I was thinking of writing something like that myself with version control for page updates just to be safe.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#129

Post by mentat »

diolpah wrote: post #122
philwelch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more of a guideline aimed at people who aren't assholes in person.

Brilliant judgement you've made of someone you don't know. I'm sure this particular instance of incivility will garner you plenty of upvotes, however.

Because people disagree with whether your approach is acceptable in any case. It's not that hard to understand.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#130

Post by azakai »

dextorious wrote: post #118
azakai wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 "trol…

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.
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