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I agree it is painful and not right to be downvoted for things like this. You are just sharing your opinion, on topic to the post. I work for Mozilla and I th

I agree it is painful and not right to be downvoted for things like this. You are just sharing your opinion, on topic to the post. I work for Mozilla and I think that the only thing we are really losing on is the perception race. A frequent trend I hear on forums and comment threads is how slow Firefox is or how much it crashes. People seem to almost enjoy making the assessment that it is a universal constant. I know that it isn't a constant. Even though I have a profile that is many years old and has a dozen or so extensions installed, even though I have run prerelease versions for the last three years, I still generally have a stable and fast browsing experience. Even when compared to Chrome which I install clean and try out for a couple of weeks every few months. There have certainly been occasions that I have run into issues, but because I have been willing to give Firefox the benefit of doubt, I've dug into those issues and usually found something that was either a bad add-on, something bad I was doing, or a bad website to be the root cause. We continue to strive to find ways to resolve these issues without having to rely on the user or the community to figure them out. That is just part of making a good product. But I know that the problems are not a universal constant that every user must deal with, or a reason to try to get everyone to move to a different browser. One of the biggest projects my team (Metrics) has been working on lately is a way to enable people to easily measure the performance and stability of their own browser and compare it to the general population. If it turns up systemic problems, that is wonderful because with evidence, it is easier to fix those problems. If it turns out that a person with poor performance is obviously an extreme outlier to the typical performance, hopefully it will make it easier to change the conversation from "Firefox is slow for everyone and no one should use it" to "Firefox is slow for me and I would like help making that not be the case for both me and anyone else who ever ends up in my situation". This would be a paradigm shift that would obviously be great for Mozilla, but I think it would be great for Google or Microsoft or Apple if they chose to follow a similar strategy as well. At the end of the day, many Mozillians do not hate Google Chrome because it is still pushing to make the web a better place. Maybe not in all the same ways we push, but every little bit is better than none of it.

sc00ter 15y ago
"I've dug into those issues and usually found something that was either a bad add-on, something bad I was doing, or a bad website to be the root cause." And therein lies the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem. The average user doesn't care who's fault it is - all they know is it's broken or slow, and as Firefox surfaces those issues, it must be Firefox's fault. Chrome does a better job of shielding users from perceived browser problems.
- DEinspanjer 15y ago
  It is certainly the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem with users who are likely to run into these issues. My question, which I hope we will be able to answer better soon, is whether this is something that actually does happen to the average user or if it only happens to certain types of power users. Either way, we need to strive to do everything we can reasonably do to fix it, but I would be much happier to know whether I was in the outlier group of people who rarely experience problems or if the "average user" does not see those problems but we continue to talk about the problems as if they were the typical case.

sc00ter 15y ago

"I've dug into those issues and usually found something that was either a bad add-on, something bad I was doing, or a bad website to be the root cause." And therein lies the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem. The average user doesn't care who's fault it is - all they know is it's broken or slow, and as Firefox surfaces those issues, it must be Firefox's fault. Chrome does a better job of shielding users from perceived browser problems.

DEinspanjer 15y ago
It is certainly the root-cause of Firefox's perception problem with users who are likely to run into these issues. My question, which I hope we will be able to answer better soon, is whether this is something that actually does happen to the average user or if it only happens to certain types of power users. Either way, we need to strive to do everything we can reasonably do to fix it, but I would be much happier to know whether I was in the outlier group of people who rarely experience problems or if the "average user" does not see those problems but we continue to talk about the problems as if they were the typical case.