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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

jasonlefkowitz.net

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Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#181

Post by ehsanu1 »

kalleboo wrote: post #173
bad_user wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> which is one reason the Awesome bar will never make it into Chrome. What does the AwesomeBar do that Chrome's address bar doesn't? Heck the Chrome address bar even does autocomplete of search terms when you have it set to use Bing…

When I first started using Chrome, the awesomebar is probably what I missed most from Firefox. On Firefox, I type a partial keyword or two, and pages from history show up which are very relevant. Do the same on Chrome, and I usually have to finish a list of keywords to search Google in order to get to the page I'm thinking of.

I ended up changing my address bar behavior on Chrome, but when I ran Firefox again for a while, I relearned my old behaviors by chance just by trying to search for stuff via the address bar, and instead finding the awesomebar offer what I was looking for with less effort. Once you get used to it, it really is inferior to how Chrome's address bar works. That said, Chrome has lots going for it as well.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#182

Post by rimantas »

codecaine wrote: post #135
DrCatbox wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is a product that treats its users like idiots. Many, many products do that these days.

which is actually a good thing

Indeed, only I wouldn't phrase it like that. Maybe "gets out of the way". Remember Krug's "don't make me think"?

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#183

Post by nirbheek »

Deleting your places.sqlite file is the easiest, but the worst way of defragmenting it. The easiest (if you're using btrfs) is to run:

`btrfs filesystem defragment ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/places.sqlite`

or use ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_DEFRAG, NULL).

As far as I know, this can only be done as root. I'm not sure if other filesystems have similar defrag hooks.

So the correct approach is to make this facility accessible from unprivileged userspace.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#184

Post by Havoc »

I've had a hanging issue too. Fixed it by disabling MSE real-time protection (20 hangs per day -> 0). Somehow I don't see MSE causing the hangs on *nix though so perhaps a separate issue. Worth a try though for anyone battling.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#185

Post by skrebbel »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #180
skrebbel wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And put the tab bar on the left, making keeping an overview of 30+ ungrouped tabs no problemo!

Or hide tabs and the tab bar altogether and use CTRL-TAB to toggle through them, like ALT-TAB does windows. Screen real-estate galore: http://i.imgur.com/XuMkx.png

Hm. That's pretty cool.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#186

Post by slowpoke »

codecaine wrote: post #135
DrCatbox wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is a product that treats its users like idiots. Many, many products do that these days.

which is actually a good thing

I disagree heavily. Treating more and more people like they are idiots in all areas of life is the reason we've become a lethargic, consume-drunken shade of society. This needs to stop. We need to force people to think. Think for themselves. Teach a man to fish and all that.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#187

Post by dagw »

pjriot wrote: post #8
ketralnis wrote: post #2

This seems a bit overblown for what amounts to a performance bug in a feature that few people even use (bookmarks).

Do people not use bookmarks? I have thousands of them. What are the alternatives that I'm missing out on? (big xmarks user too so sync is a must)

Most (non-technical) people I know just use a combination of the browser history and Google.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#188

Post by gizzlon »

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?

"FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll""

FYI, you can use the mousewheel to scroll the tabs.. without, it would be horrible

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#189

Post by mmphosis »

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…

I don't use tabs in any browser, never have, never will. Open preferences, and turn off tabs -- easy. I don't see the need for tabs when the OS provides it's own tabs for all the windows I have regardless of whether it's a web page or not. Tabs within tabs, no thanks.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#190

Post by bilban »

colanderman wrote: post #149
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 whil…

Don't get me wrong, I have got a bit of a bad tab habit that I'm trying to break. It's all too easy to open loads of them, never to read the content. In the meantime they just use resources.

I think having lots of tabs open isn't good for focus, but that's another topic.

What I was getting at, is that I believe we use tabs as bookmark replacements. Which is stupid because bookmarks are cheap. This shows a flaw in the browser.

To me it's the browser UI that let's you down. If bookmark management were better, you might not use the tabs.

Back to the spatial memory, I have a better grasp of tabs when they bunch - ala Opera and Chrome than when they scroll. I get lost in Firefox pretty quickly, the newer tab management features just don't work for me.

I don't see why you can't have a mix of live tabs, and frozen tabs.

After using Gmail for years - I'm going back to a desktop client rather reluctantly, just because it doesn't use much in the way of system resources while idling.

I was a fan of tabs initially, but in some ways I've gone off them. I'd like the window manager to look after multiple windows better, rather than use tabs.

I'd love to see some radical development in the browser UI.

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