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Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

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Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#61

Post by drivebyacct2 »

zobzu wrote: post #43

So its been a few month without bashing firefox and thus its that time of the year for that again? Except it has better memory management than any other browser now. Except its the fastest browser on Android now. Except the upgrading no longer break addons as they're compat by default now Except upgrading is now silent (no dialog box, no UAC prompt, no "welcome to the new firefox tab" - yes; on windows) Except if you…

BTW, you're being downvoted (not by me, though it's tempting) because at least a few of those are untrue.

edit: Chrome is still faster on Android for me, addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox, and I don't find the memory management to be any better. It's still horrendously slow in Linux and on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#62

Post by thaumasiotes »

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…

I quit firefox purely over its tendency to leak my entire RAM and force restarts. I was told at the time, and do believe, that the memory leaking was an addon problem. However... firefox was sold on the idea of addons. When your two main messages are "we're the most convenient browser; just look at all our awesome addons!" and "you can't use the addons, or your computer will implode", you've got a serious problem.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#63

Post by goostavos »

samspot wrote: post #29

"Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need." This is the hardest lesson, and what I need to remember most. As a developer I really do like to tinker with new software (most of the time), but as a rule users do not and we had best not forget it! I knew the firefox updates annoyed me but I…

I recently slammed into this as well. I'm am far from being a "real" developer, but I do occasionally write software for work on my own time. I spent a couple of weeks laying out a simple gui and getting all the pieces to work. I then "released" it to the office, and after seeing people clumsily poke through the menus, I decided that they must have been laid out poorly. So I rearranged everything, and redid a lot of the graphics, and swapped the versions without telling anyone. I received a crap storm of negative feedback. Ended up having to write a guide for how to use everything, and then still didn't learn my lesson! I thought X would function way better if combined with Y, etc, etc.. Pushed another version with some new features and some feature removed, and again, a torrent of confused coworkers asking me where things went.

The only good decision I made was to stop messing with it... which is hard. Each time I see people interact with it I feel there is a glaringly obvious change that needs to be made to ultimately benifit the user. But alas, I leave it be.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#64

Post by derefr »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #62
dangoor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I quit firefox purely over its tendency to leak my entire RAM and force restarts. I was told at the time, and do believe, that the memory leaking was an addon problem. However... firefox was sold on the idea of addons. When your two main messages are "we're the most convenient browser; just look at all our awesome addons!" and "you can't use the addons, or your computer will implode", you've got a serious problem.

I don't see how that's a serious problem. An add-on ecosystem can be explained literally as "we let third parties who aren't as skilled as browser-developers develop (optional) parts of our browser." That has both obvious advantages (there are way more developers passing that lower bar, serving many more needs) and obvious drawbacks (a lot of them... can't code very well.)

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#65

Post by notJim »

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.)

jono_x, yes you are banned. Hellbanned specifically, which is why I can't reply to you.

I don't understand why you are banned. Normally it seems like it happens to users who post junk, or who get downvoted a whole lot when they're new. Neither of these apply to you, however, so I'm really not sure.

If you really want to respond, maybe you could do so on your blog, and someone in the thread will link to it.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#66

Post by Legion »

What killed Firefox for me wasn't just the plugin breakage on updates, but the unnecessary plugin breakage.

For most of my broken plugins, the immediate solution was, "edit the XML file inside the .xpi, and update the maxVersion to include the latest version of Firefox."

Firefox 10 changed this behavior, making plugins assume to be compatible by default, unless set to a strict mode by the plugin author. But Firefox 10 released in January of this year, by which point I had long since moved to Chromium.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#67

Post by achal »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #58
conradfr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still don't understand why there is almost no push towards restartless extensions on the AMO site apart from one "restartless" badge for addons. The front page[0] has literally no mention of them. For a while, they didn't have too many restartless add-ons. Recently, they've been getting more popular; Adblock Plus added restartless support a while back, after much work, and there are quite a few others [1]. It would be a decent time to start featuring these much more prominently, if not exclusively.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/restartless [the only way, as far as I can tell, to get this list is to manually search for this tag]

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#68

Post by zobzu »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #61
zobzu wrote: post #43

So its been a few month without bashing firefox and thus its that time of the year for that again? Except it has better memory management than any other browser now. Except its the fastest browser on Android now. Except the upgrading no longer break addons as they're compat by default now Except upgrading is now silent (no dialog box, no UAC prompt, no "welcome to the new firefox tab" - yes; on windows) Except if you…

BTW, you're being downvoted (not by me, though it's tempting) because at least a few of those are untrue. edit: Chrome is still faster on Android for me, addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox, and I don't find the memory management to be any better. It's still horrendously slow in Linux and on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what.

go ahead and point them out.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#69

Post by simonbrown »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #57
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…

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.

The options dialog changed to a page at some point, and the page has now been redesigned. I would class both of those as pretty big, though most users probably don't use it.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#70

Post by fzzzy »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #61
zobzu wrote: post #43

So its been a few month without bashing firefox and thus its that time of the year for that again? Except it has better memory management than any other browser now. Except its the fastest browser on Android now. Except the upgrading no longer break addons as they're compat by default now Except upgrading is now silent (no dialog box, no UAC prompt, no "welcome to the new firefox tab" - yes; on windows) Except if you…

BTW, you're being downvoted (not by me, though it's tempting) because at least a few of those are untrue. edit: Chrome is still faster on Android for me, addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox, and I don't find the memory management to be any better. It's still horrendously slow in Linux and on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what.

Which ones?
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