Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

I see others have also mentioned memory-usage and that is also a fair point. At some point, Firefox would have memory leaks so huge that it spent most of its CPU time constantly trying to GC, slowing to a complete halt.

And then, just like with the updates, you had to restart. Restarting Firefox was a pain. But somehow restarting Chrome when updates come along is not. Why is that?

My desktop is a quad-core system with hyper-threading. That's 8 logical cores for the machine if utilized correctly. By Chrome having a process-per-tab model and Firefox not, everything else being the same Chrome can reduce its startup times to 12.5% of that of Firefox. It's an order of magnitude improvement.

You don't care about restarting Chrome because it just takes one second and you are back where you started. Firefox takes almost 10. That's way beyond annoying your users.

When you are the browser spending ages doing a restart, you're not in a position to force updates on your users.

Another thing which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, which has been broken in Firefox since the very first releases is the add-on and add-on compatibility checking. It's retarded and I cannot believe it hasn't been fixed yet.

The typical Firefox update process goes like this: 1. Firefox informs you there is an update and you need to restart. 2. You accept a restart 3. Firefox shuts down, updates, and restarts. 4. upon restart after the update has been installed, it checks if your addons are compatible. WTF?!?

Usually that works out fine, but every now and then it doesn't. And then it's too late. That's retarded.

Why on earth would you check compatibility when it is already too late to do something about it? The process should be re-ordered. Compatibility checking should be done first. Then Firefox could say "There is an update and all your add-ons are compatible. Would you like to update now?".

A simple re-ordering of things it already does would have solved one of the two biggest issues people have with the update-mechanism. Why hasn't this been done already?

I'm a Chrome convert now, but I keep coming back to Firefox to see if things have improved, because I really believe in what Firefox stands for and what it represents. Unfortunately, I keep coming back to Chrome because for me, it just feels like a better browser.

You seem to be confusing the Internet with corporate intranets. Browsers installed in these kinds of organisations, and the tools they want to use long-term, tend to be based around the latter. Having stability is far more important than being able to use HTML5 local storage and add drop shadows to your titles in CSS. There is a reason that, despite the endless moaning of web developers, many places are still running IE6.

If you want decade-long stability, use a platform that is tightly controlled and gives guarantees of backwards compatibility

They are. Unchanged is about as controlled and backward compatible as you can get!

Anyone who wants to get a replacement browser into these environments for the long term needs to understand that. Anyone who wants to make cloud-based solutions that seek to displace well-established in-house tools needs to understand that, too. It sucks if you want to use the shiny new possibilities of bleeding edge web technology, but the grown-ups aren't interested in an anatomical measuring contest between browser makers about who can be first to ship the next non-standardised, subject-to-change-at-any-time, bug-ridden-anyway feature.

I think Microsoft does understand this, and that's why they are still dominant in large organisations despite appearing to be behind the curve. I think Google have figured it out as well, but when they stopped supporting IE6 in their web apps, it wasn't because they had successfully forced everyone to upgrade, it's because they realised that they never would.

I think this is the single most important thing in this article and cannot be stressed enough.

Anybody that has ever had to interact with users knows this, but for developers this is very hard to believe, they choose not to see it.

Most people see software (i.e. "computers") as a tool to get some work done, or to get some entertainment. The work and the entertainment are the goal, and if it were possible to achieve it without using any software, they would do it.

Even technical-types think about software this way, not even knowing that they're doing it. Think about this: we mostly put up with complicated software and in-your-face software that's not contributing to our work or entertainment because we are learning something. Learning is just another goal that's not really the software itself. Once we notice that we aren't learning much anymore, the aforementioned software becomes a pain to use.

Or maybe it's just me...