Everybody Hates Firefox Updates • Hacker News Board

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#121

Post by conradfr » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 8:33 AM UTC

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 have 9 tabs now and 700mo taken, on Win7.

After restarting it (and loading all the tabs): 250mo.

It may well be problem with some extensions but I only use 9.

edit: if someone is lloking for the restart extension : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restartless-r...

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#122

Post by maigret » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 8:37 AM UTC

recoiledsnake wrote: post #23

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 problem with your suggestion is that they will have to maintain two codebases and support releases for the classic Firefox by proving security patches to them. Not to mention more headaches for web developers as yet another browser shows up with its own bugs, differing support for standards like HTML5 and CSS3 etc.

Funny, because two codebases exactly what Firefox is doing with FF 10 ESR, but without the renaming. So I don't find his proposition stupid, at the opposite. And come on, working on different codebases is a usual dev task, and every developer outside Facebook should know how to do that properly. Usually you have your shipped code and your development code, and you want to be at least able to ship a security fix without disclosing your new functionality. Concerning your last point, if you don't like that you are probably at the wrong place for web developments, where you should at least support a dozen different browsers. For enterprise software, that means one can just support 10 ESR instead of 1x and everything new that comes at each release, possibly breaking the application.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#123

Post by lovskogen » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 8:39 AM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #16

brigade wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So annoying your users with constant updates, reboots, and breaking functionality is okay as long as you do it from the start? And the way to get people to accept you adding such annoyance to your product is to rebrand it? Okay then.

No, but if you must move to a more rapid update schedule (as the Firefox developers clearly felt they did to stay competitive with Chrome, since users were screaming against rapid release from practically the moment the plan was announced and they went ahead with it anyway), moving the rapid updates into a new product is less disruptive than shoehorning them into your existing one.

Rapid updates doesn't need to be disruptive, look at Chrome. I don't think Firefox users will miss the Update Dialogue if they removed it, and did silent updates as Chrome. Fragmenting into two apps, and keeping an app with slower update cycle and a crappy update experience, seems bizarre.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#124

Post by lovskogen » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 8:43 AM UTC

jono_x wrote: post #41

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…

Hi Smacktoward, I'm the author of the post and I agree with everything you said here. How to reach out to new users while keeping your existing users happy is one of the oldest and biggest problems in software development. There's no perfect solution, but I like the suggestion of creating a new product name for the new thing. That can sometimes get you into trouble too, as you end up competing with yourself, Microsof…

Rapid updates doesn't need to be disruptive, look at Chrome. I don't think Firefox users will miss the Update Dialogue if they removed it, and did silent updates as Chrome. Fragmenting into two apps, and keeping an app with slower update cycle and a crappy update experience, seems bizarre.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#125

Post by jono_x » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 8:43 AM UTC

azakai wrote: post #46

1. The download/restart takes forever and interrupts your work with a bunch of intrusive dialog boxes. This is a valid complaint. Firefox did rapid release before it perfected the update process to be fully automatic and silent, that definitely caused some users issues. Mozilla has recognized that publicly and taken responsibility for that decision - and meanwhile fixed the update process as well as launched an exten…

> But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome).

Hi Azakai,

Paradoxical it may be, but this is exactly what I have observed: people leaving Firefox for Chrome and citing dislike of rapid updates as the main reason. Not just the intrusiveness of the update mechanism, but the breakage of compatibility and UI habituation are also cited as reasons.

Yes, these problems exist in Chrome as well as Firefox. It's just that users aren't noticing them as much in Chrome. Probably because, as new Chrome users, they don't yet have UI habituation and they don't yet have a workflow that depends on specific add-ons or other fragile compatibility issues.

Maybe if they stay on Chrome for long enough they will realize that the same problems exist there. But they're the sort of problems you don't encounter right away as a new user of a browser.

So yes, fixing the experience of the update itself is the highest priority since that's the number one thing that was driving people away. I know the Firefox team has been working hard on fixing this and the updates are much smoother now (especially since Firefox 12 got rid of the Windows UAC warnings.) That's great!

However, I predict that in the long term there will continue to be problems in both Firefox and Chrome caused by automatic updates breaking UI habituation, compatibility, or low-frequency use cases that particular users depended on.

Software that's as important as a web browser really ought to offer users an option to get just security/performance updates without any other changes. (Mozilla does offer Firefox ESR, but they don't publicize it and they discourage non-enterprise users from downloading it.)

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#126

Post by wanderr » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 9:00 AM UTC

botj wrote: post #106

forrestthewoods wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quit using Firefox due to absolutely horrific memory management and I never used a single add-on ever. It was extremely frustrating because every time I went to a forum seeking help the first and only thing people would do is blame add-ons. It was so bad that I had to close firefox when I wanted to do anything else. If I played a full screen game it would work great for about half an hour the suddenly it'd chug alo…

Haters-be hate'n. And how exactly does the one process per tab of chrome address memory issues? Chrome is complete garbage for me after 30ish tabs. Talk about unresponsive...

The great thing about this model is that closing the tabs kills the processes and therefore frees up memory. Last time I used FFx extensively (6 months-1year ago) I could not say the same thing, even after they announced having a pretty major fix for leaks.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#127

Post by jono_x » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 9:00 AM UTC

Well, the Hacker News traffic was more than my poor little webserver could handle. I can't even ssh into the machine to reboot lighttpd. Never thought I would see my personal blog linked on HN!

Would it be at all helpful to the discussion for me to copypasta the text of the article here, since people can't reach it otherwise?

In case the context is not obvious from the article, I have recently quit working for Mozilla, driven in part by the realizations I described. I've become quite disenchanted with the software industry and I'm not at all sure that software development is what I want to do for the rest of my career. I'm trying to decide what to do next. If anybody reading this has any similar experiences or perspective, I would be very interested to hear it. Thank you.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#128

Post by csaba » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 9:22 AM UTC

I mostly use windows 8 now, and firefox there simply does not works! Maybe it is only on my machine, I don't know, and I don't really care anymore. I really wanted to test the new non-memory eating firefox, but if tabs are disappearing, and flickering in a weird way (some random image appears instead of the tabs), than I can't use it.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#129

Post by jbk » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 9:54 AM UTC

> Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn't want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent.

To me, this is the most important. Usually, people prefer the original to the copy...

IMO, trying to catch up with (or just copy) Chrome all the times gives the messages to the users that they should use the original...

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#130

Post by lelele » Sat, Jul 07, 2012, 10:04 AM UTC

The worst thing about Firefox updates is that... they didn't work for me. On my Debian box, I had to manually download and install each new version. That, and Firefox crashing several times a day without giving me a clue about what happened, what I could have done to fix the issue and the bug-report process always failing to submit reports, made me think that Firefox's days as a better browser had long passed. I'm a happy Opera user now. Opera's update system is integrated into Debian's.