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I don't understand what happened to Firefox or how they so comprehensively lost their direction. The whole rationale of the browser was to be something small,

I don't understand what happened to Firefox or how they so comprehensively lost their direction. The whole rationale of the browser was to be something small, tight and easily extensible and to get away from the unreliability of Netscape. Now we learn they're deprecating full themes, changing plugins to be more limited (but again becoming more like Chrome), and filling the browser with pointless at best features. I can't recall ever wanting to share browsing. Screens when coding or helping sure, but it's a solved problem, so keep it and the kitchen sink out of the browser. It's probably why its becoming so slow and flaky. The two key problems it was intended to fix.

dmm 10y ago
> It's probably why its becoming so slow and flaky. I see both version of this statement all the time: "Chrome is so slow. I switched to firefox![1]" "Firefox is so slow. I switched to chrome!" What's going on? Do browsers get full of history/cookies/profiles/plugins and slow down. Is it just the act of switching that speeds things up? [1] http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-1685425815 http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-16854258...
- pcwalton 10y ago
  > I see both version of this statement all the time: "Chrome is so slow. I switched to firefox![1]" "Firefox is so slow. I switched to chrome!" I think it's simply that anecdotes are extremely unreliable when it comes to something as large and complex as a browser that's so sensitive to the specific content you browse. Firefox is slow from time to time for some people; Chrome is slow from time to time for some people.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Well I'm sure profiles are a part of it. It got bad enough that I completely removed all profile and plugin data, and clean reinstalled. Firefox remains the worst performing browser I have on this system by very large measure. Five amazon tabs are enough to basically grind it to a halt. Chrome, IE, Opera and Palemoon (a fork of an older firefox) don't do that. So I've reached a point where I can't do much more to make it usable without a debugger. I've no doubt others are fine, or find Chrome the slow one. If everyone had the issues I currently have it'd be the single highest priority bugfix in the project. I'd maybe migrate to palemoon but I don't trust it on a security front.

dmm 10y ago

> It's probably why its becoming so slow and flaky. I see both version of this statement all the time: "Chrome is so slow. I switched to firefox![1]" "Firefox is so slow. I switched to chrome!" What's going on? Do browsers get full of history/cookies/profiles/plugins and slow down. Is it just the act of switching that speeds things up? [1] http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-1685425815 http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-16854258...

pcwalton 10y ago
> I see both version of this statement all the time: "Chrome is so slow. I switched to firefox![1]" "Firefox is so slow. I switched to chrome!" I think it's simply that anecdotes are extremely unreliable when it comes to something as large and complex as a browser that's so sensitive to the specific content you browse. Firefox is slow from time to time for some people; Chrome is slow from time to time for some people.
anexprogrammer 10y ago
Well I'm sure profiles are a part of it. It got bad enough that I completely removed all profile and plugin data, and clean reinstalled. Firefox remains the worst performing browser I have on this system by very large measure. Five amazon tabs are enough to basically grind it to a halt. Chrome, IE, Opera and Palemoon (a fork of an older firefox) don't do that. So I've reached a point where I can't do much more to make it usable without a debugger. I've no doubt others are fine, or find Chrome the slow one. If everyone had the issues I currently have it'd be the single highest priority bugfix in the project. I'd maybe migrate to palemoon but I don't trust it on a security front.