My Firefox Divorce | LordKaT.com

October 9, 2009 by LordKaT » 11 Comments

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.

Thu, 10/15/2009 - 02:43

Anonymous

Wow, I'm glad I never have to go through Mozilla support..
Though as much as I love Google, until Chrome gets equivalents to all of Firefox's addons (adblock and xmarks specifically) I won't be switching myself anytime soon, especially considering Chrome is still in alpha or some shit for Linux.

Though beyond FF and Chrome, I can't speak much for browser knowledge, the next best thing I've used was Epiphany, and that just pissed me off all the time.

But anyway, good luck with whatever you're using now.

Fri, 10/30/2009 - 08:07

Anonymous

Amen to what you say - like yourself I've been with Firefox since Phoenix (around 0.8 IIRC) and have watched it become horribly slow and bloated with increasing disgust.

I also have had many of the problems you describe plus a couple of others which I'll not bore you with.

On the whole, I've not had to resort to the support forums so I've not had the joy of your last point - although I have noticed an increase in the number of Firefox fanbois/zealots in general surfing which disappoints me greatly.

Google Chrome is nice and fast, but the potential drawbacks of using a browser from the world's biggest ad broker are not lost on me!

On Windows I've been playing with a stripped down version called Iron
(http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php) which is nice and there are ways of getting adblock to work with it!

Overall though, my preferred browser is Opera (www.opera.com) I've used it since when version 4 was new - it's free (as in beer) but I happily used it since it was pay (as in cash!)

Lots of great features, truly cross platform with uniform behaviour, and (most importantly) remains fast and responsive under load - I currently (and typically) have over 30 tabs open on a 9 year old dual-P3 machine and it still seems as brisk as ever. Granted there are fewer addons than FF, but as the ones which are most important to me are already built into the browser, this isn't something which bothers me.

Opera FTMFW!

Sun, 11/08/2009 - 14:36

Earthbound_X

Offline

Joined: 10/28/2009

Huh, I can have over 10 tabs open at a time, it never takes time to change them, I just click, and they open.

Sat, 11/14/2009 - 13:53

Anonymous

The first time I tried FF, (years ago; think it was still v1.0) I kept hearing how blazing fast it was, and was amazed at how incredibly SLOW it was actually running on my computer! Then I decided to defrag my C drive (don't remember why) but that made a HUGE difference in FF's performance. it went from a slow, chugging mess to a blazingly fast browser in just a few hours. You might want to try it and see if it helps solve your problem too.

As for the awesome bar, I think you can limit the history it keeps in the privacy tab in the options menu.

I used to use Opera too, but the expansiveness of FF is what's keeping me using it (NoScript and AdBlockPlus especially). I'll give Opera another look, though; mostly because it's been a while.

Also, Flash support in FF does suck in the Ubuntu version, (One of the reasons I switched back) but it's not that bad in XP (at least I've never had the kind of issues in XP that I had in jaunty) and I've used XP much longer.

Besides, If you think FIREFOX is bad in Ubuntu, just try Thunderbird :)

Tue, 11/24/2009 - 12:59

DagoVasek

Offline

Joined: 11/24/2009

I just joined to say this.

Not sure how old this post is, but I too had alot of sluggish performance with Firefox under Ubuntu. Slow, even on the light version I'm running now. (Crunchbang Linux) I used the faster Seamonkey for a few days but, I couldn't get used to it. I gave up for a while then I found this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1152095

Now, its not as blazing fast as in windows, but considerably faster than what it was, including the performance of the system itself.

http://striderorg.110mb.com/

Wed, 12/02/2009 - 12:06

Anonymous

Slow perfomance with _six_ tabs?

My crappy laptop with 2GBs of RAM has well over *70* tabs open at all times, and I haven't had any significant slowdown occur. Nor any crash for that matter.

Then again, you're on Ubuntu and that computer runs Windows XP.

Mon, 12/07/2009 - 15:37

Anonymous

Just use Chromium, man.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-chromium-google-chrome-in-ubuntu-using-deb-package.html

Wed, 12/23/2009 - 02:47

Anonymous

I honestly never liked FF, I never saw any good thing come out of it and I knew the people behind it were infected with the Elitist strain of failbola. I just stick with IE. I can run my shit, I can see my shit, I can hear my shit, I can enjoy my shit. If it crashes once in a while whatever. It's only a minute or so of waiting.

Wed, 02/03/2010 - 14:41

#10

Anonymous

When I run Linux, I use Elinks, which is similar to Lynx, for most stuff. If I need graphical things I use Epiphany (which isn't perfect and still crashes a lot). If I'm running Windows, I use Opera.

Sat, 02/13/2010 - 16:29

#11

Anonymous

Yeah, just recently switched from firefox over to chrome.. huge upgrade in almost all departments, guess I forgot what running a lightweight browser was like.

Fri, 02/26/2010 - 17:22

#12

Anonymous

I haven't had many issues with FF in Ubuntu. I have it running on a modest 2gh machine with like 1gb ram. I've had like 20 tabs open at once while surfing porn...uh, "stuff"..., and haven't had issues. Now, I have had issues with it crashing occasionally, and when it does, ALL your tabs are lost. But when you re-open it'll ask if you want to restore the session. That usually does the trick, except when ONE of the tabs was the reason it caused it all to crash. I use the Adblock, Flashblock and NoScript plug ins in order to deal with all the ads & flash bullshit. It could be with how Ubuntu merges FF into it. They due some special kind of Ubufox branding thing, and that may be causing problems. I usually purge that, as well as a ton of other stuff from a fresh Ubuntu install. Maybe I'm getting rid of something that you keep which makes mine seem ok but not yours. Ubuntu has always been 2 steps forward, 1 step back.