9 ms·

Eight Years of Firefox

mmahemoff 14y ago
Eight years since 1.0, though its history dates back a lot further. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox
- fafner 14y ago
  It's actually more than 10 years now. The first binaries of Phoenix were available in September 2002. I don't remember when I exactly switched. But I remember that Mozilla was a huge pile of bloat, Galeon had some internal trouble, and Konqueror/KHTML had problems with several websites (mostly JS stuff IIRC). Firefox is still my favorite browser!
  - jdechko 14y ago
    I don't remember which version I started on, but remember a friend showed me one of the Phoenix betas. I had been using Netscape, and then the Mozilla suite, but I was blown away by what I saw. Ever since then, in some form or another I've used firefox.
limpangel 14y ago
Can't believe it's been this long since I ditched Opera and started using Firefox as my main browser.
- barking 14y ago
  I can't believe that it's only 8 years since firefox started
sabret00the 14y ago
Today is the anniversary of the settled identity crisis that once was. Firefox has served me great for years though and now I can't imagine calling it anything else.
ed_blackburn 14y ago
I remember being at uni (UWE Bristol), downloading the zip and exporting to program files. My mates thought I was crazy until they saw tabbed browsing...wow!
- barking 14y ago
  I'd forgotten how cool that was at the time.
- jonnymkramer 14y ago
  hah weird seeing another UWE person on here. What are you doing now?
  - ed_blackburn 14y ago
    I couldn't find a decent grad role in Bristol so I ended up in London, where I've since settled. I'm a dev after graduating in 2004 with a Computing and Information Systems degree. Since I graduated I realise that a few my UWE lecturers were really good. I didn't see the point in being asked to read Kent Beck and Martin Fowler or what I'd learn from substituting Slackware Linux's ls for my own shoddy implementation, but now I see that those visiting lecturers from Rolls Royce and Airbus knew what I'd need to know in the real world. Doing a Sandwich course and spending a year writing production code for Pfizer was beneficial too. You? http://ejb.name http://ejb.name
  - EnderMB 14y ago
    Wow, two fellow UWE people! I had to go back and double check what I was reading!
- sergiotapia 14y ago
  The first time I used tabbed browsing was using Opera waaaaay too many years ago. :)
barking 14y ago
I like firefox a lot, it's the browser I use almost all of the time. I really like the way firefox allows me to sync bookmarks across devices. I really like the fireftp add on. I don't like the way firefox makes me wait sometimes while it updates. It's really hard to figure out some things. One time I accidentally forgot to press the tab key after entering my username on log-in and entered my password in the username box (in plaintext). It took ages (even after googling) to figure out how to stop firefox offering my username+password as a log-in suggestion
- caipre 14y ago
  For those who don't know, it's possible to remove an autocomplete suggestion by highlighting it and pressing the delete key. This works for HTML form fields and address/search bar suggestions.
  - barking 14y ago
    I didn't know about that, thanks
  - srbravo1 14y ago
    whoa! thanks.
robinwauters 14y ago
I really hope this doesn't get down-voted because it's a little promotional, but I posted a video interview with Mozilla's chairwomen Mitchell Baker today, she said some interesting things I think. http://thenextweb.com/video/2012/11/09/happy-eight-birthday-firefox-a-qa-with-mozilla-chairwoman-mitchell-baker-video/ http://thenextweb.com/video/2012/11/09/happy-eight-birthday-... Direct YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWtvtwhFCk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWtvtwhFCk
- riobard 14y ago
  s/chairwomen/chairwoman/
  - robinwauters 14y ago
    Doh!
  - cpeterso 14y ago
    or simply "chair".
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      Or just "chairman" because it's the name of a position within a board or meeting and is gender neutral.
      - debacle 14y ago
        I find the term discriminatory against stools and benches.
cheeaun 14y ago
I'll never forget the first time I try Phoenix 0.1, all the way to Firefox 1.0, and still continue using it now with version 18 (Aurora).
- jjkmk 14y ago
  You're such a browser hipster ;)
kibwen 14y ago
Eight years and 800,000 bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=800000 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=800000 Given its age and heritage and historical influence (and given that it's used by hundreds of millions of people), Mozilla's codebase is right up there with Linux and GNU as one of the most impressive examples of open-source software.
- olliesaunders 14y ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcastic. But before I read this post I was going to say how much I love Firefox but regret how they fail to address bugs before implementing new features. 800,000 bugs is nothing to be proud of.
  - moondowner 14y ago
    800,000 reported bugs, not unfixed. Plus there are a lot of duplicates, invalid and similar.
  - mmcnickle 14y ago
    Mozilla bugzilla has reached bug id 800000. Mozilla typically file a bug for every actionable item, not just defects; the number of non-bogus, non-duplicate, non-feature-request, non-tracking-bug, and non-firefox-bugs (website, thunderbird, all other products since inception) will be much, much fewer.
    - dailycavalier 14y ago
      Yes, this. There have been 800,000 bugs filed for all groups within Mozilla. We use bugzilla for managing projects and tasks (ex: a request for the Firefox 8th birthday cake graphic in the blog post). It's not just for tracking Firefox bugs. We use it for just about everything.
  - kibwen 14y ago
    Not sarcastic. The only bug-free software is software that has no users.[1] A well-fed bug tracker is one of those Good Problems To Have. [1] With the exception of http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff
navid_dichols 14y ago
Firebox's firebug addon makes it worth the price of admission. Thanks for a great 8 years FF! Side note: if you could add support for base64 pngs embedded with the data uri you could really help me out of a jam...
- dailycavalier 14y ago
  File a bug to request that :) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
- sp332 14y ago
  I might have misunderstood, but doesn't this blog post describe doing that already? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759099 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759099
- cpeterso 14y ago
  data: png images work for me in Firefox. You can test your own data: images here: http://websemantics.co.uk/online_tools/image_to_data_uri_convertor/ http://websemantics.co.uk/online_tools/image_to_data_uri_con...
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
I remember making the jump from Netscape 4.72 to Mozilla 1.2, modulo a little dalliance with IE when it was still ahead of the curve. I've been on Mozilla/Firefox ever since, and never made the jump to Chrome as my main browser (though I have it installed). Firefox just keeps getting better and better, and I'm delighted at how the friendly competition between Firefox and Chrome is driving faster improvement to both, rather than the divisive extend/embrace/extinguish competition between Netscape and IE.
- kibwen 14y ago
  Ah, Netscape! I still have its throbber animation[1] indelibly burnt into my memory. I also still remember being a bit baffled as to all the excitement people were expressing over something as mundane as a web browser. Remember the full-spread two-page launch ad in the New York Times?[2] Firefox was probably the first time I'd ever heard of something "open source" in my entire life. And of course, tabbed browsing was love at first sight. [1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/about-nscp-anim.gif http://www.jwz.org/doc/about-nscp-anim.gif [2] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/press/mozilla-2004-12-15.html http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/press/mozilla-2004-12-15.html
  - T-hawk 14y ago
    Opera had tabbed browsing way before anyone else, in 2000. And actually even before that by handling pages as MDI document windows in its early versions. I used Opera all through the long night of IE6 hegemony, although always ready to switch back to IE whenever a site didn't work in Opera. There was a good, actively developed, standards-compliant browser available that whole time. It just never caught on in terms of popularity and mindshare. I hardly even noticed Firefox until around version 3.
    - kibwen 14y ago
      I didn't intend to downplay the importance of Opera, I just hadn't heard of it until I was well into college (during which I used it as my primary browser for about half a year; to this day I still have Opera's back/forward mouse-button rocker gestures mapped in Firefox). There's no question (afaik) that Opera was the first to get on the tab train.
AndresOspina 14y ago
In my humble opinion I think that while Firefox has asked some ground in market share, does a great job with the web and compete against the negligent microsoft products had 8 years to give us a better browsing experience we know today has much to do calving with Firefox.
webwanderings 14y ago
Thanks for informing it has been 8 years I used this product, I think the longest of any other leaving aside my OS. It was hard parting ways few weeks ago but it was done and now I don't regret. Good luck for your future.
mjb 14y ago
I think Firefox has to take a lot of credit for the state of the web today. In the early 2000s, it was usual for sites to be IE-only, or to be horribly broken in any alternative browser. It seems to me that the rise of popularity of Firefox correlated strongly with a drop in these IE-only sites, and I don't think that its unfair to label it as a dominant cause of this drop. Even if Firefox dies completely and leaves behind only Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE in its wake, I think it's still fair to call it a great victory for open standards and open source.
- kwanbis 14y ago
  I totally agree with you. People do not realize that it was Firefox that made an open web possible, as well as a viable Chrome.
- macspoofing 14y ago
  >I think Firefox has to take a lot of credit for the state of the web today. Of course. It was Firefox that broke IE's grip on web-standards.
- bergie 14y ago
  Yep, and without a standards-based web it would be hard to see such a bright situation for platforms like iOS and Android.
  - mjb 14y ago
    Right. Although it's hard to know if Firefox was the cause, one of many causes, or just something around at the right time to get caught up in an inevitable change. History is hard, even only 8 years later. Still, it seemed to me at the time to be at least partially causal.
    - frabcus 14y ago
      I'm confident it was Firefox. Not the browser, but the community-based marketing campaign - Spread Firefox when it was launched, and before that geeks installing Firefox on their parent's computers (and so on). For me, a key moment was when my not-very-computery Mum, without prompting by me, phoned up her stockbroker to complain the site didn't work on Firefox. She did so because she felt Firefox was the "latest greatest thing", and blamed the broker for not supporting it. In my view, modern Apple wouldn't have been possible without the Firefox community web standards campaign. The version 1 iPhone would have bombed if most websites hadn't worked on it. Likewise, modern Google wouldn't have been possible. Projects like Google Docs, Mail and Maps are much better because of the standards push that started with the Firefox community. It lets Google compete directly with Microsoft.
leeoniya 14y ago
favorite quote from Mike Shaver (in context) from http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/15/mike-shaver-thanks/ http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/15/mike-shaver-thanks/ "And [Shaver] affected my framing of the problem deeply – I remember one day a couple of years back when we were talking about some market share point, thinking about how incredibly, insanely competitive the browser technology landscape was – and he said to me: 'Look, this is the world we wanted. And this is the world we made.' Wow. Exactly right. He taught me so much about how enormous an impact a group of dedicated people can make."
jnazario 14y ago
while i applaud firefox for pushing IE off the stranglehold it had on sites (see mjb's comment), i cannot forget the stagnation it endured for a while with its crummy memory performance for long running users. it took a couple of years for someone to acknowledge that yeah, that's a real issue and worth fixing (IIRC it was heap fragmentation, beautifully visualized in a blog post where the author basically said "holy smokes! people were right!"). i turned to safari briefly and now to chrome and haven't looked back. firefox's position allowed it to get sluggish in features and performance. a lack of true competition in alternative browsers for that brief period of time (you either used IE and were afraid to move, were prevented from it in a corporate setting, or you used firefox and wouldn't go back) showed that such stagnation can happen to anyone. bloat, performance drops, etc ... thanks for opening up the web, but that stretch of time has forever burned me on mozilla products.
- TwoBit 14y ago
  I think that during that time period they were so focused on other things that the memory problems crept in and didn't get addressed. On the plus side, they now have both the best features and some of the best memory management of browsers.
dageshi 14y ago
I remember using netscape (maybe 4...?) I'd just upgraded and remember for whatever reason double clicking on a html doc on my desktop and watching it sit there load up an entire suite of apps I wasn't going to use. That was it, immediately switched to IE. I preferred Netscape but the load time was too frustrating. And then when firefox came out (or at least one of the later version) I remember repeating that exact same thing. I needed to open a html file on the desktop and IE was sloooow. So I tried firefox, much much faster. And then there was firebug.. no contest, game set and match. I switched to chrome for about a year because it seemed to render pages faster but about 3 months ago I ran into some weird problem where chrome stopped playing youtube videos properly. Tried everything, no luck, switched back to firefox and actually... I think I'll stick with it, it's a great browser.
nkuttler 14y ago
I rememer Firefox primarily for being a snappy browser, they got rid of the kitchen sink Netscape/Mozilla suite bloat. Sadly Firefox is now far behind in regard to performance compared to webkit-based browsers, for which the XUL/Toolkit, the feature creep and the legacy support are probably responsable. Using Firefox nowadays just feels too slow, even though it's addon ecosystem is unrivaled.

Eight years since 1.0, though its history dates back a lot further. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox

fafner 14y ago
It's actually more than 10 years now. The first binaries of Phoenix were available in September 2002. I don't remember when I exactly switched. But I remember that Mozilla was a huge pile of bloat, Galeon had some internal trouble, and Konqueror/KHTML had problems with several websites (mostly JS stuff IIRC). Firefox is still my favorite browser!
- jdechko 14y ago
  I don't remember which version I started on, but remember a friend showed me one of the Phoenix betas. I had been using Netscape, and then the Mozilla suite, but I was blown away by what I saw. Ever since then, in some form or another I've used firefox.

limpangel 14y ago

Can't believe it's been this long since I ditched Opera and started using Firefox as my main browser.

barking 14y ago
I can't believe that it's only 8 years since firefox started

sabret00the 14y ago

Today is the anniversary of the settled identity crisis that once was. Firefox has served me great for years though and now I can't imagine calling it anything else.

ed_blackburn 14y ago

I remember being at uni (UWE Bristol), downloading the zip and exporting to program files. My mates thought I was crazy until they saw tabbed browsing...wow!

barking 14y ago
I'd forgotten how cool that was at the time.
jonnymkramer 14y ago
hah weird seeing another UWE person on here. What are you doing now?
- ed_blackburn 14y ago
  I couldn't find a decent grad role in Bristol so I ended up in London, where I've since settled. I'm a dev after graduating in 2004 with a Computing and Information Systems degree. Since I graduated I realise that a few my UWE lecturers were really good. I didn't see the point in being asked to read Kent Beck and Martin Fowler or what I'd learn from substituting Slackware Linux's ls for my own shoddy implementation, but now I see that those visiting lecturers from Rolls Royce and Airbus knew what I'd need to know in the real world. Doing a Sandwich course and spending a year writing production code for Pfizer was beneficial too. You? http://ejb.name http://ejb.name
- EnderMB 14y ago
  Wow, two fellow UWE people! I had to go back and double check what I was reading!
sergiotapia 14y ago
The first time I used tabbed browsing was using Opera waaaaay too many years ago. :)

barking 14y ago

I like firefox a lot, it's the browser I use almost all of the time. I really like the way firefox allows me to sync bookmarks across devices. I really like the fireftp add on. I don't like the way firefox makes me wait sometimes while it updates. It's really hard to figure out some things. One time I accidentally forgot to press the tab key after entering my username on log-in and entered my password in the username box (in plaintext). It took ages (even after googling) to figure out how to stop firefox offering my username+password as a log-in suggestion

caipre 14y ago
For those who don't know, it's possible to remove an autocomplete suggestion by highlighting it and pressing the delete key. This works for HTML form fields and address/search bar suggestions.
- barking 14y ago
  I didn't know about that, thanks
- srbravo1 14y ago
  whoa! thanks.

robinwauters 14y ago

I really hope this doesn't get down-voted because it's a little promotional, but I posted a video interview with Mozilla's chairwomen Mitchell Baker today, she said some interesting things I think. http://thenextweb.com/video/2012/11/09/happy-eight-birthday-firefox-a-qa-with-mozilla-chairwoman-mitchell-baker-video/ http://thenextweb.com/video/2012/11/09/happy-eight-birthday-... Direct YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWtvtwhFCk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCWtvtwhFCk

riobard 14y ago
s/chairwomen/chairwoman/
- robinwauters 14y ago
  Doh!
- cpeterso 14y ago
  or simply "chair".
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    Or just "chairman" because it's the name of a position within a board or meeting and is gender neutral.
    - debacle 14y ago
      I find the term discriminatory against stools and benches.

cheeaun 14y ago

I'll never forget the first time I try Phoenix 0.1, all the way to Firefox 1.0, and still continue using it now with version 18 (Aurora).

jjkmk 14y ago
You're such a browser hipster ;)

kibwen 14y ago

Eight years and 800,000 bugs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=800000 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=800000 Given its age and heritage and historical influence (and given that it's used by hundreds of millions of people), Mozilla's codebase is right up there with Linux and GNU as one of the most impressive examples of open-source software.

olliesaunders 14y ago
I can't tell if this is sarcastic. But before I read this post I was going to say how much I love Firefox but regret how they fail to address bugs before implementing new features. 800,000 bugs is nothing to be proud of.
- moondowner 14y ago
  800,000 reported bugs, not unfixed. Plus there are a lot of duplicates, invalid and similar.
- mmcnickle 14y ago
  Mozilla bugzilla has reached bug id 800000. Mozilla typically file a bug for every actionable item, not just defects; the number of non-bogus, non-duplicate, non-feature-request, non-tracking-bug, and non-firefox-bugs (website, thunderbird, all other products since inception) will be much, much fewer.
  - dailycavalier 14y ago
    Yes, this. There have been 800,000 bugs filed for all groups within Mozilla. We use bugzilla for managing projects and tasks (ex: a request for the Firefox 8th birthday cake graphic in the blog post). It's not just for tracking Firefox bugs. We use it for just about everything.
- kibwen 14y ago
  Not sarcastic. The only bug-free software is software that has no users.[1] A well-fed bug tracker is one of those Good Problems To Have. [1] With the exception of http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

navid_dichols 14y ago

Firebox's firebug addon makes it worth the price of admission. Thanks for a great 8 years FF! Side note: if you could add support for base64 pngs embedded with the data uri you could really help me out of a jam...

dailycavalier 14y ago
File a bug to request that :) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
sp332 14y ago
I might have misunderstood, but doesn't this blog post describe doing that already? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759099 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4759099
cpeterso 14y ago
data: png images work for me in Firefox. You can test your own data: images here: http://websemantics.co.uk/online_tools/image_to_data_uri_convertor/ http://websemantics.co.uk/online_tools/image_to_data_uri_con...

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

I remember making the jump from Netscape 4.72 to Mozilla 1.2, modulo a little dalliance with IE when it was still ahead of the curve. I've been on Mozilla/Firefox ever since, and never made the jump to Chrome as my main browser (though I have it installed). Firefox just keeps getting better and better, and I'm delighted at how the friendly competition between Firefox and Chrome is driving faster improvement to both, rather than the divisive extend/embrace/extinguish competition between Netscape and IE.

kibwen 14y ago
Ah, Netscape! I still have its throbber animation[1] indelibly burnt into my memory. I also still remember being a bit baffled as to all the excitement people were expressing over something as mundane as a web browser. Remember the full-spread two-page launch ad in the New York Times?[2] Firefox was probably the first time I'd ever heard of something "open source" in my entire life. And of course, tabbed browsing was love at first sight. [1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/about-nscp-anim.gif http://www.jwz.org/doc/about-nscp-anim.gif [2] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/press/mozilla-2004-12-15.html http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/press/mozilla-2004-12-15.html
- T-hawk 14y ago
  Opera had tabbed browsing way before anyone else, in 2000. And actually even before that by handling pages as MDI document windows in its early versions. I used Opera all through the long night of IE6 hegemony, although always ready to switch back to IE whenever a site didn't work in Opera. There was a good, actively developed, standards-compliant browser available that whole time. It just never caught on in terms of popularity and mindshare. I hardly even noticed Firefox until around version 3.
  - kibwen 14y ago
    I didn't intend to downplay the importance of Opera, I just hadn't heard of it until I was well into college (during which I used it as my primary browser for about half a year; to this day I still have Opera's back/forward mouse-button rocker gestures mapped in Firefox). There's no question (afaik) that Opera was the first to get on the tab train.

AndresOspina 14y ago

In my humble opinion I think that while Firefox has asked some ground in market share, does a great job with the web and compete against the negligent microsoft products had 8 years to give us a better browsing experience we know today has much to do calving with Firefox.

webwanderings 14y ago

Thanks for informing it has been 8 years I used this product, I think the longest of any other leaving aside my OS. It was hard parting ways few weeks ago but it was done and now I don't regret. Good luck for your future.

mjb 14y ago

I think Firefox has to take a lot of credit for the state of the web today. In the early 2000s, it was usual for sites to be IE-only, or to be horribly broken in any alternative browser. It seems to me that the rise of popularity of Firefox correlated strongly with a drop in these IE-only sites, and I don't think that its unfair to label it as a dominant cause of this drop. Even if Firefox dies completely and leaves behind only Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE in its wake, I think it's still fair to call it a great victory for open standards and open source.

kwanbis 14y ago
I totally agree with you. People do not realize that it was Firefox that made an open web possible, as well as a viable Chrome.
macspoofing 14y ago
>I think Firefox has to take a lot of credit for the state of the web today. Of course. It was Firefox that broke IE's grip on web-standards.
bergie 14y ago
Yep, and without a standards-based web it would be hard to see such a bright situation for platforms like iOS and Android.
- mjb 14y ago
  Right. Although it's hard to know if Firefox was the cause, one of many causes, or just something around at the right time to get caught up in an inevitable change. History is hard, even only 8 years later. Still, it seemed to me at the time to be at least partially causal.
  - frabcus 14y ago
    I'm confident it was Firefox. Not the browser, but the community-based marketing campaign - Spread Firefox when it was launched, and before that geeks installing Firefox on their parent's computers (and so on). For me, a key moment was when my not-very-computery Mum, without prompting by me, phoned up her stockbroker to complain the site didn't work on Firefox. She did so because she felt Firefox was the "latest greatest thing", and blamed the broker for not supporting it. In my view, modern Apple wouldn't have been possible without the Firefox community web standards campaign. The version 1 iPhone would have bombed if most websites hadn't worked on it. Likewise, modern Google wouldn't have been possible. Projects like Google Docs, Mail and Maps are much better because of the standards push that started with the Firefox community. It lets Google compete directly with Microsoft.

leeoniya 14y ago

favorite quote from Mike Shaver (in context) from http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/15/mike-shaver-thanks/ http://john.jubjubs.net/2011/09/15/mike-shaver-thanks/ "And [Shaver] affected my framing of the problem deeply – I remember one day a couple of years back when we were talking about some market share point, thinking about how incredibly, insanely competitive the browser technology landscape was – and he said to me: 'Look, this is the world we wanted. And this is the world we made.' Wow. Exactly right. He taught me so much about how enormous an impact a group of dedicated people can make."

jnazario 14y ago

while i applaud firefox for pushing IE off the stranglehold it had on sites (see mjb's comment), i cannot forget the stagnation it endured for a while with its crummy memory performance for long running users. it took a couple of years for someone to acknowledge that yeah, that's a real issue and worth fixing (IIRC it was heap fragmentation, beautifully visualized in a blog post where the author basically said "holy smokes! people were right!"). i turned to safari briefly and now to chrome and haven't looked back. firefox's position allowed it to get sluggish in features and performance. a lack of true competition in alternative browsers for that brief period of time (you either used IE and were afraid to move, were prevented from it in a corporate setting, or you used firefox and wouldn't go back) showed that such stagnation can happen to anyone. bloat, performance drops, etc ... thanks for opening up the web, but that stretch of time has forever burned me on mozilla products.

TwoBit 14y ago
I think that during that time period they were so focused on other things that the memory problems crept in and didn't get addressed. On the plus side, they now have both the best features and some of the best memory management of browsers.

dageshi 14y ago

I remember using netscape (maybe 4...?) I'd just upgraded and remember for whatever reason double clicking on a html doc on my desktop and watching it sit there load up an entire suite of apps I wasn't going to use. That was it, immediately switched to IE. I preferred Netscape but the load time was too frustrating. And then when firefox came out (or at least one of the later version) I remember repeating that exact same thing. I needed to open a html file on the desktop and IE was sloooow. So I tried firefox, much much faster. And then there was firebug.. no contest, game set and match. I switched to chrome for about a year because it seemed to render pages faster but about 3 months ago I ran into some weird problem where chrome stopped playing youtube videos properly. Tried everything, no luck, switched back to firefox and actually... I think I'll stick with it, it's a great browser.

nkuttler 14y ago

I rememer Firefox primarily for being a snappy browser, they got rid of the kitchen sink Netscape/Mozilla suite bloat. Sadly Firefox is now far behind in regard to performance compared to webkit-based browsers, for which the XUL/Toolkit, the feature creep and the legacy support are probably responsable. Using Firefox nowadays just feels too slow, even though it's addon ecosystem is unrivaled.