Most of your post is emotion and opinion, so I thought I'd address the part that is factually incorrect:
> On a technical note each version isn't really getting any better
That's simply not true. To take a single example, the type inference engine added to the JS engine in FF9 significantly improved performance. With the new high frequency release strategy, it's not guaranteed that there will be huge new features or improvements in any given release, but the features and improvements are coming as fast as ever.
> historical problems have never been addressed
You can find ancient pet bugs for any project that either take a long time to get fixed or are never fixed. Do you have something specific in mind?
> version fragmentation is occurring
That's more-or-less false. There's some adjustment going on due to the switch to the high frequency release schedule, but the fact is the vast majority of Firefox users are on a small number of versions, almost all that have been offered an upgrade are on the latest stable release.
> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.
Can you point to anything specific to back up your claim? If you pick and choose specs, this is true for all browsers. Nobody implements everything completely and correctly. The specs are being developed as fast as ever, and it's common for one browser to be ahead in certain areas. It's also common for competing implementations to differ as the standard develops. This is not confined to Firefox.
> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.
Yeah, this is false. Gecko is still arguably the gold, um, standard for page rendering.
That said, I dread using Firefox now, for reasons that are completely emotional. There's too much UI, and web pages have an unfortunate uncanny valley thing happening when compared side-by-side with Webkit-rendered pages. The best way I can a explain it is that it's like when you see a photo of a Russian Buran, and your mind goes, "There's something not quite right about that Space Shuttle."
You're not addressing his key point, I'm recommending Chrome to anyone I speak to, many other developers I know are too. Firefox is slow, sluggish to use and confusing compared to Chrome.
The edge it had over IE was that it was a better user experience. It's not compared to Chrome anymore. Even IE is better than FF apart from the weird crash like blank screen glitch when opening a new tab that IE has.
I don't have a problem with you recommending Chrome (and I work at Mozilla). However, it's not fair to say Firefox is sluggish. With a new profile, it's just as fast as Chrome. Try it.
Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons and browser history and cookies.
Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years.
Try vacuuming your Firefox database [1], syncing everything [2] and/or create a new profile [3] with only the extensions you actually use.
Oh, and be careful of Firebug. That's why most developers laugh at Firefox for being so slow; they use Firebug, which slows Firefox down to a grinding halt. We're working on our own dev tools, which are slowly coming together. They're not a Firebug replacement yet, but they're getting there. [4]
Yeah, you're right, I didn't realise they'd improved it so. Start up was really suffering at one point, it's nippy, I'm wrong.
I think the major reason this myth has stayed in my mind is doing upgrades on startup, testing FF v Chrome just now, on a computer that FF has never been the primary browser, they're very similar in terms of responsiveness (FF still a little slower if I'm honest, but trivially and I think it's a bit psychological in the way it opens the window compared to Chrome). I'm not seeing major differences on disabling/enabling firebug though.
Right now every time I open FF it seems to upgrade, because I do it so rarely. So in my mind it's now become intolerably slow and I only open it when I really, really need 3 different sessions on a single site. I use Chrome as primary, IE secondary (due to it being more likely to have quirks and historically preferring IE dev toolbar to firebug).
As Chrome upgrades in the background and IE does it through windows update you're not playing on a fair playing field I guess.
EDIT: I should add this isn't exactly a modern computer, no SSD, 2.4ghz quad core, 3Gb RAM and my laptop's even more in need of an upgrade.
When I boot my computer, it's a little slow at first when opening applications, so differences are very noticeable.
On this computer I'm using, Firefox 9 starts faster.
Also, this version on my computer upgrades in the background. I just get a "restart" notice when it finishes, then after I restart it checks for addons updates, in case some of them are invalid, but that's pretty fast too. And these upgrades don't happen so ofter.
>>> Try vacuuming your Firefox database [1], syncing everything [2] and/or create a new profile [3] with only the extensions you actually use.
That's part of the problem. I'm a huge fan of Firefox, but I shouldn't have to manage these things in order to keep my browser fluid after six months of regular use.
You generally don't have to. Back in the day of 3.6, sure — but not these days. We automatically vacuum your DB and maintain it for you.
However, there are still extensions that cause issues, and the odd bug that is an actual issue with how we do things.
The reason he recommends creating a new profile and syncing stuff over is because it's sometimes easier than to figure out what's broken on a particular system that has a pre-Firefox 4 profile.
"Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons"
You'd have a point here if Firefox hadn't started blithely breaking everyone's add-ons by bumping the version number about 5 times per week. Okay, that's hyperbole -- I know it wasn't that often, but the point is that a "rapid release schedule" comes with real costs.
If you have 500MM users, and the mean user time to adapt to a trivial new release is 5 minutes (a gross underestimate if add-ons have broken), you've just wasted 16 million hours of user time. Just because that cost doesn't appear as a line item in the Mozilla Foundation's budget doesn't mean it isn't real.
I used Firefox for years because of the rich add-on community. When it started being more trouble than it was worth to update the add-ons (or find/write new ones, if the old one hadn't been updated), I switched to Chrome. It's unlikely that I'll be back.
If the cost of frequent updates is breaking add ons that aren't actively maintained, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. The majority of the slowness criticisms that ff receives seem to be caused by add ons.
It's not unreasonable to expect an add-on to work for more than six weeks, especially when there hasn't actually been any real, significant change in the base software. I'd bet the (unpaid) add-on authors are getting pretty tired of this as well -- they're the ones who have to deal with the emails from unhappy users.
This is my biggest complaint about Firefox, and I'm a) an add-on developer in my personal time and b) a Mozilla employee who spends 40+ hours a week working on addons.mozilla.org. I swear we're working on fixing it :)
In the meantime, sorry it's been a hassle. I wish we hadn't switched to rapid release without fixing add-on compatibility. We honestly didn't realize how hard it would be to get right.
> Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years.
Maybe I'm asking to much, but this seems totally unacceptable to me -- both things seem totally unacceptable to me. And while it may still be just true, Firefox suffers worse from this problem than any OS, software or other browser that I use.
> Mozilla can do nothing about you using Firebug, yet still gets blamed for the slowness.
This is how things go in real-world. I remember reading about how much work went into each new version of Windows because of bugs and clever code in existing software. Otherwise people who upgraded and found their old software not working anymore would have blamed Windows instead of their buggy software.
You can't boast about Firefox being extensible and then blame plugins because they break it. At least, Firefox should be warning about troublesome plugins. The more people have to deal with Firefox being slow and unstable, the more Firefox will be getting a bad rep. Sorry, but you can't fight human nature, you know. You can't change how most users think. If you want to increase market share, your software must be as much dumb-friendly as possible.
On my Linux box, Firefox is crashing lots of times a day without giving me any clues about what could have gone wrong. What am I expected to do? To become a Firefox developer? Switching to another browser is an easier path.
By saying this, I hope I don't seem unappreciative of Firefox developers' efforts.
The MemShrink team, having hit all their obvious targets in Firefox itself, are now reaching out to extension authors to help them fix their own memory problems. Firebug, being a major extension used by millions of people, is on the receiving end of this help already. There are several fixes committed into the 1.9 beta branch that reduce overall consumption, and I’m sure more will follow.
I concede that I'm not being completely fair. I actually don't develop in Firefox and only have a few versions installed on VMs for testing, no bookmarks or extensions. And, as I said in another comment, over the last 10 years, Gecko has become like a trusted friend; I know what will work and don't usually test in Firefox until way later than I should.
I was responding to YOUR stipulation that browsing experience degrades the more you use Firefox. IF it does, that seems like emergency problem #1 to fix if Firefox wants to stop hemmorrhaging users. But then, I'm speaking completely out of turn, since I haven't been a Firefox user for years.
EDIT: ...since I haven't used Firefox as my primary browser in years. I use it daily; not as a "power user."
I recommend Firefox to some people, depending on what they are looking for. Firefox has had addons for much longer, and they are much more fundamental, than on Chrome or Safari. For example, while Safari and Chrome both have an AdBlock, Firefox's works much better (no flashes of ads, blocks more video ads, etc).
And modern versions of Firefox are doing a lot better again. It is much faster these days. They now have a much better release cycle, and their updater is smoother encouraging people to keep on the upgrade treadmill.
I wouldn't write Firefox off. The recent increase in competition in the browser space has done great things for all of the browsers; they have all improved dramatically over the past couple of years.
As long as we are doing anecdotal evidence here, I work in an office with two other developers. All three of us use and recommend firefox (and did before we started working together) but develop for chrome first because of the dev tools.
That's fascinating and all, but I'm really not interested in arguing with people about their opinions. I'm not here to argue. If they make claims that are factually incorrect, I'm happy to point them at the facts.
Indeed, I replied a little lower down about emotion and opinion and that it in part it isn't mine (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3309208). But for your specific comments I'll reply.
You make 3 comments that I think answer themselves. First statement I imply that things aren't getting better, I'll agree that some things are getting better, new features and support etc... but theres a chunk of stuff not getting improved.
You note it yourself in the second point "You can find ancient pet bugs for any project". The fact is there are things not being addressed which have been raised as issues, some of them half a decade ago. Thats a pain point for most OSS projects, but browsers are a competitive space, to remain competitive some of these things need to be addressed.
Version fragmentation may have been the wrong term. What I meant was that lots of plugins aren't being supported between versions. Its not such a problem of the core FF, but without the plugins FF just isn't that great. From a support point of view, new versions every 6 months is painful, especially when I read things like pulling support for HTML 5 features they had previously supported.
It makes its a painful thing to support. I now test my HTML5 applications against IE10 and webkit, I don't consider FF worthwhile currently. I test Opera only because I use it (sorry other opera users).
For the w3c stuff my biggest pet peace is websql. On other points Mozilla have a political and ideological argument for and against like every big player, I can sympathize and support where appropriate. But WebSQL is something that I would like to be ubiquitous.
> First statement I imply that things aren't getting better, I'll agree that some things are getting better, new features and support etc... but theres a chunk of stuff not getting improved.
What things that actually matter aren't being improved?
You're wrong about plugins so I'll assume that you mean addons here, which use a completely different interface. Addon compatibility over the new release schedule has been rough so far, it's being addressed and I expect it to be, largely, a solved problem in the near future.
Pulling support for HTML 5 features? Are you referring to WebSockets, which were exposed again later once the security problems in the spec were resolved?
Web SQL DB is a terrible spec, as it stands. It effectively requires locking a specific version of SQLite (bugs and all) into the web for eternity to ensure interoperability. You'll note that IE has also refused to implement it so far. It's hardly fair to claim it's "in direct conflict with W3C standards". Web SQL DB never made it past a working group stage, and Firefox was not the only browser against implementing it.
It's simply not true that Mozilla is disengaged or actively hostile to popular standards without presenting a plausible alternative and fighting to make that alternative so.
> You're wrong about plugins so I'll assume that you mean addons here, which use a completely different interface.
I personally found Chrome's plugin “API” to be pretty terrible… I use Vimperator on FF, and not only are the Chrome alternatives awfully lacking in functionality, I also need to have enabled JS for them to work. Safe?
""""not only are the Chrome alternatives awfully lacking in functionality, I also need to have enabled JS for them to work"""
Yeah, just like 70% of the modern web, and all of Web 2.0.
"""Safe?"""
Enabling JS? Not to tin-foil-hat standards, but yes. You should also remember that Chrome has a special sandbox security model that FF lacks --and that is often found to be the safest browser in security tests, js and all.
TBH I've stopped using FF unless I'm working on a new site, I can't think off the top of my head what isn't working because as stated I don't use it much anymore.
So basically you don't know what you're talking about and you're providing Slashdot as a reference?
Also, if such discussions are possible is because Mozilla's development model is in the open, which means all of their dirty underwear is washed in public, although ultimately this is for the greater good. The same thing happens inside companies like Google or Apple, you just never hear about it.
No I don't have time to get drawn into what is essentially a nit picking argument and will probably end up circular in nature. I'm sure what would take me 30 minutes to dredge up and to get valid points to back me up can all be found in that link.
I don't know what's your interest in this, however it looks to me like you have some kind of axe to grind.
Since you're not interested in "nit picking arguments", this makes me assume you have no interest in making Firefox better, so the other possibility is that Firefox may have caused physical or psychical damage to you or your acquaintances.
I'm sure the devs from Mozilla are sorry about it. It's time to let go.
I made a casual comment mostly based around what I had noticed and people kept demanding more granular definitions which I tried to oblige. TBH I struggled with that, but since people kept demanding answers I tried to oblige, failed, and tried to bow out.
My original point was Firefox has lost the recommendation status it has previously had. I also noted several technical things people had been complaining about, many of which annoyed me previously as well.
I don' really care if I get down voted, the fact is no amount of technical features is going to solve emotional issues, and Mozilla is loosing its emotional advantage. If you wanna save FF stop being technical and start thinking emotionally.
> On a technical note each version isn't really getting any better
That's simply not true. To take a single example, the type inference engine added to the JS engine in FF9 significantly improved performance. With the new high frequency release strategy, it's not guaranteed that there will be huge new features or improvements in any given release, but the features and improvements are coming as fast as ever.
> historical problems have never been addressed
You can find ancient pet bugs for any project that either take a long time to get fixed or are never fixed. Do you have something specific in mind?
> version fragmentation is occurring
That's more-or-less false. There's some adjustment going on due to the switch to the high frequency release schedule, but the fact is the vast majority of Firefox users are on a small number of versions, almost all that have been offered an upgrade are on the latest stable release.
> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.
Can you point to anything specific to back up your claim? If you pick and choose specs, this is true for all browsers. Nobody implements everything completely and correctly. The specs are being developed as fast as ever, and it's common for one browser to be ahead in certain areas. It's also common for competing implementations to differ as the standard develops. This is not confined to Firefox.