Discussion on:

The current (and poor) state of Firefox

any codification thereof can only be a 'snapshot' of the moment. Why would anyone feel the need for new dictionaries, or style-book revisions, if (once aggregated) the rules are immutable?! Like AG's been patiently explaining: a language's 'instruction sheet' is not the language itself.

BTW, Chad, despite your proclivity to personally vilify those with whom you disagree (on opinion-rife topics), I didn't 'vote down all your posts'. I did the one where you misquoted me (put words in my mouth) and then deconstructed what you said I'd said, but it looks to me as though I'm not the only one who tired of the class blowhard's 'bloviations'. Not surprising, as I've found that I'm just the latest in a line of TR members you've made an avocation of vilifying for your sport. A couple of your posts here have 'rating #s' that went down 2; how'd I manage that?! On my own posts, the sole '-1s' tend to show up each time you post anew. You have a seeming penchant to accuse me of your own tactics (misrepresenting others on purpose--we saw that was you; reflex '-1s'; you....). Moreover, I didn't claim to have not read the comment I '-1ed'---that's you again. Should I post links now to other TR discussions I've read where you've 'embraced the dark side' to (hopefully) discredit those with whom you disagree?

AnsuGisalas : I give up. I think you would know exactly what I meant if your agenda was not to look for ways to support your own position, rather than to understand what I said. Really.

troll: . . .

I just can't agree. Let's call it an impasse then.

I guess we can agree . . . to disagree.

Try getting a new machine - I have no problem with mine when I do the same as you are trying to

I have neither bug nor bloat complaints with Firefox so I can't really even answer your poll question.

And you "screaming fan" nonsense is hysterical. Really? ANY program running on your rig makes your fan scream? BwaHAHAHAHAA!!! I get flawless performance out of Firefox on a 2 ghz laptop running XP, a 2ghz dual core running Win7, and THANK GOD for Firefox on my 1.8ghz running Windows 2000 with 512 mg RAM. I can watch Netflix on Win2000 with Firefox, a feat I haven't been able to accomplish elsewhere.

Firefox is the David to all the other Goliaths, making the fact that it works so well even more amazing. Kudos, Moz. Google has a big enough footprint in my world already.

but I'm running FF7 and the latest Chrome and I tested Facebook with both browsers and they both used 23% - 27% CPU loading the pages. Also tested with a couple other sites and get the same response. So FF7 is not a hog, your system is just slow. I guess that is what you get from a Shuttle PC.

Chrome has plugins, but most of them are not stable and don't work well. So I don't ever really plan on changing over unless FF makes a big mistake. But chrome will have really improve too.

Sadly, the root of this problem affects much of the software development industry. The current pathological obsession with rapid development is leading to unstable and unusable software up and down the stack. Devs love the "don't look back" mantra; the market is learning to hate and avoid it. Firefox and many other Open Source projects are rapidly marginalizing themselves and seem sanctimonious when called out on it.

Firefox was my default browser for 3-4 years, but with Chrome speed propouse I started my browser chage. And after some terrible discover that Chrome have a "spyware" style for sending information evean i'ts not have a page open, or its google update installed aas service, startup application, task schedule and I not sure if there's some place more... I abandon both, and use IE9. Be honests IE9 is faster than Chrome and Firefox; and better: do not have a Chrome "spyware" style.

I'm hoping Mozilla will get things fixed. As much as we have to be thankful for all the great innovations Microsoft and Google have given us, I hate supporting these liberal organizations which is one of the reasons I always preferred Firefox. I have to admit I use the Comodo Dragon flavor of the Chrome browser because it's very fast and relatively good with resource utilization. I can open Firefox these days with a single tab and then wait a few seconds and open a Dragon session with 8 pre-defined tabs and it comes up in a split second versus waiting 5 -10 seconds for Firefox to load. I still use Firefox sometimes because it seems to work better with download tools like Youtube downloader, etc.

I agree. I have always used Fire Fox since, forever. Since after ver.4..x.x. and up it just seems it got slower and slower. I remember the good ol days of 3.6.6. Such a disappointment. Almost feels like a brake up after years of companionship. Like your favorite dog going to doggy heaven in this case "Fox" heaven.

Not sure what you are all babbling about -
Did you REALLY need the newer versions of Firefox???
Using Firefox 3.5 / 3.6 at home and 3.6 at work. Not having any of the issues you all are.

Actually, Opera Next. I got my first Android over a year ago (when I saw the doom imminent for my Palm Treo 755p. Oh well, I remember when I used to visit the salvage yard to get "waste" at bulk-waste prices!

YOU KNOW, their implementation seems to work with whatevers under ir!

It would seem that your problem lies with the usage of facebook and not Firefox. I do not use facebook personally so I have no issue with Firefox, it works pretty well for me, at this time!

When FF 6 came out I upgraded and regretted everyday after until I reverted to 3.6.23. However for users on FB Games 3.6 wasn't really up to snuff so when they introduced FF 7 I decided to try it to see if they had fixed it. I am happy to report that it is not only stable on FB flash content but starts on a par with Chrome instead of taking all day and half the night like it used to. I'm back to loving Firefox as my default browser again.

I think firefox underestimates their importance in the world. They do not understand the costs involved for IT departments, every time they upgrade. My VPN will not work with Firefox upgrades, for example. Everything must be re-tested, and the vpn software must be recoded.
Then, 2 weeks later, we have to do it again!

I like Firefox and do not like Facebook.

I do not like Google Chrome because it tracks your every click (and probably more).

My biggest gripe about the development of software is that the developers can't be content to decide what features a program will have and then write the code to provide those features, test it, de-bug it, and then deliver it. Nooooh! That would be too simple. Rather, the developers throw feature after feature into the mix DURING the development cycle, and, of course, the slickwillies from the marketing department are egging them on!

For me, Firefox V3 had a reasonable feature-set. It needed to crash radically more seldom than it did. Fix that, and they'd have had me....

... is the roll out of a major version every six weeks (or so). At best we are not using FF 7.0.x, but version 4.3.x. The last three releases have been minor updates, not major ones. At this rate we will be using FF 17.x by Christmas of 2012!! That just seems stupid to me.

Gave up IE foe Firefox years ago and recently for Chrome. Chrome has become a big memory hog also requiring rebooting it. There seems to be 6-9 processes running. Now I've gone full circle going back to IE.

I have to say, that I have been a Firefox user for years, but the last year has had me looking for another browser.

I have been very frustrated with Firefox shutting down when I am in the middle of researching something. If that isn't bad enough, when I restart it, many times I lose my tabs and have to start over again.

For those reasons I now have Chrome and Opera installed and am testing them.

I still have Firefox installed, but don't use it very much.

I personally am having issues viewing Facebook using Chrome. It seems to me that after some time (hours) Chrome stops functioning if I have been using it to view Facebook. At some point Chrome will not load another web page including Google. In additon Chrome almost always locks up if I am posting at the same time I get notified of a new message. A reboot of the computer is required to regain Chrome functionality. IE and Firefox continue to work correctly. I am always using Chrome for FB, so I do not have an idea is the same symptoms can be observe if I don't use Chrome for FB. No decernable issues can be glean by viewing Task Manager and Resource Manager. I use Vista Ultimate.(yes I know it is old and buggy), not Win7, and ESET.

Its rubbish now.
And I used to love it.
Until two days ago when it ooops, firefox has crashed again for the fiftieth f...g time that day.
Switched to Opera.
Why didnt I do so sooner.

I like Chrome, except it doesn't have NoScript. I therefore continue with FF. I have noticed that FF launched faster after I ran CCleaner. I am not a heavy enough user to notice the problems, and would like things to just be lighter and faster.

I realize that I'm a very small minority as a developer of a web centric engineering application. I have the luxury of telling those who want to use what I develop that they will have to use whatever browser I use. That way I avoid the browser incompatibility mess. Currently that browser is Firefox because the combination of Firefox + Firebug is the best I know of for what I do. If there's better, someone please tell me.

Also, for people like me, social media is a waste of time. For example, I've turned off all of the emails from Facebook. In all of the hundreds of emails I received concerning those who friended me or who had convinced me to friend them, not one was ever of the slightest interest to me.

Perhaps it's a case of XXXXXX browser for some but not all, and you can replace XXXXXX with any browser you wish?

Internet Explorer works smoother for me. I haven???t encountered many bugs per se when I???ve used Firefox but it seems Firefox doesn???t operate as smoothly as Internet Explorer does.

With Internet Explorer, From what I can tell, Bugs I???ve encountered stem from the site & NOT from Internet Explorer.

The frequent major releases of Firefox is ridiculous and unnecessary. I'm still using 3.6.xx, which gets the security updates as necessary, and it works just fine for everything I need it for.

Yes, I have Chrome too, and use it to do certain things. But Firefox 3.6.xx is my go to browser.

Did anyone read the information provided by Mozilla on FF7 http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance this will let you know that they have added accelerators to the new version and there is new Java plugins that could assist your issues with FF. Please read because you can turn it off in about:config if your system cant handle it but I recommend against it. Also the hacks still work and the NO SCRIPT plugin is also an excellent idea. See people don't understand FF is like the Linux of browsers you can tinker with it and make it work for you the way you want if you have the know how. But, as for me I can use it as is and it works fine for me. That's not an opinion its a fact and I have two weak systems one is an IBM Thinkpad with 4GB of ram XPSP3 and a Dual Core processor, My other system is a DELL Latitude 830 with 4GB of ram XPSP3 and a Core2Duo processor and I only use WIFI at 2.5GHZ and i get excellent FF7 usage on both. Also note that if FF7uses accelerators for Facebook because its a large site and of course you will see a spike in your resources but is it a problem? I think not I feel that if it causes your other programs to slow down maybe you should add more ram, other than that try to limit what you have open at the same time. Rather minimize you resource usage by turning off some programs if you system cant handle it. I understand the face that if you are utilizing 75% of your processor you are actually in a good state because you are actually using what your system has. I mean really try adding some virtual memory to your system and you will see that your issues you claim are so... be of no concern. A spike in resources on your system is normal when visiting a big site or running a program and is normal.

I must say that FF7 is great when it comes to addons and security. I am running a Win7 x86 (32 bit), on a 2nd gen Ci3 with 3GB RAM.
The main reason why I don't like IE is because of it's inherent MS qualities. Chrome I don't like because its just not there yet; and it does crash repeatedly.

However; before we blame our browsers for RAM or CPU consumption, I have found that I have to control how all other applications including the OS itself connect to the internet. Now we all know that each OS is designed in a way to divide the network connection or band-width between browsing, downloading and system requirements. I have found that any browser will take more time to load (start) and will consume more RAM if I was already downloading OS (or other software) updates, and this is true for any browser..
Simple reason really is that the browser will be making a request for RAM & bandwidth which is already being occupied in part by the OS or other apps. The CPU will then have to hold that request in the background until it has allocated the needed resources and recalculated the load balancing to accommodate for each request.

Regardless of your H/W or S/W configuration and regardless of which browser you would like to use; you should not have crashes or notice any RAM spikes if you are SURE that nothing from the OS or other apps is connected to the internet in the background. I have had instances where I had more than 50 tabs opened simultaneously without trouble.

For me; IE is good but it is still MS and that's all kinds of bad. Chrome still needs a lot of work to be done. FF is the best around all-in-all.. But to tell you the absolute truth; I STILL MISS NETSCAPE!!!

I think I have never had more than about 20 tabs open at once. For more sites than that I find bookmarks work better and don't consume memory like an open tab and if you must have a lot of tabs open multiple pages of FF with a number of tabs each can work better .
Is the problem all in the 32bit version of is it in the 64bit one as well?

One of the big problems is that the number that defines "too many tabs" has been getting smaller and smaller over the years.

Because of this discussion, which has been going for some time, I switched from FF to Chrome. Then Chrome started constantly giving me alerts that this or that or another page was stalled, should I kill it? Usually, it was something that was either loading slowly over our wi-fi or having trouble with AJAX loading slowly.

However, the resources that Chrome used to put the alert together and display it tended to further delay to reload, load, or update. This led to Flash crashing, and other unsavory results.

Bah, humbug, Chrome. I'm back to Firefox, bloat and all.

1. Every new version takes more space. Eventually it made it impossible to run my laptop and my PC, and forced me to upgrade the memory. It didn't notify me of this before the upgrade, giving me an unwanted and mysterious surprise.

2. Further, it made things such as google toolbars and skype not work WITHOUT TELLING ME BEFOREHAND. Thus it really annoys me.

3. Given the above problems, it is also annoying that there doesn't appear to be an easy way to return to the previous browser version without restoring my whole computer.

All of this completely reverses the role of Mozilla as the browser "good guys", and makes me NEVER want to upgrade my browser, or even use FIREFOX again....

....my, how things have changed.
RipVan had it right when he said, "I do not trust Google in any form....". Google's new corporate motto ought to be "Do No Evil. Simply Change the Definition of Evil."
With Chrome's bulit in spyware, trackers and call-homes, I would use anythig before I would use Chrome and Mozilla handles it all well. Slower, yes, but I remember S-L-O-W (DSL, 56k, etc.) and this version of slow is still lightening fast comparatively.