RIP Firefox | Hacker News Reader

RIP Firefox

4 pointsDanielGeisler16 comments

After being a fanatical Netscape/Firefox user for 15 years I was forced to switch to Chrome due to Mozzilla's absolute incompetence. For half a year Firefox has been continually bringing my computer to a halt through utilizing all my CPU and RAM resources. So I finally installed Chrome. As a software engineer and a web developer I thought I would extend Mozilla the courtesy of explaining the departure of a loyal customer. So I went to Mozilla's comment page, but was unable to to leave a comment because I wasn't running the current version of Firefox. So I fired up Firefox and returned to the page and selected the option to express I was unhappy with Firefox, but they only had a 120 character limit to the message. I couldn't submit the message I wrote. I was outraged!!! I went to their Facebook page but it only allows you to "like" Firefox and doesn't allow the posting of messages. I have uninstalled Firefox from my computer. Mozzilla has dug a hole, jumped in and pulled the hole in behind them. And the hole is their grave. RIP Firefox!

Let me add that the straw that broke the camels back was not my frustration with how Firefox itself ran, but Mozilla's appearance of a trying to radically limit customer input! As a software developer I know things can go wrong, but you always insure that the lines of communication are open. The attempt to limit communicate when things are not going well is tantamount to committing product suicide!

According to a message of a Mozilla member they are awashed with feedback, so it may be a way to try to force people to distill their message instead of sending huge and redundant WOTs. Remember Pascal's "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

If you feel the need to send something larger, there is still the mailing lists, newsgroups, IRC and of course, just posting it elsewhere and sending a link.

The accepted message length is less than the limit for Twitter. Small is good. Microscopic, not so much. I figured I would just let my message find its own way back to Mozilla from here.

Funny, I just switched back to Firefox for development due to the prevalence of tab crashes in Chrome.

Yup. Me too. I'm tired of Chrome's flakiness and process per tab as well as process per plugin. Back to FireFox as default browser.

I'm confused as to why it matters if there's a different process for each plugin/tab. Care to elaborate? Also, what flakiness have you experienced?

Process-per-tab is supposed to cut down on single tabs taking down the whole browser, but in Chrome's case it just means that Flash will crash daily requiring you to reboot/reload tabs you didn't even know were running Flash. That is, process-per-tab falls down a bit when the thing that crashes is running in multiple tabs anyway.

Thanks, this could be a valid issue, but so far my CPU and ARM utilization seem to be much less than using Firefox. Well, time will tell.

That may be the case, and to be sure I switched to Chrome in the first place due to the lag in having an 800M Firefox process stinking up the joint, so for now my conclusion is that they both suck in subtly different ways, behave identically 80% of the time, and the remainder I'll just bat back and forth with my default browser setting.

Were there any addon's installed ?

What's Mozilla's comment page?

http://www.mozilla.org/contact/

> I wasn't running the current version of Firefox

Well here's your problem.

Let me guess: had he by any chance installed a metric buttload of extensions? And then not tried creating a new profile in order to isolate whatever was soaking up the CPU cycles? Because that's usually the cause of Firefox performance problems ...

Actually the frequent updates to Firefox break the compatibility of so many extensions that it is rather difficult to run a buttload of extensions.

I had been running the current version of Firefox until an hour before I visited the site running Chrome. Bad assumption from using one piece of information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com