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IMHO, Firefox has more and more trouble to renew itself. This browser was great when it come out, fast, reliable and virus-free. I remember the good old time o

IMHO, Firefox has more and more trouble to renew itself. This browser was great when it come out, fast, reliable and virus-free. I remember the good old time of IE when you have to wonder forever whenever if you'll click on a suspicious link or not. However, I have the feeling since chrome come out, they don't innovate anymore. Extensions are slow and unreliable, a lot of stuff feels like copy/paste from Opera or Chrome, Firebug, once the greatest, seems outdated, they have taken forever to support retina display on the mac, their engine crash or freeze in JS heavy environment... and they removed the blink tag. My 5 cents.

nnethercote 13y ago
Your conventional wisdom is about two years out of date.
- hartator 13y ago
  I've reacted because yesterday we have tried better_errors gem on our rails app. Safari and Chrome was fine but Firefox froze and crash while executing the JS. Maybe I am wrong, but I keep using side by side with Chrome and Safari (Nerds has a lot of tabs and windows open!) and that's my feeling.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    You really ought to log a bug about that.
AndreasFrom 13y ago
With improvements to the garbage collector [1], the developer tools and the recent emphasis on performance [2], I think Firefox has really benefitted from the competition. [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/07/18/clawing-our-way-back-to-precision/ https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/07/18/clawing-our-w... [2]: http://arewefastyet.com/ http://arewefastyet.com/
Ygg2 13y ago
Oh no, not the BLINK tag!!! Fiends, criminals, collaborators with the devil! /sarcasm While I share some sentiments in regards to their UI, Mozilla has done nothing but good moves so far - supporting PDF.js, Shumway, Servo, Rust, Mozilla Persona (login), Jetpack, etc. Firefox has performed admirably and I use it as a main browser.
K0nserv 13y ago
The main problem is not any of these things. The many problem is that they still have not implemented one-process-per tab which makes the browser severely inferior to Chrome.
- shock 13y ago
  I do not consider Firefox inferior to Chrome because of this, instead I consider Firefox superior to Chrome for this very reason. With 6 tabs open, Chromium is using 1.6GB of RAM, while I can browse forever in Firefox until it reaches that kind of memory consumption. Am I missing something? Why is the one-process-per-tab model considered "severely" superior?
  - nekgrim 13y ago
    One tab can freeze (because of the js, for example) without killing the rest of the browser.
    - shock 13y ago
      I don't remember when this has last happened to me. If this is the major reason, I, most definitely, prefer the current Firefox approach: much less memory utilization and the chance that I have to restart the browser once in a blue moon (not a problem for me in real use) vs very high memory usage but I'm protected in the off chance that one tab messes up my browser (and I always have to live with the high memory usage). So FF devs, if you're listening, this is a vote against Electrolysis (if it means higher memory usage than current FF).
      - Symmetry 13y ago
        I seem to run into that pretty frequently on Firefox 19 at work, but I don't think I ever notice it when I'm running 23 at home.
        shock 13y ago
        I've been on the Aurora channel for some time now and it's been a pretty smooth ride for me. You should give it a try to see how it works out for you.
sitkack 13y ago
I recently tried switching back to FF from Chrome and I find FF to lag horribly. Downloads are frequently broken and stall. The <filename>, <filename.part> thing is ridiculous. It feels like there is a molasses powered queue between input events and response, FF feels like a drunken master. I am in Chrome right now, I wish I was in FF.
- rangibaby 13y ago
  Broken / stalled downloads don't sound like a Firefox problem to me. If you can reliably get a DL to fail in Firefox (that works fine in another browser) and reproduce it, file a bug :-)
  - sitkack 13y ago
    I can't get things to reliably fail, admittedly the connections I am on are flaky. I have been traveling around the world for the last 8 months. From direct experience I know that Chrome handles flakey connections much better than FF. I routinely get downloads that are completely stuck in FF, showing 20KB/S as a download speed but the file hasn't been touched in 5 minutes and nothing gets written to disk and the activity monitor shows 0KB/s of network traffic. I would open a bug, but I would have to write a server that would expose the problem, no decent repro case and it wouldn't get fixed. ---- edit, Many times I have to pause a download and then resume to get the dl unstuck.
- 616c 13y ago
  I refuse to install Chrome, but do install the pure open-source Chromium. I routinely get that behavior with Chrom[e|ium], which leaves files with a crx extension littered throughout my Downloads directory. But to be fair from both our ends, neither is that useful individual anecdote(s) != empiricism.
  - sitkack 13y ago
    Yeah, I have been toying with how to write a server to automated test cases to repro these bugs. Almost all issues I have with browsers is how they behave on slow connections. On the very fast and reliable connections we have in the states, many of the issues are not present.
KwanEsq 13y ago
Good job their extension system allows you to easily restore the blink tag to your browsing, should you wish ;) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restore-blink-tag/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restore-blink... Disclaimer: I created the above extension

nnethercote 13y ago

Your conventional wisdom is about two years out of date.

hartator 13y ago
I've reacted because yesterday we have tried better_errors gem on our rails app. Safari and Chrome was fine but Firefox froze and crash while executing the JS. Maybe I am wrong, but I keep using side by side with Chrome and Safari (Nerds has a lot of tabs and windows open!) and that's my feeling.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  You really ought to log a bug about that.

AndreasFrom 13y ago

With improvements to the garbage collector [1], the developer tools and the recent emphasis on performance [2], I think Firefox has really benefitted from the competition. [1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/07/18/clawing-our-way-back-to-precision/ https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/07/18/clawing-our-w... [2]: http://arewefastyet.com/ http://arewefastyet.com/

Ygg2 13y ago

Oh no, not the BLINK tag!!! Fiends, criminals, collaborators with the devil! /sarcasm While I share some sentiments in regards to their UI, Mozilla has done nothing but good moves so far - supporting PDF.js, Shumway, Servo, Rust, Mozilla Persona (login), Jetpack, etc. Firefox has performed admirably and I use it as a main browser.

K0nserv 13y ago

The main problem is not any of these things. The many problem is that they still have not implemented one-process-per tab which makes the browser severely inferior to Chrome.

shock 13y ago
I do not consider Firefox inferior to Chrome because of this, instead I consider Firefox superior to Chrome for this very reason. With 6 tabs open, Chromium is using 1.6GB of RAM, while I can browse forever in Firefox until it reaches that kind of memory consumption. Am I missing something? Why is the one-process-per-tab model considered "severely" superior?
- nekgrim 13y ago
  One tab can freeze (because of the js, for example) without killing the rest of the browser.
  - shock 13y ago
    I don't remember when this has last happened to me. If this is the major reason, I, most definitely, prefer the current Firefox approach: much less memory utilization and the chance that I have to restart the browser once in a blue moon (not a problem for me in real use) vs very high memory usage but I'm protected in the off chance that one tab messes up my browser (and I always have to live with the high memory usage). So FF devs, if you're listening, this is a vote against Electrolysis (if it means higher memory usage than current FF).
    - Symmetry 13y ago
      I seem to run into that pretty frequently on Firefox 19 at work, but I don't think I ever notice it when I'm running 23 at home.
      - shock 13y ago
        I've been on the Aurora channel for some time now and it's been a pretty smooth ride for me. You should give it a try to see how it works out for you.

sitkack 13y ago

I recently tried switching back to FF from Chrome and I find FF to lag horribly. Downloads are frequently broken and stall. The <filename>, <filename.part> thing is ridiculous. It feels like there is a molasses powered queue between input events and response, FF feels like a drunken master. I am in Chrome right now, I wish I was in FF.

rangibaby 13y ago
Broken / stalled downloads don't sound like a Firefox problem to me. If you can reliably get a DL to fail in Firefox (that works fine in another browser) and reproduce it, file a bug :-)
- sitkack 13y ago
  I can't get things to reliably fail, admittedly the connections I am on are flaky. I have been traveling around the world for the last 8 months. From direct experience I know that Chrome handles flakey connections much better than FF. I routinely get downloads that are completely stuck in FF, showing 20KB/S as a download speed but the file hasn't been touched in 5 minutes and nothing gets written to disk and the activity monitor shows 0KB/s of network traffic. I would open a bug, but I would have to write a server that would expose the problem, no decent repro case and it wouldn't get fixed. ---- edit, Many times I have to pause a download and then resume to get the dl unstuck.
616c 13y ago
I refuse to install Chrome, but do install the pure open-source Chromium. I routinely get that behavior with Chrom[e|ium], which leaves files with a crx extension littered throughout my Downloads directory. But to be fair from both our ends, neither is that useful individual anecdote(s) != empiricism.
- sitkack 13y ago
  Yeah, I have been toying with how to write a server to automated test cases to repro these bugs. Almost all issues I have with browsers is how they behave on slow connections. On the very fast and reliable connections we have in the states, many of the issues are not present.

KwanEsq 13y ago

Good job their extension system allows you to easily restore the blink tag to your browsing, should you wish ;) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restore-blink-tag/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restore-blink... Disclaimer: I created the above extension