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Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

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Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#81

Post by cheeaun »

Here's what I think Mozilla/Firefox should have done before starting the rapid release cycle:

1. Migrate all extensions to restartless/JetPack. Extensions for Firefox are very powerful but may sometimes break when new versions are released, which then the compatibility check feature is introduced to "solve" this. Before the rapid release cycle, I've already seen some users reluctant to update and would wait for extensions to be updated first before updating to new version of Firefox. So now with this cycle, it just annoys them further. If all extensions were done in a more standard (and simpler) extension API first, this would have reduce the impact on the upgrading process. Users don't have to worry so much if the extensions that they depend on, would break.

2. Remove 3rd-party themes and embrace the 'Personas' (simpler themes/skins). Or at least improve theme development into something more standardized like JetPack. Since the Mozilla days, theme development hasn't change much. Extensions have JetPack, but themes have nothing (Personas is entirely a different thing). The case with themes is exactly the same as extensions. I know some users wouldn't upgrade to Firefox because the theme is not updated yet. I'm not sure if anyone still install custom Firefox themes, but themes played a decent role in attracting users (from IE?) in the early days.

3. Implement Electrolysis (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). From my observation, the real problem with Firefox is not the memory usage but its slowness. When users notice that the browser is getting slower (slow startup, slow tab-switching, slow UI response), they probably look at the number of tabs, try to find out the problem and saw that huge GBs of memory used. Firefox is now better at memory management, but the problem is still there. I'm not 100% sure about the implementation details; I'm thinking that if Firefox has Chrome-like multi-process architecture, the interface would be more responsive and memory management would be even better.

So, after this, implement rapid release cycle, enabled by default for new users/installs and prompt existing users to optionally opt in. Make the update process unobtrusive and it would be a win-win situation for everyone.

(I created one of the first 3rd-party themes for Firefox, since the Phoenix days.)

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#82

Post by streptomycin »

smsm42 wrote: post #79
dangoor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests…

Progress is nice, but unfortunately as a user I don't care too much about progress if the bottom line is the same. Sorry to sound disdainful about your efforts, and I know how hard it is, and I have greatest respect for the efforts of Firefox developers, but the bottom line is - it is (was, last time I checked) still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve, and still becomes unusable after mere days of work. And even admira…

> still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve

It leaks a lot when it's using a tiny amount of memory, and it leaks hardly at all when it's using a large amount of memory?

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#84

Post by thristian »

smsm42 wrote: post #79
dangoor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests…

Progress is nice, but unfortunately as a user I don't care too much about progress if the bottom line is the same. Sorry to sound disdainful about your efforts, and I know how hard it is, and I have greatest respect for the efforts of Firefox developers, but the bottom line is - it is (was, last time I checked) still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve, and still becomes unusable after mere days of work. And even admira…

To counter your anecdote with another, different anecdote with more numbers in it, back in the days of Firefox 4 and subsequent versions, it would not be unusual for my Firefox to hit 500MB to 1GB of RAM usage after a day of browsing. Right now, my Firefox 15 has been running for a day, and about:memory says the total is 363.26MB. Firefox has slimmed down a lot in the past year.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#85

Post by morsch »

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…

I'm not sure most users would move to the new product. Most people stick to the software they use. That might be because they don't want to learn a different interface. But I think, fundamentally, many people don't even want to deal with the existence of alternatives, they're blissfully ignorant of choice and of weighing up- and downsides[1]). I'm the same way with laundry detergent. That's a fickle kind of loyalty, though.

So, if that's true and people stuck with Firefox, you'd have to maintain Firefox between the snapshot releases of Frequentfox. You'd have to push an update at least every time you fix a security issue, which can be pretty often. So you'd still need to figure out a good user experience for dealing with frequent updates. Fortunately, that's a solved problem, and the user doesn't even need to notice you've updated their software.

Of course as you add features and modify/improve the user interface in Frequentfox, your Firefox snapshots will be different enough that you'd still end up alienating users, so you can't go crazy developing Frequentfox, either.

I'm voting for frequent push updates, transparent if they don't change anything significant, and with a gentle introduction to the changes if they do. Big changes should be rare, maybe explain the motivation behind them to the user, and ideally make them option. Despite all the rage, I think the user interface changes from Firefox 3 to trunk weren't all that jarring; significant tweaks more than fundamental reworkings of the UI, the awesome bar is a great example.

[1] Edit: I think this is what you call a "second-order decision", a term I just learned, e.g. http://thinking-marketing.blogspot.de/2009/11/second-order-d...

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#86

Post by [deleted] »

ascendant wrote: post #54
dangoor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests…

Sadly though now users have had years of poor memory management burned into their memories. Regardless of if it was FF or the addons, it's associated with FF now and will take time to shed.

[deleted]

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#87

Post by benthumb »

I guess I'm in the minority in that I liked the updates: it was like getting a suprise gift ... but the incompatibility w/ the latest version of flash has forced me, unfortunately, to move on.

It's not even necessarily Mozilla's fault, but my other browers don't have this issue. I'm trying out Opera for the umpteenth time ... it always eventually disappoints, but I'm going to give it another go.

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#88

Post by uxp »

breadbox wrote: post #7
Geee wrote: post #4

The problem isn't about 'rapid release cycles', but about the UX design of the update process. Even before the rapid release cycles, Firefox would check for add-on updates every time it was started. Chrome's update mechanism is completely seamless and invisible and requires zero user attention.

Which, ironically, is almost as bad, when you suddenly realize that you basically let Chrome change the UI, and there's no way to return to the UI you once knew.

Except that Chrome has never really changed it's UI. The presentation at the end of Google's 2012 IO Day 2 keynote actually timelapses through the UI. The only change is the removal of the home button outside of general micro-tweaks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPtJd6AzU8c&feature=playe...

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#89

Post by dbaupp »

tedunangst wrote: post #76
dangoor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Firefox developers care a good deal about memory management. More than Add-on authors unfortunately. We've had a project called MemShrink running for about a year and it has been making steady progress. and that progress has been shipping to users. The current Aurora channel release even has a fix for most add-on bad behavior. Firefox actually stacks up really well in memory usage (even in third party tests…

I would like to believe you, but since every Firefox release is faster than ever and uses less memory, if that were really true Firefox would run on an Atari and be so fast it would literally travel into the future to fetch pages. But that's not the case.

Your assertion is entirely false. Just because something keeps getting larger/faster/smaller doesn't mean it will eventually be arbitrarily large/fast/small. e.g. the sequence 1, 1 + 1/2, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8,... keeps getting bigger and bigger, but it never goes past 2.

(Futhermore, in my personal experience, Firefox has been using less and less memory.)

Re: Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

#90

Post by thristian »

dredmorbius wrote: post #13

A lot of agreement. Some disagreements. Yes, frequent updates, especially those that break plugins, suck massively. Each update is a huge leap of dread into the "well, what's going to break this time" sea. The biggest single fault I've got with Firerfox (running FF13) isn't updates, it's memory usage. It still leaks massively, and pretty much requires a daily restart. State preservation is good enough that this doesn…

the change I'd like to see is one in which a small handful of tabs (I may easily run over 100) are considered "current and active" (foreground, pinned apps), and the rest function more as a stateful bookmark. Which, given that on crash recovery I tend to leave tabs unrefreshed until I actually open them, they largely are.

That's exactly how I use tabs: I've got 77 tabs open right now, grouped into 9 different topic groups in Firefox's "Panorama" mode. Most of them are collections of information about some particular topic or other that I don't need most of the time, but when I next switch back to working on that topic I'd hate to have to find them all again. Almost none of those tabs are currently loaded into memory. In Firefox's preferences, I have "Tabs" → "Don't load tabs until selected" ticked, which means that, well, open background tabs don't load the page in question until I switch to them the first time. I think in an upcoming version of Firefox, that option is ticked by default.

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