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Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

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Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#51

Post by kwierso »

dangoor wrote: post #44
Karunamon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have not had an extension break since FF7 (now on FF14) It's been my experience that extensions don't 'break' (i.e. stop working as expected) as much as they self validate against the currently running version of FF and refuse to load unless the developer has flagged it as workable. Every time a major release comes out, half of my plugins are disabled. Then, I go and download the compatability reporter plugin (whi…

I believe it was Firefox 12 or 13 that made add-one compatible by default. Except for add-ons with binary parts, I don't think you should find so many turned off with each update now.

10, actually.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#52

Post by jono_x »

mbrubeck wrote: post #48

Hey pg (or other moderators), it would be nice if you could unban jono_x who is the author of this post and signed up to respond to comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jono_x (For now, you can read them if you set "showdead" in your HN profile.)

I'm banned? (My posts were showing up for me, so I had no idea.)

Did get banned because I broke a rule I wasn't aware of? Or is it that a newly registered account needs to be approved by a moderator before the comments show up?

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#53

Post by human_error »

I'm still trying to figure out why the "add-ons" you install appear in "extensions" window and what's the difference between an extension and an addon. I can search and install Firebug but can disable/remove it from extension section.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#54

Post by ascendant »

dangoor wrote: post #40
earl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that Chrome updates work. They've only broken something once in I think 3 years of daily use at this point (some update unchecked "warn before quitting"). They also don't generally create popups and the update process itself is literally invisible. Firefox on the other hand... sigh. I really liked that browser, but the updates, and the broken plugins, and the shit memory management, and the develop…

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests…

Sadly though now users have had years of poor memory management burned into their memories. Regardless of if it was FF or the addons, it's associated with FF now and will take time to shed.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#55

Post by SoftwareMaven »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #24
jhatax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few user interfaces have withstood the test of time. There are notable exceptions, of course - the iOS UI, uTorrent, and the Chrome browser immediately come to mind. Other applications and operating systems have continued to evolve their user interface over 18-24 months. In some cases, the evolution is necessary for the sake of usability. Take Android for instance: The UI update in ICS dramatically enhanced usab…

>Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much. I think Windows interface has withstood the test of time pretty well. The basic UX paradigm is essentially unchanged from Windows 95 with whatever that followed basically being tweaks rather than big changes.

Until the ribbons took over everything.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#56

Post by aviraldg »

earl wrote: post #28
smacktoward wrote: post #12

I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefo…

The other thing is that Chrome updates work. They've only broken something once in I think 3 years of daily use at this point (some update unchecked "warn before quitting"). They also don't generally create popups and the update process itself is literally invisible. Firefox on the other hand... sigh. I really liked that browser, but the updates, and the broken plugins, and the shit memory management, and the develop…

Okay, this might sound funny, but Firefox is actually faster than Chrome on my crappy netbook which has about a gig of RAM. Plus, it can handle more tabs (200+, don't ask) without bringing the thing to a screeching halt.

I'm pretty sure you're talking about an earlier version of Firefox -- I agree, there were problems there, but things have gotten much better with the latest versions. I run Firefox Aurora (which is kinda equivalent to Chrome's dev channel) and I haven't seen anything breaking yet.

I've also used Chrome [dev] for a while and while it was pretty good, it also decided to declare that "my user profile was corrupt" after every few days. Not fun. Plus, it could hardly handle 50+ tabs, but I guess that is due to the way the Chromium sandbox and tab threading model works (and the Atom processor in my netbook.)

tl;dr: I run Firefox Aurora (with 200+ tabs) on a netbook with 1 gig of RAM. Where's that memory problem you were talking about?

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#57

Post by keeperofdakeys »

jhatax wrote: post #18
breadbox wrote: post #3

The takeaway quote: "After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!" I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.

Very few user interfaces have withstood the test of time. There are notable exceptions, of course - the iOS UI, uTorrent, and the Chrome browser immediately come to mind. Other applications and operating systems have continued to evolve their user interface over 18-24 months. In some cases, the evolution is necessary for the sake of usability. Take Android for instance: The UI update in ICS dramatically enhanced usab…

Chrome definitely have changed their UI over time, however the changes have been so small you probably have forgotten (just removing buttons). It's surprising to think about it now, but it used to have a lot more of them.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#58

Post by keeperofdakeys »

conradfr wrote: post #36
dredmorbius wrote: post #13

A lot of agreement. Some disagreements. Yes, frequent updates, especially those that break plugins, suck massively. Each update is a huge leap of dread into the "well, what's going to break this time" sea. The biggest single fault I've got with Firerfox (running FF13) isn't updates, it's memory usage. It still leaks massively, and pretty much requires a daily restart. State preservation is good enough that this doesn…

Yes, memory has become better, but only marginally. That's why I use the "restartless restart" extension. And if you use Firebug, you are screwed as well, only quicker. I never really liked Chrome, but it's so fast and snappy, and Firefox has still not catch up in that area.

I'm always surprised with peoples experience with Firefox memory usage of recent, it has been excellent for me. I can sometimes get upto 200+ tabs, while only sitting on 1.5GB of used memory. This is in Linux, but most of the memory-handling code shouldn't be that different between OSs in terms of GC algorithms.

As for restartless extensions, I think mozilla should really push people to switch their extensions to use the api. The other advantage is version independence, which helps with some of users pains of firefox.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#59

Post by ja2ke »

jpxxx wrote: post #11

This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point. Requesting permission to update throws a significant amount of users. They're typically not capable of determining if the request is legitimate or not, they're fearful of updating things they rely on, and god help them if it's not a one-click update.

Yep, most "consumer-level" end users would prefer to not be asked. I'm probably a bad nerd, but it's even true of me. When I go to my parents house for some holiday or another, I used to meticulously check everything on my mom's computer to make sure it was working well. Now I basically just jam on the manual software update button for everything she has installed that doesn't autoupdate, because she's too afraid or inconvenienced by the manual update button. Everything else, though, is just managing itself and she doesn't notice.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#60

Post by Bjartr »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #55
recoiledsnake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much. I think Windows interface has withstood the test of time pretty well. The basic UX paradigm is essentially unchanged from Windows 95 with whatever that followed basically being tweaks rather than big changes.

Until the ribbons took over everything.

But only after extensive testing found them quantitatively better than the old menu system.
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