5 ms·

Most of your post is emotion and opinion, so I thought I'd address the part that is factually incorrect: > On a technical note each version isn't really gettin

Most of your post is emotion and opinion, so I thought I'd address the part that is factually incorrect: > On a technical note each version isn't really getting any better That's simply not true. To take a single example, the type inference engine added to the JS engine in FF9 significantly improved performance. With the new high frequency release strategy, it's not guaranteed that there will be huge new features or improvements in any given release, but the features and improvements are coming as fast as ever. > historical problems have never been addressed You can find ancient pet bugs for any project that either take a long time to get fixed or are never fixed. Do you have something specific in mind? > version fragmentation is occurring That's more-or-less false. There's some adjustment going on due to the switch to the high frequency release schedule, but the fact is the vast majority of Firefox users are on a small number of versions, almost all that have been offered an upgrade are on the latest stable release. > on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players. Can you point to anything specific to back up your claim? If you pick and choose specs, this is true for all browsers. Nobody implements everything completely and correctly. The specs are being developed as fast as ever, and it's common for one browser to be ahead in certain areas. It's also common for competing implementations to differ as the standard develops. This is not confined to Firefox.

mattmanser 15y ago
You're not addressing his key point, I'm recommending Chrome to anyone I speak to, many other developers I know are too. Firefox is slow, sluggish to use and confusing compared to Chrome. The edge it had over IE was that it was a better user experience. It's not compared to Chrome anymore. Even IE is better than FF apart from the weird crash like blank screen glitch when opening a new tab that IE has.
- gkoberger 15y ago
  I don't have a problem with you recommending Chrome (and I work at Mozilla). However, it's not fair to say Firefox is sluggish. With a new profile, it's just as fast as Chrome. Try it. Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons and browser history and cookies. Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years. Try vacuuming your Firefox database [1], syncing everything [2] and/or create a new profile [3] with only the extensions you actually use. Oh, and be careful of Firebug. That's why most developers laugh at Firefox for being so slow; they use Firebug, which slows Firefox down to a grinding halt. We're working on our own dev tools, which are slowly coming together. They're not a Firebug replacement yet, but they're getting there. [4] 1 http://mozillalinks.org/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-for-better-performance-now-with-no-restart/ http://mozillalinks.org/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-for... 2 http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/sync/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/sync/ 3 http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles 4 http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/developer-tools-in-firefox-aurora-10/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/developer-tools-in-firefox-...
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    Yeah, you're right, I didn't realise they'd improved it so. Start up was really suffering at one point, it's nippy, I'm wrong. I think the major reason this myth has stayed in my mind is doing upgrades on startup, testing FF v Chrome just now, on a computer that FF has never been the primary browser, they're very similar in terms of responsiveness (FF still a little slower if I'm honest, but trivially and I think it's a bit psychological in the way it opens the window compared to Chrome). I'm not seeing major differences on disabling/enabling firebug though. Right now every time I open FF it seems to upgrade, because I do it so rarely. So in my mind it's now become intolerably slow and I only open it when I really, really need 3 different sessions on a single site. I use Chrome as primary, IE secondary (due to it being more likely to have quirks and historically preferring IE dev toolbar to firebug). As Chrome upgrades in the background and IE does it through windows update you're not playing on a fair playing field I guess. EDIT: I should add this isn't exactly a modern computer, no SSD, 2.4ghz quad core, 3Gb RAM and my laptop's even more in need of an upgrade.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      When I boot my computer, it's a little slow at first when opening applications, so differences are very noticeable. On this computer I'm using, Firefox 9 starts faster. Also, this version on my computer upgrades in the background. I just get a "restart" notice when it finishes, then after I restart it checks for addons updates, in case some of them are invalid, but that's pretty fast too. And these upgrades don't happen so ofter.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    "Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons" You'd have a point here if Firefox hadn't started blithely breaking everyone's add-ons by bumping the version number about 5 times per week. Okay, that's hyperbole -- I know it wasn't that often, but the point is that a "rapid release schedule" comes with real costs. If you have 500MM users, and the mean user time to adapt to a trivial new release is 5 minutes (a gross underestimate if add-ons have broken), you've just wasted 16 million hours of user time. Just because that cost doesn't appear as a line item in the Mozilla Foundation's budget doesn't mean it isn't real. I used Firefox for years because of the rich add-on community. When it started being more trouble than it was worth to update the add-ons (or find/write new ones, if the old one hadn't been updated), I switched to Chrome. It's unlikely that I'll be back.
- lambda 15y ago
  I recommend Firefox to some people, depending on what they are looking for. Firefox has had addons for much longer, and they are much more fundamental, than on Chrome or Safari. For example, while Safari and Chrome both have an AdBlock, Firefox's works much better (no flashes of ads, blocks more video ads, etc). And modern versions of Firefox are doing a lot better again. It is much faster these days. They now have a much better release cycle, and their updater is smoother encouraging people to keep on the upgrade treadmill. I wouldn't write Firefox off. The recent increase in competition in the browser space has done great things for all of the browsers; they have all improved dramatically over the past couple of years.
- notatoad 15y ago
  As long as we are doing anecdotal evidence here, I work in an office with two other developers. All three of us use and recommend firefox (and did before we started working together) but develop for chrome first because of the dev tools.
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    You should really get out and meet more then ;) It does wonders for your career.
njharman 15y ago
> Most of your post is emotion and opinion The vast majority of the population makes decisions based on emotion and opinion. They are determining factors. Facts often don't matter.
- FrankBooth 15y ago
  That's fascinating and all, but I'm really not interested in arguing with people about their opinions. I'm not here to argue. If they make claims that are factually incorrect, I'm happy to point them at the facts.
rjd 15y ago
Indeed, I replied a little lower down about emotion and opinion and that it in part it isn't mine (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3309208 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3309208). But for your specific comments I'll reply. You make 3 comments that I think answer themselves. First statement I imply that things aren't getting better, I'll agree that some things are getting better, new features and support etc... but theres a chunk of stuff not getting improved. You note it yourself in the second point "You can find ancient pet bugs for any project". The fact is there are things not being addressed which have been raised as issues, some of them half a decade ago. Thats a pain point for most OSS projects, but browsers are a competitive space, to remain competitive some of these things need to be addressed. Version fragmentation may have been the wrong term. What I meant was that lots of plugins aren't being supported between versions. Its not such a problem of the core FF, but without the plugins FF just isn't that great. From a support point of view, new versions every 6 months is painful, especially when I read things like pulling support for HTML 5 features they had previously supported. It makes its a painful thing to support. I now test my HTML5 applications against IE10 and webkit, I don't consider FF worthwhile currently. I test Opera only because I use it (sorry other opera users). For the w3c stuff my biggest pet peace is websql. On other points Mozilla have a political and ideological argument for and against like every big player, I can sympathize and support where appropriate. But WebSQL is something that I would like to be ubiquitous.
- FrankBooth 15y ago
  > First statement I imply that things aren't getting better, I'll agree that some things are getting better, new features and support etc... but theres a chunk of stuff not getting improved. What things that actually matter aren't being improved? You're wrong about plugins so I'll assume that you mean addons here, which use a completely different interface. Addon compatibility over the new release schedule has been rough so far, it's being addressed and I expect it to be, largely, a solved problem in the near future. Pulling support for HTML 5 features? Are you referring to WebSockets, which were exposed again later once the security problems in the spec were resolved? Web SQL DB is a terrible spec, as it stands. It effectively requires locking a specific version of SQLite (bugs and all) into the web for eternity to ensure interoperability. You'll note that IE has also refused to implement it so far. It's hardly fair to claim it's "in direct conflict with W3C standards". Web SQL DB never made it past a working group stage, and Firefox was not the only browser against implementing it.
toddheasley 15y ago
> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players. Yeah, this is false. Gecko is still arguably the gold, um, standard for page rendering. That said, I dread using Firefox now, for reasons that are completely emotional. There's too much UI, and web pages have an unfortunate uncanny valley thing happening when compared side-by-side with Webkit-rendered pages. The best way I can a explain it is that it's like when you see a photo of a Russian Buran, and your mind goes, "There's something not quite right about that Space Shuttle."

mattmanser 15y ago

You're not addressing his key point, I'm recommending Chrome to anyone I speak to, many other developers I know are too. Firefox is slow, sluggish to use and confusing compared to Chrome. The edge it had over IE was that it was a better user experience. It's not compared to Chrome anymore. Even IE is better than FF apart from the weird crash like blank screen glitch when opening a new tab that IE has.

gkoberger 15y ago
I don't have a problem with you recommending Chrome (and I work at Mozilla). However, it's not fair to say Firefox is sluggish. With a new profile, it's just as fast as Chrome. Try it. Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons and browser history and cookies. Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years. Try vacuuming your Firefox database [1], syncing everything [2] and/or create a new profile [3] with only the extensions you actually use. Oh, and be careful of Firebug. That's why most developers laugh at Firefox for being so slow; they use Firebug, which slows Firefox down to a grinding halt. We're working on our own dev tools, which are slowly coming together. They're not a Firebug replacement yet, but they're getting there. [4] 1 http://mozillalinks.org/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-for-better-performance-now-with-no-restart/ http://mozillalinks.org/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-for... 2 http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/sync/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/sync/ 3 http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles 4 http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/developer-tools-in-firefox-aurora-10/ http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/developer-tools-in-firefox-...
- mattmanser 15y ago
  Yeah, you're right, I didn't realise they'd improved it so. Start up was really suffering at one point, it's nippy, I'm wrong. I think the major reason this myth has stayed in my mind is doing upgrades on startup, testing FF v Chrome just now, on a computer that FF has never been the primary browser, they're very similar in terms of responsiveness (FF still a little slower if I'm honest, but trivially and I think it's a bit psychological in the way it opens the window compared to Chrome). I'm not seeing major differences on disabling/enabling firebug though. Right now every time I open FF it seems to upgrade, because I do it so rarely. So in my mind it's now become intolerably slow and I only open it when I really, really need 3 different sessions on a single site. I use Chrome as primary, IE secondary (due to it being more likely to have quirks and historically preferring IE dev toolbar to firebug). As Chrome upgrades in the background and IE does it through windows update you're not playing on a fair playing field I guess. EDIT: I should add this isn't exactly a modern computer, no SSD, 2.4ghz quad core, 3Gb RAM and my laptop's even more in need of an upgrade.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    When I boot my computer, it's a little slow at first when opening applications, so differences are very noticeable. On this computer I'm using, Firefox 9 starts faster. Also, this version on my computer upgrades in the background. I just get a "restart" notice when it finishes, then after I restart it checks for addons updates, in case some of them are invalid, but that's pretty fast too. And these upgrades don't happen so ofter.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  "Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons" You'd have a point here if Firefox hadn't started blithely breaking everyone's add-ons by bumping the version number about 5 times per week. Okay, that's hyperbole -- I know it wasn't that often, but the point is that a "rapid release schedule" comes with real costs. If you have 500MM users, and the mean user time to adapt to a trivial new release is 5 minutes (a gross underestimate if add-ons have broken), you've just wasted 16 million hours of user time. Just because that cost doesn't appear as a line item in the Mozilla Foundation's budget doesn't mean it isn't real. I used Firefox for years because of the rich add-on community. When it started being more trouble than it was worth to update the add-ons (or find/write new ones, if the old one hadn't been updated), I switched to Chrome. It's unlikely that I'll be back.
lambda 15y ago
I recommend Firefox to some people, depending on what they are looking for. Firefox has had addons for much longer, and they are much more fundamental, than on Chrome or Safari. For example, while Safari and Chrome both have an AdBlock, Firefox's works much better (no flashes of ads, blocks more video ads, etc). And modern versions of Firefox are doing a lot better again. It is much faster these days. They now have a much better release cycle, and their updater is smoother encouraging people to keep on the upgrade treadmill. I wouldn't write Firefox off. The recent increase in competition in the browser space has done great things for all of the browsers; they have all improved dramatically over the past couple of years.
notatoad 15y ago
As long as we are doing anecdotal evidence here, I work in an office with two other developers. All three of us use and recommend firefox (and did before we started working together) but develop for chrome first because of the dev tools.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  You should really get out and meet more then ;) It does wonders for your career.

njharman 15y ago

> Most of your post is emotion and opinion The vast majority of the population makes decisions based on emotion and opinion. They are determining factors. Facts often don't matter.

FrankBooth 15y ago
That's fascinating and all, but I'm really not interested in arguing with people about their opinions. I'm not here to argue. If they make claims that are factually incorrect, I'm happy to point them at the facts.

rjd 15y ago

Indeed, I replied a little lower down about emotion and opinion and that it in part it isn't mine (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3309208 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3309208). But for your specific comments I'll reply. You make 3 comments that I think answer themselves. First statement I imply that things aren't getting better, I'll agree that some things are getting better, new features and support etc... but theres a chunk of stuff not getting improved. You note it yourself in the second point "You can find ancient pet bugs for any project". The fact is there are things not being addressed which have been raised as issues, some of them half a decade ago. Thats a pain point for most OSS projects, but browsers are a competitive space, to remain competitive some of these things need to be addressed. Version fragmentation may have been the wrong term. What I meant was that lots of plugins aren't being supported between versions. Its not such a problem of the core FF, but without the plugins FF just isn't that great. From a support point of view, new versions every 6 months is painful, especially when I read things like pulling support for HTML 5 features they had previously supported. It makes its a painful thing to support. I now test my HTML5 applications against IE10 and webkit, I don't consider FF worthwhile currently. I test Opera only because I use it (sorry other opera users). For the w3c stuff my biggest pet peace is websql. On other points Mozilla have a political and ideological argument for and against like every big player, I can sympathize and support where appropriate. But WebSQL is something that I would like to be ubiquitous.

FrankBooth 15y ago
> First statement I imply that things aren't getting better, I'll agree that some things are getting better, new features and support etc... but theres a chunk of stuff not getting improved. What things that actually matter aren't being improved? You're wrong about plugins so I'll assume that you mean addons here, which use a completely different interface. Addon compatibility over the new release schedule has been rough so far, it's being addressed and I expect it to be, largely, a solved problem in the near future. Pulling support for HTML 5 features? Are you referring to WebSockets, which were exposed again later once the security problems in the spec were resolved? Web SQL DB is a terrible spec, as it stands. It effectively requires locking a specific version of SQLite (bugs and all) into the web for eternity to ensure interoperability. You'll note that IE has also refused to implement it so far. It's hardly fair to claim it's "in direct conflict with W3C standards". Web SQL DB never made it past a working group stage, and Firefox was not the only browser against implementing it.

toddheasley 15y ago

> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players. Yeah, this is false. Gecko is still arguably the gold, um, standard for page rendering. That said, I dread using Firefox now, for reasons that are completely emotional. There's too much UI, and web pages have an unfortunate uncanny valley thing happening when compared side-by-side with Webkit-rendered pages. The best way I can a explain it is that it's like when you see a photo of a Russian Buran, and your mind goes, "There's something not quite right about that Space Shuttle."