My Firefox Divorce
I've been using Firefox since the early days, when it was called Phoenix - when it was a lightweight browser, free of all the crap that came with Internet Explorer and Navigator. It was fast, flexible, and it just worked.
Since then, Firefox has matured into that fat friend we all have who sits at home all day and does nothing but watch TV.
Since the early days of being able to just surf the web like I wanted to, Firefox has become this bloated, nasty beast of a browser. It no longer loads, displays websites, or shuts down quickly. While I was willing to forgive Phoenix for not displaying websites correctly (thanks to their strict standards compliance), I'm not willing to forgive Firefox for such an atrocity - it's so feature bloated that non-standard rendering is almost expected.
Well, I decided to end my relationship with Firefox today after a few months of attempting - and failing - to use Firefox 3.5 successfully. Here is my list of problems:
- Multiple tabs are slow - my machine has MORE than enough RAM to run six tabs in the background; yet, every time I try to switch between tabs there is a good two seconds of hard drive thrashing before the tab opens.
- Content style flashing - this only happens on flash-heavy websites, but it shouldn't happen at all: on these websites the layout of the screen will be redrawn occasionally for no apparent reason.
- Poor flash support - flash video works wonderfully on IE, Chome, and Opera; but, in Firefox, video frequently freezes the entire browser or slows the entire computer down.
- The Awesome Bar is a hog - there's no need for the awesome bar to remember EVERY website I've been to ever since I started using the browser. I like the idea, but there's no reason the Awesome Bar needs to be so damn slow.
- DNS caching - there is absolutely no reason for a browser to have this feature. The network (and the system) maintains its own DNS cache. It's not the job of the browser to poorly emulate this feature. This problem with DNS is especially prevalent on slow Internet connections.
- Horrible OS integration - whether it's on Windows, OS X, or Linux, Firefox just doesn't look right. I'm using Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu and it just looks out of place.
- Horrible support - I'm sick of dealing with the Firefox community; they're a bunch of elitists that do not know how to properly diagnose and treat a problem. When I tell someone "I'm using a clean installation of Firefox" I should not be asked - several times - "are you sure there are no plugins running?" It's disgusting, horrible, humiliating. I hate every second I've ever spent on the Mozilla support forums. I hate every e-mail I've ever exchanged with everyone involved with the Firefox project. I hate the Mozilla organization from the top down. Every single person involved with this project is, in my opinion, an ignorant jackass.
The last point is what really drove me to drop Firefox: I am sick of being asked "are you sure" by wanna-be tech support personnel. Just to make sure my freezing problem wasn't related to anything in the OS or Firefox installation, I put it in a VM with a fresh Ubuntu install, and installed Firefox in that VM, and THEN I ran Firefox in safe mode - how much more "clean" of an install can you possibly expect from someone?
Of course, the idiots on the Mozilla forums aren't the reason I left. It's the e-mail I received from a developer of Firefox (who shall remain nameless) that drove me to drop Firefox and every Mozilla related product from my system:
Well, you have no idea what you're talking about. Running an installation in a VM isn't a clean install.
First, I know what I'm talking about. Second, short of wiping my hard drive and reinstalling the OS, creating a VM dedicated to a fresh installation of Firefox is the cleanest way I know of to install a piece of software.
To hell with Firefox. Long live Lynx.
