Ninth Anniversary of Firefox 1.0 Release 153
Nine years ago today, Firefox 1.0 was released. Mozilla writes "Mozilla created Firefox to be an amazingly fun, safe, and fast Web browser that embodies the values of our mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. In the nine years since we first launched Firefox, we have moved and shaped the Web into the most valuable public resource of our time."
The first release of the little project to write a lighter alternative to Seamonkey is a bit over a year older.
don't care. (Score:5, Interesting)
phoenix was where it was at.
it all started going downhill after politics and marketing departments of mozilla got involved.
the 1.0 release was pretty much meaningless milestone in the big picture for the project. imho phoenix 0.2 should be the release to celebrate if any.
Re:don't care. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:don't care. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. The youngsters won't remember that, and some of the not-so-young have forgotten it. If Firefox disappeared tomorrow, and we never saw another release, it would have served it's primary purpose. We would still have four major browsers available, all largely "standards compliant", along with a number of less popular browsers. Firefox changed the landscape, dramatically.
I can't even remember which milestone I started on now, but it seemed to take FOREVER for 1.0 to come out. I guess it's close to a decade since I grabbed my first copy of Firefox now. To lazy to look up the dates for all the point.whatever releases.
Re:don't care. (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
People may not realize it, but we came dangerously close to a world where Microsoft Internet Explorer was the only accepted web browser. If Mozilla and Firefox had not gained popularity, it is quite probable that IE would have dominated enough market share to push out all other browsers. And nobody would bother creating sites that worked in anything else. Furthermore this would have virtually killed any OSes that Microsoft didn't feel like supporting with IE.
As is is now, we have several open source browsers that are ported to many different OSes, and no dignified web site would even think of only supporting one browser.
Mozilla did great but the battle is elsewhere (Score:4, Interesting)
> we came dangerously close to a world where Microsoft
> Internet Explorer was the only accepted web browser.
We dodged that bullet but now we're heading to a world where facebook.com plus a small few other sites are the internet.
It's not Mozilla's fault but, as Stallman says, freedom is about controlling your computing on your computer, so it's a real problem that a lot of computing is being done on Facebook's servers.
(That said, it would be useful if Mozilla Firefox did more to make its users aware of what free software is - such as putting a clearer link in the menu or in the About dialogue box.)
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If that were true, there would be no point in search. Yes there are a few that are very popular, but their relative popularity doesn't come at the expense of the very long tail [wikipedia.org].
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Mozilla, behind the scenes, no in the open, at W3C and IETF is making sure it stays that way as much as possible.
If you think things can't change you clearly don't live in the real world.
Mozilla was important and Mozilla remains important.
As an example is iOS. An other example is Androidm which is getting more and more closed:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ [arstechnica.com]
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FYI, it's = it is/has. ;)
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/phoenix/releases/ [mozilla.org] doesn't even show v1.0. Only v0.1 to v0.5. However, its readme says to go to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ [mozilla.org] that show v1.0 as 12/10/2004 (DOOM shareware's release 11 years old! 20 in 2013!).
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"I guess it is close to a decade since I grabbed my first copy of Firefox now."
If you choose to live life as an anal retentive, you could also choose to know what the hell you are being retentive about. ;)
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Alright - I clicked the links. I really didn't understand what you were saying, I guess. You're stating "it is" to confirm that it's been a decade? That being the case, I apologize for the snappy comeback.
I think I got onboard about here:
0.4/ 12/11/02, 6:00:00 PM
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Truth. Back then websites were typically written for IE5 or 6 and sometimes Netscape 4. Writing web pages to standards was for activist nerds, because at that point IE's market share was around 90%.
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Those were very dark times. Sometimes I would go to a 'website' only to find out that it really was a .exe file that IE could run (of course with full privileges). My friend, who back then was an avid supporter of all things Microsoft, came to me once to tell me he had been looking for registration keys on the internet and now his computer was infected with so many viruses that it was completely unusable. I laughed and said: I warned you many times to not use IE! He went to FF and never looked back.
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funny thing is that I don't remember having any such problems with phoenix. everything worked or the things that didn't work were irrelevant.
granted that I didn't have to use any intranet web apps or such...
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(*) Google controls the "living" HTML.
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So we should be celebrating Firefox 0.8?
Whatever. The early version numbers were little known, and when I came on board the browser was around 0.8 or 0.9 already.
I recall having tried the predecessor, plain old "Mozilla browser" around 1.2 and wasn't expecting of my first trial of phoenix. Yet it was good enough to wean me off of Opera.
Things were fine for a while, but by version 2.0 I was already preferring to install 0.9 to get around the sluggishness and large memory consumption of new builds on my single core PC. That was before I used extens
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You don't care but NBA, CBS, Comcast, Care More, etc. care though! :P
wtf happened... (Score:4, Insightful)
to that 'lean' browser of yesteryear?
Re:wtf happened... (Score:4, Insightful)
to that 'lean' browser of yesteryear?
Exactly.
The problem isn't just that Firefox is bloated and full of unnecessary crap. Even worse, they keep changing or removing existing features that are actually useful. Every new version now brings more pointless changes that make Firefox just a little bit worse. And no matter how much users complain about all the constant pointless tinkering and the nonstop treadmill of unnecessary changes, the response from Mozilla is always the same. A thinly veiled Fuck You We Don't Care What You Think.
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to that 'lean' browser of yesteryear?
Exactly.
The problem isn't just that Firefox is bloated and full of unnecessary crap. Even worse, they keep changing or removing existing features that are actually useful. Every new version now brings more pointless changes that make Firefox just a little bit worse. And no matter how much users complain about all the constant pointless tinkering and the nonstop treadmill of unnecessary changes, the response from Mozilla is always the same. A thinly veiled Fuck You We Don't Care What You Think.
Their response is more along the lines of if you don't like you can customize it anyway you like. My Firefox is functionally and aesthetically pretty similar to Firefox 2.0. A clean install a of Firefox uses less than 100mb of RAM when first launched. It was very close second to chrome in Benchmarks [tomshardware.com]. There are enough plugins out there you can get the functionality/aesthetics you want. It just might require a bit of tinkering on your part.
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Which seems more evidence of how badly Tom's Hardware botched the testing than anything else.
In real use Chrome is so wildly faster than Firefox it's incredible, thanks largely to its Javascript engine and the fact most modern web sites are incredibly JS heavy. I'm not even talking 20% faster, but closer to 200%, literally running circles around Firefox.
It's to the point that just taking raw performance into consideration, I can't stand using Firefox lately
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Chrome's Javascript is terrible in my experience. Every time I write something that needs speed, both Firefox and IE are way better. The last example was a page that did nothing more than scroll and resize images across a page, so they were bigger when in the middle of the page, and smaller by the edges. The page just runs the images in an infinite loop, and the images are only about 600 pixels big, and there are only 70-80 of them. For maximum smoothness, I ran setInterval at 4ms for 250fps, and easily obt
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My most recent Firefox experience was finding out that they broke their own Jetpack AddOn API, making it impossible to build an AddOn that works in both Firefox 17 and Firefox 24.
That wouldn't normally be a big deal, but 17 and 24 are both LTS versions-- meaning our client was moving directly from one to the other! And it was impossible for us to make a single .xpi that supported both!
Mozilla's a clown college now, I can only assume any real software engineer with talent has long since moved on.
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I got a support call recently from a user whose whole office puzzled me when they said their local IT branch has them on version 17.
Our official policy only observes 2 versions and I had never thought hard about those stray callers that blatantly appear to be ~10 versions "behind".
Thanks for reminding me that LTS is the reason behind this. I much preferred the days of you could say "you're running 2.0 and should upgrade to 3.0" You can no longer tell that the huge number gap is no more than 12 months becau
Firefox is not a browser (Score:1)
It's an updater.
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Well, it allows you to visit websites while you're waiting for the next update. That's why people mistake it for a browser.
Last good version. (1.5) (Score:2, Insightful)
FF1.5 was and still is the only good version.
After that it went downhill with them adding crap features, bloating the hell out of the browser and breaking the API EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN TIME. THEY STILL DO THIS NOW. LEARN WHAT AN API IS YOU MORONS, APIS AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BREAK, THAT IS THEIR POINT!
I gave up caring about their nonsense when Chromium became stable enough. (v0.3, still on my desktop for some reason)
I still have one installed, webdev, etc.
The only thing I mainly use it for is for a couple ex
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Pfft. Firefox 2.0.0.x was pretty good, it was with 3.x that it got slower and I eventually switched to Chrome for better speed.
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On the other hand, that API issue is serious.
For a lot of time, I were using Firefox instead of Chrome because of my NetBanking plugin. Chrome was a bit faster than Firefox at that time, but not that faster - and I enjoyed my Firefox add-ons.
And then, suddenly, Mozilla start to spit new versions in a crazy way, and my NetBanking stop working after every single new (sub)version of Firefox. Hell by hell, I decided Chrome's "hell" was a bit more worthy - at least, I got some faster renderings and the Google's
Lost its way (Score:3, Insightful)
They got off track when the goals stopped being about speed, standards, stability and security.
At that point it became just another app.
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If that was true, they wouldn't have rewritten their Javascript engine twice, been obsessing about hardware acceleration, wouldn't have bothered to make it the browser using the least amount of RAM after being the one that used the most two years ago, etc. They haven't even finished implementing HTML5 yet because they're so focused on performance, including threading the browser and efforts to improve their DOM engine's performance that won't pay off for at least another year at this rate.
In the face of tho
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The fact is they have to focus on performance, especially their Javascript engine...precisely because their performance sucks big harry balls, most especially their Javascript engine!
Call me back when/if they ever actually make progress. All I've seen as a user is a browser that has gotten nothing but slower and slower with each release, a sharp contrast to Chrome and IE.
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I run Firefox constantly, albeit grudgingly, because it's sadly a browser we have to support. Across dozens of systems of a variety of hardware configurations and platforms. This isn't a case of "just my PC is funky". If it ever actually improves I'll be one of the first to notice.
I haven't seen anything but significant degradation from Firefox for years. Every update is a downgrade. In performance, in functionality, in usability. You are right that Firefox it isn't at its low point today...only becau
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Because everyone and their mom must be running Firefox either without Javascript or with no more than a single tab open. And heaven help you if you open any dev tools with Firefox...yee gads!
Although I do find it amusing that if you trust Firebug's load time metrics it's just as fast as everyone else....never mind it hasn't actually rendered everything it says is "completed" yet, or gotten half way through the billion lines of javascript that most serious sites now run.
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I'll forgive Firefox when it can
A) Pull its own weight without lagging on common sites despite being run on incredibly powerful systems.
B) Stops forcing incredibly stupid "features" and UI design failures.
----
With our test labs and such we're running every browser across an array of configurations and performance levels. On Javascript intensive sites Firefox simply lags far behind everything else. That didn't matter so much pre "Web 2.0", but today when JQuery is considered lightweight compared to many co
I wish they'd stop fucking with the layout (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost every new iteration of FF removes or detrimentally alters a feature that people use and rely on.
It's really starting to piss me off as I have to find extensions or workarounds to replace the functions they keep taking away.
The most recent annoyance is to the find-in-page function, before it was well laid out and I had absolutely no issues with it, but now it's ruined, the close bar X button has been moved from immediately left of the search box to the right edge of the bar which is really far away on
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Yep. Switch to SeaMonkey.
By the way, I'm working on a patch to make fork SeaMonkey's find bar code back to the old find bar so it's no longer reliant on the stuff in /toolkit/. Time will tell whether it gets accepted.
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Palemoon's OK but being Windows only it's not quite right for me. I'd probably use it over Firefox if SeaMonkey wasn't available, except on Linux obviously.
The other thing about Palemoon is it all rests on basically one guy who develops it, as far as I can see. I don't know whether it's more or less likely to survive than SeaMonkey but it's risky to throw in with a project that could die any day if the one guy who develops it disappears. :-)
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"Fun"? (Score:3)
Maybe I'm getting hung up on the wrong thing here, but how the fuck do you measure how "fun" a web-browsing experience is? What does that actually mean? What is it that makes Firefox fundamentally more enjoyable during recreational use that, say, Chrome/Opera/Safari/IE/etc. are missing?
I'm fine with the rest of this and happy birthday to Firefox and all, but what is it that actually makes for a "fun" browsing experience, other than the specific websites that I choose to use?
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It's not just you - this is precisely the word that I was coming in here to comment about.
Firefox is still my primary browser, and I still think it's the "most free" and potentially most "featureful" one left (even Chromium is subject to Google's whims and reluctances - as an example, in my case I find it irritating that Firefox has had native .opus support for <audio> tags by default for over a year, while Google only implemented perhaps six months ago...and still has it disabled by default. Apparent
I remember using Phoenix 0.9 (Score:2)
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Me too. I started with Netscape. I never used IE and I marveled at people who kept using the rusty and bent piece of junk IE6 was when the rest of the world had moved on.
Fork-Bomb tab-model (Score:2)
Chrome's tab-model is a literal Fork-Bomb. If I have to explain it to you, you need to get off /.
Unlike Firefox where it JIT loads tabs as you need them. Try restoring a 30+ multi-tab session with Chrome, good-luck.
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Moreover, Firefox realized how stupid it was to load all your tabs at once when you restarted the browser. It's insane. 50 tabs open, and I have to wait for them to load? No thanks! I can see maybe wanting a specific subset of the tabs load that way upon restart, but given how quickly pages load and how infrequently you're going to use each of those 50 tabs, it's just insane not to wait until you switch to them to reload them from cache/website.
Especially given that whenever I reopen Chrome that way, a good
I dumped Firefox for main use. (Score:1)
When they decided to start hiding or removing useful settings while adding so much bloatware into it that they might as well have renamed it FireIE 6.0, I quit using it for daily browsing habits.
Now that it is up to version 25+ (which is fucking stupid in its own right, trying to play version catch-up with Google just because), I still find that I don't use it for anything but Twitch.tv and Disqus.
For some reason the chat interface for Twitch never loads in Chrome no matter what I do, and Disqus comments ne
Re:Chrome Is Better (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to say, but Firefox is kind of irrelevant these days.
Chrome is developed by a company whose sole purpose of existence is to spy on people in order to sell more advertising - a lot of it via their browser.
Mozilla is just out to make a browser, email client and other useful tools.
Also, any perceived superiority shall be removed in a release or so - the browser market is just too competitive.
Re:Chrome Is Better (Score:4, Informative)
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I love FF. It has some features that make it much more usable than Safari for me. I never considered Chrome because I'm happy with FF and see no reason to change browsers. And now I have an extra reason not to change.
Re:Chrome Is Better (Score:4, Informative)
I would agree, but all of a sudden I'm having huge issues with Chrome :(
Tabs becoming unresponsive, mysterious downloads in the background stopping me from quitting, tabs taking ages to close etc etc.
No extensions, no java, no flash.
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You should try it on OS X and Linux. It is not really worth using apart from in testing.
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I have no problem with it on OSX.
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No problems worth talking about here in Linux Land. Chrome compares favorably with Opera and Firefox. There is not a great deal to choose between the three, IMHO.
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Also Chrome is the only choice on Linux if you want to have a up to date Flash plugin (you can also transfer that plugin into Chromium, although it's a PITA). The old NPAPI Flash plugin (version 11.2) still seems to linger in various distros though (package flashplugin-installer in Ubuntu).
Well, HTML5 video is already working quite well, and seems to have better hardware acceleration. Even YouTube could as well end the long-lasted HTML5 experiment [youtube.com] and just go full HTML5.
Re:Chrome Is Better (Score:4, Informative)
Even YouTube could as well end the long-lasted HTML5 experiment [youtube.com] and just go full HTML5.
Google has some lies and secrets here.
Their defacto behavior, which I'll call a "claim" is that you must have flash to play video xyz even in the HTML5 mode. This happens with MOST popular videos because they are monetized (the secret there is that Google's advertisement modules aren't ready in HTML5 yet)
To debunk this, just load an iPad or iPhone and see if you're *ever* forced to suffer even half of the consecuences... when sir Steve Job decided to ignore Flash on mobile. The takeaway is that faking your UA string with a FF extension yields those nice mp4 files without fuss, and I don't recall seeing video ads in player with that variant. The annoying thing is you have to put up with the mobile navigation, AND as of about 9 months ago, clicking a playlist link to with a preordered list of long series of videos (videogame Let's plays) would link you to a standalone vid. When you have about 100 videos and need to continue from #86, it's a major pain to rely on searches and the unreliable sidebar randomly hinting episode #2 or #98 but not #87. I'm pretty sure there's some express secret reason youtube doesn't like you binging^W playing sequential videos.
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Yep, you are correct. Some months ago I was able to set my UA simply to Internet Explorer 10 and got every video as HTML5. That trick seems to not work anymore though.
You didn't say if the other UA tricks were tested so...
try an extension with selectable agents and pick Safari for iPad or iPhone. Coupled with adblock, disabling flash and using noscript is closer to my setup and probably confuses their sniffing.
I haven't tested in while
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Re: Chrome Is Better (Score:5, Interesting)
No. I used Chrome for a few years there but I got unhappy that it was the only closed source application I was using on a daily basis. So I moved back to Firefox and have found it a good experience. The only gripe I have after 9 months is that the dev tools feel slugish.
I'm even using Firefox on Android and find that better than Chrome.
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Chrome Is Better
I think you'll find it's possible for other people to have different opinions to yours and for both of you to be correct. Amazing, eh?
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No, it's not.
It keeps Chrome civilized, and feels niches where Chrome is not viable.
In this exact moment, my Atom 330 box remains useful only because FIrefox runs fine on it - I don't know why, but Chrome performs extremely poorly on it.
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Text based browsers are great, when that's all you need or want. We can bemoan the waste and bloat on the internet, but at the same time, all of us like a pretty browser with some bells and whistled. Of course, "pretty" is in the eye of the beholder, but for most of us "pretty" is something more than a mostly blank with simple print. The solution seems to be, install your favorite (or least despised, as the case may be) and tweak it to your liking.
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and, like Internet Exploder and Fuckle Chrap...
It's at this point when I begin to tune out the geek.
Just use a text based browser like Lynx instead, uses almost no memory or processor resources and is virtually invulnerable to malware.
Accessibility makes the case for Lynx. Extreme constraints on bandwidth makes the case for Lynx. Cekkular
Re:Nine, eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, at least we can celebrate the first years. Before the new versioning system and adding everything but your mom's dong instead of letting addons do the work.
It's worse than that. With every new version, useful features are changed or removed and people are being forced to use more and more extensions to regain functionality that has been ripped out. Which leads to the current ridiculous situation:
-- You have to depend on some random person to create the extensions you need
-- You have to hope that the random person continues to update the extension so that it works with future versions of Firefox
-- Or you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to write extensions yourself just so you can restore functionality that never should have been removed in the first place
-- Installing too many extensions is well known to cause performance and/or stability problems with Firefox.
Re:Nine, eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Installing too many extensions is well known to cause performance and/or stability problems with Firefox.
Having too many extensions does not cause performance/stability problems. Individual, poorly written extensions do, when they leak memory.
Every time Firefox comes up as a topic on /., people say they want it simpler and smaller, and follow the newest trends young browser projects bring. It's ridiculous to expect it to not change the UI at the same time.
-- You have to hope that the random person continues to update the extension so that it works with future versions of Firefox
Firefox extensions don't need to be updated by the developer for future versions.
-- You have to depend on some random person to create the extensions you need
If that is true, then there are not enough people that have your problem, and are happy with the change Firefox devs introduced.
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I agree, it's easy to find examples where the majority on people in a /. discussion are wanting the first two.
But, Mr. Mozilla Developer, can you point to any examples where the majority of people in a /. discussion are wanting the third?
I suspect you might have a lot of trouble with that - which is why I'm just going to sit back and consider the Mozilla develo
It's a self-correcting problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Take a look at these numerous different measures of browser usage shares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_share#Historical_usage_share [wikipedia.org]
The most obvious trend concerning Firefox is the steady downward slide in its usage share. It has gone from over 30% of the market back in 2010 to down near 15% these days.
Firefox 4.0 was released in March of 2011, although it was obvious before then that bad decisions were being made, and would continue to be made. This is when people in the know moved on to other browsers, followed by stragglers.
The decline is very much due to how they've treated their users like absolute rubbish. They've focused on stupid UI changes, adding useless features and functionality that nobody wants, and removing very critical functionality that many users depend on, all while ignoring the pleas of the community to fix some very major issues like Firefox's slow performance and unbelievable memory usage.
People aren't dumb. They know when they're getting shit upon, and they'll deal with it. That's why they've mainly moved to Chrome. It may have a shitty UI, but at least it's fast, at least it doesn't use far too much memory, and at least Google manages to not piss off most users with each release.
When a product loses 50% of its usage share over just a few years, it'll most likely become a dead product within a few more. I hate to say it, but Firefox is on its way out. The numbers show it, and there's nothing being done to reverse this trend.
Re:It's a self-correcting problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
The decline is solely from Chrome becoming mainstream and Google advertising it on their site, where lots of mom and pop Firefox users probably "accidentally" switch to Chrome because of some warning or advertisement from Google.
The reality is both Chrome and Firefox are great browsers, and only a tiny fraction of people are upset with the changes from version to version. Generally, most of us should just be happy that people are NOT using IE6 anymore.
Although personally, Chrome has not kept up with important CSS3 features nearly as well as Firefox, and now IE10 and IE11 have passed Chrome in my book. I mean, something as BASIC as linear gradients you'd expect to work in all modern browsers, but only Firefox and IE10+ can get it right. See bug 41756 - http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41756#c71 [google.com]
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The decline is solely from Chrome becoming mainstream and Google advertising it on their site, where lots of mom and pop Firefox users probably "accidentally" switch to Chrome because of some warning or advertisement from Google.
I agree with it being due to the marketing Google does, but not with the medium. I think it's more like those fucking toolbars that comes bundled in the installation of other software.
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Chrome is becoming a bloated piece of shit too. It used to start up quickly and load pages quickly. That's going out the window in my experience. They are also starting to have bugs that never resolve, or take a long time to resolve. One that's been bothering me recently is that YouTube videos playing in other tabs skip when you do pretty much anything in another tab. It's 2013 and it can't play sound properly under a modicum of load. Ridiculous.
Re:It's a self-correcting problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
I must point out that Chrome doesn't beat Firefox in memory usage. I just swapped from a Linux Mint Debian installation, in which I used Firefox primarily, to a Sabayon Linux installation, in which I use Chrome primarily. Similar configurations, similar extensions, similar page load - very similar memory usage. I suppose that anyone could do that same test for themselves, and different people would get different results. Someone who loads a butt-ton load of Java apps in their browser may find that brand Z works better, while someone who gloms onto every Flash app will find that brand Y works best, while the other dude who runs a stripped down version with no extensions enabled finds that brand X is bestest and fastest.
For MY purposes, it actually seems that Firefox may have a very slight edge on Chrome for memory usage, but I'd have to do some double checking before I committed myself to that statement.
Re:It's a self-correcting problem. (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say waaaaaay beyond a slight edge thanks to the memshrink project.
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ [mozilla.org]
Old measurements. Situation keeps improving. Latest 2 or 3 firefox versions use smart loading/unloading of large images on image heavy web pages, for example.
http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/figure3_browserfootprint.jpg [itworld.com]
Personally, on my chromebook, Chrome used 615MiB w/ 2 tabs open (crosh and a blank tab) while Firefox in Crouton used 385MiB with 18 tabs open, and that was after I had cycled through all the tabs to make sure they hadn't been unloaded.
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Awesome feature and fix. Some never-ending-scoll webpages would slow FF down to a crawl on this laptop because of the images.
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I must point out that Chrome doesn't beat Firefox in memory usage. I just swapped from a Linux Mint Debian installation, in which I used Firefox primarily, to a Sabayon Linux installation, in which I use Chrome primarily. Similar configurations, similar extensions, similar page load - very similar memory usage. I suppose that anyone could do that same test for themselves, and different people would get different results. Someone who loads a butt-ton load of Java apps in their browser may find that brand Z works better, while someone who gloms onto every Flash app will find that brand Y works best, while the other dude who runs a stripped down version with no extensions enabled finds that brand X is bestest and fastest.
For MY purposes, it actually seems that Firefox may have a very slight edge on Chrome for memory usage, but I'd have to do some double checking before I committed myself to that statement.
You know Firefox 24 is a big improvement over 4 but you know what? No one cares after what they did. Compare IE as an example?
IE is a great browser now! No really. IE 11 supports HTML 5, CSS 3, hardware acceleration and low latency javascript that rivals both Chrome and Firefox. I tested it as snappy.
But does anyone on slashdot care? NOPE!
They remember IE 6 and some of us geeks who have suffered through developing old IE pages and removed malware last decade from silverhaired users who do not know what a b
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When MS open source IE and port it to Linux I might care about it. I don't run Windows, why should I care about a Windows-only browser?
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Does IE11 have Adblock Edge, NoScript, Greasemonkey, Ghostery, or HTTPS Everywhere? Does it have any extensions?
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AC already responded with my answer. Can I download IE and install it on Linux? I'll test IE tonight and report back . . . .
Oh - same old story. In order to run IE, I have to run it in Wine. And, I suppose that I would be restricted to IE7 or maybe IE8. Possibly to IE6. There really isn't any test to be conducted here, Microsoft still doesn't make a browser for me.
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IE 11 keeps crashing on me : / Also VS2013 keeps crashing : /
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Granted I used 4.0 on Windows 98 SE and 24 (and now 25) on XP, but 4 crashed much less often.
But then again, whatever version of Firefox I was running back around the first part of 2013 didn't crash at least once a day the way 24 and 25 have been on this same machine.
I understand that I'm not justified in being very demanding considering I get it for free, but I wish there was a simple way to "un-upgrade" to whatever version I was running before I gave in to the constant nagging to upgrade.
No, I don't remem
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So, might be worth checking about:crashes to see if there's a bug associated with your particular crash.
Maybe they enabled, like, graphics acceleration for a flakey card, and you can turn it off.
Or maybe they need attention drawn to it.
WRT installing old versions.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ [mozilla.org]
Grab one off of there, install it (or unzip it).
If you're under windows btw, you can also try 64 bit nightlies for any date here:
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/ [mozilla.org]
ESR is another option.
http://www.m [mozilla.org]
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Oh, and you can turn off autoupdate in prefs or about:config
Preferences->Advanced->Update
app.update.enabled
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It didn't autoupdate (I try to avoid letting others change my computer behind my back while I'm not looking), they just kept nagging me to update and I was stupid enough to allow it.
Then when it started crashing on a regular basis, I allowed the next update hoping they'd fixed the problem. No such luck.
If they can update without having to do a full install from scratch, why can't there be a "rollback" button?
Why can't it remember for me which version I was running the last time it worked?
about:crashes does
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Well... Rolling back would require, I guess, using incrementally more and more space. Like, keeping a snapshot copy of each version in your profile. Not only would people object at some point, but it is a security risk, since unless you are on ESR, security fixes are part of new version increment now.
No bugs associated w/ any of the about:crashes links ?
Was stack trace in anything GL related?
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"Was stack trace in anything GL related?"
Unfotunately you're asking that of some whose programming expertise is pretty much on the level of getting Turbo Pascal to say "Hello World".
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Welll, you could link me to a few of 'em. I might want to nag the devs or file a bug.
Hrm. My e-mail address below is maybe a bit *too* obfuscated based on your response.
Try:
g r o (dot) y 8 m (at) l a r e n e g
I hope that's discernable. /. too - I don't think there's anything particularly problematic in most of 'em, unless I guess you're worried someone would find something possibly exploitable and target you specifically.
Could probably just post them on
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I'm hip deep in TiVo wrangling at the moment so it might be a while before I darken your inbox.
Re:It's a self-correcting problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is precisely the kind of whining that shows that we don't deserve a product like Firefox. A feature I don't want gets added in? Surely nobody wanted it! They removed a feature that I use? Surely it's because they're out to get me!
You people whine like there's no tomorrow. In the meantime Internet Explorer changes it's UI in every release and keeps adding features "nobody wants" but their share keeps climbing. In the meantime Chrome makes boneheaded mistakes and invents tons of stuff that only a few businesses care about, and they're the saviors of the Internet.
Really, Firefox fans need to chill the fuck out and (for lack of a better phrase) check their damn entitlement. You're not the only people in the world, and Firefox isn't dying because they're ignoring you. They're dying because nobody wants to use a browser that even the fans hate. They're dying because they can't compete against three companies with gobs of money. Even Opera couldn't compete, and they weren't a non-profit organization.
It's clear as clear can be that Mozilla cares about its users. It's replaced half their codebase to appease user's addictions to Javascript and fancy special effects that require hardware acceleration. It woke up to their addon RAM problems and in 2 years have become the lowest RAM user of the major browsers.
But do its fans care? No! Because they also removed a fucking checkbox from the UI, because it was causing other people problems. No! Because they couldn't keep moving Firefox forward without dropping some of their lesser-used UI elements and hoping the community will pick up the slack.
Understanding is a precious commodity, and Firefox's own vocal fans are shooting themselves in the foot by pretending that Mozilla has to cater to their whims and their whims only. They cry about Firefox losing marketshare, then cry more when Mozilla works to solve that problem, because suddenly the tiny crowd of people they were catering to (which couldn't sustain them) isn't the only game in town.
In short, you guys suck. I'm glad I'm not using Firefox anymore. I get to hear all sorts of praise for my browser of choice even when it screws up, because its fans understand that shit happens, and don't obsess over the problems. They realize that much more "good" has happened. You guys can't do that. You don't deserve Firefox anymore.
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I however was getting sick of firefox, and find chrome to be a much better experience (even though they are at version 30 already.. but at least they don't even advertise it)
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UI for Disable Javascript.
You either have to use about:config or NoScript (which you should probably be using anyways).
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the awesombar removed the feature of having a normal behaving urlbar without it doing unwanted things.
The statusbar
The ridiculous versioning numbering removed the functionality of knowing when you were given a security update only, or a functionality breaking / user interface altering update. Before this only happened at major version changes. now it can happen during any random security update. The ESR is a farce. A token version, it is not taken seriously by the developers.
The feature to not have bloat on
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Learning to write code, specifically to write extensions is a good investment.
Firefox is my favorite browser, and I would like to thank the Firefox team and congratulate with the ninth anniversary.
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Wasn't SeaMonkey discontinued in 2009 or something?!
Does it even get security updates? Support HTML 5? I am not a troll here but curious as I thought it was abandonware for quite some time.
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This is only confusing to people who followed Mozilla development closely enough to have seen "SeaMonkey" used to refer to the Suite. I'd guess that it was some
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Yes, that's exactly what they do. I believe you entirely, because every time I've reported a bug, they've completely ignored it and Firefox has been consistently getting slower and buggier over the years. That's because I'm living on bizarro earth.
Look, Firefox doesn't need your help to die a slow death. Stop lying through your teeth already. It's painful to see this kind of childish nonsense get upvoted because like it's the truth. Even I, who've had some painful experiences with Firefox, am not so petty a
Re: Nine, eh? (Score:2)