Scripting News: Where I'm at with Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Scripting News: Where I'm at with Firefox

scripting.com

13 pointsapievangelist15 comments

What was called from x.y to x.y+1 is now x to x+1. Did Mozilla continue support for 3.5 for long after the 3.6 release? I don't see what the fuss is unless you're equating version numbers to progress, which is the wrong thing to do.

That said, they could throw a bone to enterprise and so on by copying the idea of Long Term Support versions for those IT departments that are more used to meaningful version numbers.

At first I thought this article was a parody of the enterprise browser upgrade rationale.

But then I realised it was serious. How can someone who works with web technology not realise the downsides not upgrading browsers causes? I mean, IE6...

I try every new firefox release for at least a week, and to be honest I haven't seen an advantage of using it since chrome came out.

It is just way too slow[1], it may have better extensions better adblocking and a regular ui but it just can't compete.

[1] Slow in both snappiness and perceived rendering compared to chrome, firefox also still likes to crash or freeze on me which rarely happens with chrome even though I run the dev channel.

I haven't had a crash yet in FF5 or 4 (flash crashed several times but did not bring down the browser). Also, I notice about 0 rendering delay.

Are you using linux, linux seems like a secondhand citizen with regards to firefox and that is where I see all my problems.

I don't know if crashing is the right word but it does become completely unresponsive often enough that it is noticeable and annoying. (Unresponsive as in it has to be killed to regain functionality.)

Ubuntu, yes.

What about "terminal unresponsiveness" in which the browser stay very unresponsive until you shut it down?

Not that either. Sorry for the short response, but I think that answers your question. It works great! You should try it :)

I've been using it -- on Linux and on OS X. I'm guessing that if I got more RAM, the "terminal unresponsiveness" would mostly go away. I've got only a gig in my old Macbook.

I don't think I've seen that in Firefox since they shunted Flash into a different process, which was a couple of years ago.

Many people actually like to blame Firefox for imaginary problems since it's not the new kid on the block anymore.

Likewise, IE9 ain't bad.

This explains that ;-)

My favorite complaint is that firefox has become slower and more bloated over time.

I'd like to see such folk browse today's web with the original version of FF... :) The average webpage today is way more complicated than 10 years ago.

Interesting discussion, but why is there a picture of Joe Montana on Winer's post?

>I think Google is a troubled company and very large and very rich, and likely to use their browser in power plays against their competitors, with little regard for users.

I like to look for the best in Google, but I found this baseless assertion... to be rather baseless, especially given (my perception) of the quality of Chrome and what it has done for the web in the last two short years.

As a Chrome-convert, I enjoy watching people stray away from Firefox 3.6.x only to go sprinting back when they're an inch out of their comfort zone. If all you know is FF4, 5 and Aurora... I can see why auto-updating, cutting-edge would be terrifying. Author, I invite you, download Chrome, get on the Dev channel. You'll never have an extension that breaks, no modal dialog boxes on every boot checking compatibility. Fast-updating doesn't have to mean unstable... but I certainly understand why you feel that way.

Mozilla is in the process of converting to a nimbler and lighter development and release cycle. They're not very good at it so far, in my opinion (I'm also a jaded Linux user, though).

Unfortunately you do sound like a Chrome dev or promoter.

Chrome's way ain't bad. Firefox way ain't bad, and it's their first iteration of their new development and release strategy.

Firefox's extension incompatibility comes from something that is important to understand:

Firefox can be 100.00% modified using extensions, including the start-up mechanism, everything. Chrome cannot do that. Most Firefox extensions are written that way, mostly because of Firefox's history (extensions were only doable that way for a long time). The drawback is such control require browser restart and compatibility check and there is NO possible way around that.

Firefox also supports on-the-fly extensions which do not require restart or anything like that - like Chrome. However, like Chrome they also allow lesser control and thus these are not very widely used, at least, yet.

Firefox nighties, Aurora, and beta are also far from unstable. It's rare for nighties to ever break, and I've been using them for a decade. It never happened to any other channel.

In fact, that's one strong point of Firefox vs Chrome. Chrome is not actually very stable. It usually doesn't matter too much as tabs are per process and can be easily reloaded or reopened when Chrome crashes so I find it mostly ok. But the bottom line is that Chrome annoys me by crashing every now and then. Firefox nearly NEVER crashes (once a year?).

I would however agree that Firefox is a lot faster and slicker on Windows than any other platform, that said, it's not so bad on OSX and Linux. In comparison Chrome is mostly identically good on these 3 platforms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com