Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#161

Post by zobzu » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 4:03 AM UTC

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?

hitting on mozilla is trendy. thats all there is to it. its funny to read how the horrible firefox is faster than chrome and more efficient in many ares too. like type inference. like memory usage. like 2d acceleration.

in fact 99% judge ff on startup time. its mostly due to the ui toolkit xul.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#162

Post by burgerbrain » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 4:06 AM UTC

wnight wrote: post #160

burgerbrain wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, that I'd believe. What OS are you in? How long do you keep it running like this? Sounds good.

I'm using Fedora 15^, and I think Opera has been running for approximately 3 weeks right now (my current uptime).

^ with Awesome WM, not those gnome/unity/kde memory pigs ;)

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#163

Post by zobzu » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 4:09 AM UTC

caf wrote: post #100

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 req…

actually it does

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#164

Post by burgerbrain » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 4:16 AM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #154

burgerbrain wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

In the last 6 months. As you knew perfectly well, of course....

No, actually I didn't know that. I no longer use firefox, and their scheme honestly makes no sense to me. I am convinced they only adopted it so that Mozilla supporters can shoot down any criticism from people who abandoned it more than a few weeks ago by saying "well your criticism is hardly relevant, we're several version numbers past what you were using now!" Notice several examples of this tactic in this very discussion...

But anyway, are they bumping the version number every 1.2 months then? Is that supposed to be obvious?

PS: I would also like to add that "There hasn't been a major UI change in 6 months" is anything but a strong refutation of the original assertion that Mozilla changes up the UI too much. This is another example of redefining "major release" to silence valid criticism.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#165

Post by zobzu » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 4:22 AM UTC

fletchowns wrote: post #105

redthrowaway wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I didn't make any comment or complaint about the practical difference...

whats funny is you got downvotedand his hateful, not so relevant comment like go compile it us upvoted. figures !

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#166

Post by zobzu » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 4:25 AM UTC

kijin wrote: post #28

Yep, same problem. Firefox hangs whenever I try to do anything "intensive" with Places, such as selectively deleting stuff from the history or reorganizing a large number of bookmarks. It's gotten much better than before, though. Weird thing is, Firefox is still faster than Chrome on my computer (Win7x64). I don't know what's wrong with my computer, but Chrome is noticeably slower than Firefox in day-to-day use. This…

drink more G cool aid. ff is also faster here. but also on my other comps, except for the osx ones where chrome is better.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#167

Post by Jach » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 4:47 AM UTC

Why does there have to be one? I'm happy using both Firefox and Chrome, they each have their own workflows for me.

I have a personal gmail account, and a work google apps gmail account, and recently Google decided you can only stay logged into one gmail account at a time per browser session. So if I want both open, I have my personal one in Firefox and my work email in Chrome. That in general leads to the use of using Firefox for personal browsing and Chrome for work-related browsing.

In Firefox I have all my bookmarks and Stumble Upon, along with RSS feeds and about 400 tabs opened (not loaded with the Bartab Lite addon and organized in a tree with the TreeStyle Tabs addon). In Chrome I have work-related things open, like our issue list and email, so very few tabs, and I use it for quick googling (work or personal). I also have Firefox using websync so I can get at my tabs from school or other computers. Chrome's also nice for having a Private Browsing mode instantly launchable without closing your other non-private session.

Firefox only crashes completely these days, sometimes, when java applets load. Chrome only crashes on pages.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#168

Post by gcp » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 5:20 AM UTC

burgerbrain wrote: post #164

bzbarsky wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the last 6 months. As you knew perfectly well, of course....

No, actually I didn't know that. I no longer use firefox, and their scheme honestly makes no sense to me. I am convinced they only adopted it so that Mozilla supporters can shoot down any criticism from people who abandoned it more than a few weeks ago by saying "well your criticism is hardly relevant, we're several version numbers past what you were using now!" Notice several examples of this tactic in this very dis…

I am convinced they only adopted it so that Mozilla supporters can shoot down any criticism from people who abandoned it more than a few weeks ago by saying "well your criticism is hardly relevant, we're several version numbers past what you were using now!" Notice several examples of this tactic in this very discussion...

Increasing the version number doesn't fix bugs, but pretty much every time it has been pointed out in this topic, it was "we fixed some issues in that area, please try a newer version".

I don't understand the argument here. You're saying Mozilla is rapidly addressing the issues users are complaining about, and that is somehow a bad thing?

But anyway, are they bumping the version number every 1.2 months then? Is that supposed to be obvious?

The 6 week schedule has been pointed out in every HN thread about FF, and many public announcements before the rapid release system started, and the last 3 releases (not counting Beta and Aurora) have exactly been 6 weeks apart. So yes, it's supposed to be quite obvious by now. Don't ask me where your "2 weeks" figure comes from.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#169

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 5:20 AM UTC

jlarocco wrote: post #140

nitrogen wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if that means losing some history on a crash, is the fact that a user has visited one web site, but not another, really that important? Yes, it is. Imagine you're typing a long comment, you've copied it into the clipboard just to be safe, and just before you submit, your OS crashes or you lose power. Or, imagine you're looking for reference information on an obscure API, and you've finally found a useful page aft…

That seems pretty far fetched. How often has that actually happened to you? I can honestly say that in 15 years of web browsing I've never had either of those problems, and don't know anybody who has. Seems silly to significantly slow everything down for everybody because of a one in a trillion chance somebody will lose power at an inconvenient time. And hey, maybe if the browser were faster, you'd have time to submi…

That seems pretty far fetched.

Just about everything important seems far-fetched until it happens (Who imagined spam botnets when designing SMTP? Who would've thought that Therac-25 operators would get fast enough at entering commands to trigger a race condition?).

How often has that actually happened to you?

Since Firefox syncs often, it can't. But, I have lost long comments and e-mails (before Gmail auto-saved drafts) to page/browser/OS crashes, and I've been saved by the history when I couldn't remember the one site that had some answer I needed.

I can honestly say that in 15 years of web browsing I've never had either of those problems, and don't know anybody who has.

Isn't that exactly the sentiment being complained about in the article?

Seems silly to significantly slow everything down for everybody because of a one in a trillion chance somebody will lose power at an inconvenient time.

And hey, maybe if the browser were faster, you'd have time to submit the comment or bookmark the page before the power goes out...

If anything, experience has taught me that catastrophic failures just love to occur at inconvenient times. For example, demonstrations work when you're alone or with other engineers, but as soon as you present to someone else everything stops working.

Besides, I'm not saying browsers should be slower. I'm saying that they should synchronize more often than once every 10-15 minutes and be prepared for edge cases. I'm of the view that software should, where possible, mimic physical objects -- changes are instantaneous and persistent -- with the reversibility of virtual objects.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#170

Post by jbellis » Fri, Oct 14, 2011, 5:39 AM UTC

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…

Another satisfied Tree Style Tabs user here. After the AwesomeBar, that's the number two thing keeping me on FireFox. Especially now that version 7 cut its memory footprint in half.