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Comment by monk_e_boy | Hacker News Reader

Yay! Time for another firefox rant. I love the idea of firefox and I used to love it a lot. But not now. I keep trying it and always go back to chrome.

It crashes. A lot. Like, at least once a day I have to ctrl+alt+del and restart it on my laptop. It freezes and the window stops responding, it doesn't even paint.

In the inspector, the DOM breadcrumb area scrolls and moves around. It's like the blink tag, only worse.

JS debugger feels worse and clunky compared to Chrome.

Element inspector feels like duplo to chromes lego (does that make sense?)

I opened firefox yesterday and found a new speach bubble icon asking me to connect to O2 for something. WTF?! WTactualF is that all about?

/rant

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Your bugs are probably in extensions and not Firefox proper. Try starting in "safe mode" by just holding the Shift key while FF is launching. If it's still a problem, try asking in #firefox on irc.mozilla.org. They're great at helping users troubleshoot, and they'll help you file a bug report if it comes to that.

The speech bubble by the way is a way to video chat from the browser itself. It uses WebRTC which is already in modern browsers so its not like they've added a ton of code to get that feature baked into the browser.

Not sure why you saw O2 but I saw Telefonica which is the company that works with Firefox to deliver their Firefox OS phones. I suppose Telefonica/O2 is needed because even though WebRTC is a real-time direct connection between you and somebody else, you may need a 3rd party to help you connect to one another at first.

>The speech bubble by the way is a way to video chat from the browser itself. //

You know there are a myriad of ways to use the browser to do video chat already - websites that offer WebRTC video chat. You follow a URL, maybe from a bookmark, and use the one you want (eg http://appear.in).

None of that requires modifying browser chrome nor forcing buttons on to established users toolbars.

This is a marketing deal disguised as browser development.

It's just that chrome devtools are really, really well made in many dimensions. But keep in mind that Mozilla has been catching up a lot (impressive knowing the budget difference) both in devtools and under the hood (memory usage).

Don't forget about FireBug which is pretty awesome.

I heard it was an unmaintanable mess, that's why Mozilla added in-house devtools. I liked FireBug UX more, but I like that Firefox has metalevel coding/debugging capabilities out of the box (the smalltalk fan speaking).

It was, it also was slow as hell. Now it's much better. I don't see any issues, but then again I run pretty fast pc.

I would start by thinning the crap that you probably have in the form of extensions... I've been running Firefox since 1.0 on all OSes and I can't remember it crashing on me once (it probably happened, a long time ago, but I honestly can't remember.)

I'd love to know what you do for a living.... As a web developer I've had more FF crashes than I can count. Chrome has extensions as well and I have WAY fewer crashes with Chrome, if "having extensions" im FF means that you can't complain about crashes then FF is useless as extensions are a MAJOR selling point.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted so much. I assume the usual FOSS fanboyism that rules HN.

I used Chrome, IE11, and Firefox all day. FF is the only one that locks up and crashes on me. Its so rare in the other browsers I'm shocked when it happens in FF. I run almost no extensions and I think my copy at work has zero extensions and I don't even have flash installed, so the idea that it must be a plugin problem is questionable. Once a day lockups or crashes are still, unfortunately, common. I really wish it was a better QA'd project. Its such a nice piece of software, but I imagine its reached the point where it can and should be forked to a lightweight browser the same way FF forked from the big ugly Mozilla suite. Current leadership at Mozilla just don't seem to make crashes and resource usage a priority.

I also dont like how it switched on me from google to yahoo as my default search engine. If MS did this in IE people on HN would be losing their shit, but because this project is a FOSS darling, everyone just made excuses for it. At the very least it should have asked me if I wanted to change to whatever search engine they've gotten into bed with this year.

This sounds very different from my experience. Have you ever looked at about:crashes and checked into any bugs hanging off your crash signatures? (And if not, please file bugs!) If you make a list of your crashes available, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can dig out some explanation for your problems, or make sure the appropriate bugs are on file with Mozilla.

I know for a fact that Mozilla leadership does prioritize crashes and resource usage (in fact, this is one reason for all of the work on the process separation feature called Electrolysis), but of course they will prioritize crashes that affect lots of users. For various reasons, it could be that your crashes are different from those. (I'll assume that you're on the most recent version of Firefox already.)

THIS. Developers on HN with problems have the requisite skills to be able to file good bugs.

I've been filing bugs for years yet the QA of the product is still at unaccepatable levels. FF's constant passing of the buck is bothersome. When they can't blame extensions they blame people for not participating. Yet somehow Chrome/Chromium exists just fine without me writing big reports for it, same for Safari, IE, etc.

FF just has poor QA. That's a problem and all the excuse making actually hurts the product as FF leadership isn't seeing enough complaints apparantly, when an army of nerds are refusing to acknowledged these problems.

"When they can't blame extensions they blame people for not participating."

Extensions are commonly blamed because of the way that Firefox implements extensions.

They essentially become a fully integrated part of the browser with full privileges. When extensions do things that they shouldn't be doing (but can anyway, because what's stopping them?), the extensions are blamed.

Of course there have been many lessons learned from a decade-old extension ecosystem. Other, newer browsers have benefitted from those lessons (ie. Chrome). Mozillians know the problems with the current extension model but the hard part is having the resources to do something about it.

"Yet somehow Chrome/Chromium exists just fine without me writing big reports for it, same for Safari, IE, etc."

SOMEBODY is writing bug reports. FWIW, there are what, 50000 Google employees, a majority of which could be dogfooding prerelease Chrome and filing bugs. Mozilla has 1/50 of that to dogfood Firefox and depends heavily on its community to make contributions.

Links to specific Bugzilla bugs and crash reports please.

>I also dont like how it switched on me from google to yahoo as my default search engine. If MS did this in IE people on HN would be losing their shit, but because this project is a FOSS darling, everyone just made excuses for it. At the very least it should have asked me if I wanted to change to whatever search engine pimp they've gotten into bed with this year.

No need for excuses, I use FF and my default search engine is Google. It was two "clicks" to change back but sorry if that was to dramatic for you. Most people realize Mozilla is not going to make someone's search engine the default for free and that contracts end.

People will complain about anything...

> If MS did this in IE people on HN would be losing their shit

If they changed people that had set it to google, sure.

But changing the default? That's not something to be mad about.

> FOSS fanboyism that rules HN.

It's this, people HATE when you criticize FF (as I found the other week when I got downvoted for raising, what I thought were, valid points about crashes, lockups, and not being multi-process). I upvoted you and your parent but it won't be enough to stem the tide of downvotes (this is probably going to get downvoted as well).

Cool....

Dear downvoters,

How about you actually respond with your reasoning instead of proving my point perfectly.

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