Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice
robert.ocallahan.org
robert.ocallahan.org
Firefox rocks my world for all those reasons and more.
Hell, I would use it just for the Tree-Style Tabs addon, which isn't available for Chrome.
But I use Chrome at least as often as Firefox for one reason alone: when everything doesn't go smoothly and a page does crash, it doesn't take the whole browser down with it.
When Firefox hangs and/or crashes, it's much more annoying because everything is interrupted to a greater degree.
Chrome: Oops! This tab crashed, just reload it or close it and move on.
Firefox: Firefox has encountered an error and must be closed. Do you wish to debug?
As someone who spends a third of the day on the web professionally, and always has 10-50 tabs open, it matters.
Thankfully, plugins made it into their own processes a while ago, which has greatly reduced the number of crashes.
That said, per-tab multi-process is coming as part of Electrolysis: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
You can follow along the roadmap here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/Roadmap
It's already available in Nightly builds just disabled by default. If you'd like to try out a Nightly on Windows without messing with your local copy of Firefox, grab a copy of Firefox Portable Nightly and it'll run with it's own separate profile and Firefox install without affecting your local one: http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable/test#...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
I believe you can enable it right now in about:config (browser.tabs.remote), but it's not production-quality yet.
I don't know about today, but a few years back starting up Firefox was painfully slow, and when an update arrived it would first nag you about it and then during restart started checking for extension compatibilies. Even using felt sluggish and was temporarily fixed by running the sqlite vacuum in it db.
Chrome for whatever reason had none these issues, and it felt even slightly nicer to use, with usability enhancements all around like more fluid animations in tab moving, and all settings on a nicely laid out web view instead of a tiny modeless window with 10 tabs.
I really hope Firefox can not just catch up, but go past Chrome. Unfortunately the last time I tried it not too long ago, it didn't start but instead wanted to show that it is checking for extension compatibilies. Didn't exactly fill me with excitement.
http://secunia.com/vulnerability-review/browser_security.htm...
On my x86_64 linux system, Firefox is marginally faster at Mozilla's Kraken benchmark (a few %), and Chrome is much faster at Google's Octane benchmark (30+%).
There's a reason why I keep going back to Chrome after trying each version of Firefox for a week or two, and it's all related to basic user experience: performance and stability.
Use whatever browser you like best.
The author is Robert O'Callahan, who is a Distinguished Engineer at Mozilla and a 15-year veteran of browser development. He's not just some random blogger spouting off.
You've simply pulled out a variation on the old "correlation does not imply causation" retort.
To be clear, I am not accusing him of dishonesty, but I don't trust him to be impartial. People have a tendency to overvalue the thing they are working on.
https://i.imgur.com/2QlIZwo.png
It also enabled address bar autocomplete, which I did not previously have enabled.
The previous update, Firefox 29, came with Australis, which left me with a completely unusable configuration and required me to fiddle with yet another "classic restorer" style addon. I now use:
* "Classic theme restorer" to gut Australis
* "oldbar" to get rid of the AwesomeBar
* "Old default image style" to restore the old style for displaying raw images.
* "Switch to tab no more" to cut off yet another head of the hydra that is AwesomeBar
* "Undo close tab replacement" to restore the Recently closed tabs menu.
But what can I do? I obviously need security updates and the latest support for web standards, so I can't ignore new versions. But I'm tired of fighting a browser that I no longer recognize.
Second, both projects have been in active development for years so I'd imagine their userbases are substantial. Pentadactyl has about 20k downloads for release 1.0 alone, probably closer to 100k for all versions. Certainly not the majority of FF users but hardly ignorable either.
Australis was in the pipeline for a long time, and all work was done in the open. It's one of the reasons there was such a huge fuss made about it.
Addon/extension authors had plenty of warnings and opportunities to make sure that their code didn't break.
Recently I started using Chromium off and on because FF just seems to be so damn slow if I have more than four tabs open. Reddit + RES is so slow that it's completely unusable. I'm talking a several second delay between each keystroke and the character appearing in the input boxes.
Also, FF's sync is quite a pain to set up, especially if you don't have another device with you.
I fear the recent UI changes may have been the last nail in the coffin for me. I had a very nice setup using pentadactyl with some select add-on icons on the statusline. Now, that isn't possible. I have to choose between a superfluous navigation bar or no icons.
This was fixed in Firefox 29. More info at https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefo...
I'm waiting for a complete "Sane" plugin in Firefox that has all the modifications you mentioned rolled into one.
> With the latest update, for some reason my address bar is gigantic
For some reason? What would you expect if you have UI-altering addons installed (Classic theme restorer and oldbar), which might or might not work correctly under the most recent version of the broswer?
Someone in the comments worries that recent firefox versions are not entirely compatible with pentadactyl. But they are forced into enabling the awesomebar (which, admittedly, is useless when using 5dactyl) only because 5dactyl doesn't restore addon icons on browser restart, which is a bug in the addon, not firefox (sorry if I misunderstood the issue, but that's the way it looked to me).
If you are using some UI altering addon (which I understand the need to and also do), you should be aware this kind of behavior can happen, and that it is not entirely the browser's fault.
> 2. Location bar is too big. (Only in Firefox 31 and newer.)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-2-the...
Looking at the version history of the theme, it looks like the author has been heroically trying to shield users from changes. I'd be pretty annoyed if I had written some addon in the distant past and were forced to make fixes because the Firefox devs broke something that should have been stable 20 versions ago. Firefox's main selling point (in my opinion) is its vast library of high-quality addons and themes. They should be doing everything possible to preserve backward-compatibility, not breaking large swaths of their library.
That said, he's right... `sudo apt-get install firefox`.
Ex: Popup blocking required modification to the browser before it became a vital core feature.
I sympathize with the general sentiment of the article, but this is just hyperbole. I used Firefox when it was the best browser (for me), and I'm using Chrome now because it's the best browser.
It's an analogy, and hence imperfect, but might still be useful.
Chrome is not a superficially better browser—as a web developer I can attest that Chrome beats out Firefox in myriad ways. Candy has no value other than flavor, and is actually bad for you. The advent of Google's release of Chrome (and the collaboration between Google and Apple engineers on WebKit) has launched the web forward at a speed that Firefox has been struggling to keep up with. That INCLUDES security and openness, not just new prefixed CSS properties.
The browser war was Firefox's to lose, and they dropped the ball. They weren't ready for Chrome, and have yet to catch up.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing
aren't most biggish free(and open source) software projects in GSOC? https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/list/public/google/g... Should we stop using/trusting anything that get resources from Google, ever?
"Yeah. I use GMail too. Fortunately, switching browsers is easier than switching hosted services ... for now ... and I think it also has more impact."
Obviously there are a few issues with the argument, but I think it brings up an important point.. and demands that the anti-Chrome/pro-Firefox argument matures a bit more.
I'd guess about half of my searches go like this:
* type into URL bar * get Bing result * after a quick glance: decide that result is useless * copy/paste into Google
I'd love to use Bing almost exclusively (especially since I'm really happy with my Lumia 630), but it is really frustrating sometimes.
"Employee of company A praises company B (from which company A gets most of their revenue)" is not a noteworthy story. But change "praises" to "criticizes" and it's entirely different.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
I have also been gravely concerned, as the author is, by what I see at Google. Five years ago, had there been Google offices in Melbourne, I would have enjoyed working for them. In the three years since then I steadily became opposed to Google and I do not believe that I would be willing to be employed by them; they are now pushing the Chrome brand far too far, using a very significant marketing budget on it purely to get people to use it, and from their other web properties pushing Chrome constantly, almost always to my mind deceptively and far too often outright lying. Telling people to upgrade from IE6 was entirely understandable, and I could even forgive that they will push their own browser rather than merely pushing for a newer browser of whichever brand. But if I’m using Firefox, why would you go pestering me to “upgrade” to this browser with claims of its being faster which are simply not true? Four years ago they were true, to be sure; Firefox was slower than Chrome. But that has long since been fixed and the two are competitive now, Chrome winning in some areas, Firefox winning in others. (Of course, I believe Firefox to be winning in more, but that can immediately be discounted as a biased and unreasoned view.)
I look at what punishment Microsoft got for its anticompetitive behaviour and I wonder how long it can be before Google is dealt with. Because as it is, they’re just as great a threat as Microsoft ever was to the web, if not greater.
Google looks fair and feels foul.
That's a good point. The article says that Google is "writing contracts with Android OEMs forcing them to make Chrome the default browser". When Microsoft was doing that a while back with Internet Explorer, they were sued by the government and forced to unbundle IE from Windows.
If he was to port that to chrome, I would be gone in a heartbeat. Chrome is (from my experiences browsing the web with both browsers), a better browser in almost every sense of the word. Faster updates, Feels much faster browsing and overall just a more enjoyable user experience.
If firefox wants to stay relevant, they will have a real battle on their hands.
This latest design update firefox did is especially infuriating. The steps firefox was making me take to revert my experience to what I knew was insulting. I understand you want me to use this new interface, but you are going to hardcode it so much that I have to read a 3 page doc and install random addons to revert it? This mentality seems to plague mozilla. A bunch of FOSS guys get to decide what the rest of end up with every release.
I'd really love to see FF do something really smart with certificate management. E.g. like Certificate Patrol but more advanced. That would be a major security improvement over what's out there.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notscripts/odjhifo...
I also don't understand why you claim that Chrome has faster updates, since both browsers have a 6 weeks update cycle.
Instead of using baseless FUD to try and win people over to your browser, work on making it the best from a usability and performance standpoint so people move over to it naturally. That's what Chrome did to me when it came out and what keeps me using it today.
The article does not lay out a watertight argument, but I see what it is trying to say: pay attention to more than just the obvious features of a browser -- also pay attention to its implications in the market.
Smart people realize that it is not in your self-interest to simply buy the best (cheapest or fastest) product or service, if defined narrowly. If you care about reliability, longevity, and service, sometimes you pay more or accept some idiosyncrasies, because your goal is to support an organization that behaves in a way that you like.
It is naive to think that "choosing the best browser" is simply a matter of the browser itself. There is a bigger story, and if you don't at least recognize this, it might be time to take the blinders off.
"Chrome will be shipping Shadow DOM publicly (in conjunction with Moz) in the very near future. Whatever API gets shipped will be frozen almost immediately. If you want to suggest name changes, as we brainstormed a bit at the f2f, do so RIGHT NOW or forever hold your peace."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Feb/0103.h...
That's not the Web I want.
FWIW, I've started self-hosting as much as possible of my 'critical' items, be it at home, or on a VPS. You don't need vast amounts of bandwidth, and it's become much easier to setup over time (OpenVPN, OwnCloud, gitlab, or even just using a NAS with such features).
Items that you want to share are a slightly different matter (size, bandwidth, server security, etc), but in general I dislike putting my entire life on social media anyway.
> And he affected my framing of the problem deeply – I remember one day a couple of years back when we were talking about some market share point, thinking about how incredibly, insanely competitive the browser technology landscape was – and he said to me: “Look, this is the world we wanted. And this is the world we made.” Wow. Exactly right. He taught me so much about how enormous an impact a group of dedicated people can make.
Anyone have a good solution to bookmarks? This would be for Debian.
For me, right now, it's Chrome. Before Chrome it was Opera. Mozilla needs to focus on providing better value in their browser rather the current releases which seem to always contain odd half-assed features.
You think Microsoft would hesitate cutting a Bing deal?
Keep in mind that whatever the bug is, it's probably only trivial to reproduce for you. If it truly was globally easy to reproduce, it would send the crash stats (https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox) through the roof.
Having said that, it's not good when crashes make your Firefox installation unusable. Firefox has a feature called about:crashes that will provide you with the URLs of your crash reports. Have you considered going to http://support.mozilla.org and reporting this?
It remains to be seen, and likely forever will, whether large corporations suffer from some unavoidable, fundamental flaw that prohibits them from innovating. As a casual observer, it seems to me that Google is very aware there is a risk of that, and its executives consistently make moves to mitigate it. They silo small innovation labs like Google X within the company, they fund "moonshots," and they acquire as many innovative small teams as they can. They do all of that with more resources at their disposal than almost any other company in the world. So it stands to reason that if Google is consciously aware of the risk of innovation slowdown ("turning into Microsoft"), and actively throwing more money at avoiding the problem than any other company on the planet, that they have a far better chance of continued innovation than "the underdog."
A comparison I think is valid is if an
- Your communications (Gmail, Hangouts, Voice)
- Your working data (Drive, Docs)
- Your footprint on the Web (Google Analytics, Ads)
- Your footprint on the Internet (Fiber, Loon)
- Your browser (Chrome)
- Your operating system (ChromeOS, Android, GlassOS)
- Your device (Chromebooks, Glass, Wear, Android phones and tablets)
- Your movements and travel (Maps, Ingress, ITA)
- Your robotic overlords (Boston Dynamics)
Not to mention the upcoming plays for home integration (Nest, Thread), your means of transportation (Android Auto, self-driving cars), and your activity and health data (Fit).
Each vertical success reinforces the Google Platform, and lends momentum to Google's efforts in other verticals. It presents one hell of a barrier for start-ups (unless you fancy share-cropping), decreases consumer choice, and ultimately, that amount of consolidated power just doesn't seem healthy for a functioning market or society.
Edit: All of that, and I somehow forgot YouTube. And G+. But we all forgot G+, right?
And yet, somehow we aren't all living in a Microsoftian dystopia.
Things may have looked very different had they continued the heavy development pace after releasing IE6. IE had a fast and modern engine compared to contemporaries when IE6 was first released, but then it went five years without any major updates.
I'm undecided about Google's growing browser control, but in any case I don't see Google making the same mistakes as Microsoft.
1) Build a better browser than Chrome, and 2) Come up with a way to generate revenue that doesn't depend on Google's benevolence towards Firefox.
Are non Christians suppose to be offended ? Will I be able to ignore the fact that he may be a pro-lifer supporting attacks on abortion clinics? A tea-bagger...
Find it tasteless to present oneself this way, and it seems it's only Anglo-Saxon Christians who choose to do so. As if they're a persecuted minority coming out of the closet.
Did anyone ever see non Christians introducing themselves on their blog by their religion or belive system? Jon Doe, atheist? Jane Doe, Muslim?
(Remember folks, don't down-vote just because you disagree! Sorry if it offends your sensibilities :)