Dear Firefox, I feel sad about you.

7 points by deepak-kumar 12 years ago | 12 comments

I have been in web app development since 2008 and have used PHP, Python, ROR, Javascript, HTML, CSS etc with my most favorite browser Firefox and I always loved it. But now FF is not in my favorite browser list instead I just use it for testing purposes to see if things working or not just like you keep testing your app on IE7,8,9 etc.

I did not even realize that since last 18 months or so I am using only Chrome and dear Firefox I was not missing you. I got everything in Chrome I needed (speed, dev tools, no browser crashing etc. etc.).

I did a bit of research and I did get to see rants about FF not doing well (and for chrome as well :P).

And now I don't need Firefox anymore. I just want it to die like IE7. Some of you might say that I am cribbing and not helping FF to make it better.

I don't know if there are more people like me who just use chrome as default browser and feel sad about FF.

I keep running both latest stable & dev/nightly builds of FF and chrome on my multiple machines but chrome outperforms everytime and at least I don't feel the slowness.

Overall chrome ROCKS!

daliusd 12 years ago |

That's quite a rant :)

1. My experience: I have not experienced Firefox being significantly slower than Chrome. I personally do not notice anything. Firefox on Android works amazingly (better than Chrome significantly). I have not seen Firefox crash yet.

2. Your experience: It is just a rant. You are not contributing anything good to this world and the only good thing about your rant is understanding that people might have your problem. Like Mozilla doesn't know this problem and has not done anything towards that. You could have written the same rant more positively, maybe with some metrics and ideally with analysis what must be improved. Firefox is open source browser.

deepak-kumar 12 years ago | |

My intention was not to sound like rant but if I did then it's my bad. I notice the issues with ubuntu a lot and I was big fan of it as mentioned above but not anymore as you know the reason. I get paid for developing application which work on browsers and not make browsers work fast. The point is big number of devs won't be able to give their time to make browsers better but that does not mean they can't say bad is bad.

heldrida 12 years ago | | |

I'm sorry, but Chrome doesn't work better then Firefox on Ubuntu. Actually, you need to install Chromium instead! You pointed Chrome + Ubuntu, which is not very stable compared with Chromium.

For web development, I think the Dev tools on FF are getting better, so I'm still using Firebug. I often use both Firefox + Chrome and I don't think one is better then another. I do trust Firefox, comparing with Chrome, the latest looks like a bot, maybe google new web spider ? Well, looks like (Urls magically appearing in their list, etc), not sure.

Firefox and Chrome teams are extremely important, they're bringing new stuff all the time, researching, etc! I wouldn't say their work is bad!

If you can't do better, STFU!

daliusd 12 years ago | | |

What Firefox version do you use? While I would expect from Ubuntu to update firefox regularly.

m_gloeckl 12 years ago |

I've had a short fling with Chrome, when it was still fairly new and Firefox suffered from severe performance issues (during the 3.6.x era).

Today's picture is a little different. Sure, on JS heavy web applications and those optimized for Chrome (a few google maps based apps come to mind) Firefox gets outperformed by Chrome significantly.

Considering browser extensions: I still feel that Chrome extensions lack in functionality compared to their pendants on the Firefox platform. For example, I have yet to find a good mouse gestures addon that can restore a closed tab with its' history intact. I don't blame the addon authors, that seems to be much more a problem with the API.

Memory usage with a lot of opened tabs is also an issue for me. On my own machine at home, I do have a lot of spare memory, but at work not so much. I'm a messy person when it comes to tabs, I leave a lot of them open and never close them, because I might need to look up something later on. Firefox is surprisingly memory-efficient (which was not always the case in the past) with a lot of open tabs, while Chrome hogs memory like crazy. On my work machine, it forces the OS to swap and the whole systems hangs frequently.

The last thing is customizability. If I don't like a particular behaviour on Firefox, there's surely a way to change it. Be it keybindings or the amount of lines I want to scroll with one tick of the mouse wheel (There's even a possibility to set different settings for different modifier keys!), for most things there's a setting or (thanks to the rich extension API) an addon that does the job.

TL;DR: Chrome might be faster for some use cases, Firefox still thakes the cake in the overall user experience discipline

PS: User experience and preference is subjective. Competition and choice are good and everyone gets to use the tool of their choice.

deepak-kumar 12 years ago | |

I must agree to the fact that you can not blame addon authors for any slowdown or memory usage.

Lorenz-Kraft 12 years ago |

Hi, i think you should try to deinstall ALL Plugins and ReRun your FF vs Chrome experience. I had somehow the same issue with FF like crashing, being slow etc. I didn't have the time to debug and investigate the problem, so i tried a "blank" FF and everything was smooth again. I think the same will happen very soon to my Chrome too. Most of the time its a stuck/brocken/badly written plugin/extension. The software itself is very mature. If you experience the same problem on MORE than one PC with a clean install, just report it to FF with a description of the circumstances etc. They will fix it.

cryptos 12 years ago |

I like the emphasis of freedom in the Firefox philosophie, but I must admit that I'm using Chrome more and more. This is simply because firefox has more bugs annoying me. A few month ago there was a terrible font rendering bug in FF for several versions. Chrome never had such bugs. It offers a great userinterface with a unified location and search bar. It is fast. It has amazing developer tools ... and so on. I want to like Firefox, but Chrome makes it sometimes hard.

deepak-kumar 12 years ago | |