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> Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched — three years ago.

by azakai 15y ago

> Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched — three years ago. This is an odd statement, considering that many Firefox devs run Linux. I'm running Firefox on Linux right now, and it works great. I guess the author of the article is hitting a specific bug. It isn't a general issue that affects all users of Firefox on Linux.

aphyr 15y ago
Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. I haven't looked back since switching to Chrome. FF ignored obvious bugs for years. X pixmap freeing? Open since 2004. [1] I waited for six years, having to restart my browser every few hours, because it would leak over 2 GB from having a network graphs page open. Startup time? Last time I opened it, six months ago, FF took over 10 seconds to start, cold. Chromium snaps open in under a quarter second. Then there's developer friendliness. Writing extensions is a complete mess, especially compared to Chrome. Configuration structure is haphazard at best. Profile corruption is a thing. I don't understand how a multi-million dollar foundation can tolerate this kind of experience. Don't get me started on the rendering bugs. :-/ [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259672 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259672
- azakai 15y ago
  > Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. Assuming not, then since Firefox's development is done in the open, I assume you have some evidence for this - meeting notes or such that show that? Or some other evidence? The evidence to the contrary seems overwhelming. Firefox's main focus in 4.0 was on performance, see arewefastyet.com for JS, and the major rewrite of the graphics system (Layers) that lets it use things like Direct2D on Windows as just two examples. And as a consequence of those huge efforts, Firefox just won Toms Hardware's speed test, beating Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,30... Edit: Looks like I'm being downvoted. Please tell me hacker news isn't deteriorating into reddit, where opposing opinions are downvoted by reflex...
  - dextorious 15y ago
    > I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. He made a valid and extended argument, one can read and agree or disagree with. You isolate just a phrase from it and call him on "trolling"? In general, internet discussions would be much much better if "troll" and "FUD" weren't used to disqualify arguments we don't like (or, maybe weren't used, period).
    - azakai 15y ago
      To throw around comments like "but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness" - that's textbook flamebait. It's a direct insult to Firefox developers and fans, and its only result will be to start an argument. So it's a natural suspicion that he might be trolling. In any case, I gave a reasoned response, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he isn't trolling. But if he was, I guess I was wasting my time. I do agree with you: Internet discussions would be much better if we did not use "troll", "FUD", "flamebait", etc., but also if people did not act in those ways.
      - dextorious 15y ago
        > To throw around comments like "but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness" - that's textbook flamebait. Sure, but it can also be his honest opinion, that he came to by comparing, say, the minimal changes between Chrome versions and the more evolved FF updates. What I'm saying is, the entirety of his comment matters to see if it's "trolling" or not, not just a juicy quote.
        azakai 15y ago
        You're right, the rest of the comment was not so bad, and that's in his favor. He could have avoided the flamebait sentence and I would have politely disagreed but had no issue with his comment.
  - aphyr 15y ago
- carussell 15y ago
  > the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. : > I've recently been running into a number of "benchmarks" where some rendering engines achieve better performance by simply doing the wrong thing because the right one would be "too slow". […] This is not exactly an isolated incident; a number of the performance issues I've run into recently in Gecko have had to do with correctly handling edge cases that this particular open-source engine happens to just not handle.[1] 1. Boris Zbarsky. "Performance vs. correctness tradeoffs". Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days. 2009 October 18. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html
rythie 15y ago
Well that's nice for you that it works, usually works for me at home. I run about 200 desktop linux machines and sqlite locking is a common problem on firefox. Users are often completely unaware of how to fix even though they are quite technical.
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  As mentioned in the article's comments, this appears to have been recently resolved. Here is the full thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025
  - Raphael 15y ago
    Aha. Now here may be the root cause: Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh 2011-09-18 12:33:22 PDT The problem here is that Places (along with lots of other places in our code) still creates and uses synchronous database statements. SQLite is only threadsafe because it serializes all access to a database connection (this is unlikely to change any time soon). To make this problem worse, every time we "fix" an area that does this, we end up putting more work on the background thread, which increases the likelihood that the remaining places that need to acquire the mutex on the main thread will encounter contention for the mutex. Some of you might recall we hit this problem in the run-up to Firefox 4 as well (November/December of last year), and it caused Marco and I to have to reachitect a bunch of stuff in Places for a few months in order to work around it. Until Firefox removes all uses of the synchronous Storage API from the main thread, this issue will keep rearing it's head. (When that happens we can actually use SQLite in a way that stops using mutexs and will likely speed it up too.)
  - rythie 15y ago
    I'll believe it when I see it, pretty doubtful at this point.
    - masterleep 15y ago
      Use the workaround that's in that thread. It works today.
mpk 15y ago
I run FF on linux for dev work (not on FF itself, but for JS heavy web apps). Actually, I run a whole bunch of different FF versions with different profiles for testing a huge variety of things. My main gripe is that some of the extensions (NoScript, Firebug and friends) sometimes break things, hog the CPU in one way or another or just plain eat up the heap. I am fine with this. These are extensions, after all and it's for dev stuff, which I judge by a slightly different standard than 'normal user' stuff. The latest FF releases especially make me happy because they're adding modern web features and working on UX and performance. And it shows and feels. I don't care about bookmarks because I don't bother storing those in the browser anymore. Was the choice for storing 'stuff' in SQLite a good one? Yes of course it was. It's the best cross-platform way to store structured data on disk, which is why everybody and his/her dog has made the same choice. Are there inefficient ways in which it is being used? Maybe. Probably? I haven't looked into this, but this is hardly an insurmountable problem. Sure it felt like FF was lagging behind once the WebKit browsers started coming out (with better JS engines) but the Mozilla Team is back in the game with its new release cycles and updates. And this makes me very happy.
- dhimes 15y ago
  Has Chrome implemented mathML yet? I user firefox for that.
  - runningdogx 15y ago
    http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=firefox+7&b2=chrome+16 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3251 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606 No, Chrome still does not have mathml.
staktrace 15y ago
Perhaps FF devs have super-beefed-up machines (required to compile FF) that average users don't, and therefore don't see many of the performance problems that average users do?
- planckscnst 15y ago
  I run Firefox on Arch Linux on an old Atom-based netbook and on LMDE an old AMD 3200+. Neither have had issues, so it's not the case that Firefox is generically broken on all of Linux.

by azakai 15y ago

aphyr 15y ago

Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. I haven't looked back since switching to Chrome. FF ignored obvious bugs for years. X pixmap freeing? Open since 2004. [1] I waited for six years, having to restart my browser every few hours, because it would leak over 2 GB from having a network graphs page open. Startup time? Last time I opened it, six months ago, FF took over 10 seconds to start, cold. Chromium snaps open in under a quarter second. Then there's developer friendliness. Writing extensions is a complete mess, especially compared to Chrome. Configuration structure is haphazard at best. Profile corruption is a thing. I don't understand how a multi-million dollar foundation can tolerate this kind of experience. Don't get me started on the rendering bugs. :-/ [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259672 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259672

azakai 15y ago
> Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. Assuming not, then since Firefox's development is done in the open, I assume you have some evidence for this - meeting notes or such that show that? Or some other evidence? The evidence to the contrary seems overwhelming. Firefox's main focus in 4.0 was on performance, see arewefastyet.com for JS, and the major rewrite of the graphics system (Layers) that lets it use things like Direct2D on Windows as just two examples. And as a consequence of those huge efforts, Firefox just won Toms Hardware's speed test, beating Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,30... Edit: Looks like I'm being downvoted. Please tell me hacker news isn't deteriorating into reddit, where opposing opinions are downvoted by reflex...
- dextorious 15y ago
  > I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. He made a valid and extended argument, one can read and agree or disagree with. You isolate just a phrase from it and call him on "trolling"? In general, internet discussions would be much much better if "troll" and "FUD" weren't used to disqualify arguments we don't like (or, maybe weren't used, period).
  - azakai 15y ago
    To throw around comments like "but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness" - that's textbook flamebait. It's a direct insult to Firefox developers and fans, and its only result will be to start an argument. So it's a natural suspicion that he might be trolling. In any case, I gave a reasoned response, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he isn't trolling. But if he was, I guess I was wasting my time. I do agree with you: Internet discussions would be much better if we did not use "troll", "FUD", "flamebait", etc., but also if people did not act in those ways.
    - dextorious 15y ago
      > To throw around comments like "but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness" - that's textbook flamebait. Sure, but it can also be his honest opinion, that he came to by comparing, say, the minimal changes between Chrome versions and the more evolved FF updates. What I'm saying is, the entirety of his comment matters to see if it's "trolling" or not, not just a juicy quote.
      - azakai 15y ago
        You're right, the rest of the comment was not so bad, and that's in his favor. He could have avoided the flamebait sentence and I would have politely disagreed but had no issue with his comment.
- aphyr 15y ago
carussell 15y ago
> the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness. : > I've recently been running into a number of "benchmarks" where some rendering engines achieve better performance by simply doing the wrong thing because the right one would be "too slow". […] This is not exactly an isolated incident; a number of the performance issues I've run into recently in Gecko have had to do with correctly handling edge cases that this particular open-source engine happens to just not handle.[1] 1. Boris Zbarsky. "Performance vs. correctness tradeoffs". Three Monkeys, Three Typewriters, Two Days. 2009 October 18. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html

rythie 15y ago

Well that's nice for you that it works, usually works for me at home. I run about 200 desktop linux machines and sqlite locking is a common problem on firefox. Users are often completely unaware of how to fix even though they are quite technical.

jasonlotito 15y ago
As mentioned in the article's comments, this appears to have been recently resolved. Here is the full thread: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025
- Raphael 15y ago
  Aha. Now here may be the root cause: Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh 2011-09-18 12:33:22 PDT The problem here is that Places (along with lots of other places in our code) still creates and uses synchronous database statements. SQLite is only threadsafe because it serializes all access to a database connection (this is unlikely to change any time soon). To make this problem worse, every time we "fix" an area that does this, we end up putting more work on the background thread, which increases the likelihood that the remaining places that need to acquire the mutex on the main thread will encounter contention for the mutex. Some of you might recall we hit this problem in the run-up to Firefox 4 as well (November/December of last year), and it caused Marco and I to have to reachitect a bunch of stuff in Places for a few months in order to work around it. Until Firefox removes all uses of the synchronous Storage API from the main thread, this issue will keep rearing it's head. (When that happens we can actually use SQLite in a way that stops using mutexs and will likely speed it up too.)
- rythie 15y ago
  I'll believe it when I see it, pretty doubtful at this point.
  - masterleep 15y ago
    Use the workaround that's in that thread. It works today.

mpk 15y ago

I run FF on linux for dev work (not on FF itself, but for JS heavy web apps). Actually, I run a whole bunch of different FF versions with different profiles for testing a huge variety of things. My main gripe is that some of the extensions (NoScript, Firebug and friends) sometimes break things, hog the CPU in one way or another or just plain eat up the heap. I am fine with this. These are extensions, after all and it's for dev stuff, which I judge by a slightly different standard than 'normal user' stuff. The latest FF releases especially make me happy because they're adding modern web features and working on UX and performance. And it shows and feels. I don't care about bookmarks because I don't bother storing those in the browser anymore. Was the choice for storing 'stuff' in SQLite a good one? Yes of course it was. It's the best cross-platform way to store structured data on disk, which is why everybody and his/her dog has made the same choice. Are there inefficient ways in which it is being used? Maybe. Probably? I haven't looked into this, but this is hardly an insurmountable problem. Sure it felt like FF was lagging behind once the WebKit browsers started coming out (with better JS engines) but the Mozilla Team is back in the game with its new release cycles and updates. And this makes me very happy.

dhimes 15y ago
Has Chrome implemented mathML yet? I user firefox for that.
- runningdogx 15y ago
  http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=firefox+7&b2=chrome+16 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3251 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6606 No, Chrome still does not have mathml.

staktrace 15y ago

Perhaps FF devs have super-beefed-up machines (required to compile FF) that average users don't, and therefore don't see many of the performance problems that average users do?

planckscnst 15y ago
I run Firefox on Arch Linux on an old Atom-based netbook and on LMDE an old AMD 3200+. Neither have had issues, so it's not the case that Firefox is generically broken on all of Linux.