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Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

jasonlefkowitz.net

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Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#131

Post by azakai »

aphyr wrote: post #120
azakai wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. Assuming not, then since Firefox's development is done in the open, I assume you have some evidence for this - meeting notes or such that show that? Or some other evidence? The evidence to the contr…

Not trolling, but perhaps I was unclear. First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010, and it's clear the FF team has moved to improve performance since then. Perhaps my impressions from that time frame are no longer valid, but the issues I checked in Bugzilla while writing my post seemed largely unresolved. I said "gestalt" to critici…

> First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010

Oh, ok. The last year was a big year for FF performance: There have been huge gains in speed and reductions in memory usage. FF4 began that, and FF7, 8 and 9 take it even further.

Given that you are talking about the time period before that, I can understand more where you are coming from - performance was a lesser priority then compared to other features. Thanks for clarifying that.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#132

Post by alanh »

Since we’re on the topic of longstanding Firefox issues: Add support for `display: run-in` already. You are the ONLY browser not to support it. http://www.quirksmode.org/css/display.html

Last I brought this up, I was told:

1. that it wasn’t completely defined, and some edge cases can arise

2. that it 'wasn't necessary' as you could 'solve' the problem by adding more (wrapping) markup

3. that `run-in` was going to be dropped from CSS2.1.

None of this is very valid.

1. So do what the other browsers do, and/or when you encounter a weird edge case, fall back to `display: block` (as suggested by the spec).

2. Adding more markup (A) because one browser is being pissy (B) goes against the fundamental philosophies of both CSS (A) and web standards (B). Clearly!

3. It’s only being dropped from the spec because they can finalize the spec if it is 100% implemented by 100% of the major browsers. So this is circular reasoning caused by your ten-year rolling decision to ignore `run-in`.

Run-in is a very useful concept (I’m always tempted to use it on /about.html). Please, reconsider.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#133

Post by alanh »

aphyr wrote: post #120
azakai wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. Assuming not, then since Firefox's development is done in the open, I assume you have some evidence for this - meeting notes or such that show that? Or some other evidence? The evidence to the contr…

Not trolling, but perhaps I was unclear. First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010, and it's clear the FF team has moved to improve performance since then. Perhaps my impressions from that time frame are no longer valid, but the issues I checked in Bugzilla while writing my post seemed largely unresolved. I said "gestalt" to critici…

They now fire `load` events on stylesheet loads? Awesome! Shameful it’s been that way for so long. I’ve seen terrible work-arounds like always just firing a faux-load event 100ms after the stylesheet was added to the page, in the wild.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#134

Post by acqq »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #47

Now that AdBlock Plus is fully functional in Chrome/Chromium, we've been moving all of our clients -- a few hundred individuals and businesses -- off of Firefox. So far, everybody's been a lot happier with that. Firefox is terrible . It's embarrassing. And, I've completely lost interest in arguing over it anymore. The responses from Mozilla, Asa especially, have either been, "We don't think that's a problem", or some…

I switched from FF to Opera a few years ago and I'm still happy. FF really behaves bad, even on fast computers -- my girlfriend uses it and I've seen locks described in the OP. I use Opera on the Windows computer from 2002 and on my Linux Core 2 computer and it's very responsive on both.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#135

Post by codecaine »

DrCatbox wrote: post #87
bad_user wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is terrible. It's embarrassing. I do have Firefox occasionally choking, which annoys me as hell, but I'm on Firefox 8. I do get frustrated, but criticizing a software package that you get for freaking free, especially one that you ow so much to, with such a harsh tone really is unwarranted. And it really is free in a not-for-profit way. The Awesome bar that the article mentions really saves you from making us…

Chrome is a product that treats its users like idiots. Many, many products do that these days.

which is actually a good thing

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#136

Post by Osmose »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #121
TheSOB88 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I don't notice much bad with FF, so I don't know what I'm missing. What am I missing? What makes FF terrible and Chrome goodly?

It's not so much that Chrome is great, as that it doesn't seem to have the faults that Firefox does. - The "hanging" issue: I literally just replaced a laptop because of this one. On my older laptop, Firefox became unusable, and got worse with each version, not better. I didn't have very many tabs open (~10?), and after about 6 hours or so, hovering the pointer over a link would give me the rainbow pinwheel, clicking…

Not to ignore your other points, but there is now a proposal being worked on for having an extended support edition for business deployments:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:...

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#137

Post by Joakal »

burgerbrain wrote: post #75
gcp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, at each release, it seems the focuses on UI changes are the more important... I've seen almost no UI changes in Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. All the change-logs were basically backend optimizations.

"I've seen almost no UI changes in Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9." So.. in the past 2 weeks? Seriously, that absurd numbering scheme needs to stop too.

Chrome's doing it too. Just ignore the versioning.

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#138

Post by frossie »

asadotzler wrote: post #54

Jason, we’ve been working on this. There were some big performance improvements in Firefox 6 and 7 and we’ve got a big hang fix that’s just about to hit in Firefox 8. Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?

I suffer quite a lot from Firefox performance issues since I need to run two instances on one machine, and Firefox 7 fixed ALL my hanging/swapping issues. Great job on that and I definitely urge everybody to upgrade.

While I'm here I'll add my usual "Dump Firefox? You can pry Tree Style Tab out of my cold dead hands" comment.

That said, I have also experienced the "we are not doing it cause we don't like it no matter how insanely useful it is to corporate users" attitude, eg. the perennial refusal to add overstrike:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38415

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#139

Post by philwelch »

diolpah wrote: post #122
philwelch wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more of a guideline aimed at people who aren't assholes in person.

Brilliant judgement you've made of someone you don't know. I'm sure this particular instance of incivility will garner you plenty of upvotes, however.

I'm just taking what you said at face value. If you come on HN, act like an asshole, and go on to say you'd behave the same in person, then the inference is pretty obvious, isn't it?

Re: Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

#140

Post by jlarocco »

nitrogen wrote: post #115
tytso wrote: post #70

The fundamental problem with Mozilla is that it is trying to do database queries in its UI loop, and it wants every single piece of state safely on disk after every single click. This results in a huge amount of disk space to get written to disk as you visit every single click. Now I don't know about you, but if my computer crashes, do I really care if everything up to the last click is safely on disk? I wouldn't car…

And if that means losing some history on a crash, is the fact that a user has visited one web site, but not another, really that important? Yes, it is. Imagine you're typing a long comment, you've copied it into the clipboard just to be safe, and just before you submit, your OS crashes or you lose power. Or, imagine you're looking for reference information on an obscure API, and you've finally found a useful page aft…

That seems pretty far fetched.

How often has that actually happened to you? I can honestly say that in 15 years of web browsing I've never had either of those problems, and don't know anybody who has.

Seems silly to significantly slow everything down for everybody because of a one in a trillion chance somebody will lose power at an inconvenient time.

And hey, maybe if the browser were faster, you'd have time to submit the comment or bookmark the page before the power goes out...

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