Why Firefox Has Jumped the Shark | Hacker News Reader

Why Firefox Has Jumped the Shark

pcworld.com

28 pointsdragonquest45 comments

"the stupid URL bar that explodes into a list of sites whenever I type even a single letter there"

Um, that feature is brilliant, it's the only way I can still handle my bookmarks. Haven't tried Google Chrome, so I don't know if they have come up with a better solution. Have they?

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 (change? no!) but it's grown on me.

i love it too. Another great advantage: you don't have to remember the exact url/domain name, which is getting difficult to spell these days.

All I need to do is type, say, "yc"

Why is this good? I type the letter "n" and news.ycombinator comes up. (I'm on ff 2.0). If I type "yc" I get this:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

It's deterministic, being alphabetic, and superior in every way. I don't want the fricken address bar throwing dice on my input.

The key distinction being the ability to find the URLs that you don't know by fishing for the one piece you do remember, that may (inconveniently) not be until the end of the URL.

An example: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/ which I inevitably reach by typing "big"; this was un-possible with the previous iterations.

Fair point, but if I type "n" I could well end up with news.bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com or any number of other sites I've been looking at. There aren't many sites with the "yc" combination of letters.

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 believe the proper name for it is, in fact, the "awesome bar".

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.

Actually the Opera 9.5 beta and Firefox 3 betas both started using a "Awesome Bar" type feature around the same time. Opera 9.27 was released over a year ago.

That's what I mean. I didn't like "Awesome Bar". I use the latest version of Opera that doesn't use it (and reluctantly use Firefox 3)

I believe Chrome does the same sort of thing, and it includes "Search for..." for the the tokens you have already entered.

Plus, chrome has the added advantage of not hanging when a js/flash intensive app is cranking away. So overall its faster.

Chrome sometimes decides that I have too many tabs open and none of them should render. Just as annoying. :(

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

Your need for plugins, styles, and scripts are the exact reason why the author claims Firefox has jumped the shark. It definitely can't feel 'right' if you need to customize it so much.

It feels 100% right after I am done customizing it. Chrome can never feel right because it's not customizable at all, really. One size does not fit all, and you don't get to tell me what feels right.

Everyone has different needs. Mine are not the same as yours. I used Chrome for several weeks, and it didn't meet my needs at all. With no extensions, I was unable to do 1/10th the things I do in Firefox.

It's not a bad browser, but it's extremely limited. I hope this will change, as I'd like more competition, but Chrome simply doesn't do the things that my extensions in Firefox enable it to do.

Also, some reading up on why FF has the extension model, and that not everyone uses a browser the same way, might be instructive here.

Agreed. I used to have a similar bloated Firefox setup and then switched to Chrome. I just couldn't go back to the Fox, even missing a few features like delicious integration, the feel of the url/search bar is too good.

Same here. I even went to the trouble of building a bookmarklet to handle the only Firefox plugin that I missed (rikaichan - http://www.tokyomuslim.com/2009/04/japanese-english-bookmark...)

+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.

"It just doesn't feel right any more" - this point makes no sense at all, and the worst part is that the whole article is based on this saying.

(I suspect the real meaning is "It is not that brand new shiny toy any more, and Chrome is")

There is a lot to be said of aesthetics, and I must say that Chrome looks and feels much sexier than the default Firefox theme.

But whatever, none of them are much different from each other anyway. Where is the real innovation?

The expression "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark.

Little more than linkbait, and less well argued than a Dvorak piece.

Lots of handwaving, some ad hominem and plenty of condescension. I like Chrome's speed and stability. I really like the idea that if one tab crashes (beyond recovery), the rest will survive. But I still use Firefox and will go on doing so until Chrome gives me two things I need:

1) a set of plugins (add-ons, extensions, whatever) equivalent to the ones I use

2) a way to decide that yes, I want to have a title bar

The feature #2 might seem laughable to most, but it's important to me. What Chrome devs did there, I can only describe as "arrogance". It's okay to decide that the title bar, in your opinion, is a waste of "screen real-estate". It's perfectly natural to ship Chrome with the title bar removed by default. But it's arrogant not to offer an option to turn it back on. Some of us are actually using that "screen real-estate".

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)]

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 dig plugins as much as the next guy, but it's not enough to make me open Firefox...

Then you don't, in fact, dig the plugins as much as THIS next guy. Mind you, it's the only thing that brings me back to FF, but if Chrome supported even just adblock, I'd jump in a second. But the plugins are its killer feature, ^2.

You can kinda get adblock with Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org/). Notice that I said "kinda." :-)

Actually, I'm using that right now. I've used priv in the past so it's not quite so foreign. I'm finding chrome+priv actually usable.

Still waiting for something a bit more "on the fly right click" configurable, for my ADHD moments. =)

Tried the 3.5 beta? It made me switch back from chrome. They fixed the speed and it's got all the plugins :)

I use Firefox at work and Chrome at home. There's no way I could use Chrome for my job, it just doesn't have anywhere near the developer capabilities I need.

But Chrome really is beautiful. And lightning fast. Unfortunately, I regularly bump into things I can't do, like block those god-forsaken flash ads, email a link to the page I'm viewing or Ctrl-Tab to switch back and forth between tabs (as opposed to cycling through all of them), just to name a few. And these things make Chrome not quite "feel right" to me.

Chrome has some things to learn from Firefox, and Firefox has some things to learn from Chrome. And competition is healthy. So I'm sure interesting things are coming.

I like Chrome much better. The only thing that I use Firefox for is Firebug. Other than that, I try to avoid most of the plugins Firefox is famous for anyway. I find that they just make it slower. Maybe 3.5 will change that though.

> Maybe 3.5 will change that though.

Doubtful. The new JS JIT is only turned on for web content, so extensions don't benefit at all.

On the technical side, there's no reason that FireFox should lose out to Chrome, but I think the argument that he is making is that Chrome has a better design, and user experience - an idea he sums into FF not feeling right.

If Chrome add-ons in the future cover the needs for most people, and both are rendering things well, then it may just come down to a design choice for most people.

Personally, I don't care much for google on my personal computer and hope that it doesn't come to be the case. One of the biggest holes in my current set up, is that all of my e-mail goes to Google. I don't trust Google so I consider this a security threat.

I just know I never used Firefox again after Safari 4 Beta...

+1 - At first I was kinda angry because Safari 4 is essentially Google Chrome by apple (at least in terms of user interface). But then I was happy because there isn't a Google Chrome for the Mac.

"Safari 4 is essentially Google Chrome by Apple."

Google Chrome is essentially Webkit by Google.

Webkit is essentially KHTML by Apple.

Why be angry when it's all so circular?

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.

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.

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.

The use of the word 'why' in that title is entirely disingenuous - his whole point is "just because".

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