4 ms·

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

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.
  - drzaiusapelord 12y ago
    I've been filing bugs for years yet the QA of the product is still at unaccepatable levels. FF's constant passing of the buck is bothersome. When they can't blame extensions they blame people for not participating. Yet somehow Chrome/Chromium exists just fine without me writing big reports for it, same for Safari, IE, etc. FF just has poor QA. That's a problem and all the excuse making actually hurts the product as FF leadership isn't seeing enough complaints apparantly, when an army of nerds are refusing to acknowledged these problems.
    - yuhong 12y ago
      Links to specific Bugzilla bugs and crash reports please.
    - dblohm7 12y ago
      "When they can't blame extensions they blame people for not participating." Extensions are commonly blamed because of the way that Firefox implements extensions. They essentially become a fully integrated part of the browser with full privileges. When extensions do things that they shouldn't be doing (but can anyway, because what's stopping them?), the extensions are blamed. Of course there have been many lessons learned from a decade-old extension ecosystem. Other, newer browsers have benefitted from those lessons (ie. Chrome). Mozillians know the problems with the current extension model but the hard part is having the resources to do something about it. "Yet somehow Chrome/Chromium exists just fine without me writing big reports for it, same for Safari, IE, etc." SOMEBODY is writing bug reports. FWIW, there are what, 50000 Google employees, a majority of which could be dogfooding prerelease Chrome and filing bugs. Mozilla has 1/50 of that to dogfood Firefox and depends heavily on its community to make contributions.
01Michael10 12y ago
>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 pimp they've gotten into bed with this year. No need for excuses, I use FF and my default search engine is Google. It was two "clicks" to change back but sorry if that was to dramatic for you. Most people realize Mozilla is not going to make someone's search engine the default for free and that contracts end. People will complain about anything...
joshstrange 12y ago
> FOSS fanboyism that rules HN. It's this, people HATE when you criticize FF (as I found the other week when I got downvoted for raising, what I thought were, valid points about crashes, lockups, and not being multi-process). I upvoted you and your parent but it won't be enough to stem the tide of downvotes (this is probably going to get downvoted as well).
- joshstrange 12y ago
  Cool.... Dear downvoters, How about you actually respond with your reasoning instead of proving my point perfectly.
Dylan16807 12y ago
> If MS did this in IE people on HN would be losing their shit If they changed people that had set it to google, sure. But changing the default? That's not something to be mad about.

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.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  I've been filing bugs for years yet the QA of the product is still at unaccepatable levels. FF's constant passing of the buck is bothersome. When they can't blame extensions they blame people for not participating. Yet somehow Chrome/Chromium exists just fine without me writing big reports for it, same for Safari, IE, etc. FF just has poor QA. That's a problem and all the excuse making actually hurts the product as FF leadership isn't seeing enough complaints apparantly, when an army of nerds are refusing to acknowledged these problems.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    Links to specific Bugzilla bugs and crash reports please.
  - dblohm7 12y ago
    "When they can't blame extensions they blame people for not participating." Extensions are commonly blamed because of the way that Firefox implements extensions. They essentially become a fully integrated part of the browser with full privileges. When extensions do things that they shouldn't be doing (but can anyway, because what's stopping them?), the extensions are blamed. Of course there have been many lessons learned from a decade-old extension ecosystem. Other, newer browsers have benefitted from those lessons (ie. Chrome). Mozillians know the problems with the current extension model but the hard part is having the resources to do something about it. "Yet somehow Chrome/Chromium exists just fine without me writing big reports for it, same for Safari, IE, etc." SOMEBODY is writing bug reports. FWIW, there are what, 50000 Google employees, a majority of which could be dogfooding prerelease Chrome and filing bugs. Mozilla has 1/50 of that to dogfood Firefox and depends heavily on its community to make contributions.

01Michael10 12y ago

>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 pimp they've gotten into bed with this year. No need for excuses, I use FF and my default search engine is Google. It was two "clicks" to change back but sorry if that was to dramatic for you. Most people realize Mozilla is not going to make someone's search engine the default for free and that contracts end. People will complain about anything...

joshstrange 12y ago

> FOSS fanboyism that rules HN. It's this, people HATE when you criticize FF (as I found the other week when I got downvoted for raising, what I thought were, valid points about crashes, lockups, and not being multi-process). I upvoted you and your parent but it won't be enough to stem the tide of downvotes (this is probably going to get downvoted as well).

joshstrange 12y ago
Cool.... Dear downvoters, How about you actually respond with your reasoning instead of proving my point perfectly.

Dylan16807 12y ago

> If MS did this in IE people on HN would be losing their shit If they changed people that had set it to google, sure. But changing the default? That's not something to be mad about.