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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

jasonlefkowitz.net

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Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#141

Post by jsolson »

socillion wrote: post #109
TheSOB88 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just to chip in with why I personally refuse to use Chrome: -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20 -Occasional Flash problems render the browser utterly useless for several minutes before it asks whether I am interested in continuing what I was doing -Not visiting a tab for a while results in a ridiculous wait for it to load My screen size makes having multiple rows of tabs si…

> -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20

Interesting. This is actually one of the big reasons why I prefer Chrome over FF. FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll" while Chrome resizes the tabs to fit.

What about Chrome's implementation do you find more unwieldy than Firefox's?

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#142

Post by bilban »

Oh well, I've been using Firefox since it's pheonix, firebird days!

I've never evangalised so hard about a piece of software, and every Linux and Apple user owe it a debt of gratitude, in as much that it was a good cross platform browser.

Performance wise, some upgrades have been for the better some for the worst. But don't get too sentimental about past incarnations. I remember there being memory issues in the 2.x line. I saw the browser eating over a half gig of ram once - and I nearly fell off my chair.

Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself why? It just slows your computer down. I think we use them as replacement for bookmarks, which says something about the browser UI.

I've only recently left 3.6 to try out TenFourFox on my power pc - which at first felt a million times better, but after my initial excitement, I noticed it's a bit of a cpu hog. Idling with Gmail open, it seems to be quite greedy. Which suggests to me that there is an inherent problem with the browser - imagine if I had a handful of web apps open.

To say Firefox is broken is a bit strong. It would be better to say it has it's faults and could be faster. If it's DB is a bottleneck - could it be swapped for something else?

I do however think the browser UI is in serious need of some love, and could do with some innovation. It's barely changed. For example tab management is dire.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#143

Post by azakai »

hoverkraft wrote: post #88

It's endearing that for each comment presenting a criticism of some aspect of Firefox, there's at least one reply from somebody saying, "But /I/ don't have that problem" (see thaumaturgy's top-ranked post). So great. You don't run into problem x or problem y. But a LOT of people do. And when I sit down at somebody's computer, and they use Firefox, and they have more than a couple tabs open, it's slow. Inconceivably s…

The fact is, different people experience different things.

Many people report that Firefox holds up better with many tabs open than Chrome. Perhaps since Chrome has one process per tab, which ends up straining some OSes. And many people report the opposite. It probably depends a lot on the OS, the specific tabs, their number, what addons they have, etc.

There are definitely a variety of bugs that some Firefox users hit, and those users get a frustrating experience. I don't think anyone is denying that. But there are also plenty of users that are clearly very happy. And there are users of other browsers that also hit bugs - for example I recently noticed that Opera was churning my HD for no reason. Never seen that on any browser until then. I had to stop using Opera because of it.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#144

Post by ximeng »

frossie wrote: post #138
asadotzler wrote: post #54

Jason, we’ve been working on this. There were some big performance improvements in Firefox 6 and 7 and we’ve got a big hang fix that’s just about to hit in Firefox 8. Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?

I suffer quite a lot from Firefox performance issues since I need to run two instances on one machine, and Firefox 7 fixed ALL my hanging/swapping issues. Great job on that and I definitely urge everybody to upgrade. While I'm here I'll add my usual "Dump Firefox? You can pry Tree Style Tab out of my cold dead hands" comment. That said, I have also experienced the "we are not doing it cause we don't like it no matter…

It seems unlikely that Chrome will get tree style tabs any time soon, despite some popular interest:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=99332&#38...

"If I stop using the dev version, and switch to beta or (shudder) released, and turn off updating, will that give me the tabs back, or is it too late?"

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#145

Post by windsurfer »

asadotzler wrote: post #54

Jason, we’ve been working on this. There were some big performance improvements in Firefox 6 and 7 and we’ve got a big hang fix that’s just about to hit in Firefox 8. Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?

Arch Linux here, Firefox 7.0.1. No hanging, no Flash problems, 15+ tabs is a-okay, and extensions work great. I'm happy!

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#146

Post by kissickas »

jsolson wrote: post #141
socillion wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to chip in with why I personally refuse to use Chrome: -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20 -Occasional Flash problems render the browser utterly useless for several minutes before it asks whether I am interested in continuing what I was doing -Not visiting a tab for a while results in a ridiculous wait for it to load My screen size makes having multiple rows of tabs si…

> -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20 Interesting. This is actually one of the big reasons why I prefer Chrome over FF. FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll" while Chrome resizes the tabs to fit. What about Chrome's implementation do you find more unwieldy than Firefox's?

I don't know about socillion, but Tree Style Tabs is one of the reasons I won't stop using Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#147

Post by Bo102010 »

pythoning wrote: post #113

Disable unnecessary extensions and plugins and Firefox 7 will be instantaneous and memory efficient. Right now on OS X Leopard I have Hacker News, Slashdot, CNBC and Huffington Post (yuck) open in FF 7.01 and FF is using 179 MB. When I had Firebug and the Stumbleupon tool bar enabled as well as some useless plugins that were enabled by default for media types I don't use, these same tabs were using 440 MB. Google con…

My sister complained to me about the "hanging" Firefox problem, and disabling stupid extensions fixed it right up. Firefox really needs to have a profile-cleaning mechanism.

These problems people report must be very system-dependent. I've been running Firefox on my 2GB RAM Dell laptop I bought in 2007 for $600 without any issues.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#148

Post by colanderman »

socillion wrote: post #109
TheSOB88 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just to chip in with why I personally refuse to use Chrome: -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20 -Occasional Flash problems render the browser utterly useless for several minutes before it asks whether I am interested in continuing what I was doing -Not visiting a tab for a while results in a ridiculous wait for it to load My screen size makes having multiple rows of tabs si…

You might like Opera. It handles dozens of tabs beautifully, and you can group tabs into collapsible groups so you can both (a) navigate them and (b) see them all on the screen at once without having to scroll.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#149

Post by colanderman »

bilban wrote: post #142

Oh well, I've been using Firefox since it's pheonix, firebird days! I've never evangalised so hard about a piece of software, and every Linux and Apple user owe it a debt of gratitude, in as much that it was a good cross platform browser. Performance wise, some upgrades have been for the better some for the worst. But don't get too sentimental about past incarnations. I remember there being memory issues in the 2.x l…

> Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself why?

Spatial memory. If my tabs are not exactly where I left them last week, I utterly forget what I was doing. (I'm one of those people whose room looks like a mess but I can tell you where anything is -- so long as no-one's moved it.)

If tabs are slowing things down, then the browser should "background" tabs that haven't been used in a while. (I'd say swap them to disk but the OS does this already!) Pause Javascript, Flash, etc.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#150

Post by jbondeson »

jsolson wrote: post #141
socillion wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to chip in with why I personally refuse to use Chrome: -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20 -Occasional Flash problems render the browser utterly useless for several minutes before it asks whether I am interested in continuing what I was doing -Not visiting a tab for a while results in a ridiculous wait for it to load My screen size makes having multiple rows of tabs si…

> -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20 Interesting. This is actually one of the big reasons why I prefer Chrome over FF. FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll" while Chrome resizes the tabs to fit. What about Chrome's implementation do you find more unwieldy than Firefox's?

Tab Groups. For those of us who do lots of research and like to keep it organized it's a godsend.

Right now I have 159 tabs open -- I was curious so I decided to count. If I tried that in Chrome I'm pretty sure it would crash and burn hard, not to mention there would be no ability to keep it organized.

I know there are some research workflows that would allow me to do that as well, but I haven't really taken the time to dive into them after I found tab groups.

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