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Eight Years of Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Eight Years of Firefox

#51

Post by dageshi »

I remember using netscape (maybe 4...?) I'd just upgraded and remember for whatever reason double clicking on a html doc on my desktop and watching it sit there load up an entire suite of apps I wasn't going to use.

That was it, immediately switched to IE. I preferred Netscape but the load time was too frustrating.

And then when firefox came out (or at least one of the later version) I remember repeating that exact same thing. I needed to open a html file on the desktop and IE was sloooow. So I tried firefox, much much faster. And then there was firebug.. no contest, game set and match.

I switched to chrome for about a year because it seemed to render pages faster but about 3 months ago I ran into some weird problem where chrome stopped playing youtube videos properly. Tried everything, no luck, switched back to firefox and actually... I think I'll stick with it, it's a great browser.

Re: Eight Years of Firefox

#52

Post by TwoBit »

wyuenho wrote: post #43
mjb wrote: post #28

I think Firefox has to take a lot of credit for the state of the web today. In the early 2000s, it was usual for sites to be IE-only, or to be horribly broken in any alternative browser. It seems to me that the rise of popularity of Firefox correlated strongly with a drop in these IE-only sites, and I don't think that its unfair to label it as a dominant cause of this drop. Even if Firefox dies completely and leaves…

Not to discredit Firefox for spearheading our revolt against the IE monopoly, but I think Firefox has sometimes been given too much credit for everything from standard compliance to innovation, and not enough credit to other browsers on the market. First of all, standard compliance. I don't think Firefox 1.0 or its ancestors and subsequent version are all that standard compliant. Yes, for about 1 year in 2004-2005 it…

First you say this:

"I don't think Firefox from the day it came out to the present day is all that great in terms of UX." Then you prove that statement by talking about who invented features first and say "The driver to innovative browser UI had always been Opera".

These two things are unrelated. I stopped reading after that.

Re: Eight Years of Firefox

#53

Post by TwoBit »

jnazario wrote: post #44

while i applaud firefox for pushing IE off the stranglehold it had on sites (see mjb's comment), i cannot forget the stagnation it endured for a while with its crummy memory performance for long running users. it took a couple of years for someone to acknowledge that yeah, that's a real issue and worth fixing (IIRC it was heap fragmentation, beautifully visualized in a blog post where the author basically said "holy…

I think that during that time period they were so focused on other things that the memory problems crept in and didn't get addressed. On the plus side, they now have both the best features and some of the best memory management of browsers.

Re: Eight Years of Firefox

#56

Post by dobro »

TwoBit wrote: post #52
wyuenho wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to discredit Firefox for spearheading our revolt against the IE monopoly, but I think Firefox has sometimes been given too much credit for everything from standard compliance to innovation, and not enough credit to other browsers on the market. First of all, standard compliance. I don't think Firefox 1.0 or its ancestors and subsequent version are all that standard compliant. Yes, for about 1 year in 2004-2005 it…

First you say this: "I don't think Firefox from the day it came out to the present day is all that great in terms of UX." Then you prove that statement by talking about who invented features first and say "The driver to innovative browser UI had always been Opera". These two things are unrelated. I stopped reading after that.

People that "stopped reading" after some point, but still went on to rant about an article, rarely provide any useful insight.

Case in point.

Oh, and "those two things" are not unrelated. His argument is that Firefox never drove UI innovation, and almost all the good things we now take for granted were copied from other browsers (Opera and Chrome). Left to itself, Firefox had (and would continue to have) a subpar UI.

Your point is that being a late adopter of UI goodness doesn't preclude you having a good UI. But "good UI" is relative. If you are a late adopter your UI is always worse than the competition.

Re: Eight Years of Firefox

#57

Post by nkuttler »

I rememer Firefox primarily for being a snappy browser, they got rid of the kitchen sink Netscape/Mozilla suite bloat. Sadly Firefox is now far behind in regard to performance compared to webkit-based browsers, for which the XUL/Toolkit, the feature creep and the legacy support are probably responsable.

Using Firefox nowadays just feels too slow, even though it's addon ecosystem is unrivaled.

Re: Eight Years of Firefox

#58

Post by jdechko »

fafner wrote: post #11
mmahemoff wrote: post #2

Eight years since 1.0, though its history dates back a lot further. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox

It's actually more than 10 years now. The first binaries of Phoenix were available in September 2002. I don't remember when I exactly switched. But I remember that Mozilla was a huge pile of bloat, Galeon had some internal trouble, and Konqueror/KHTML had problems with several websites (mostly JS stuff IIRC). Firefox is still my favorite browser!

I don't remember which version I started on, but remember a friend showed me one of the Phoenix betas. I had been using Netscape, and then the Mozilla suite, but I was blown away by what I saw. Ever since then, in some form or another I've used firefox.

Re: Eight Years of Firefox

#59

Post by bzbarsky »

wyuenho wrote: post #43
mjb wrote: post #28

I think Firefox has to take a lot of credit for the state of the web today. In the early 2000s, it was usual for sites to be IE-only, or to be horribly broken in any alternative browser. It seems to me that the rise of popularity of Firefox correlated strongly with a drop in these IE-only sites, and I don't think that its unfair to label it as a dominant cause of this drop. Even if Firefox dies completely and leaves…

Not to discredit Firefox for spearheading our revolt against the IE monopoly, but I think Firefox has sometimes been given too much credit for everything from standard compliance to innovation, and not enough credit to other browsers on the market. First of all, standard compliance. I don't think Firefox 1.0 or its ancestors and subsequent version are all that standard compliant. Yes, for about 1 year in 2004-2005 it…

> and continued to be the most standard compliant, fastest > browser on the planet

That really depends on how and what you measure. For example, Gecko's CSS implementation was much more standards-compliant than WebKit's at the time... and continues to be so as of last time people actually measured, with the CSS 2.1 test suite.

But yes, WebKit does have better marketing there.

Re: Eight Years of Firefox

#60

Post by cpeterso »

navid_dichols wrote: post #17

Firebox's firebug addon makes it worth the price of admission. Thanks for a great 8 years FF! Side note: if you could add support for base64 pngs embedded with the data uri you could really help me out of a jam...

data: png images work for me in Firefox. You can test your own data: images here:

http://websemantics.co.uk/online_tools/image_to_data_uri_con...

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