5 ms·

Yay! Time for another firefox rant. I love the idea of firefox and I used to love it a lot. But not now. I keep trying it and always go back to chrome. It cras

Yay! Time for another firefox rant. I love the idea of firefox and I used to love it a lot. But not now. I keep trying it and always go back to chrome. It crashes. A lot. Like, at least once a day I have to ctrl+alt+del and restart it on my laptop. It freezes and the window stops responding, it doesn't even paint. In the inspector, the DOM breadcrumb area scrolls and moves around. It's like the blink tag, only worse. JS debugger feels worse and clunky compared to Chrome. Element inspector feels like duplo to chromes lego (does that make sense?) I opened firefox yesterday and found a new speach bubble icon asking me to connect to O2 for something. WTF?! WTactualF is that all about? /rant

agumonkey 12y ago
It's just that chrome devtools are really, really well made in many dimensions. But keep in mind that Mozilla has been catching up a lot (impressive knowing the budget difference) both in devtools and under the hood (memory usage).
- romanovcode 12y ago
  Don't forget about FireBug which is pretty awesome.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    I heard it was an unmaintanable mess, that's why Mozilla added in-house devtools. I liked FireBug UX more, but I like that Firefox has metalevel coding/debugging capabilities out of the box (the smalltalk fan speaking).
    - romanovcode 12y ago
      It was, it also was slow as hell. Now it's much better. I don't see any issues, but then again I run pretty fast pc.
sp332 12y ago
Your bugs are probably in extensions and not Firefox proper. Try starting in "safe mode" by just holding the Shift key while FF is launching. If it's still a problem, try asking in #firefox on irc.mozilla.org. They're great at helping users troubleshoot, and they'll help you file a bug report if it comes to that.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted so much. I assume the usual FOSS fanboyism that rules HN. I used Chrome, IE11, and Firefox all day. FF is the only one that locks up and crashes on me. Its so rare in the other browsers I'm shocked when it happens in FF. I run almost no extensions and I think my copy at work has zero extensions and I don't even have flash installed, so the idea that it must be a plugin problem is questionable. Once a day lockups or crashes are still, unfortunately, common. I really wish it was a better QA'd project. Its such a nice piece of software, but I imagine its reached the point where it can and should be forked to a lightweight browser the same way FF forked from the big ugly Mozilla suite. Current leadership at Mozilla just don't seem to make crashes and resource usage a priority. I also dont like how it switched on me from google to yahoo as my default search engine. If MS did this in IE people on HN would be losing their shit, but because this project is a FOSS darling, everyone just made excuses for it. At the very least it should have asked me if I wanted to change to whatever search engine they've gotten into bed with this year.
- dochtman 12y ago
  This sounds very different from my experience. Have you ever looked at about:crashes and checked into any bugs hanging off your crash signatures? (And if not, please file bugs!) If you make a list of your crashes available, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can dig out some explanation for your problems, or make sure the appropriate bugs are on file with Mozilla. I know for a fact that Mozilla leadership does prioritize crashes and resource usage (in fact, this is one reason for all of the work on the process separation feature called Electrolysis), but of course they will prioritize crashes that affect lots of users. For various reasons, it could be that your crashes are different from those. (I'll assume that you're on the most recent version of Firefox already.)
  - dblohm7 12y ago
    THIS. Developers on HN with problems have the requisite skills to be able to file good bugs.
    - 12y ago
xtrumanx 12y ago
The speech bubble by the way is a way to video chat from the browser itself. It uses WebRTC which is already in modern browsers so its not like they've added a ton of code to get that feature baked into the browser. Not sure why you saw O2 but I saw Telefonica which is the company that works with Firefox to deliver their Firefox OS phones. I suppose Telefonica/O2 is needed because even though WebRTC is a real-time direct connection between you and somebody else, you may need a 3rd party to help you connect to one another at first.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  >The speech bubble by the way is a way to video chat from the browser itself. // You know there are a myriad of ways to use the browser to do video chat already - websites that offer WebRTC video chat. You follow a URL, maybe from a bookmark, and use the one you want (eg http://appear.in http://appear.in). None of that requires modifying browser chrome nor forcing buttons on to established users toolbars. This is a marketing deal disguised as browser development.
sebnukem2 12y ago
I would start by thinning the crap that you probably have in the form of extensions... I've been running Firefox since 1.0 on all OSes and I can't remember it crashing on me once (it probably happened, a long time ago, but I honestly can't remember.)
- joshstrange 12y ago
  I'd love to know what you do for a living.... As a web developer I've had more FF crashes than I can count. Chrome has extensions as well and I have WAY fewer crashes with Chrome, if "having extensions" im FF means that you can't complain about crashes then FF is useless as extensions are a MAJOR selling point.

agumonkey 12y ago

It's just that chrome devtools are really, really well made in many dimensions. But keep in mind that Mozilla has been catching up a lot (impressive knowing the budget difference) both in devtools and under the hood (memory usage).

romanovcode 12y ago
Don't forget about FireBug which is pretty awesome.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I heard it was an unmaintanable mess, that's why Mozilla added in-house devtools. I liked FireBug UX more, but I like that Firefox has metalevel coding/debugging capabilities out of the box (the smalltalk fan speaking).
  - romanovcode 12y ago
    It was, it also was slow as hell. Now it's much better. I don't see any issues, but then again I run pretty fast pc.

sp332 12y ago

Your bugs are probably in extensions and not Firefox proper. Try starting in "safe mode" by just holding the Shift key while FF is launching. If it's still a problem, try asking in #firefox on irc.mozilla.org. They're great at helping users troubleshoot, and they'll help you file a bug report if it comes to that.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

drzaiusapelord 12y ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted so much. I assume the usual FOSS fanboyism that rules HN. I used Chrome, IE11, and Firefox all day. FF is the only one that locks up and crashes on me. Its so rare in the other browsers I'm shocked when it happens in FF. I run almost no extensions and I think my copy at work has zero extensions and I don't even have flash installed, so the idea that it must be a plugin problem is questionable. Once a day lockups or crashes are still, unfortunately, common. I really wish it was a better QA'd project. Its such a nice piece of software, but I imagine its reached the point where it can and should be forked to a lightweight browser the same way FF forked from the big ugly Mozilla suite. Current leadership at Mozilla just don't seem to make crashes and resource usage a priority. I also dont like how it switched on me from google to yahoo as my default search engine. If MS did this in IE people on HN would be losing their shit, but because this project is a FOSS darling, everyone just made excuses for it. At the very least it should have asked me if I wanted to change to whatever search engine they've gotten into bed with this year.

dochtman 12y ago
This sounds very different from my experience. Have you ever looked at about:crashes and checked into any bugs hanging off your crash signatures? (And if not, please file bugs!) If you make a list of your crashes available, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I can dig out some explanation for your problems, or make sure the appropriate bugs are on file with Mozilla. I know for a fact that Mozilla leadership does prioritize crashes and resource usage (in fact, this is one reason for all of the work on the process separation feature called Electrolysis), but of course they will prioritize crashes that affect lots of users. For various reasons, it could be that your crashes are different from those. (I'll assume that you're on the most recent version of Firefox already.)
- dblohm7 12y ago
  THIS. Developers on HN with problems have the requisite skills to be able to file good bugs.
  - 12y ago

xtrumanx 12y ago

The speech bubble by the way is a way to video chat from the browser itself. It uses WebRTC which is already in modern browsers so its not like they've added a ton of code to get that feature baked into the browser. Not sure why you saw O2 but I saw Telefonica which is the company that works with Firefox to deliver their Firefox OS phones. I suppose Telefonica/O2 is needed because even though WebRTC is a real-time direct connection between you and somebody else, you may need a 3rd party to help you connect to one another at first.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>The speech bubble by the way is a way to video chat from the browser itself. // You know there are a myriad of ways to use the browser to do video chat already - websites that offer WebRTC video chat. You follow a URL, maybe from a bookmark, and use the one you want (eg http://appear.in http://appear.in). None of that requires modifying browser chrome nor forcing buttons on to established users toolbars. This is a marketing deal disguised as browser development.

sebnukem2 12y ago

I would start by thinning the crap that you probably have in the form of extensions... I've been running Firefox since 1.0 on all OSes and I can't remember it crashing on me once (it probably happened, a long time ago, but I honestly can't remember.)

joshstrange 12y ago
I'd love to know what you do for a living.... As a web developer I've had more FF crashes than I can count. Chrome has extensions as well and I have WAY fewer crashes with Chrome, if "having extensions" im FF means that you can't complain about crashes then FF is useless as extensions are a MAJOR selling point.