15 ms·

Everybody Hates Firefox Updates

227 points by krakensden 14y ago

breadbox 14y ago
The takeaway quote: "After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!" I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.
- alttab 14y ago
  This. I haven't seen a good UI change in a while. If the answer to "why" is "its ugly" then run away fast.
- powerslave12r 14y ago
  Gmail and Google search.
- jhatax 14y ago
  Very few user interfaces have withstood the test of time. There are notable exceptions, of course - the iOS UI, uTorrent, and the Chrome browser immediately come to mind. Other applications and operating systems have continued to evolve their user interface over 18-24 months. In some cases, the evolution is necessary for the sake of usability. Take Android for instance: The UI update in ICS dramatically enhanced usability. In my experience, the designers of unchanged interfaces put a lot of thought into almost every interaction a user could have with their application/operating system. Armed with the use-cases, the designers invested time and effort in creating the core UI "right", and determined a seamless way to make incremental updates. Chrome and iOS are, again, perfect examples of this concept in action. Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much. Firefox's UI changed radically in version 4. A good number of users revolted and there was uproar about the theme refresh, but most of the users that stuck around got used to the changes. That they are changing the UI again, only 24 months after the fact, does not reflect very well on the design philosophy behind the 4.0 refresh. Lots of questions come to mind - Did the designers not do adequate research during 4.0? Was the development time-frame too short? Was 4.0 just an interim solution to what they perceived a bigger problem? Are curved tabs really better than rectangular ones? Do I get back a lot of screen real estate? Is this a case of Not-Designed-By-Me syndrome?... I continue to use Firefox today, partially because I know my way around the application so well but mostly because I trust that Mozilla values my privacy. I do think that they go half the distance sometimes with their privacy measures - "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default, and Firefox accepts and keeps "Third Party Cookies" until they expire. In these specific cases, I understand that these are measures taken to ensure they can keep the lights on at their headquarters. With the impending changes to the UI, I will be using the app only on the basis of my trust in Mozilla. And we all know that trust is a tenuous thing to hang by...
  - recoiledsnake 14y ago
    >Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much. I think Windows interface has withstood the test of time pretty well. The basic UX paradigm is essentially unchanged from Windows 95 with whatever that followed basically being tweaks rather than big changes.
    - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
      Until the ribbons took over everything.
      - Bjartr 14y ago
        But only after extensive testing found them quantitatively better than the old menu system.
        keithpeter 14y ago
        Testing with users inexperienced in both UIs or testing with users who knew pre-ribbon Office well? A reference? I find it takes a bit of time to find where functions have moved on Office 2010, and I seem to be taking a long time to internalise the 'logic' for finding less used functions. Probably all those years on Office old style.
    - Someone 14y ago
      I think that is partly in the same way roman numbers withstood the test of time: being well-known made them appear easier than they are. For example, one annoyance is the rule for what ends up in alt-tab. I work with XP at work and regularly cannot alt-tab to windows I alt-tabbed to seconds ago because they popped up some dialog (or is that only with alerts?) The rule for what ends up in the task bar also is incomprehensible for mortals. For awhile, every new release of Office managed to introduce a new variation (yes, Word is MDI, but all its windows show up separately being one variation) I guess that, if you ask users about these features, they will just say "yes, sometimes it does that".
  - 14y ago
- AshleysBrain 14y ago
  Can't users who don't like the new-fangled UI just stay on old versions? I know that ultimately creates compatibility headaches, but it at least gives them time to decide to move along.
  - snatch_backside 14y ago
    Security vulnerabilities, sir.
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      That and websites insisting on new functionality. HTML5 and embedded video support, notably at present.
Geee 14y ago
The problem isn't about 'rapid release cycles', but about the UX design of the update process. Even before the rapid release cycles, Firefox would check for add-on updates every time it was started. Chrome's update mechanism is completely seamless and invisible and requires zero user attention.
- breadbox 14y ago
  Which, ironically, is almost as bad, when you suddenly realize that you basically let Chrome change the UI, and there's no way to return to the UI you once knew.
  - overcyn 14y ago
    Is it almost as bad though if people are moving from firefox to chrome?
  - uxp 14y ago
    Except that Chrome has never really changed it's UI. The presentation at the end of Google's 2012 IO Day 2 keynote actually timelapses through the UI. The only change is the removal of the home button outside of general micro-tweaks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPtJd6AzU8c&feature=player_detailpage#t=3579s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPtJd6AzU8c&feature=playe...
    - grabastic 14y ago
      Although... to my great frustration, Chrome has made pretty big changes to their preferences pages over time.
    - pkamb 14y ago
      The only one that's really bothered me is the removal of the "Go" button on the right side of the URL bar. Still miss it.
chalst 14y ago
Excellent article, with one quote in particular that seems to make a well-grounded, broader point: > I have another theory, too: When software companies get to a certain size, they start taking their users for granted. They start treating their users as pawns in a battle against some other company. Faceless millions. Gotta copy everything the other company does, or risk falling behind. So they end up doing everything the other company does whether the users want it or not, and probably doing a crappy job to boot. > In our case, we started thinking of everything in terms of the battle against Google Chrome. Oh no, Chrome is doing such-and-such; we'd better do something equivalent or we'll fall behind! We thought we needed a rapid update process like Chrome. We were jealous of their rapid update capability, which let them deploy improvements to users continuously. We had to "catch up" with Chrome's updating capability. > Credit where it's due: the way Google handled Chrome updates was very, very smart. They recognized that updates are one of the hardest things to get right, so they solved that problem first, before releasing version 1. The first release of Chrome was little more than an empty box of a browser, but it was wrapped around an excellent updating system. This let them gradually transform that empty box into a full-featured browser, without the users ever realizing they were getting updates. > Firefox did not do such a good job with rapid releases. I've written before about the specific mistakes we made, so I won't go into detail again. To summarize: we did the updates in a very intrusive way, requiring lots of user attention, which made people annoyed because it happened so often. When people restarted after an update to find no visible difference, they wondered what was so important about that update. (Remember the rule that the benefit of the update needs to outweigh the pain? We broke that rule.) Worse yet, we didn't do enough to preserve add-on compatibility, making the updates extremely disruptive to people who depended on certain add-ons; and we kept going with our old version-numbering scheme even though the meaning of the numbers had changed completely, leading to mass confusion. This reminds me of certain OS races: Microsoft trying to upgrade its 16-bit, cooperative multitasking Windows 3.1, and then ditching it for a new model based on NT, while Apple flounders with the Mac OS's 6 to 9, until it finally got a reasonable architecture with OSX - leading to Microsoft floundering with Vista. But the problem here is the opposite - the difficulty in competing is the same, but the two companies were reluctant to recognise the edge the competitor's system had on theirs until it was costly to fix.
- 14y ago
larrik 14y ago
"There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn." This just isn't true. In a web browser, sure, the UI barely matters. Going through the menus in Firefox or Chrome is rare, enough so that Chrome tends to look different every time I do it. But for real programs, the UI defines the workflow, and that should be optimized, even at the expense of familiarity. Just be sure that it actually IS better. So yes, the quoted advice should probably be considered and possibly adopted by FireFox and maybe Chrome. But desktop software shouldn't accept it without a huge dose of salt.
- samspot 14y ago
  I think he is quoting someone with that line but I can't place it. If I remember correctly the purpose of that advice was not to keep you from ever changing your UI, but to instead weigh the cost carefully.
- jono_x 14y ago
  > "There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn." Yeah, I guess I was overstating the case for rhetorical purposes. I don't think there's never a UI change that improves on what you already know. Once in a while a new interface comes along that's so much more efficient that it's worth retraining yourself. What I'm trying to say is that these changes are rare. I think designers tend to overestimate the benefit of a change and underestimate the power of habituation. (P.S. thanks for catching my typo ("haver"). Fixed it.)
- lazylland 14y ago
  "There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn." I hope this doesn't become the epithet of Windows 8!
- oneandoneis2 14y ago
  Eh? The UI isn't just the menus! It's the shortcut keys and the ways in which functionality is exposed and a whole lot else. "In a web browser, sure, the UI barely matters."??? In a web browser, the UI is the ONLY thing that matters. Every browser out there can render a web page. It's how it responds to the user and what it enables you to do that makes all the difference. The biggest reason I stick with FF is the pentadactyl extension - A browser without decent vi-like controls is intolerable to me, and chrome's equivalent isn't up to par. So I stick with FF, for the UI.
samspot 14y ago
I hate firefox updates because I use it infrequently enough that I have to update just about every time I open it. Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. Makes me not even want to turn the thing on. So, note to developers: Frequent updates drive your infrequent users crazy.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Frequent users as well. Though both sets suffer.
  - samspot 14y ago
    For sure, though they might not notice as much since its not every time they turn it on. I play some games that do weekly updates and they largely haven't been as annoying since i play them consistently. I'm sure this varies depending on personality though.
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  > Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot. Since most people leave it connected to the power socket, I wonder why they don't wake it sometime and do all the updates and go back to being powered off.
  - samspot 14y ago
    True, but my xbox is broken. However when it was working the updates went pretty quickly. PS updates often take up to 45 minutes.
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      As far as I can tell, all ps3 system and game updates are hosted on some dude's dsl line. And they can't be bsckgrounded probably the worst part.
jpxxx 14y ago
This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point. Requesting permission to update throws a significant amount of users. They're typically not capable of determining if the request is legitimate or not, they're fearful of updating things they rely on, and god help them if it's not a one-click update.
- ja2ke 14y ago
  Yep, most "consumer-level" end users would prefer to not be asked. I'm probably a bad nerd, but it's even true of me. When I go to my parents house for some holiday or another, I used to meticulously check everything on my mom's computer to make sure it was working well. Now I basically just jam on the manual software update button for everything she has installed that doesn't autoupdate, because she's too afraid or inconvenienced by the manual update button. Everything else, though, is just managing itself and she doesn't notice.
- vogonj 14y ago
  "This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point." yes, but no. saying that silent self-update is table stakes is missing the point: table stakes from your users' perspective is "shipping software that doesn't need to be consciously maintained." whether you ship rarely and get the bugs out before you do, or ship frequently but have automatic upgrades that don't break things, doesn't matter.
smacktoward 14y ago
I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefox" had been in users' hands for seven years -- nine if you count pre-1.0 versions. Over that time, users' expectations of what a product branded "Firefox" was settled into a particular place. Rapid release was painful because it broke those expectations. Suddenly Firefox didn't behave like people expected a product labeled "Firefox" to behave anymore. It's like opening a bottle labeled "Coke" and having orange juice pour out. "But orange juice is better for you!" Yeah, but that's still not what I expect to get when I open a Coke bottle. There's a simple way Mozilla could have avoided this: just call the rapid-release product something else. Create a new brand, and put it on a version of the browser that receives updates every six weeks. Call it Fastfox or Frequentfox or really anything other than Firefox. Then encourage users to start moving from Firefox to the new hotness. Make the new product compatible with Firefox extensions, but don't do the version-number compatibility check that Firefox does, so users aren't constantly being prompted to update working addons. (Yes, both products are the same code under the hood. That doesn't matter. The important thing is that you communicate to users that this is a thing that is something other than Firefox, which resets their expectations.) Eventually you'd have most users on the new product, since that's where the cool new features that get users excited would be showing up. Curmudgeons and enterprises would stay with boring old Firefox, but that's OK, because you make "Firefox" just a periodic snapshot of Frequentfox development. "Firefox" becomes a legacy brand, maintained for those who care about it. But the new brand is clearly established as the new hotness. This lets you move your users without violating their expectations. They expect the new product to behave differently, because it's a new product. It's got a different name and everything! Violent changes in direction for an established product, on the other hand, always tick off users, because they do violence to those users' expectations of what that product is. It's better to send your well-loved legacy brand gracefully off into the sunset, in other words, than to try and shock new life into it with electric paddles.
- brigade 14y ago
dredmorbius 14y ago
A lot of agreement. Some disagreements. Yes, frequent updates, especially those that break plugins, suck massively. Each update is a huge leap of dread into the "well, what's going to break this time" sea. The biggest single fault I've got with Firerfox (running FF13) isn't updates, it's memory usage. It still leaks massively, and pretty much requires a daily restart. State preservation is good enough that this doesn't matter a whole lot, but the change I'd like to see is one in which a small handful of tabs (I may easily run over 100) are considered "current and active" (foreground, pinned apps), and the rest function more as a stateful bookmark. Which, given that on crash recovery I tend to leave tabs unrefreshed until I actually open them, they largely are. State-tracking in browsers really sucks. I've begun using the vimperator plugin, and it does a hugely awesome job of helping with this, mostly in the close/undo mode that handles history, and in being able to do partial matches and tab-completion (based on history and bookmarks) when opening new tabs / navigating to a page. Chrome isn't all that hot. It's fast, it offers a different broken memory model (groups of tabs run in isolated processes, but consume much more memory on a per-tab basis), and it plays well with Google's own Web properties. But it lacks the extension flexibility Firefox has (especially UI tweaks such as Vimperator, Tree-style Tabs / Tabkit (sadly incompatible with recent releases), and Remove it Permanently) which I find highly useful, As for updates: call it old age, call it maturity, but I prefer things not change, especially UIs. Much of the greatest frustration and outcry on Linux has been over desktop UI metaphors (GNOME and KDE especially), and Microsoft is rapidly heading into the same fray. As much as I dislike actually using the Mac interface, I have to admit that Apple have kept it highly consistent for the 11 years of OS X. Yes, we can eventually get over it, but big changes should happen very infrequently, and then be left alone for a goodly while. If you need a sandpit to play in, fork a conceptual project, and realize that your userbase for this will be very different from the mainstream, though it may provide some valuable insights. Frequently interrupting my workflow really, really, really sucks, more than you can possibly imagine. It's one of the joys of running on Debian GNU/Linux -- so long as you're on stable, big changes are infrequent and small changes are all but invisible. Best of both worlds. IF you are going to rely on a plugin architecture, THEN get the damned baseline worked out and keep it stable. Screwing with APIs pains everyone. It screws your users and your developer community. I'm becoming of the opinion that we want a bifurcation of the browser. There's an app platform, for Web 2.0 stuff, where it's really necessary. And there's something closer to ePub / Readability / Readability Redux / Instapaper, which presents deep textual content in a format that's both device-appropriate and highly nondistracting. When I find myself using Chrome with the Developer Tools window open, editing page and style elements as I go, something is very, very wrong with the Web.
comex 14y ago
Site seems to be down. It would be very nice if someone made a service like Mirrordot for HN.
- jono_x 14y ago
  Hi, author of the post here. I never anticipated HN-style traffic on my personal blog. My poor lighttpd server couldn't handle it. I just rebooted; should work now.
samspot 14y ago
"Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need." This is the hardest lesson, and what I need to remember most. As a developer I really do like to tinker with new software (most of the time), but as a rule users do not and we had best not forget it! I knew the firefox updates annoyed me but I had no idea they bothered the general population just as much. I actually switched to chrome because of the memory leak in firebug so I didn't have quite the same experience.
- goostavos 14y ago
  I recently slammed into this as well. I'm am far from being a "real" developer, but I do occasionally write software for work on my own time. I spent a couple of weeks laying out a simple gui and getting all the pieces to work. I then "released" it to the office, and after seeing people clumsily poke through the menus, I decided that they must have been laid out poorly. So I rearranged everything, and redid a lot of the graphics, and swapped the versions without telling anyone. I received a crap storm of negative feedback. Ended up having to write a guide for how to use everything, and then still didn't learn my lesson! I thought X would function way better if combined with Y, etc, etc.. Pushed another version with some new features and some feature removed, and again, a torrent of confused coworkers asking me where things went. The only good decision I made was to stop messing with it... which is hard. Each time I see people interact with it I feel there is a glaringly obvious change that needs to be made to ultimately benifit the user. But alas, I leave it be.
  - samspot 14y ago
    You can mitigate a lot of this with budget usability testing (show your mom :)).
ck2 14y ago
I have not had an extension break since FF7 (now on FF14) Firefox has come a long way and I as a developer I don't like how Chrome hides everything. It's also super easy in Firefox to turn off automatic updates and only update manually when you are ready (help -> about firefox)
- Karunamon 14y ago
  >I have not had an extension break since FF7 (now on FF14) It's been my experience that extensions don't 'break' (i.e. stop working as expected) as much as they self validate against the currently running version of FF and refuse to load unless the developer has flagged it as workable. Every time a major release comes out, half of my plugins are disabled. Then, I go and download the compatability reporter plugin (which gives you the option to override the version check), and 9 times out of 10, every single plugin works fine. Also, what did you mean "how Chrome hides everything"? I'll admit the plugin system isnt near as robust, but for web development, I'm in passionate love with the Chrome/ium developer tools.
  - dangoor 14y ago
    I believe it was Firefox 12 or 13 that made add-one compatible by default. Except for add-ons with binary parts, I don't think you should find so many turned off with each update now.
    - kwierso 14y ago
      10, actually.
  - accountswu 14y ago
    >Also, what did you mean "how Chrome hides everything"? I think he's talking about how Chrome keeps the update process invisible to the user.
bengoodger 14y ago
It would be funny if people were switching to Chrome because they were tired of updates. Chrome updates _all_the_time_. Also no one gives a hoot about version numbers. I don't think people hate the updates, they hate the nagging popups. There's not really much difference between a browser notification and one of those annoying "I see you've been on my site for 23 seconds, take my survey!!!11" screens. I wrote about this at length last year: https://plus.google.com/u/0/105636695715347097518/posts/G9hbCEMC2wF https://plus.google.com/u/0/105636695715347097518/posts/G9hb... A prerequisite to a non-annoying rapid release cycle IMO is silent update. It's why we spent the time to get that part of the technology stack working first. I predict user frustration with Firefox will decrease now they've implemented this.
zobzu 14y ago
So its been a few month without bashing firefox and thus its that time of the year for that again? Except it has better memory management than any other browser now. Except its the fastest browser on Android now. Except the upgrading no longer break addons as they're compat by default now Except upgrading is now silent (no dialog box, no UAC prompt, no "welcome to the new firefox tab" - yes; on windows) Except if you need a Firefox that doesn't change version at all, you can use Firefox ESR. Cause it's not having things fixed now that matters. Nope. Never!
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  BTW, you're being downvoted (not by me, though it's tempting) because at least a few of those are untrue. edit: Chrome is still faster on Android for me, addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox, and I don't find the memory management to be any better. It's still horrendously slow in Linux and on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what.
  - zobzu 14y ago
    go ahead and point them out.
  - fzzzy 14y ago
    Which ones?
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    I love how you know the reason for being downvoted... Memory management is definitely better and we have no idea what extensions you are using.
  - gcp 14y ago
    Chrome is still faster on Android for me Please give some example where. addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox Which ones? I haven't had a broken extension in months (since Firefox 10), and I use quite a few. on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what Are you implying Firefox is using 12G on your machine? To be honest, I think what's happening is that one of those "extensions that keeps breaking" is crap and what is using all that memory. Real Firefox has none of the problems you describe (very vaguely and without specifics), so it's hard to take you seriously - let alone see how it could be fixed.
gwillen 14y ago
jono_x: For some reason your account appears to have been banned from the moment of creation. Nobody can see any of your comments.
azakai 14y ago
1. The download/restart takes forever and interrupts your work with a bunch of intrusive dialog boxes. This is a valid complaint. Firefox did rapid release before it perfected the update process to be fully automatic and silent, that definitely caused some users issues. Mozilla has recognized that publicly and taken responsibility for that decision - and meanwhile fixed the update process as well as launched an extended support release version of Firefox that updates far less frequently. 2. The update may break stuff that you counted on, either by removing features you were using, or by breaking compatibility with other software you use. Maybe the developers never tested your use case, or worse - they tested for it but decdided it didn't matter because only 2% of users used it. Tough luck to you if you're one of those 2%. This point is ironic - because the claim is that users are switching to Chrome, which is the inventor of the 6-week update process. Chrome's 6-week updates can break websites or features that you rely on (I heard devs complain about breakage in the plugin interfaces for examples), just like Firefox's 6-week updates can. When you update software every 6 weeks, and you make those updates real updates (not small security updates), then you risk breaking stuff for users. If you don't like that, you can't use either Chrome or Firefox. You might prefer IE, Safari and Opera which are slower-updating (there is also the Firefox extended support release as mentioned before). So yes, the Firefox implementation of rapid release did not begin 100% smoothly, issues were admitted and worked on. But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome). Side note, there is definite anecdotal evidence for users leaving Firefox for Chrome over rapid release. But there is also anecdotal evidence of users moving in other directions. Looking at the browser market share statistics, Firefox has declined a little and stabilized, with most of the previous decline coming from users of Firefox 3.6, not the modern rapid release versions. Of course the anecdotal stuff could still be right - perhaps 3.6 users move to the modern version, and some modern version people leave for another browser. But it's hard to differentiate that from people just leaving 3.6 directly (and people on modern versions being happy and staying), the data is hard to interpret.
- jono_x 14y ago
  > But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome). Hi Azakai, Paradoxical it may be, but this is exactly what I have observed: people leaving Firefox for Chrome and citing dislike of rapid updates as the main reason. Not just the intrusiveness of the update mechanism, but the breakage of compatibility and UI habituation are also cited as reasons. Yes, these problems exist in Chrome as well as Firefox. It's just that users aren't noticing them as much in Chrome. Probably because, as new Chrome users, they don't yet have UI habituation and they don't yet have a workflow that depends on specific add-ons or other fragile compatibility issues. Maybe if they stay on Chrome for long enough they will realize that the same problems exist there. But they're the sort of problems you don't encounter right away as a new user of a browser. So yes, fixing the experience of the update itself is the highest priority since that's the number one thing that was driving people away. I know the Firefox team has been working hard on fixing this and the updates are much smoother now (especially since Firefox 12 got rid of the Windows UAC warnings.) That's great! However, I predict that in the long term there will continue to be problems in both Firefox and Chrome caused by automatic updates breaking UI habituation, compatibility, or low-frequency use cases that particular users depended on. Software that's as important as a web browser really ought to offer users an option to get just security/performance updates without any other changes. (Mozilla does offer Firefox ESR, but they don't publicize it and they discourage non-enterprise users from downloading it.)
mbrubeck 14y ago
Hey pg (or other moderators), it would be nice if you could unban jono_x who is the author of this post and signed up to respond to comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jono_x http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jono_x (For now, you can read them if you set "showdead" in your HN profile.)
- jono_x 14y ago
  I'm banned? (My posts were showing up for me, so I had no idea.) Did get banned because I broke a rule I wasn't aware of? Or is it that a newly registered account needs to be approved by a moderator before the comments show up?
  - mbrubeck 14y ago
    Yay! You are unbanned now. The spam filtering algorithms are not open source, but I believe they are a bit trigger-happy when it comes to brand new accounts that post a lot of comments at once. My uninformed guess is that you were caught by an overzealous filter.
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      >The spam filtering algorithms are not open source // The moderation of this social network is completely opaque and often, it seems, whatever algorithms or feelings the mods use to guide them are wrong. That's probably survivor/selection bias but who's to know ...
- notJim 14y ago
  jono_x, yes you are banned. Hellbanned specifically, which is why I can't reply to you. I don't understand why you are banned. Normally it seems like it happens to users who post junk, or who get downvoted a whole lot when they're new. Neither of these apply to you, however, so I'm really not sure. If you really want to respond, maybe you could do so on your blog, and someone in the thread will link to it.
- GFischer 14y ago
  We can read jono's replies, but we can't answer. Jono, if you see some indirect answers it's because we can't reply directly to yours.
human_error 14y ago
I'm still trying to figure out why the "add-ons" you install appear in "extensions" window and what's the difference between an extension and an addon. I can search and install Firebug but can disable/remove it from extension section.
- nnethercote 14y ago
  I too didn't understand this for quite some time. "Extensions" are things like AdBlock Plus and NoScript. "Plug-ins" are things like Flash. "add-ons" is a term that covers both extensions and plug-ins. That's why the add-ons manager has tabs for both "extensions" and "plug-ins". To confuse the issue, people very frequently use "add-on" when they really mean "extension".
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    Isn't that really because Mozilla don't make the extension vs addon vs plugin distinction clear themselves? If you go to the Firefox add-ons in about:addons and do a search for an addon called "flash" then a link to the [Adobe] flash plugin isn't presented (as either best match nor name match). It's got to be amongst the top 10 addons used surely?? Certainly one of the top 10 for the keyword "flash". So? Equally the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ page doesn't mention plugins at all, not even under the "more" top menu. If you search at the addons page you only get extensions and no plugins offered to you (eg https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=flash https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=flash). Extensions are found at addresses like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/$extensionName https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/$extensionNam...; shouldn't that be /en-US/firefox/extension/... ? In short Mozilla don't make it clear to users so how should a user be expected to see the difference? Is there a real difference or is it just an arbitrary Firefox UI distinction?
Legion 14y ago
What killed Firefox for me wasn't just the plugin breakage on updates, but the unnecessary plugin breakage. For most of my broken plugins, the immediate solution was, "edit the XML file inside the .xpi, and update the maxVersion to include the latest version of Firefox." Firefox 10 changed this behavior, making plugins assume to be compatible by default, unless set to a strict mode by the plugin author. But Firefox 10 released in January of this year, by which point I had long since moved to Chromium.
tsotha 14y ago
I agree with everything he's written. I was a diehard Firefox fan. The plethora of releases was annoying in itself - it's a damn browser, fer chrissake. Mature technology. Removing all the buttons so it looks like Chrome isn't improvement, it's just change. But even then I stuck with it until they managed to break it completely. Loading a page with a lot of external links would take, literally, five minutes. I tried disabling all my plugins, disabling javascript, etc, etc. No joy. Finally I gave up and downloaded Chrome. I still use Firefox at work, but only because I'm using an OS for which there's no Chrome.
melling 14y ago
I get a Firefox update every single day because I'm on the Nightly. If people would quit complaining and embrace the rapid upgrade cycle, we can advance the web at an accelerated pace. Almost half the people on the Internet are getting an upgrade every 6 weeks. The next three years could see as much change as the last 10, for example. Btw,yes I understand we have legacy browsers and they won't get the full experience, but when they finally do, they'll get that better browser.
smsm42 14y ago
Never had any problems with Firefox updates. Switched to Chrome because Firefox leaked memory like crazy and because unusable after less than a week of work. I use browser quite intensively and keep tens of tabs open at all time. Firefox seems to be unable to deal with it. I suffered for years but once Chrome got decent extensions that was it.
- nnethercote 14y ago
  How long has it been since you tried Firefox? Its memory consumption has improved a lot recently. And FF15 will prevent the vast majority of add-on leaks (which was the biggest remaining problem).
  - shasty 14y ago
    Why even say shit like that? FF is dead in the water and it has been for years. Try it lately? yeah about as much as Im willing to "try" Internet Explorer. It doesnt work like that you fuck your customers and they bolt...forever.
city41 14y ago
One thing I've not seen anyone bring up in the comments here is Chrome updates just as often as Firefox does. Chrome might even update more often than Firefox does. I don't know because Chrome solved the rapid update problem exceptionally well. Chrome could update every hour and I probably wouldn't even notice, let alone care. Rapid updates in and of themselves are not the problem here.
- Tangaroa 14y ago
  Here are the two major problems that I see in Mozilla's "rapid updates" process: 1) Interruption of user work process Firefox freezes for a few seconds at startup to see if there are any updates to the core or plugins. If this were handled in the background in a separate thread that did not freeze the browser, no one would care about it except for privacy advocates who don't want their version number being leaked. Then there are the popups and request to reboot that also interrupt the user's work process, given that the user has probably been trying to get work done while the download was going on. 2) Stupid versioning For as long as software version numbers have existed, most vendors have used the major.minor.patch pattern. A change in the major version number usually means a break in the public API, so software vendors provide a different API library for every major version that they release, and they allow plugins to decide what API version to use. Mozilla decided to increase their _major_ version number for every _patch_. Firefox's latest version 420 or however high they are now should probably be something like 4.2.20. The stupid numbering will only annoy users who expect Mozilla to follow best software development practices, but it shouldn't affect plugins. If Firefox is doing their updates correctly, they will be exposing a separate API library for every major version update that they've done in their rapid major version update schedule. Of course, they're doing it wrong. Plugins built for version 4 or version 5 no longer work because FF is only providing the latest API version 420, and only until next week when 421 comes out. Mozilla's solution is for all plugin vendors to update their plugins after every FF update, and for users to wait until the plugin vendors have done this. There would be no plugin breakage if Mozilla had updated the patch and minor version numbers for non-breaking updates. I've said this on /. but the Moz devs argued that their choice was between rapid major version updates or no updates at all. I find that hard to believe. Something is wrong with their toolkit if they cannot support minor version number updates.
cheeaun 14y ago
Here's what I think Mozilla/Firefox should have done before starting the rapid release cycle: 1. Migrate all extensions to restartless/JetPack. Extensions for Firefox are very powerful but may sometimes break when new versions are released, which then the compatibility check feature is introduced to "solve" this. Before the rapid release cycle, I've already seen some users reluctant to update and would wait for extensions to be updated first before updating to new version of Firefox. So now with this cycle, it just annoys them further. If all extensions were done in a more standard (and simpler) extension API first, this would have reduce the impact on the upgrading process. Users don't have to worry so much if the extensions that they depend on, would break. 2. Remove 3rd-party themes and embrace the 'Personas' (simpler themes/skins). Or at least improve theme development into something more standardized like JetPack. Since the Mozilla days, theme development hasn't change much. Extensions have JetPack, but themes have nothing (Personas is entirely a different thing). The case with themes is exactly the same as extensions. I know some users wouldn't upgrade to Firefox because the theme is not updated yet. I'm not sure if anyone still install custom Firefox themes, but themes played a decent role in attracting users (from IE?) in the early days. 3. Implement Electrolysis (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). From my observation, the real problem with Firefox is not the memory usage but its slowness. When users notice that the browser is getting slower (slow startup, slow tab-switching, slow UI response), they probably look at the number of tabs, try to find out the problem and saw that huge GBs of memory used. Firefox is now better at memory management, but the problem is still there. I'm not 100% sure about the implementation details; I'm thinking that if Firefox has Chrome-like multi-process architecture, the interface would be more responsive and memory management would be even better. So, after this, implement rapid release cycle, enabled by default for new users/installs and prompt existing users to optionally opt in. Make the update process unobtrusive and it would be a win-win situation for everyone. (I created one of the first 3rd-party themes for Firefox, since the Phoenix days.)
- gcp 14y ago
  3. Implement Electrolysis (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). From my observation, the real problem with Firefox is not the memory usage but its slowness. Electrolysis does nothing to solve this, which is why it was abandoned. I'm thinking that if Firefox has Chrome-like multi-process architecture, the interface would be more responsive and memory management would be even better. Memory usage is far worse with multi-process, it's one reason Firefox uses less memory than Chrome.
yaix 14y ago
Rapid release cicle: Good. Changing extention APIs or UI: Bad.
benthumb 14y ago
I guess I'm in the minority in that I liked the updates: it was like getting a suprise gift ... but the incompatibility w/ the latest version of flash has forced me, unfortunately, to move on. It's not even necessarily Mozilla's fault, but my other browers don't have this issue. I'm trying out Opera for the umpteenth time ... it always eventually disappoints, but I'm going to give it another go.
its_so_on 14y ago
Not me, I think it's great. For once you can run firefox, as opposed to some specific version you downloaded eons ago - the 90's model of software.
Tloewald 14y ago
The big problem with Firefox updates for me, and this predates the rapid release BS, is that they occur when you launch Firefox, wasting your time precisely when you're in a hurry. If they just waited until you were idle and then updated in the background they'd be hugely better. (Extra points for figuring out if compatible versions of plugins are available yet first, downloading them too, etc.)
- mccr8 14y ago
  I believe that background updates are coming in Firefox 15.
nwmcsween 14y ago
Chrome uses courgette, now if it actually became a standalone project that could be used outside of google (you need to jump through their frankly stupid build system) I'm sure it would see adoption.
- mccr8 14y ago
  Courgette is very cool, but all it does is make updates smaller, which is only one part of making updates less annoying. Also, Google was sued in 2009 for patent infringement for the algorithm, which likely makes other people nervous about using it. I'm not sure if or how that was resolved.
edanm 14y ago
This is a lot of analysis when the answer seems very simple and is hidden in the article: Firefox Updates weren't done as well as Chrome Updates, which is why they weren't popular. I've been using Chrome for years (after using FF for years). With Chrome, I never realize there are updates. The idea of updating Chrome just doesn't enter into my consciousness. So the fact that they update all-the-friggin'-time doesn't matter to me - it never registers in my mind. With FF, every update I would realize it. So even if the updates were just a popup "hey, we've updated", doing it once every two months will cause me to acknowledge their updating once every 2 months. Which I don't want to do, because I don't care, at all about Firefox updating. I just want to browse the web.
jono_x 14y ago
Well, the Hacker News traffic was more than my poor little webserver could handle. I can't even ssh into the machine to reboot lighttpd. Never thought I would see my personal blog linked on HN! Would it be at all helpful to the discussion for me to copypasta the text of the article here, since people can't reach it otherwise? In case the context is not obvious from the article, I have recently quit working for Mozilla, driven in part by the realizations I described. I've become quite disenchanted with the software industry and I'm not at all sure that software development is what I want to do for the rest of my career. I'm trying to decide what to do next. If anybody reading this has any similar experiences or perspective, I would be very interested to hear it. Thank you.
csaba 14y ago
I mostly use windows 8 now, and firefox there simply does not works! Maybe it is only on my machine, I don't know, and I don't really care anymore. I really wanted to test the new non-memory eating firefox, but if tabs are disappearing, and flickering in a weird way (some random image appears instead of the tabs), than I can't use it.
jbk 14y ago
> Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn't want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent. To me, this is the most important. Usually, people prefer the original to the copy... IMO, trying to catch up with (or just copy) Chrome all the times gives the messages to the users that they should use the original...
lelele 14y ago
The worst thing about Firefox updates is that... they didn't work for me. On my Debian box, I had to manually download and install each new version. That, and Firefox crashing several times a day without giving me a clue about what happened, what I could have done to fix the issue and the bug-report process always failing to submit reports, made me think that Firefox's days as a better browser had long passed. I'm a happy Opera user now. Opera's update system is integrated into Debian's.
- gcp 14y ago
  Was this Iceweasel or Firefox? Debian doesn't ship Firefox by default.
  - lelele 14y ago
    Firefox. I don't use Debian's Iceweasel.
technojunkie 14y ago
The top three reasons I switched to Chrome: 1. Memory bloat on Firefox. It's ridiculous that I have to restart the browser every day or more often just to get back more memory. 2. Plugin breakage. I'm sure it's better now but too little too late? 3. Separate processes for each tab and speed. Chrome FEELS faster even if it might not be, but it's amazing that if one tab crashes the whole browser doesn't. #2 appears to be much better, but if Mozilla implements #3, then #1 won't see so bad and I would definitely consider using it again more often.
- gcp 14y ago
  Mozilla has already said they will never implement 3 because it's pointless. Separate processes per tab make the browser slower, not faster. Crash resilience is obtained through sandboxing the plugins that were crashing in the first place (hi Flash!), instead of entire browser instances. It's one of the reasons Firefox uses less memory than Chrome.
josteink 14y ago
As someone who converted from Firefox to Chrome, I think this mostly sums it up pretty well. Especially the part about being community-driven and then not listening to the community. I see others have also mentioned memory-usage and that is also a fair point. At some point, Firefox would have memory leaks so huge that it spent most of its CPU time constantly trying to GC, slowing to a complete halt. And then, just like with the updates, you had to restart. Restarting Firefox was a pain. But somehow restarting Chrome when updates come along is not. Why is that? My desktop is a quad-core system with hyper-threading. That's 8 logical cores for the machine if utilized correctly. By Chrome having a process-per-tab model and Firefox not, everything else being the same Chrome can reduce its startup times to 12.5% of that of Firefox. It's an order of magnitude improvement. You don't care about restarting Chrome because it just takes one second and you are back where you started. Firefox takes almost 10. That's way beyond annoying your users. When you are the browser spending ages doing a restart, you're not in a position to force updates on your users. Another thing which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, which has been broken in Firefox since the very first releases is the add-on and add-on compatibility checking. It's retarded and I cannot believe it hasn't been fixed yet. The typical Firefox update process goes like this: 1. Firefox informs you there is an update and you need to restart. 2. You accept a restart 3. Firefox shuts down, updates, and restarts. 4. upon restart after the update has been installed, it checks if your addons are compatible. WTF?!? Usually that works out fine, but every now and then it doesn't. And then it's too late. That's retarded. Why on earth would you check compatibility when it is already too late to do something about it? The process should be re-ordered. Compatibility checking should be done first. Then Firefox could say "There is an update and all your add-ons are compatible. Would you like to update now?". A simple re-ordering of things it already does would have solved one of the two biggest issues people have with the update-mechanism. Why hasn't this been done already? I'm a Chrome convert now, but I keep coming back to Firefox to see if things have improved, because I really believe in what Firefox stands for and what it represents. Unfortunately, I keep coming back to Chrome because for me, it just feels like a better browser.
- Jgrubb 14y ago
  I did the exact same thing last year. Tried switching back from Chrome to FF and using FireBug again. FF kept crashing on me. Gave it two days, switched back to Chrome.
DigitalSea 14y ago
The number one issue with Firefox is the fact the developers who make the changes and the people who tell the developers to make the changes do not listen. It's the same issue with the Wordpress development team as well, both open source projects being led in the wrong direction ignoring absolutely everything the community asks for. Firefox used to be completely about open source in the sense of the meaning; change what users want changed, add in features the users want added in, but then Firefox got popular and didn't have to try as hard to impress people any more and the downward spiral continued. I'm one of those people that switched to Chrome. I only switched about 6 months ago because I had hope that Firefox would come to their senses and fix their damn browser, but it never happened. Chrome has it down-pat in terms of backwards compatibility for plugins and themes and no memory issues. The number one complaint I had with Firefox is the plugins I needed to do my job and keep myself entertained were being blamed for the memory issues of Firefox when it has been a known problem in Firefox for sometime. Every few releases the Mozilla team touts new memory optimisation fixes that will make the browser more stable, but the browser still feels clunky and buggy. Fair enough the developers of Firefox addons should be doing their part in terms of proper memory management (releasing memory when not needed, etc) but seriously addons are Javascript, HTML and CSS mostly and Mozilla should have worked out a way to effectively auto manage memory even for really bad plugins. I know the Aurora channel supposedly has a fix for the bad plugin behaviour issues, but the whole poor addon memory management issue has been an issue with Firefox since the really early days (around version 1.5 I believe). For years Mozilla denied any memory issues with the browser, it wasn't until a little while ago when the market share started dropping of Firefox that they started feigning interest in the memory management issues.
CrLf 14y ago
"All software sucks. Users would be a lot happier if they had to use a lot less of it." I think this is the single most important thing in this article and cannot be stressed enough. Anybody that has ever had to interact with users knows this, but for developers this is very hard to believe, they choose not to see it. Most people see software (i.e. "computers") as a tool to get some work done, or to get some entertainment. The work and the entertainment are the goal, and if it were possible to achieve it without using any software, they would do it. Even technical-types think about software this way, not even knowing that they're doing it. Think about this: we mostly put up with complicated software and in-your-face software that's not contributing to our work or entertainment because we are learning something. Learning is just another goal that's not really the software itself. Once we notice that we aren't learning much anymore, the aforementioned software becomes a pain to use. Or maybe it's just me...
halfninety 14y ago
A bug report from last year on the plugin compatibility problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=691336 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=691336 No one ever cared.
- gcp 14y ago
  Mostly because Firefox 10 sidestepped the entire issue with a much better solution.
drhowarddrfine 14y ago
I love Firefox updates. I've never had an issue. I click on the update link and it's done within seconds. Then I get all the new goodies like it was my birthday. Seems like the only people who complain are home users. At least that's what I gather from the forums I visit. They just don't understand why things need to change even after a long drawn explanation.
drucken 14y ago
There is a reason many people still use Firefox 3.x and it not's just for legacy or development reasons. I cannot stress smacktoward's astute post enough.
gooddaysir 14y ago
I just want to add my voice and agree that yes, I hate the Firefox updates. I actually hate using Firefox because of it. When I can abandon it completely (it's still used a bit in my work environment) it will be none to soon.
Macha 14y ago
Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://evilbrainjono.net/blog%3Fshowcomments%3Dtrue%26permalink%3D1094&hl=en&safe=off&client=ms-android-google&sky=mrdr&site=webhp&prmd=imvns&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
kraemate 14y ago
Is it just me or is firefox's update system completely broken? I am using some firefox 3.x version because the software-updater never finds a new version (and i do not wish to download a new executable). This is on OSX. On ubuntu, because updates are controlled via apt, i'm again forced to use ancient firefox versions. The last time i had a successful update was during the 1.5 days.
brownbat 14y ago
I went back to Firefox for a bit when Ubiquity was under active development. I've never seen a new drop-in user interface add so much to my productivity... I've never fully understood why it was shelved.
shasty 14y ago
Why not make the fuckin thing better? The updates are only frustrating because they represent an outward representation of how lost mozilla is internally. It sucks. Its slow. Its ugly. It crashes often. It breaks plugins every fucking 5 seconds. Id rather use firefox 3 than the shit mozilla is pushing right now. Total junk. Make the next update a browser worth using.

227 points by krakensden 14y ago

The takeaway quote: "After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!" I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.

alttab 14y ago
This. I haven't seen a good UI change in a while. If the answer to "why" is "its ugly" then run away fast.
powerslave12r 14y ago
Gmail and Google search.
jhatax 14y ago
Very few user interfaces have withstood the test of time. There are notable exceptions, of course - the iOS UI, uTorrent, and the Chrome browser immediately come to mind. Other applications and operating systems have continued to evolve their user interface over 18-24 months. In some cases, the evolution is necessary for the sake of usability. Take Android for instance: The UI update in ICS dramatically enhanced usability. In my experience, the designers of unchanged interfaces put a lot of thought into almost every interaction a user could have with their application/operating system. Armed with the use-cases, the designers invested time and effort in creating the core UI "right", and determined a seamless way to make incremental updates. Chrome and iOS are, again, perfect examples of this concept in action. Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much. Firefox's UI changed radically in version 4. A good number of users revolted and there was uproar about the theme refresh, but most of the users that stuck around got used to the changes. That they are changing the UI again, only 24 months after the fact, does not reflect very well on the design philosophy behind the 4.0 refresh. Lots of questions come to mind - Did the designers not do adequate research during 4.0? Was the development time-frame too short? Was 4.0 just an interim solution to what they perceived a bigger problem? Are curved tabs really better than rectangular ones? Do I get back a lot of screen real estate? Is this a case of Not-Designed-By-Me syndrome?... I continue to use Firefox today, partially because I know my way around the application so well but mostly because I trust that Mozilla values my privacy. I do think that they go half the distance sometimes with their privacy measures - "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default, and Firefox accepts and keeps "Third Party Cookies" until they expire. In these specific cases, I understand that these are measures taken to ensure they can keep the lights on at their headquarters. With the impending changes to the UI, I will be using the app only on the basis of my trust in Mozilla. And we all know that trust is a tenuous thing to hang by...
- recoiledsnake 14y ago
  >Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much. I think Windows interface has withstood the test of time pretty well. The basic UX paradigm is essentially unchanged from Windows 95 with whatever that followed basically being tweaks rather than big changes.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    Until the ribbons took over everything.
    - Bjartr 14y ago
      But only after extensive testing found them quantitatively better than the old menu system.
      - keithpeter 14y ago
        Testing with users inexperienced in both UIs or testing with users who knew pre-ribbon Office well? A reference? I find it takes a bit of time to find where functions have moved on Office 2010, and I seem to be taking a long time to internalise the 'logic' for finding less used functions. Probably all those years on Office old style.
  - Someone 14y ago
    I think that is partly in the same way roman numbers withstood the test of time: being well-known made them appear easier than they are. For example, one annoyance is the rule for what ends up in alt-tab. I work with XP at work and regularly cannot alt-tab to windows I alt-tabbed to seconds ago because they popped up some dialog (or is that only with alerts?) The rule for what ends up in the task bar also is incomprehensible for mortals. For awhile, every new release of Office managed to introduce a new variation (yes, Word is MDI, but all its windows show up separately being one variation) I guess that, if you ask users about these features, they will just say "yes, sometimes it does that".
- 14y ago
AshleysBrain 14y ago
Can't users who don't like the new-fangled UI just stay on old versions? I know that ultimately creates compatibility headaches, but it at least gives them time to decide to move along.
- snatch_backside 14y ago
  Security vulnerabilities, sir.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    That and websites insisting on new functionality. HTML5 and embedded video support, notably at present.

Geee 14y ago

The problem isn't about 'rapid release cycles', but about the UX design of the update process. Even before the rapid release cycles, Firefox would check for add-on updates every time it was started. Chrome's update mechanism is completely seamless and invisible and requires zero user attention.

breadbox 14y ago
Which, ironically, is almost as bad, when you suddenly realize that you basically let Chrome change the UI, and there's no way to return to the UI you once knew.
- overcyn 14y ago
  Is it almost as bad though if people are moving from firefox to chrome?
- uxp 14y ago
  Except that Chrome has never really changed it's UI. The presentation at the end of Google's 2012 IO Day 2 keynote actually timelapses through the UI. The only change is the removal of the home button outside of general micro-tweaks. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPtJd6AzU8c&feature=player_detailpage#t=3579s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPtJd6AzU8c&feature=playe...
  - grabastic 14y ago
    Although... to my great frustration, Chrome has made pretty big changes to their preferences pages over time.
  - pkamb 14y ago
    The only one that's really bothered me is the removal of the "Go" button on the right side of the URL bar. Still miss it.

chalst 14y ago

Excellent article, with one quote in particular that seems to make a well-grounded, broader point: > I have another theory, too: When software companies get to a certain size, they start taking their users for granted. They start treating their users as pawns in a battle against some other company. Faceless millions. Gotta copy everything the other company does, or risk falling behind. So they end up doing everything the other company does whether the users want it or not, and probably doing a crappy job to boot. > In our case, we started thinking of everything in terms of the battle against Google Chrome. Oh no, Chrome is doing such-and-such; we'd better do something equivalent or we'll fall behind! We thought we needed a rapid update process like Chrome. We were jealous of their rapid update capability, which let them deploy improvements to users continuously. We had to "catch up" with Chrome's updating capability. > Credit where it's due: the way Google handled Chrome updates was very, very smart. They recognized that updates are one of the hardest things to get right, so they solved that problem first, before releasing version 1. The first release of Chrome was little more than an empty box of a browser, but it was wrapped around an excellent updating system. This let them gradually transform that empty box into a full-featured browser, without the users ever realizing they were getting updates. > Firefox did not do such a good job with rapid releases. I've written before about the specific mistakes we made, so I won't go into detail again. To summarize: we did the updates in a very intrusive way, requiring lots of user attention, which made people annoyed because it happened so often. When people restarted after an update to find no visible difference, they wondered what was so important about that update. (Remember the rule that the benefit of the update needs to outweigh the pain? We broke that rule.) Worse yet, we didn't do enough to preserve add-on compatibility, making the updates extremely disruptive to people who depended on certain add-ons; and we kept going with our old version-numbering scheme even though the meaning of the numbers had changed completely, leading to mass confusion. This reminds me of certain OS races: Microsoft trying to upgrade its 16-bit, cooperative multitasking Windows 3.1, and then ditching it for a new model based on NT, while Apple flounders with the Mac OS's 6 to 9, until it finally got a reasonable architecture with OSX - leading to Microsoft floundering with Vista. But the problem here is the opposite - the difficulty in competing is the same, but the two companies were reluctant to recognise the edge the competitor's system had on theirs until it was costly to fix.

14y ago

larrik 14y ago

"There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn." This just isn't true. In a web browser, sure, the UI barely matters. Going through the menus in Firefox or Chrome is rare, enough so that Chrome tends to look different every time I do it. But for real programs, the UI defines the workflow, and that should be optimized, even at the expense of familiarity. Just be sure that it actually IS better. So yes, the quoted advice should probably be considered and possibly adopted by FireFox and maybe Chrome. But desktop software shouldn't accept it without a huge dose of salt.

samspot 14y ago
I think he is quoting someone with that line but I can't place it. If I remember correctly the purpose of that advice was not to keep you from ever changing your UI, but to instead weigh the cost carefully.
jono_x 14y ago
> "There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn." Yeah, I guess I was overstating the case for rhetorical purposes. I don't think there's never a UI change that improves on what you already know. Once in a while a new interface comes along that's so much more efficient that it's worth retraining yourself. What I'm trying to say is that these changes are rare. I think designers tend to overestimate the benefit of a change and underestimate the power of habituation. (P.S. thanks for catching my typo ("haver"). Fixed it.)
lazylland 14y ago
"There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn." I hope this doesn't become the epithet of Windows 8!
oneandoneis2 14y ago
Eh? The UI isn't just the menus! It's the shortcut keys and the ways in which functionality is exposed and a whole lot else. "In a web browser, sure, the UI barely matters."??? In a web browser, the UI is the ONLY thing that matters. Every browser out there can render a web page. It's how it responds to the user and what it enables you to do that makes all the difference. The biggest reason I stick with FF is the pentadactyl extension - A browser without decent vi-like controls is intolerable to me, and chrome's equivalent isn't up to par. So I stick with FF, for the UI.

samspot 14y ago

I hate firefox updates because I use it infrequently enough that I have to update just about every time I open it. Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. Makes me not even want to turn the thing on. So, note to developers: Frequent updates drive your infrequent users crazy.

dredmorbius 14y ago
Frequent users as well. Though both sets suffer.
- samspot 14y ago
  For sure, though they might not notice as much since its not every time they turn it on. I play some games that do weekly updates and they largely haven't been as annoying since i play them consistently. I'm sure this varies depending on personality though.
recoiledsnake 14y ago
> Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot. Since most people leave it connected to the power socket, I wonder why they don't wake it sometime and do all the updates and go back to being powered off.
- samspot 14y ago
  True, but my xbox is broken. However when it was working the updates went pretty quickly. PS updates often take up to 45 minutes.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    As far as I can tell, all ps3 system and game updates are hosted on some dude's dsl line. And they can't be bsckgrounded probably the worst part.

jpxxx 14y ago

This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point. Requesting permission to update throws a significant amount of users. They're typically not capable of determining if the request is legitimate or not, they're fearful of updating things they rely on, and god help them if it's not a one-click update.

ja2ke 14y ago
Yep, most "consumer-level" end users would prefer to not be asked. I'm probably a bad nerd, but it's even true of me. When I go to my parents house for some holiday or another, I used to meticulously check everything on my mom's computer to make sure it was working well. Now I basically just jam on the manual software update button for everything she has installed that doesn't autoupdate, because she's too afraid or inconvenienced by the manual update button. Everything else, though, is just managing itself and she doesn't notice.
vogonj 14y ago
"This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point." yes, but no. saying that silent self-update is table stakes is missing the point: table stakes from your users' perspective is "shipping software that doesn't need to be consciously maintained." whether you ship rarely and get the bugs out before you do, or ship frequently but have automatic upgrades that don't break things, doesn't matter.

smacktoward 14y ago

I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is. When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted. Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefox" had been in users' hands for seven years -- nine if you count pre-1.0 versions. Over that time, users' expectations of what a product branded "Firefox" was settled into a particular place. Rapid release was painful because it broke those expectations. Suddenly Firefox didn't behave like people expected a product labeled "Firefox" to behave anymore. It's like opening a bottle labeled "Coke" and having orange juice pour out. "But orange juice is better for you!" Yeah, but that's still not what I expect to get when I open a Coke bottle. There's a simple way Mozilla could have avoided this: just call the rapid-release product something else. Create a new brand, and put it on a version of the browser that receives updates every six weeks. Call it Fastfox or Frequentfox or really anything other than Firefox. Then encourage users to start moving from Firefox to the new hotness. Make the new product compatible with Firefox extensions, but don't do the version-number compatibility check that Firefox does, so users aren't constantly being prompted to update working addons. (Yes, both products are the same code under the hood. That doesn't matter. The important thing is that you communicate to users that this is a thing that is something other than Firefox, which resets their expectations.) Eventually you'd have most users on the new product, since that's where the cool new features that get users excited would be showing up. Curmudgeons and enterprises would stay with boring old Firefox, but that's OK, because you make "Firefox" just a periodic snapshot of Frequentfox development. "Firefox" becomes a legacy brand, maintained for those who care about it. But the new brand is clearly established as the new hotness. This lets you move your users without violating their expectations. They expect the new product to behave differently, because it's a new product. It's got a different name and everything! Violent changes in direction for an established product, on the other hand, always tick off users, because they do violence to those users' expectations of what that product is. It's better to send your well-loved legacy brand gracefully off into the sunset, in other words, than to try and shock new life into it with electric paddles.

brigade 14y ago

dredmorbius 14y ago

A lot of agreement. Some disagreements. Yes, frequent updates, especially those that break plugins, suck massively. Each update is a huge leap of dread into the "well, what's going to break this time" sea. The biggest single fault I've got with Firerfox (running FF13) isn't updates, it's memory usage. It still leaks massively, and pretty much requires a daily restart. State preservation is good enough that this doesn't matter a whole lot, but the change I'd like to see is one in which a small handful of tabs (I may easily run over 100) are considered "current and active" (foreground, pinned apps), and the rest function more as a stateful bookmark. Which, given that on crash recovery I tend to leave tabs unrefreshed until I actually open them, they largely are. State-tracking in browsers really sucks. I've begun using the vimperator plugin, and it does a hugely awesome job of helping with this, mostly in the close/undo mode that handles history, and in being able to do partial matches and tab-completion (based on history and bookmarks) when opening new tabs / navigating to a page. Chrome isn't all that hot. It's fast, it offers a different broken memory model (groups of tabs run in isolated processes, but consume much more memory on a per-tab basis), and it plays well with Google's own Web properties. But it lacks the extension flexibility Firefox has (especially UI tweaks such as Vimperator, Tree-style Tabs / Tabkit (sadly incompatible with recent releases), and Remove it Permanently) which I find highly useful, As for updates: call it old age, call it maturity, but I prefer things not change, especially UIs. Much of the greatest frustration and outcry on Linux has been over desktop UI metaphors (GNOME and KDE especially), and Microsoft is rapidly heading into the same fray. As much as I dislike actually using the Mac interface, I have to admit that Apple have kept it highly consistent for the 11 years of OS X. Yes, we can eventually get over it, but big changes should happen very infrequently, and then be left alone for a goodly while. If you need a sandpit to play in, fork a conceptual project, and realize that your userbase for this will be very different from the mainstream, though it may provide some valuable insights. Frequently interrupting my workflow really, really, really sucks, more than you can possibly imagine. It's one of the joys of running on Debian GNU/Linux -- so long as you're on stable, big changes are infrequent and small changes are all but invisible. Best of both worlds. IF you are going to rely on a plugin architecture, THEN get the damned baseline worked out and keep it stable. Screwing with APIs pains everyone. It screws your users and your developer community. I'm becoming of the opinion that we want a bifurcation of the browser. There's an app platform, for Web 2.0 stuff, where it's really necessary. And there's something closer to ePub / Readability / Readability Redux / Instapaper, which presents deep textual content in a format that's both device-appropriate and highly nondistracting. When I find myself using Chrome with the Developer Tools window open, editing page and style elements as I go, something is very, very wrong with the Web.

comex 14y ago

Site seems to be down. It would be very nice if someone made a service like Mirrordot for HN.

jono_x 14y ago
Hi, author of the post here. I never anticipated HN-style traffic on my personal blog. My poor lighttpd server couldn't handle it. I just rebooted; should work now.

samspot 14y ago

"Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need." This is the hardest lesson, and what I need to remember most. As a developer I really do like to tinker with new software (most of the time), but as a rule users do not and we had best not forget it! I knew the firefox updates annoyed me but I had no idea they bothered the general population just as much. I actually switched to chrome because of the memory leak in firebug so I didn't have quite the same experience.

goostavos 14y ago
I recently slammed into this as well. I'm am far from being a "real" developer, but I do occasionally write software for work on my own time. I spent a couple of weeks laying out a simple gui and getting all the pieces to work. I then "released" it to the office, and after seeing people clumsily poke through the menus, I decided that they must have been laid out poorly. So I rearranged everything, and redid a lot of the graphics, and swapped the versions without telling anyone. I received a crap storm of negative feedback. Ended up having to write a guide for how to use everything, and then still didn't learn my lesson! I thought X would function way better if combined with Y, etc, etc.. Pushed another version with some new features and some feature removed, and again, a torrent of confused coworkers asking me where things went. The only good decision I made was to stop messing with it... which is hard. Each time I see people interact with it I feel there is a glaringly obvious change that needs to be made to ultimately benifit the user. But alas, I leave it be.
- samspot 14y ago
  You can mitigate a lot of this with budget usability testing (show your mom :)).

ck2 14y ago

I have not had an extension break since FF7 (now on FF14) Firefox has come a long way and I as a developer I don't like how Chrome hides everything. It's also super easy in Firefox to turn off automatic updates and only update manually when you are ready (help -> about firefox)

Karunamon 14y ago
>I have not had an extension break since FF7 (now on FF14) It's been my experience that extensions don't 'break' (i.e. stop working as expected) as much as they self validate against the currently running version of FF and refuse to load unless the developer has flagged it as workable. Every time a major release comes out, half of my plugins are disabled. Then, I go and download the compatability reporter plugin (which gives you the option to override the version check), and 9 times out of 10, every single plugin works fine. Also, what did you mean "how Chrome hides everything"? I'll admit the plugin system isnt near as robust, but for web development, I'm in passionate love with the Chrome/ium developer tools.
- dangoor 14y ago
  I believe it was Firefox 12 or 13 that made add-one compatible by default. Except for add-ons with binary parts, I don't think you should find so many turned off with each update now.
  - kwierso 14y ago
    10, actually.
- accountswu 14y ago
  >Also, what did you mean "how Chrome hides everything"? I think he's talking about how Chrome keeps the update process invisible to the user.

bengoodger 14y ago

It would be funny if people were switching to Chrome because they were tired of updates. Chrome updates _all_the_time_. Also no one gives a hoot about version numbers. I don't think people hate the updates, they hate the nagging popups. There's not really much difference between a browser notification and one of those annoying "I see you've been on my site for 23 seconds, take my survey!!!11" screens. I wrote about this at length last year: https://plus.google.com/u/0/105636695715347097518/posts/G9hbCEMC2wF https://plus.google.com/u/0/105636695715347097518/posts/G9hb... A prerequisite to a non-annoying rapid release cycle IMO is silent update. It's why we spent the time to get that part of the technology stack working first. I predict user frustration with Firefox will decrease now they've implemented this.

zobzu 14y ago

So its been a few month without bashing firefox and thus its that time of the year for that again? Except it has better memory management than any other browser now. Except its the fastest browser on Android now. Except the upgrading no longer break addons as they're compat by default now Except upgrading is now silent (no dialog box, no UAC prompt, no "welcome to the new firefox tab" - yes; on windows) Except if you need a Firefox that doesn't change version at all, you can use Firefox ESR. Cause it's not having things fixed now that matters. Nope. Never!

drivebyacct2 14y ago
BTW, you're being downvoted (not by me, though it's tempting) because at least a few of those are untrue. edit: Chrome is still faster on Android for me, addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox, and I don't find the memory management to be any better. It's still horrendously slow in Linux and on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what.
- zobzu 14y ago
  go ahead and point them out.
- fzzzy 14y ago
  Which ones?
- chris_wot 14y ago
  I love how you know the reason for being downvoted... Memory management is definitely better and we have no idea what extensions you are using.
- gcp 14y ago
  Chrome is still faster on Android for me Please give some example where. addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox Which ones? I haven't had a broken extension in months (since Firefox 10), and I use quite a few. on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what Are you implying Firefox is using 12G on your machine? To be honest, I think what's happening is that one of those "extensions that keeps breaking" is crap and what is using all that memory. Real Firefox has none of the problems you describe (very vaguely and without specifics), so it's hard to take you seriously - let alone see how it could be fixed.

gwillen 14y ago

jono_x: For some reason your account appears to have been banned from the moment of creation. Nobody can see any of your comments.

azakai 14y ago

1. The download/restart takes forever and interrupts your work with a bunch of intrusive dialog boxes. This is a valid complaint. Firefox did rapid release before it perfected the update process to be fully automatic and silent, that definitely caused some users issues. Mozilla has recognized that publicly and taken responsibility for that decision - and meanwhile fixed the update process as well as launched an extended support release version of Firefox that updates far less frequently. 2. The update may break stuff that you counted on, either by removing features you were using, or by breaking compatibility with other software you use. Maybe the developers never tested your use case, or worse - they tested for it but decdided it didn't matter because only 2% of users used it. Tough luck to you if you're one of those 2%. This point is ironic - because the claim is that users are switching to Chrome, which is the inventor of the 6-week update process. Chrome's 6-week updates can break websites or features that you rely on (I heard devs complain about breakage in the plugin interfaces for examples), just like Firefox's 6-week updates can. When you update software every 6 weeks, and you make those updates real updates (not small security updates), then you risk breaking stuff for users. If you don't like that, you can't use either Chrome or Firefox. You might prefer IE, Safari and Opera which are slower-updating (there is also the Firefox extended support release as mentioned before). So yes, the Firefox implementation of rapid release did not begin 100% smoothly, issues were admitted and worked on. But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome). Side note, there is definite anecdotal evidence for users leaving Firefox for Chrome over rapid release. But there is also anecdotal evidence of users moving in other directions. Looking at the browser market share statistics, Firefox has declined a little and stabilized, with most of the previous decline coming from users of Firefox 3.6, not the modern rapid release versions. Of course the anecdotal stuff could still be right - perhaps 3.6 users move to the modern version, and some modern version people leave for another browser. But it's hard to differentiate that from people just leaving 3.6 directly (and people on modern versions being happy and staying), the data is hard to interpret.

jono_x 14y ago
> But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome). Hi Azakai, Paradoxical it may be, but this is exactly what I have observed: people leaving Firefox for Chrome and citing dislike of rapid updates as the main reason. Not just the intrusiveness of the update mechanism, but the breakage of compatibility and UI habituation are also cited as reasons. Yes, these problems exist in Chrome as well as Firefox. It's just that users aren't noticing them as much in Chrome. Probably because, as new Chrome users, they don't yet have UI habituation and they don't yet have a workflow that depends on specific add-ons or other fragile compatibility issues. Maybe if they stay on Chrome for long enough they will realize that the same problems exist there. But they're the sort of problems you don't encounter right away as a new user of a browser. So yes, fixing the experience of the update itself is the highest priority since that's the number one thing that was driving people away. I know the Firefox team has been working hard on fixing this and the updates are much smoother now (especially since Firefox 12 got rid of the Windows UAC warnings.) That's great! However, I predict that in the long term there will continue to be problems in both Firefox and Chrome caused by automatic updates breaking UI habituation, compatibility, or low-frequency use cases that particular users depended on. Software that's as important as a web browser really ought to offer users an option to get just security/performance updates without any other changes. (Mozilla does offer Firefox ESR, but they don't publicize it and they discourage non-enterprise users from downloading it.)

mbrubeck 14y ago

Hey pg (or other moderators), it would be nice if you could unban jono_x who is the author of this post and signed up to respond to comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jono_x http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jono_x (For now, you can read them if you set "showdead" in your HN profile.)

jono_x 14y ago
I'm banned? (My posts were showing up for me, so I had no idea.) Did get banned because I broke a rule I wasn't aware of? Or is it that a newly registered account needs to be approved by a moderator before the comments show up?
- mbrubeck 14y ago
  Yay! You are unbanned now. The spam filtering algorithms are not open source, but I believe they are a bit trigger-happy when it comes to brand new accounts that post a lot of comments at once. My uninformed guess is that you were caught by an overzealous filter.
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    >The spam filtering algorithms are not open source // The moderation of this social network is completely opaque and often, it seems, whatever algorithms or feelings the mods use to guide them are wrong. That's probably survivor/selection bias but who's to know ...
notJim 14y ago
jono_x, yes you are banned. Hellbanned specifically, which is why I can't reply to you. I don't understand why you are banned. Normally it seems like it happens to users who post junk, or who get downvoted a whole lot when they're new. Neither of these apply to you, however, so I'm really not sure. If you really want to respond, maybe you could do so on your blog, and someone in the thread will link to it.
GFischer 14y ago
We can read jono's replies, but we can't answer. Jono, if you see some indirect answers it's because we can't reply directly to yours.

human_error 14y ago

I'm still trying to figure out why the "add-ons" you install appear in "extensions" window and what's the difference between an extension and an addon. I can search and install Firebug but can disable/remove it from extension section.

nnethercote 14y ago
I too didn't understand this for quite some time. "Extensions" are things like AdBlock Plus and NoScript. "Plug-ins" are things like Flash. "add-ons" is a term that covers both extensions and plug-ins. That's why the add-ons manager has tabs for both "extensions" and "plug-ins". To confuse the issue, people very frequently use "add-on" when they really mean "extension".
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  Isn't that really because Mozilla don't make the extension vs addon vs plugin distinction clear themselves? If you go to the Firefox add-ons in about:addons and do a search for an addon called "flash" then a link to the [Adobe] flash plugin isn't presented (as either best match nor name match). It's got to be amongst the top 10 addons used surely?? Certainly one of the top 10 for the keyword "flash". So? Equally the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ page doesn't mention plugins at all, not even under the "more" top menu. If you search at the addons page you only get extensions and no plugins offered to you (eg https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=flash https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=flash). Extensions are found at addresses like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/$extensionName https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/$extensionNam...; shouldn't that be /en-US/firefox/extension/... ? In short Mozilla don't make it clear to users so how should a user be expected to see the difference? Is there a real difference or is it just an arbitrary Firefox UI distinction?

Legion 14y ago

What killed Firefox for me wasn't just the plugin breakage on updates, but the unnecessary plugin breakage. For most of my broken plugins, the immediate solution was, "edit the XML file inside the .xpi, and update the maxVersion to include the latest version of Firefox." Firefox 10 changed this behavior, making plugins assume to be compatible by default, unless set to a strict mode by the plugin author. But Firefox 10 released in January of this year, by which point I had long since moved to Chromium.

tsotha 14y ago

I agree with everything he's written. I was a diehard Firefox fan. The plethora of releases was annoying in itself - it's a damn browser, fer chrissake. Mature technology. Removing all the buttons so it looks like Chrome isn't improvement, it's just change. But even then I stuck with it until they managed to break it completely. Loading a page with a lot of external links would take, literally, five minutes. I tried disabling all my plugins, disabling javascript, etc, etc. No joy. Finally I gave up and downloaded Chrome. I still use Firefox at work, but only because I'm using an OS for which there's no Chrome.

melling 14y ago

I get a Firefox update every single day because I'm on the Nightly. If people would quit complaining and embrace the rapid upgrade cycle, we can advance the web at an accelerated pace. Almost half the people on the Internet are getting an upgrade every 6 weeks. The next three years could see as much change as the last 10, for example. Btw,yes I understand we have legacy browsers and they won't get the full experience, but when they finally do, they'll get that better browser.

smsm42 14y ago

Never had any problems with Firefox updates. Switched to Chrome because Firefox leaked memory like crazy and because unusable after less than a week of work. I use browser quite intensively and keep tens of tabs open at all time. Firefox seems to be unable to deal with it. I suffered for years but once Chrome got decent extensions that was it.

nnethercote 14y ago
How long has it been since you tried Firefox? Its memory consumption has improved a lot recently. And FF15 will prevent the vast majority of add-on leaks (which was the biggest remaining problem).
- shasty 14y ago
  Why even say shit like that? FF is dead in the water and it has been for years. Try it lately? yeah about as much as Im willing to "try" Internet Explorer. It doesnt work like that you fuck your customers and they bolt...forever.

city41 14y ago

One thing I've not seen anyone bring up in the comments here is Chrome updates just as often as Firefox does. Chrome might even update more often than Firefox does. I don't know because Chrome solved the rapid update problem exceptionally well. Chrome could update every hour and I probably wouldn't even notice, let alone care. Rapid updates in and of themselves are not the problem here.

Tangaroa 14y ago
Here are the two major problems that I see in Mozilla's "rapid updates" process: 1) Interruption of user work process Firefox freezes for a few seconds at startup to see if there are any updates to the core or plugins. If this were handled in the background in a separate thread that did not freeze the browser, no one would care about it except for privacy advocates who don't want their version number being leaked. Then there are the popups and request to reboot that also interrupt the user's work process, given that the user has probably been trying to get work done while the download was going on. 2) Stupid versioning For as long as software version numbers have existed, most vendors have used the major.minor.patch pattern. A change in the major version number usually means a break in the public API, so software vendors provide a different API library for every major version that they release, and they allow plugins to decide what API version to use. Mozilla decided to increase their _major_ version number for every _patch_. Firefox's latest version 420 or however high they are now should probably be something like 4.2.20. The stupid numbering will only annoy users who expect Mozilla to follow best software development practices, but it shouldn't affect plugins. If Firefox is doing their updates correctly, they will be exposing a separate API library for every major version update that they've done in their rapid major version update schedule. Of course, they're doing it wrong. Plugins built for version 4 or version 5 no longer work because FF is only providing the latest API version 420, and only until next week when 421 comes out. Mozilla's solution is for all plugin vendors to update their plugins after every FF update, and for users to wait until the plugin vendors have done this. There would be no plugin breakage if Mozilla had updated the patch and minor version numbers for non-breaking updates. I've said this on /. but the Moz devs argued that their choice was between rapid major version updates or no updates at all. I find that hard to believe. Something is wrong with their toolkit if they cannot support minor version number updates.

cheeaun 14y ago

Here's what I think Mozilla/Firefox should have done before starting the rapid release cycle: 1. Migrate all extensions to restartless/JetPack. Extensions for Firefox are very powerful but may sometimes break when new versions are released, which then the compatibility check feature is introduced to "solve" this. Before the rapid release cycle, I've already seen some users reluctant to update and would wait for extensions to be updated first before updating to new version of Firefox. So now with this cycle, it just annoys them further. If all extensions were done in a more standard (and simpler) extension API first, this would have reduce the impact on the upgrading process. Users don't have to worry so much if the extensions that they depend on, would break. 2. Remove 3rd-party themes and embrace the 'Personas' (simpler themes/skins). Or at least improve theme development into something more standardized like JetPack. Since the Mozilla days, theme development hasn't change much. Extensions have JetPack, but themes have nothing (Personas is entirely a different thing). The case with themes is exactly the same as extensions. I know some users wouldn't upgrade to Firefox because the theme is not updated yet. I'm not sure if anyone still install custom Firefox themes, but themes played a decent role in attracting users (from IE?) in the early days. 3. Implement Electrolysis (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). From my observation, the real problem with Firefox is not the memory usage but its slowness. When users notice that the browser is getting slower (slow startup, slow tab-switching, slow UI response), they probably look at the number of tabs, try to find out the problem and saw that huge GBs of memory used. Firefox is now better at memory management, but the problem is still there. I'm not 100% sure about the implementation details; I'm thinking that if Firefox has Chrome-like multi-process architecture, the interface would be more responsive and memory management would be even better. So, after this, implement rapid release cycle, enabled by default for new users/installs and prompt existing users to optionally opt in. Make the update process unobtrusive and it would be a win-win situation for everyone. (I created one of the first 3rd-party themes for Firefox, since the Phoenix days.)

gcp 14y ago
3. Implement Electrolysis (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). From my observation, the real problem with Firefox is not the memory usage but its slowness. Electrolysis does nothing to solve this, which is why it was abandoned. I'm thinking that if Firefox has Chrome-like multi-process architecture, the interface would be more responsive and memory management would be even better. Memory usage is far worse with multi-process, it's one reason Firefox uses less memory than Chrome.

yaix 14y ago

Rapid release cicle: Good. Changing extention APIs or UI: Bad.

benthumb 14y ago

I guess I'm in the minority in that I liked the updates: it was like getting a suprise gift ... but the incompatibility w/ the latest version of flash has forced me, unfortunately, to move on. It's not even necessarily Mozilla's fault, but my other browers don't have this issue. I'm trying out Opera for the umpteenth time ... it always eventually disappoints, but I'm going to give it another go.

its_so_on 14y ago

Not me, I think it's great. For once you can run firefox, as opposed to some specific version you downloaded eons ago - the 90's model of software.

Tloewald 14y ago

The big problem with Firefox updates for me, and this predates the rapid release BS, is that they occur when you launch Firefox, wasting your time precisely when you're in a hurry. If they just waited until you were idle and then updated in the background they'd be hugely better. (Extra points for figuring out if compatible versions of plugins are available yet first, downloading them too, etc.)

mccr8 14y ago
I believe that background updates are coming in Firefox 15.

nwmcsween 14y ago

Chrome uses courgette, now if it actually became a standalone project that could be used outside of google (you need to jump through their frankly stupid build system) I'm sure it would see adoption.

mccr8 14y ago
Courgette is very cool, but all it does is make updates smaller, which is only one part of making updates less annoying. Also, Google was sued in 2009 for patent infringement for the algorithm, which likely makes other people nervous about using it. I'm not sure if or how that was resolved.

edanm 14y ago

This is a lot of analysis when the answer seems very simple and is hidden in the article: Firefox Updates weren't done as well as Chrome Updates, which is why they weren't popular. I've been using Chrome for years (after using FF for years). With Chrome, I never realize there are updates. The idea of updating Chrome just doesn't enter into my consciousness. So the fact that they update all-the-friggin'-time doesn't matter to me - it never registers in my mind. With FF, every update I would realize it. So even if the updates were just a popup "hey, we've updated", doing it once every two months will cause me to acknowledge their updating once every 2 months. Which I don't want to do, because I don't care, at all about Firefox updating. I just want to browse the web.

jono_x 14y ago

Well, the Hacker News traffic was more than my poor little webserver could handle. I can't even ssh into the machine to reboot lighttpd. Never thought I would see my personal blog linked on HN! Would it be at all helpful to the discussion for me to copypasta the text of the article here, since people can't reach it otherwise? In case the context is not obvious from the article, I have recently quit working for Mozilla, driven in part by the realizations I described. I've become quite disenchanted with the software industry and I'm not at all sure that software development is what I want to do for the rest of my career. I'm trying to decide what to do next. If anybody reading this has any similar experiences or perspective, I would be very interested to hear it. Thank you.

csaba 14y ago

I mostly use windows 8 now, and firefox there simply does not works! Maybe it is only on my machine, I don't know, and I don't really care anymore. I really wanted to test the new non-memory eating firefox, but if tabs are disappearing, and flickering in a weird way (some random image appears instead of the tabs), than I can't use it.

jbk 14y ago

> Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn't want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent. To me, this is the most important. Usually, people prefer the original to the copy... IMO, trying to catch up with (or just copy) Chrome all the times gives the messages to the users that they should use the original...

lelele 14y ago

The worst thing about Firefox updates is that... they didn't work for me. On my Debian box, I had to manually download and install each new version. That, and Firefox crashing several times a day without giving me a clue about what happened, what I could have done to fix the issue and the bug-report process always failing to submit reports, made me think that Firefox's days as a better browser had long passed. I'm a happy Opera user now. Opera's update system is integrated into Debian's.

gcp 14y ago
Was this Iceweasel or Firefox? Debian doesn't ship Firefox by default.
- lelele 14y ago
  Firefox. I don't use Debian's Iceweasel.

technojunkie 14y ago

The top three reasons I switched to Chrome: 1. Memory bloat on Firefox. It's ridiculous that I have to restart the browser every day or more often just to get back more memory. 2. Plugin breakage. I'm sure it's better now but too little too late? 3. Separate processes for each tab and speed. Chrome FEELS faster even if it might not be, but it's amazing that if one tab crashes the whole browser doesn't. #2 appears to be much better, but if Mozilla implements #3, then #1 won't see so bad and I would definitely consider using it again more often.

gcp 14y ago
Mozilla has already said they will never implement 3 because it's pointless. Separate processes per tab make the browser slower, not faster. Crash resilience is obtained through sandboxing the plugins that were crashing in the first place (hi Flash!), instead of entire browser instances. It's one of the reasons Firefox uses less memory than Chrome.

josteink 14y ago

As someone who converted from Firefox to Chrome, I think this mostly sums it up pretty well. Especially the part about being community-driven and then not listening to the community. I see others have also mentioned memory-usage and that is also a fair point. At some point, Firefox would have memory leaks so huge that it spent most of its CPU time constantly trying to GC, slowing to a complete halt. And then, just like with the updates, you had to restart. Restarting Firefox was a pain. But somehow restarting Chrome when updates come along is not. Why is that? My desktop is a quad-core system with hyper-threading. That's 8 logical cores for the machine if utilized correctly. By Chrome having a process-per-tab model and Firefox not, everything else being the same Chrome can reduce its startup times to 12.5% of that of Firefox. It's an order of magnitude improvement. You don't care about restarting Chrome because it just takes one second and you are back where you started. Firefox takes almost 10. That's way beyond annoying your users. When you are the browser spending ages doing a restart, you're not in a position to force updates on your users. Another thing which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, which has been broken in Firefox since the very first releases is the add-on and add-on compatibility checking. It's retarded and I cannot believe it hasn't been fixed yet. The typical Firefox update process goes like this: 1. Firefox informs you there is an update and you need to restart. 2. You accept a restart 3. Firefox shuts down, updates, and restarts. 4. upon restart after the update has been installed, it checks if your addons are compatible. WTF?!? Usually that works out fine, but every now and then it doesn't. And then it's too late. That's retarded. Why on earth would you check compatibility when it is already too late to do something about it? The process should be re-ordered. Compatibility checking should be done first. Then Firefox could say "There is an update and all your add-ons are compatible. Would you like to update now?". A simple re-ordering of things it already does would have solved one of the two biggest issues people have with the update-mechanism. Why hasn't this been done already? I'm a Chrome convert now, but I keep coming back to Firefox to see if things have improved, because I really believe in what Firefox stands for and what it represents. Unfortunately, I keep coming back to Chrome because for me, it just feels like a better browser.

Jgrubb 14y ago
I did the exact same thing last year. Tried switching back from Chrome to FF and using FireBug again. FF kept crashing on me. Gave it two days, switched back to Chrome.

DigitalSea 14y ago

The number one issue with Firefox is the fact the developers who make the changes and the people who tell the developers to make the changes do not listen. It's the same issue with the Wordpress development team as well, both open source projects being led in the wrong direction ignoring absolutely everything the community asks for. Firefox used to be completely about open source in the sense of the meaning; change what users want changed, add in features the users want added in, but then Firefox got popular and didn't have to try as hard to impress people any more and the downward spiral continued. I'm one of those people that switched to Chrome. I only switched about 6 months ago because I had hope that Firefox would come to their senses and fix their damn browser, but it never happened. Chrome has it down-pat in terms of backwards compatibility for plugins and themes and no memory issues. The number one complaint I had with Firefox is the plugins I needed to do my job and keep myself entertained were being blamed for the memory issues of Firefox when it has been a known problem in Firefox for sometime. Every few releases the Mozilla team touts new memory optimisation fixes that will make the browser more stable, but the browser still feels clunky and buggy. Fair enough the developers of Firefox addons should be doing their part in terms of proper memory management (releasing memory when not needed, etc) but seriously addons are Javascript, HTML and CSS mostly and Mozilla should have worked out a way to effectively auto manage memory even for really bad plugins. I know the Aurora channel supposedly has a fix for the bad plugin behaviour issues, but the whole poor addon memory management issue has been an issue with Firefox since the really early days (around version 1.5 I believe). For years Mozilla denied any memory issues with the browser, it wasn't until a little while ago when the market share started dropping of Firefox that they started feigning interest in the memory management issues.

CrLf 14y ago

"All software sucks. Users would be a lot happier if they had to use a lot less of it." I think this is the single most important thing in this article and cannot be stressed enough. Anybody that has ever had to interact with users knows this, but for developers this is very hard to believe, they choose not to see it. Most people see software (i.e. "computers") as a tool to get some work done, or to get some entertainment. The work and the entertainment are the goal, and if it were possible to achieve it without using any software, they would do it. Even technical-types think about software this way, not even knowing that they're doing it. Think about this: we mostly put up with complicated software and in-your-face software that's not contributing to our work or entertainment because we are learning something. Learning is just another goal that's not really the software itself. Once we notice that we aren't learning much anymore, the aforementioned software becomes a pain to use. Or maybe it's just me...

halfninety 14y ago

A bug report from last year on the plugin compatibility problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=691336 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=691336 No one ever cared.

gcp 14y ago
Mostly because Firefox 10 sidestepped the entire issue with a much better solution.

drhowarddrfine 14y ago

I love Firefox updates. I've never had an issue. I click on the update link and it's done within seconds. Then I get all the new goodies like it was my birthday. Seems like the only people who complain are home users. At least that's what I gather from the forums I visit. They just don't understand why things need to change even after a long drawn explanation.

drucken 14y ago

There is a reason many people still use Firefox 3.x and it not's just for legacy or development reasons. I cannot stress smacktoward's astute post enough.

gooddaysir 14y ago

I just want to add my voice and agree that yes, I hate the Firefox updates. I actually hate using Firefox because of it. When I can abandon it completely (it's still used a bit in my work environment) it will be none to soon.

Macha 14y ago

Mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://evilbrainjono.net/blog%3Fshowcomments%3Dtrue%26permalink%3D1094&hl=en&safe=off&client=ms-android-google&sky=mrdr&site=webhp&prmd=imvns&strip=1 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

kraemate 14y ago

Is it just me or is firefox's update system completely broken? I am using some firefox 3.x version because the software-updater never finds a new version (and i do not wish to download a new executable). This is on OSX. On ubuntu, because updates are controlled via apt, i'm again forced to use ancient firefox versions. The last time i had a successful update was during the 1.5 days.

brownbat 14y ago

I went back to Firefox for a bit when Ubiquity was under active development. I've never seen a new drop-in user interface add so much to my productivity... I've never fully understood why it was shelved.

shasty 14y ago

Why not make the fuckin thing better? The updates are only frustrating because they represent an outward representation of how lost mozilla is internally. It sucks. Its slow. Its ugly. It crashes often. It breaks plugins every fucking 5 seconds. Id rather use firefox 3 than the shit mozilla is pushing right now. Total junk. Make the next update a browser worth using.