
Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser - smacktoward
http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2011/10/dear-mozilla-fix-your-damn-browser-already/
======
thaumaturgy
Now that AdBlock Plus is fully functional in Chrome/Chromium, we've been
moving all of our clients -- a few hundred individuals and businesses -- off
of Firefox. So far, everybody's been a lot happier with that.

Firefox is _terrible_. It's embarrassing. And, I've completely lost interest
in arguing over it anymore. The responses from Mozilla, Asa especially, have
either been, "We don't think that's a problem", or sometimes, "go piss up a
rope". Other people constantly chime in and say, "But _I_ don't have that
problem!", as if that somehow makes it better for the many many people who do
have problems with Firefox.

Fortunately, this isn't quite Netscape versus Internet Explorer all over
again; this time, we have a well-supported third option, too.

~~~
bad_user

         Firefox is terrible. It's embarrassing.
    

I do have Firefox occasionally choking, which annoys me as hell, but I'm on
Firefox 8.

I do get frustrated, but criticizing a software package that you get for
freaking free, especially one that you ow so much to, with such a harsh tone
really is unwarranted.

And it really is free in a not-for-profit way. The Awesome bar that the
article mentions really saves you from making useless round-trips to Google /
being exposed to Google Ads, even if this hurts Mozilla's revenues; on the
other hand Chrome's primary reason for being is Google's control on the web,
ensuring that Google's search remains the default, which is one reason the
Awesome bar will never make it into Chrome.

Also, AdBlock Plus in Chrome has known bugs and limitations because of Chrome,
because while Firefox is a platform, Chrome is a product that treats its users
like idiots.

~~~
kalleboo
> which is one reason the Awesome bar will never make it into Chrome.

What does the AwesomeBar do that Chrome's address bar doesn't? Heck the Chrome
address bar even does autocomplete of search terms when you have it set to use
Bing…

~~~
ehsanu1
When I first started using Chrome, the awesomebar is probably what I missed
most from Firefox. On Firefox, I type a partial keyword or two, and pages from
history show up which are very relevant. Do the same on Chrome, and I usually
have to finish a list of keywords to search Google in order to get to the page
I'm thinking of.

I ended up changing my address bar behavior on Chrome, but when I ran Firefox
again for a while, I relearned my old behaviors by chance just by trying to
search for stuff via the address bar, and instead finding the awesomebar offer
what I was looking for with less effort. Once you get used to it, it really is
inferior to how Chrome's address bar works. That said, Chrome has lots going
for it as well.

------
asadotzler
Jason, we’ve been working on this. There were some big performance
improvements in Firefox 6 and 7 and we’ve got a big hang fix that’s just about
to hit in Firefox 8.

Can you grab an Aurora or Beta build and see if things are better?

~~~
frossie
I suffer quite a lot from Firefox performance issues since I need to run two
instances on one machine, and Firefox 7 fixed ALL my hanging/swapping issues.
Great job on that and I definitely urge everybody to upgrade.

While I'm here I'll add my usual "Dump Firefox? You can pry Tree Style Tab out
of my cold dead hands" comment.

That said, I have also experienced the "we are not doing it cause we don't
like it no matter how insanely useful it is to corporate users" attitude, eg.
the perennial refusal to add overstrike:

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38415>

~~~
ximeng
It seems unlikely that Chrome will get tree style tabs any time soon, despite
some popular interest:

[http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=99332&...](http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=99332&can=1&q=%22side%20tabs%22&colspec=ID%20Stars%20Pri%20Area%20Feature%20Type%20Status%20Summary%20Modified%20Owner%20Mstone%20OS)

"If I stop using the dev version, and switch to beta or (shudder) released,
and turn off updating, will that give me the tabs back, or is it too late?"

------
hoverkraft
It's endearing that for each comment presenting a criticism of some aspect of
Firefox, there's at least one reply from somebody saying, "But /I/ don't have
that problem" (see thaumaturgy's top-ranked post).

So great. You don't run into problem x or problem y.

But a LOT of people do. And when I sit down at somebody's computer, and they
use Firefox, and they have more than a couple tabs open, it's slow.
Inconceivably slow. Especially in light of how snappy Chrome manages to be
with a big stack of tabs open.

And then on a modern computer, a nice shiny new computer, things are pausing
erratically, and there's lag, and it's slow, and it feels like 2005.

I can hear you leaping to Firefox's defense now: "Sure, but that was only true
until 5.323, when they fixed the 'FF is slow as shit' bug!" Or, "yes, but that
has never happened to /me/, and I run Firefox on a Pentium I that I spilled a
bunch of grape juice on and kick every day."

Congrats, you're either an anomaly, incredibly fortunate, or you limit your
number of tabs, restart Firefox regularly, and clear out your history daily.
All things that I can assure you, ordinary, non-technical people NEVER DO.

Chrome managed to make a browser that doesn't become unbearably slow under
normal usage patterns. Firefox, for all its moral superiority (and I gladly
concede that point), has never managed to do that.

~~~
azakai
The fact is, different people experience different things.

Many people report that Firefox holds up better with many tabs open than
Chrome. Perhaps since Chrome has one process per tab, which ends up straining
some OSes. And many people report the opposite. It probably depends a lot on
the OS, the specific tabs, their number, what addons they have, etc.

There are definitely a variety of bugs that some Firefox users hit, and those
users get a frustrating experience. I don't think anyone is denying that. But
there are also plenty of users that are clearly very happy. And there are
users of other browsers that also hit bugs - for example I recently noticed
that Opera was churning my HD for no reason. Never seen that on any browser
until then. I had to stop using Opera because of it.

------
azakai
> Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful
> to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched — three years
> ago.

This is an odd statement, considering that many Firefox devs run Linux. I'm
running Firefox on Linux right now, and it works great.

I guess the author of the article is hitting a specific bug. It isn't a
general issue that affects all users of Firefox on Linux.

~~~
aphyr
Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the _gestalt_ of Firefox
is of a development process that values press and feature creep over
performance and correctness.

I haven't looked back since switching to Chrome. FF ignored obvious bugs for
_years_. X pixmap freeing? Open since 2004. [1] I waited for _six years_ ,
having to restart my browser every few hours, because it would leak over 2 GB
from having a network graphs page open. Startup time? Last time I opened it,
six months ago, FF took over _10 seconds_ to start, cold. Chromium snaps open
in under a quarter second.

Then there's developer friendliness. Writing extensions is a complete mess,
especially compared to Chrome. Configuration structure is haphazard at best.
Profile corruption is a _thing_. I don't understand how a multi-million dollar
foundation can tolerate this kind of experience.

Don't get me started on the rendering bugs. :-/

[1] <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259672>

~~~
azakai
> Sure, the impact of any specific bug is limited--but the gestalt of Firefox
> is of a development process that values press and feature creep over
> performance and correctness.

I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not. Assuming not, then since
Firefox's development is done in the open, I assume you have some evidence for
this - meeting notes or such that show that? Or some other evidence?

The evidence to the contrary seems overwhelming. Firefox's main focus in 4.0
was on performance, see arewefastyet.com for JS, and the major rewrite of the
graphics system (Layers) that lets it use things like Direct2D on Windows as
just two examples. And as a consequence of those huge efforts, Firefox just
won Toms Hardware's speed test, beating Chrome, Opera, IE and Safari,

[http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-
browser,30...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-
browser,3037-17.html)

Edit: Looks like I'm being downvoted. Please tell me hacker news isn't
deteriorating into reddit, where opposing opinions are downvoted by reflex...

~~~
aphyr
Not trolling, but perhaps I was unclear.

First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well,
Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010, and it's clear the FF
team has moved to improve performance since then. Perhaps my impressions from
that time frame are no longer valid, but the issues I checked in Bugzilla
while writing my post seemed largely unresolved.

I said "gestalt" to criticize not Firefox's _actual_ development process, but
the _impression_ one might get as a longterm user (e.g. me.) Things like
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=474718>, which stood unresolved
for roughly _two years_. <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185236>
went unresolved for almost NINE years--was just fixed last week.
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279048>: five years.

    
    
        "This is an easily-demonstrated bug that "renders" (so to 
        speak) many pages unusable, or forces designers to impose 
        kludgey Javascript 'fixes' for Firefox users. This bug has
        been around for many versions, and has been mentioned many 
        times.
    
        Please, please someone on the Firefox team -- take on this project."
    

It's not just FF: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12916> is
still unresolved, after eleven years, despite a hundred dollar bounty.
Bugzilla is _full_ of wontfix/worksforme legal wrangling where users unable to
write the patches themselves (and having dealt some with FF's internals, I
understand why) are told that their bugs don't matter.

Meanwhile, FF expanded from its stripped-down, single-purpose origins into a
memory-consuming beast. On my Linux machines, it crashed _daily_. I would much
rather see crashes, leaks, and slowdowns addressed _before_ building new
systems like the Awesomebar, tabs-in-titlebar, phishing prevention, and so
forth.

Every developer I know has switched to Chrome. When I ask about it, I hear
common rationales: speed, robustness, parsimony.

Does that clarify my criticism? There's a lot of great code in Firefox, but I
don't think we should paper over the holes in the software _or_ its
development culture.

~~~
bzbarsky
Aphyr, every single browser engine has longstanding bugs; it's just a matter
of priorities.

WebKit doesn't have load events for stylesheets either, for example. It has
buggy CSS selector matching, on purpose (doing the right thing was deemed too
slow). There are multi-year-open bugs in V8 and Chrome, and that whole project
hasn't even had an open bug database for more than a few years.

So I'm not sure the development culture is any different. You just haven't had
a chance yet to file a bug and get it ignored by the WebKit folks for a few
years. It happens all the time....

~~~
aphyr
You're absolutely right; I've been bitten by chrome/webkit bugs as well, some
of which remain unpatched. And Chrome's relative youth means the browser code
hasn't acquired the same level of cruft--so I can't strongly infer a
difference in process.

------
masterleep
This longstanding bug has been found and fixed in the past few weeks. There’s
a workaround as well (use the Places Maintenance addon to properly index your
Places database).

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=686025>

~~~
metageek
I _thought_ I hadn't seen Firefox hang in a while.

------
kemayo
I remember one of my co-workers telling me that Firefox was running great for
him now that he'd upgraded from 4GB of RAM to 8GB. It finally wasn't slowly
grinding to a halt any time he had more than a handful of tabs open for more
than an hour or two.

Seemed a bit like Stockholm Syndrome to me.

~~~
jamesgeck0
How long ago was this? There's been a number of memory usage improvements
since 3.5.

I had 40 tabs open for the better part of last week and didn't notice a
performance hit; and I've only got 2Gb RAM.

~~~
weaksauce
I have the latest version and my long running high count tab sessions slow
down my system tremendously. OSX 8GB RAM.

~~~
CWuestefeld
I have memory-hemorrhaging problems under various versions of Windows as well.
I need to restart at least once a day (I typically have ~8 tabs in use).

But the clincher that made me switch to Chrome a couple weeks ago was that
every couple of hours it would decide of its own accord to tear off a tab into
a new window, and then hang. This solved the memory leakage, but not in a
useful way.

I'm pretty sure that my problems are related to badly-behaving addins. But
Firefox doesn't provide any good way to troubleshoot addins (compare to
Chrome), and it seemed to me that the process to track down the culprit given
that the problem is nondeterministic and takes a couple of hours to manifest
would be more difficult than the switch to Chrome.

That said, I'm having some compatibility problems with Chrome. Like, last
night the CAPTCHA in the free annual credit report site wouldn't work.

~~~
weaksauce
Yeah. I had the same problem with chrome as well. Same setup. Maybe web
browsers can't handle how I work with them at the moment. Maybe I'll go down
the rabbit hole and try to fix some of the bugs myself.

------
jbk
I am a bit in the same situation as the author, using Firefox since before it
was called Firefox, on all platforms and advocating it very widely.

But, it is hard to go on advocating it. True, they fixed many issues on JS
speed and memory with the latest releases (after denying the issues for a
loooong time).

However, the slowness of the SQlite backend is quite annoying, as mentioned on
the article. The SSL management is beyond ridiculous, especially when the
whole model of Certificate Authorities is broken, as the news showed us. The
breakage of extensions at each update is abnormal. The Linux integration is
abysmal... And yet, at each release, it seems the focuses on UI changes are
the more important...

IE9 is now decent, Chrome is really good and Opera too. All most of my
developers friends have moved to Chrome...

~~~
gcp
_And yet, at each release, it seems the focuses on UI changes are the more
important..._

I've seen almost no UI changes in Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. All the change-
logs were basically backend optimizations.

~~~
burgerbrain
_"I've seen almost no UI changes in Firefox 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9."_

So.. in the past 2 weeks?

Seriously, that absurd numbering scheme needs to stop too.

~~~
bzbarsky
In the last 6 months. As you knew perfectly well, of course....

~~~
burgerbrain
No, actually I didn't know that. I no longer use firefox, and their scheme
honestly makes no sense to me. I am convinced they only adopted it so that
Mozilla supporters can shoot down any criticism from people who abandoned it
more than a few weeks ago by saying _"well your criticism is hardly relevant,
we're several version numbers past what you were using now!"_ Notice several
examples of this tactic in this very discussion...

But anyway, are they bumping the version number every 1.2 months then? Is that
supposed to be obvious?

PS: I would also like to add that _"There hasn't been a major UI change in 6
months"_ is anything _but_ a strong refutation of the original assertion that
Mozilla changes up the UI too much. This is another example of redefining
"major release" to silence valid criticism.

~~~
gcp
_I am convinced they only adopted it so that Mozilla supporters can shoot down
any criticism from people who abandoned it more than a few weeks ago by saying
"well your criticism is hardly relevant, we're several version numbers past
what you were using now!" Notice several examples of this tactic in this very
discussion..._

Increasing the version number doesn't fix bugs, but pretty much every time it
has been pointed out in this topic, it was "we fixed some issues in that area,
please try a newer version".

I don't understand the argument here. You're saying Mozilla is rapidly
addressing the issues users are complaining about, and that is somehow a bad
thing?

 _But anyway, are they bumping the version number every 1.2 months then? Is
that supposed to be obvious?_

The 6 week schedule has been pointed out in every HN thread about FF, and many
public announcements before the rapid release system started, and the last 3
releases (not counting Beta and Aurora) have exactly been 6 weeks apart. So
yes, it's supposed to be quite obvious by now. Don't ask me where your "2
weeks" figure comes from.

~~~
burgerbrain
2 weeks was obviously a sarcastic exaggeration, I am not asking you where it
came from. This is however the first I've heard that 6 weeks is the new
version scheme..

 _"I don't understand the argument here. You're saying Mozilla is rapidly
addressing the issues users are complaining about, and that is somehow a bad
thing?"_

If that was what Mozilla was actually doing, I wouldn't have issues. In
practice nothing ever really seems to change.

No, my point is that there seems to be a bizarre attitude among Mozilla
supporters that in order to have the "right" to criticize firefox, you have to
continue to subject yourself to its abuse.

Well I've had enough abuse. I've given them the benefit of the doubt time and
time again for damn near half a decade now. They now need to make a sincere
and dramatic effort to win back my trust. And no, _"I've changed, I promise I
won't hit you anymore baby.."_ won't do it _this_ time. Fool me once...

I've moved on to greener pastures, but I _will_ continue to point out what
shit firefox is until I see that Mozilla finally has recognized what their
users have been saying for years, admits that they were wrong, apologizes, and
details (no hand-waving) their recovery plan. Mozilla needs to get on the 12
steps program for bad software development and user relations.

------
cookiecaper
I used Chromium on Linux for 2+ years and switched back to Firefox during the
4.0 beta cycle. I'm much happier with Firefox's extensibility and interface
and I haven't had any major issues since going back. The main reason I used
Chrome was because it was so much faster in terms of WebGL and JS execution,
but now that Firefox is regularly improving and competitive, I am much happier
with the experience.

~~~
rorrr
I had to switch to FF 7 (clean install, no addons) for one full day yesterday,
and it feels so much slower than Chrome.

I used to be a huge FF advocate, until Chrome arrived. At first I stayed on FF
and tried Chrome a couple of times. It lacked AdBlock back then, so I didn't
switch immediately. There's no way I'm going back to FF now.

------
mahyarm
Chrome hang's too, especially when I have 12 engadget tabs open on engadget.
Firefox not so much then I have those same 12 tabs. This is on OSX.

------
jroseattle
As a dev, FF was my go-to utility browser due to Firebug. Google released
Chrome, and I found myself using FF rarely.

I rebuilt a laptop recently. After loading it up with software, it was a good
3 weeks before I even noticed that I didn't have FF installed.

~~~
vectorpush
I've had a similar experience. I've really come to appreciate Chrome's built
in developer tools and have pretty much left Firebug in the dust.

~~~
redthrowaway
I'm in the opposite boat. I find firebug easier to use for the limited use
cases I encounter (mostly scraping html id tags) than Chrome's dev tools.

That said, I still far prefer Chrome as a browser.

------
plasma
I use to be a fan of firefox, but switched to chrome because:

1) it became slow to open. FF use to open within a few seconds, it now opened
in no less than 30 seconds.

Strike 1.

1) I then noticed during the 30 seconds that ff was accessing my dish access
was crazy. A bug report said it was "working as intended" because it was
needing to derive encryption keys for ssl by reading my temp data files on
disk.

So 30 sec load time from hdd access at startup is working as intended? Strike
2.

3) ff updates brick extensions. They aren't usable after an update. Just
annoying to experience each update.

3) I switched my mums pc to chrome after the resent few ff updates. Too much
mental energy and effort to click next/yes to each update wizard step, to then
see the plugins out of date too etc, just silly.

She asks "whats this" each time ff asked about updates, after doing it a few
times recently and teaching her it was ok to say yes to, I sill just replaced
it with chrome that eliminated the support overhead for me.

So I had switched to chrome and it opens fast. No crazy disk access.

It doesn't pester me at all about updates, or break things due to new
versions. It just works and gets out of my way.

------
sciurus
In Mozilla's defense, they've handled Places-related issues well in the past.

[http://shaver.off.net/diary/2008/05/25/fsyncers-and-
curvebal...](http://shaver.off.net/diary/2008/05/25/fsyncers-and-curveballs/)

------
kijin
Yep, same problem. Firefox hangs whenever I try to do anything "intensive"
with Places, such as selectively deleting stuff from the history or
reorganizing a large number of bookmarks. It's gotten much better than before,
though.

Weird thing is, Firefox is still faster than Chrome on my computer (Win7x64).
I don't know what's wrong with my computer, but Chrome is noticeably slower
than Firefox in day-to-day use. This only happens on this particular computer.
Chrome is indeed faster in every other computer I've tried. Very strange.

~~~
zobzu
drink more G cool aid. ff is also faster here. but also on my other comps,
except for the osx ones where chrome is better.

------
bigohms
I dropped FF b/c of the memory leak. As a test, on a spare mac I wrote a
script that launched FF and Chrome simultaneously and visited 10 websites I
frequent. They both had similar clean profiles. After roughly two days of
continuous refresh/load cycles, Chrome's memory was at 148MB, FF was 988MB.

~~~
jamesgeck0
What version of Firefox? As of 7, memory usage is almost as good as Opera for
me.

------
tytso
The fundamental problem with Mozilla is that it is trying to do database
queries in its UI loop, and it wants every single piece of state safely on
disk after every single click. This results in a huge amount of disk space to
get written to disk as you visit every single click. Now I don't know about
you, but if my computer crashes, do I really care if everything up to the last
click is safely on disk? I wouldn't care at all if the last 10 or 15 minutes
of browser history; I don't care if the link colors are a little off due to a
some history getting lost on a system crash.

Compounding this is the fact that SQLlite was never intended to be a high
performance database. It was designed for portability, and ease of setup.
Which is fine, but it means that SQLlite uses many more I/O's and issues many
more fsync()'s than would be strictly necessary. (In fact, Oracle doesn't
issue a single fsync operation on a transaction commit; it uses direct I/O
instead.)

So even if Firefox manages to get rid of all of the various problems that
cause its UI thread to block, this fundamental design mistake will cause them
to do excess I/O's, which burns battery and burns SSD write cycles. They would
be much better off if they kept all of their state in memory, and 10-15
minutes, updated the on-disk database in a completely asynchronous fashion.

And if that means losing some history on a crash, is the fact that a user has
visited one web site, but not another, really that important?

~~~
capnrefsmmat
> The fundamental problem with Mozilla is that it is trying to do database
> queries in its UI loop, and it wants every single piece of state safely on
> disk after every single click

No, this is not true. Since Firefox 3.5 they have avoided this entirely:

[https://autonome.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/front-end-
performa...](https://autonome.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/front-end-performance-
in-firefox-35-and-beyond/)

This approach has been largely replaced with asynchronous queries off-the-
main-thread, since the temporary tables were actually a performance problem:

<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552023>

So they've already done what you've suggested. It turned out to cause
problems, and was replaced. AFAIK, there's basically no database queries in
the Mozilla UI loop.

~~~
tytso
They are using asynchronous queries still, and the problem is that they aren't
always asynchronous if there are any long-running queries happening in the
background. That's the reason for the hang per the most recent bug.

If temp tables were causing problem, then there's something seriously wrong
with SQLlite's in-memory temporary tables (or how they are being used). By
definition they shouldn't be blocking...

~~~
capnrefsmmat
Firefox was creating memory-backed temporary tables and syncing them to disk;
however, the process of regularly syncing to disk while using the browser
caused issues. It also added to start-up time requirements.

For example, if you don't want to hold the entire history in memory but only
the most recent changes, you have to create a view spanning the temporary
table and the on-disk table to do history queries (so the Awesomebar returns
results from pages you just visited, as well as ones already written to disk)
and things get complicated.

~~~
nknight
Define "regularly", he's talking about 15 minutes. I don't know that I'd even
want it done that often. This is not critical data, let the filesystem layers
do their job, at which point the RAM used by keeping a (very small, in any
event) working set cached is also irrelevant as the filesystem cache takes
over.

------
crikli
Here here!

I've completely given up on Firefox on my MBP (3.06 Core2, 8GB, 480GB SSD).
Between the egregious javascript memory leak and constantly increasing
resource utilization it's just unusable. And my fans are running full tilt
within 60 seconds of starting it.

------
Jach
Why does there have to be one? I'm happy using both Firefox and Chrome, they
each have their own workflows for me.

I have a personal gmail account, and a work google apps gmail account, and
recently Google decided you can only stay logged into one gmail account at a
time per browser session. So if I want both open, I have my personal one in
Firefox and my work email in Chrome. That in general leads to the use of using
Firefox for personal browsing and Chrome for work-related browsing.

In Firefox I have all my bookmarks and Stumble Upon, along with RSS feeds and
about 400 tabs opened (not loaded with the Bartab Lite addon and organized in
a tree with the TreeStyle Tabs addon). In Chrome I have work-related things
open, like our issue list and email, so very few tabs, and I use it for quick
googling (work or personal). I also have Firefox using websync so I can get at
my tabs from school or other computers. Chrome's also nice for having a
Private Browsing mode instantly launchable without closing your other non-
private session.

Firefox only crashes completely these days, sometimes, when java applets load.
Chrome only crashes on pages.

------
dsrikanth
I share the same feeling. It is becoming a pain. If I keep it open for few
hours, it inevitably crashes and needs a restart. I started using firefox few
years back only because it won't crash and is stable. Not anymore I guess!

~~~
re_todd
Yeah, I have to restart it at least once a day. In addition to "Clear Recent
History", how about a "Clear Older History", where I can delete everything
older than a month or a week? That would clean out probably more than 95% of
the cruft possibly speeding things up. I'm sure there's a way to do this, but
how about an easy way for the average user?

------
alanh
Since we’re on the topic of longstanding Firefox issues: Add support for
`display: run-in` already. You are the ONLY browser not to support it.
<http://www.quirksmode.org/css/display.html>

Last I brought this up, I was told:

1\. that it wasn’t completely defined, and some edge cases can arise

2\. that it 'wasn't necessary' as you could 'solve' the problem by adding more
(wrapping) markup

3\. that `run-in` was going to be dropped from CSS2.1.

None of this is very valid.

1\. So do what the other browsers do, and/or when you encounter a weird edge
case, fall back to `display: block` (as suggested by the spec).

2\. Adding more markup (A) because _one browser_ is being pissy (B) goes
against the fundamental philosophies of both CSS (A) and web standards (B).
Clearly!

3\. It’s only being dropped from the spec because they can finalize the spec
if it is 100% implemented by 100% of the major browsers. So this is _circular
reasoning_ caused by your ten-year rolling decision to ignore `run-in`.

Run-in is a very useful concept (I’m always tempted to use it on /about.html).
Please, reconsider.

~~~
bzbarsky
> So do what the other browsers do

What other browsers do is completely insane (e.g. removing a block that a run-
in has run into makes the run-in just disappear altogether in WebKit), so
implementing it would be actively bad for the web.

> It’s only being dropped from the spec because they can > finalize the spec
> if it is 100% implemented by 100% of > the major browsers.

They can finalize the spec as long as every feature is implemented
interoperably by _two_ browsers.

There are three run-in implementations, and they're completely incompatible.
The feature got dropped from the spec because the working group couldn't
figure out any way to even define a restricted behavior subset that Presto,
Trident, and WebKit implement the same way.

So no, Gecko's lack of implemetation here didn't block the spec in any way.
The fact that all three existing implementations are completely incompatible
with each other and all horribly broken had a lot more to do with it.

------
wazoox
I see lots of unfair complaining here. I'm still running FF even on machines
with 1GB of RAM, and I actually had troubles with memory leaks on Mac, that
were mostly related to some extensions.

------
bilban
Oh well, I've been using Firefox since it's pheonix, firebird days!

I've never evangalised so hard about a piece of software, and every Linux and
Apple user owe it a debt of gratitude, in as much that it was a good cross
platform browser.

Performance wise, some upgrades have been for the better some for the worst.
But don't get too sentimental about past incarnations. I remember there being
memory issues in the 2.x line. I saw the browser eating over a half gig of ram
once - and I nearly fell off my chair.

Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself why?
It just slows your computer down. I think we use them as replacement for
bookmarks, which says something about the browser UI.

I've only recently left 3.6 to try out TenFourFox on my power pc - which at
first felt a million times better, but after my initial excitement, I noticed
it's a bit of a cpu hog. Idling with Gmail open, it seems to be quite greedy.
Which suggests to me that there is an inherent problem with the browser -
imagine if I had a handful of web apps open.

To say Firefox is broken is a bit strong. It would be better to say it has
it's faults and could be faster. If it's DB is a bottleneck - could it be
swapped for something else?

I do however think the browser UI is in serious need of some love, and could
do with some innovation. It's barely changed. For example tab management is
dire.

~~~
colanderman
> Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself
> why?

Spatial memory. If my tabs are not exactly where I left them last week, I
utterly forget what I was doing. (I'm one of those people whose room looks
like a mess but I can tell you where anything is -- so long as no-one's moved
it.)

If tabs are slowing things down, then the browser should "background" tabs
that haven't been used in a while. (I'd say swap them to disk but the OS does
this already!) Pause Javascript, Flash, etc.

~~~
bilban
Don't get me wrong, I have got a bit of a bad tab habit that I'm trying to
break. It's all too easy to open loads of them, never to read the content. In
the meantime they just use resources.

I think having lots of tabs open isn't good for focus, but that's another
topic.

What I was getting at, is that I believe we use tabs as bookmark replacements.
Which is stupid because bookmarks are cheap. This shows a flaw in the browser.

To me it's the browser UI that let's you down. If bookmark management were
better, you might not use the tabs.

Back to the spatial memory, I have a better grasp of tabs when they bunch -
ala Opera and Chrome than when they scroll. I get lost in Firefox pretty
quickly, the newer tab management features just don't work for me.

I don't see why you can't have a mix of live tabs, and frozen tabs.

After using Gmail for years - I'm going back to a desktop client rather
reluctantly, just because it doesn't use much in the way of system resources
while idling.

I was a fan of tabs initially, but in some ways I've gone off them. I'd like
the window manager to look after multiple windows better, rather than use
tabs.

I'd love to see some radical development in the browser UI.

------
timjahn
Couldn't agree more. For the past year+, Firefox has been getting noticeably
slower and slower, to the point that I would cringe when clicking that little
fox planet and thinking of what I could do in the next 3 minutes while Firefox
opened.

A few months ago, I finally switched to Chrome 100% and very rarely use the
bloated software that is now Firefox.

I used to recommend Firefox as THE browser. Now I recommend people uninstall
it.

------
sova
The version of Firefox that is my favorite is actually pre-firefox. Phoenix
was an amazing browser -- it was lightweight, incredibly fast, and the UI was
simple and _very_ customizable.

Phoenix, in my opinion, is the original idea and message behind Firefox: a
fast and friendly alternative to bloated browsers. Over the years, Firefox has
become HUGE. Why make a Firefox 7, 8, 9 etc. if it just keeps adding more
things instead of cutting through the glut with the sword of speediness and
optimization? Really, all I want a browser to do is pass the acid3 test and be
up and running as quickly as possible. Cut everything else out.

I think of Phoenix as like a pamphlet, Firebird (Firefox 1) as a novel, and
current Firefox as an encyclopedia. Tucked somewhere within... on a select
number of sheets in that amassed bramble of pages and thorns... in there is a
browser we all know and love.

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free" ~ Michelangelo

Firefox+Mozilla: please don't stop carving. We appreciate all you do, but it's
time to get back to basics.

------
fletchowns
At least with Firefox you don't have to deal with things like this:
<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41467>

When Firefox dropped <http://> at least they gave you the ability to turn it
back on!

~~~
Permit
I'm impressed by the passion with which people want <http://> back in their
URLs. Perhaps it's tangential to the original thread, but why's it such a big
deal?

~~~
muuh-gnu
> but why's it such a big deal?

Because people copy&paste URLs all the time, and without the <http://> they
dont work where pasted. Not having <http://> when youre copy-pasting feels
like a part of your URL is missing.

What I dont know is for whom they are hiding <http://>? I'd guess there are 2
types of users, those who need the URL, then they need it complete, including
the <http://>, and those who dont need the URL to be visible at all (except
maybe the domain name), like they dont need the current path in Explorer. But
who exactly needs half an URL which is then only magically completed upon
C&P-ing? And those who allegedly dont need <http://>, why do they need the
part after the TLD? From their POV, the arguments part is even more useless
than <http://>.

~~~
joshuacc
Lack of a superfluous <http://> is one of the things that I love about Chrome.
And, for the record, it _is_ included when you copy from the URL bar in every
version I've seen on Windows.

~~~
smacktoward
> for the record, it is included when you copy from the URL bar

Yes, but this is part of what makes the "feature" so annoying for usability
obsessives such as myself. It makes copy & paste work differently in the URL
bar than they do everywhere else and in every other application. Normally copy
only copies the text you select. Now when you paste you not only paste the
text you selected, but some extra, previously unseen text as well.

I know that once you hide the "<http://> you pretty much have to do copy &
paste this way, to avoid people pasting incomplete URLs, but it still feels
weird, at least to me...

------
pnathan
Firefox after 3 ran like a crippled dog.

I switched to Phoenix, because it was a relief from the bloat of Netscape 6.
It's been a long time since then, and running a modern Firefox tends to seem
like Netscape 6 bloat.

So I use Chrome. I am agnostic about my browsers. I like _speed, speed,
speed_.

------
pythoning
Disable unnecessary extensions and plugins and Firefox 7 will be instantaneous
and memory efficient.

Right now on OS X Leopard I have Hacker News, Slashdot, CNBC and Huffington
Post (yuck) open in FF 7.01 and FF is using 179 MB.

When I had Firebug and the Stumbleupon tool bar enabled as well as some
useless plugins that were enabled by default for media types I don't use,
these same tabs were using 440 MB.

Google controls my email, phone, SMS and search information, I will not give
them browser level access even if they let you opt out of data collection.

I like Firefox, it works great now and is rapidly improving. Mozilla's rapid
release cycles should be applauded.

~~~
Bo102010
My sister complained to me about the "hanging" Firefox problem, and disabling
stupid extensions fixed it right up. Firefox really needs to have a profile-
cleaning mechanism.

These problems people report must be very system-dependent. I've been running
Firefox on my 2GB RAM Dell laptop I bought in 2007 for $600 without any
issues.

------
jerhewet
> totally kills the value of the Awesome Bar

I disable the (air quote) Awesome (end air quote) Bar every time I do a fresh
install of Firefox.

I hate this damned feature with a passion (thank you, but I already know how
to type, so _get the hell out of my way!_ ), and if the product doesn't have a
switch to turn this damned feature off I'll find a competing product that
does. Note that so many people _loathed_ this feature that Mozilla added an
option to turn the damned thing off.

And yes, I always do my Google searches by launching a bookmark that has their
damned look-ahead feature disabled as well.

------
mzarate06
"Firefox, on Linux at least, is busted. It’s busted so bad that it’s painful
to use. And it’s been this way ever since Firefox 3 launched"

I'm suprised I don't see posts like this more often, specifically about the
Linux version. I've been on Ubuntu since 7.04, and Firefox has always felt
like beta software, especially when running any Flash media. I get far less
crashes on Chrome, so I've started moving away from Firefox and find the
Chrome experience much more reliable.

~~~
sciurus
I have the opposite problem: flash will consistently fail to work on a page in
Chromium but work fine in Firefox, even though they're using the same copy of
libflashplayer.so.

------
gabyar
I was going to say that Firefox's lack of innovation and quality in the last
couple of years, as compared to Chrome, could be due to lack of funding. But
it turns out their revenue is well over $100 million annually, which should be
enough to fix bugs. <http://goo.gl/g5Upc>

Still a good browser, but there's no question they've lost quite a bit of
mojo.

------
nirbheek
Deleting your places.sqlite file is the easiest, but the _worst_ way of
defragmenting it. The easiest (if you're using btrfs) is to run:

`btrfs filesystem defragment ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/places.sqlite`

or use ioctl(fd, BTRFS_IOC_DEFRAG, NULL).

As far as I know, this can only be done as root. I'm not sure if other
filesystems have similar defrag hooks.

So the correct approach is to make this facility accessible from unprivileged
userspace.

------
acabal
I'm excited for Ubuntu 11.10 if only because it means I can flatten and
reinstall, thus relieving me of Firefox's performance woes for another few
months. It's really crazy the amount of memory it uses and the slowdowns that
happen when you keep it open for more than a few hours.

------
Havoc
I've had a hanging issue too. Fixed it by disabling MSE real-time protection
(20 hangs per day -> 0). Somehow I don't see MSE causing the hangs on *nix
though so perhaps a separate issue. Worth a try though for anyone battling.

------
dendory
I have a few issues with the current Firefox, but I use it as my full time
browser and I never see a crash.. I'm not sure it's fair to criticize Mozilla
itself and not some other piece of the ecosystem like plugins or extensions.

------
ck2
I've also been using firefox since 1.0 and had such problems through 3.6

But 7.0 is the best version yet for me and radically faster on startup and
operation (and I use a ton of extensions).

It just took a weekend to get 7.0 to behave like 3.x and then I was happy.

------
codexon
I noticed this problem in Windows along with huge memory leaks.

I've switched to Firefox Nightly and this lag seems to have gone away.

As a bonus, the browser feels as fast as Chrome and it takes several weeks
more usage before needing a restart due to slowness.

------
daltontf
The new rapid release development cycle has bit Mozilla in the rear. For
example, FF 7.0.1 on Vista needs to be run as Administrator. I didn't find
this out until it just stopped working on my wife's laptop.

~~~
gcp
Uh, no, of course it doesn't. Something is seriously fubar on your side.

------
BadassFractal
I'd kill for multi-row tab support in Chrome (TabMixPlus in Firefox or by
default part of the browser in Opera). It's the only thing that keeps me from
switching 100% from FF.

------
emp_
The problem with FF is that it came to beat something really bad, now they
have to beat something really good and are kinda lost in the inversion of
priorities.

------
smoyer
I feel the same pain ... I've switched away from Firefox now and only use it
when I'm compatibility testing my applications/sites.

------
Finster
Sounds like he needs to fix Linux.

Good Luck!

------
drivebyacct2
What happened to Firefox focusing on Linux responsiveness? They even
acknowledged it as an issue and promised to work on it, but I've yet to see
that occur at all.

------
dbbo
The _only_ reason I have stuck with Firefox so long is that Vimperator and
later Pentadactyl blow all Chromium vim-like addons out of the water. I have
finally got so sick of paging issues and unresponsive scripts in Firefox
(sometimes to the extent that even the Magic SysRq key could save me) that
lately I've been using Chromium + vrome exclusively.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Same. Also the Ant Video Downloader is great for getting indie music and
remixes from Youtube (and then ripping the audio out of the Flash with
Audacity or something).

FF's plugin capabilities are unmatched, hopefully their new Continuous
Integration/Deployment model will enable them to iterate quicker on the
performance and other issues.

------
cluboholic
whats surprising is how well Internet Explorer turns out to be.. when IE10
final comes out I might actually switch to IE for a change.

I turned my pc's screen this morning only to find out that the firefox session
i had running from the previous day was consuming 2.5gb of memory.. with 3
tabs open.. whatever those tabs were doing all night .. that amount of memory
can only be accounted to a memory leak a river can pass through. and yes i'm
using the latest version thanks.

------
ketralnis
This seems a bit overblown for what amounts to a performance bug in a feature
that few people even use (bookmarks).

~~~
pjriot
Do people not use bookmarks? I have thousands of them. What are the
alternatives that I'm missing out on? (big xmarks user too so sync is a must)

~~~
smackfu
Most people use Google, or something like Facebook gets autocompleted.

~~~
metageek
And the autocomplete relies on the Places system, which is what is hanging (or
was, until a few weeks ago).

