I use (actually use) about 35 plug-ins, around 50 user styles, and a few Greasemonkey scripts. Until Chrome gets all those, no way I can use Chrome. I've customized my Firefox experience so much, most people can't even recognize it. No way I can do that on Chrome. And in Linux, I run Firefox totally in a ramdisk, so it's ridiculously fast: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1120475
+1 for that link. I've also got tons of add-ons, and that just made my Firefox 3.5b4 run even faster than it already does.
I must admit that I've stopped using firefox completely since I got hooked on Chrome, but I was never a big plugin user. I wouldn't go so far as to say firefox was dead as a result though. The oddest thing is that I don't miss having an ad blocker in chrome, and I have no idea why! Maybe I've just gotten used to seeing ads again, or maybe Chrome blocks popups better than firefox did back before I got the adblock plugin.
Firefox has become the thing it was created to replace, a beast of a browser that seemingly sucks up resources from nearby computers just to open a new window.
Also, the term "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark.
[edit: that said, as much as I like Safari 4 and Chrome, I find it very hard to live without Firebug and the Web Developer extension when it comes to building websites (though the webkit inspector is getting closer with each release)]
I must admit that I've stopped using firefox completely since I got hooked on Chrome, but I was never a big plugin user. I wouldn't go so far as to say firefox was dead as a result though. The oddest thing is that I don't miss having an ad blocker in chrome, and I have no idea why! Maybe I've just gotten used to seeing ads again, or maybe Chrome blocks popups better than firefox did back before I got the adblock plug…
I stopped using Firefox as my main browser when I got a mac a little under 4 years ago, and started using Safari. I was using adblock prior to that switch, and while I don't have any ad blocking now, except for the fact that pop-ups are blocked, I am barely ever bothered by an ad. I'm fairly convinced that ad obtrusiveness has gone down in general over the past few years. There are some exceptions (I'm looking at you, weather.com), but in general people seem to have realized that they had to tone down the ads if they wanted people to see them at all.
I just know I never used Firefox again after Safari 4 Beta...
Using same here. Main UI criticism of S4b is the placement of the tabs on top of the window, which has overloaded their usage semantics. In any event, I switched to safari when Firefox 3 something kept crashing on me. Switched to safari and haven't looked back.
This guy sums up my sentiments on the issue quite nicely. Firefox just can't hang anymore in the presence of Chrome, and Safari (and arguably even IE). I dig plugins as much as the next guy, but it's not enough to make me open Firefox for anything more than testing these days.
Tough room.
For what it's worth, it's generally considered polite here to respond to things you disagree with in comments rather than downvoting them. Downvotes are reserved for things that detract from the discussion such as personal attacks and spam.
That said, it's surprising to find so much disagreement and denial to a common sentiment like this. I used to like Firefox a lot. Then it didn't substantially improve itself for 4 years. Then it added an inch of toolbars to the top of itself. And it started taking 10 seconds to load up (often announcing that it needed to close again so that it could update something.)
Then somebody else came out with a browser that pointed those things out, and it felt like a breath of fresh air. It just seems to me (and the author of this item) like Firefox has lost its way a bit.
I love that bar, I don't even need to bookmark pages I visit a lot any more. All I need to do is type, say, "yc" and up pops this site. "tv" will show me tonight's TV listings. "gu" brings up the Guardian. If I wanted to come back to this story, "yc firefox" would most likely bring me here and to any other HN stories I'd read with Firefox in the title. And so on. I didn't really like it when it was first brought in (…
Out of all the reasons a person could dislike Firefox 3, I never understood why this one is so important.
Because it reduces predictability at first. It used to be that I could predict what site would be at the top when I typed even a single letter, so I could triple-click, hit a letter, down-arrow, enter, and not have to actually parse what the dropdown list says. Safari (on my Mac, anyway) still has this property, except without the down-arrow, so it's even faster. With the "ultra-cool bar" or whatever it's called, I have to pay attention each and every time, which slows my browsing to the eight or ten sites I actually visit most, but which I don't bother to bookmark because I know exactly where they are.
I still can't get used to the "stupid" URL bar (I'd call it too smart for my liking). It's a pity it is a pervasive trend amongst modern browsers. I have a copy of Opera 9.27 that doesn't yet have it, it's a pity it cannot render more and more sites properly. Can I switch to the classic URL bar?
You can switch off the feature in the settings, afaik.