4 ms·

Developers, please stop making add-ons and extensions for Google products. You accelerate Google's domination and vendor lock-in when you do.

collyw 12y ago
I could say the exact same things about iOS apps. Or Android. Or Windows. But a bit of competition is generally good.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  Yeah, no offense to GP but that is possibly the worst way of looking at it. There are platforms where developers need to stop developing. iOS was the main one; it has extreme lock in, an unfriendly development environment, an extremely unfriendly publishing environment and is actively doing evil things. But no, all aboard the ios apps train! Windows I could say similar things about but given the competition I really can't. Android... Definitely not. Some of the most free mobile OSes run atop of android. But when it comes to developing on platforms in general, developers absolutely need to use themselves as a voice to tell other platforms what is good, what is needed, etc. There are excellent general desktop features that people have found on mac os, windows and linux alike. Without developers to make use of them, regardless of the "open" or "closed" state of the platform, users are worse off.
ishansharma 12y ago
This is a very important point. I switched to Firefox mainly due to intertial scrolling and better fonts (Chrome looks crap till this 37 beta and needs a flag). Extensions are more powerful on Firefox but I think they are coplicated as well. There are many popular extensions that just don't have updates on Firefox. One example is Evernote. I used it a lot on Chrome but their Firefox extension is almost 1 year old version and Chrome/Opera extensions have much better UI now. I hope this improves soon.
- XzetaU8 12y ago
  You can try the latest Beta build (August 14) of Web Clipper 6 here: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/60185-web-clipper-6-for-firefox-beta/ https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/60185-web-clipper-6-fo...
matthewmacleod 12y ago
You could say that about building an app or add-on for literally any product.
- rurounijones 12y ago
  Not with a straight face.
- coldtea 12y ago
  So? It's a matter of degree. Creating an add-on for a product with a smaller market share is not that bad. But for a product with 60%+ that also belongs to a company that "owns" Search, Maps and Email and is known to play dirty it's a different story.
myrryr 12y ago
What are we to do? We build data visualization software, but firefox is REALLY slow at rendering SVG (so no d3 for us). We have a choice of asking our customers to run ie11 or chrome, since both run quickly. We would recommend firefox, since we really like the Mozilla foundation, but the performance of it is so bad we have to steer people away from it. It is a sad state of affairs.
- GlennS 12y ago
  I'm a little surprised by this. I can believe that Firefox is slower (I haven't done the comparison myself), but even so it's still capable of rendering hundreds of thousands of points or thousands of complicated geometric shapes. I would have thought it you had more data than that then the points will all be rammed together and hard to distinguish, so it would be better to switch to density plots.
  - shangxiao 12y ago
    I've also noticed it slower on an SVG based app. Not terribly slower, just enough to make it look slightly glitchy compared with the smoothness of Chrome with interactive actions like drag n dropping components around.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- lucb1e 12y ago
  If you make software (which people want to use, of course) and notice a mainstream open source browser (in this case Firefox) being slow at something in particular, wouldn't it be advantageous to you and everyone else if some of you could briefly look under the hood to see what the problem is? Maybe not fix the bug, but at least let Mozilla know that there is a pain point somewhere (perhaps with specific source files or functions which take forever). Probably gets it fixed much faster as when you just keep using Chrome and disregard Firefox completely.
  - shangxiao 12y ago

collyw 12y ago

I could say the exact same things about iOS apps. Or Android. Or Windows. But a bit of competition is generally good.

scrollaway 12y ago
Yeah, no offense to GP but that is possibly the worst way of looking at it. There are platforms where developers need to stop developing. iOS was the main one; it has extreme lock in, an unfriendly development environment, an extremely unfriendly publishing environment and is actively doing evil things. But no, all aboard the ios apps train! Windows I could say similar things about but given the competition I really can't. Android... Definitely not. Some of the most free mobile OSes run atop of android. But when it comes to developing on platforms in general, developers absolutely need to use themselves as a voice to tell other platforms what is good, what is needed, etc. There are excellent general desktop features that people have found on mac os, windows and linux alike. Without developers to make use of them, regardless of the "open" or "closed" state of the platform, users are worse off.

ishansharma 12y ago

This is a very important point. I switched to Firefox mainly due to intertial scrolling and better fonts (Chrome looks crap till this 37 beta and needs a flag). Extensions are more powerful on Firefox but I think they are coplicated as well. There are many popular extensions that just don't have updates on Firefox. One example is Evernote. I used it a lot on Chrome but their Firefox extension is almost 1 year old version and Chrome/Opera extensions have much better UI now. I hope this improves soon.

XzetaU8 12y ago
You can try the latest Beta build (August 14) of Web Clipper 6 here: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/60185-web-clipper-6-for-firefox-beta/ https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/60185-web-clipper-6-fo...

matthewmacleod 12y ago

You could say that about building an app or add-on for literally any product.

rurounijones 12y ago
Not with a straight face.
coldtea 12y ago
So? It's a matter of degree. Creating an add-on for a product with a smaller market share is not that bad. But for a product with 60%+ that also belongs to a company that "owns" Search, Maps and Email and is known to play dirty it's a different story.

myrryr 12y ago

What are we to do? We build data visualization software, but firefox is REALLY slow at rendering SVG (so no d3 for us). We have a choice of asking our customers to run ie11 or chrome, since both run quickly. We would recommend firefox, since we really like the Mozilla foundation, but the performance of it is so bad we have to steer people away from it. It is a sad state of affairs.

GlennS 12y ago
I'm a little surprised by this. I can believe that Firefox is slower (I haven't done the comparison myself), but even so it's still capable of rendering hundreds of thousands of points or thousands of complicated geometric shapes. I would have thought it you had more data than that then the points will all be rammed together and hard to distinguish, so it would be better to switch to density plots.
- shangxiao 12y ago
  I've also noticed it slower on an SVG based app. Not terribly slower, just enough to make it look slightly glitchy compared with the smoothness of Chrome with interactive actions like drag n dropping components around.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lucb1e 12y ago
If you make software (which people want to use, of course) and notice a mainstream open source browser (in this case Firefox) being slow at something in particular, wouldn't it be advantageous to you and everyone else if some of you could briefly look under the hood to see what the problem is? Maybe not fix the bug, but at least let Mozilla know that there is a pain point somewhere (perhaps with specific source files or functions which take forever). Probably gets it fixed much faster as when you just keep using Chrome and disregard Firefox completely.
- shangxiao 12y ago