
Here’s Why Firefox is Still Years Behind Google Chrome - stevewillensky
http://www.howtogeek.com/165264/heres-why-firefox-is-still-years-behind-google-chrome/
======
nathanb
This article is, in my opinion, not very good. It documents areas where
Firefox differs from Chrome, yes, but it fails to make the case why I should
care.

* I don't want a multi-process architecture, I want it so one tab can't kill my entire browser. If Firefox can get there in a different way than Chrome, so much the better.

* I don't care whether or not my browser utilizes certain Windows features, since I run Linux. Have we seen an attack against Firefox which would have been stopped if it utilized this Windows feature? The article provides no evidence of this.

* I don't want a desktop app store. addons.mozilla.org is, for all intents and purposes, Firefox's app store. mozilla.org is Mozilla's "app store". This is kind of a silly request.

I use Firefox for the following reasons:

* There are extensions I like which have no equivalent (that I know of) in Chrome

* Inertia

* I like the Mozilla Foundation better than I like Google

I don't expect these reasons to convince you. They are sufficient for
convincing me. I'm not going to pretend like they present a compelling
argument.

~~~
jervisfm
> There are extensions I like which have no equivalent (that I know of) in
> Chrome

Can you give an some examples of useful extensions you use that are available
in Firefox but not yet in Chrome ?

~~~
q_revert
vimperator is probably the most useful web extension i've ever used.. and it
doesn't have a _good_ chrome equivalent

[http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator](http://www.vimperator.org/vimperator)

~~~
jcbrand
I've used Vimperator before but I now use Vimium on chromium and very much
prefer it.

When you navigate via keyboard (by pressing "f"), Vimperator marks links with
numbers, Vimium marks them with letters, from ("a to "zz'). Letters are much
nicer when you can touch type and your hands are already on the keys.

Vimperator used to do silly things like hide the address bar and force you
into doing everything in a kind of "command mode". It never felt very smoothly
integrated with the browser and it was always a pain to try and open a new
site via command mode instead of just using <Ctrl>-L and typing it in the
address bar. Invariably I would try to type something in a textbox or use some
keyboard shortcut, only to find that Vimperator hijacked it and I'm now typing
in command mode.

Vimium doesn't give me these problems because it doesn't have a command
prompt/mode. Besides that, it's integrated very nicely with chrome, in such a
way that I can use normal keyboard shortcuts as far as possible, but have vim-
like shortcuts for the things that matter (e.g. "/" for searching, navigation
via keyboard etc.)

~~~
q_revert
to me vimperator isn't just about having a few vim bindings here and there, it
completely redefines the browsing experience... also, when you "f" to find
links, you can just enter a piece of the url string and vimperator opens it..
either way, it doesn't matter much..

vimium is a lightweight clone of vimperator, if that's what you want then of
course you'll prefer it..

these "problems" you're talking about in vimperator are features once you
actually embrace it and use it properly. it's a power user's tool.. and should
be recognized as such..

[http://i.imgur.com/vznzJMV.png](http://i.imgur.com/vznzJMV.png)

------
numbsafari
He gives a bunch of "ways" in which FireFox is (in his opinion) behind Google
Chrome.

The only "reason" (why) he gives is mentioned very briefly:

> With so many former Firefox developers now working on Chrome at Google,
> perhaps it makes sense that the innovation has been happening in Chrome, not
> Firefox.

The real question we should be asking is what happened to investment in
FireFox? Why has mozilla had a hard time retaining or acquiring talent? If the
community values the existence of FireFox, and a real (top to bottom) open-
source alternative to the IE-Chrome-Safari triumvirate, what can be done to
get Mozilla back on track?

Most importantly, what happened to Mozilla that it stopped being an innovator
and became an imitator? Is it something inherent in it's status as a "not for
profit"? Is there something wrong with it's values and goals that prevents it
from being truly innovative?

Those are intended as mostly rhetorical questions. My point is that the
article has a bad title. It should be "Here's How FireFox is Behind Google
Chrome" not "Here's Why".

"Here's Why" is a much more difficult conversation to have--and I don't
pretend to know enough about Mozilla to have any insights or opinions on the
matter.

~~~
pja
Non-profits find it culturally difficult to pay Google-level salaries to
developers perhaps?

~~~
numbsafari
That's certainly part of it. Non-profits generally cannot compete with Google
in terms of cash.

But are there other ways for them to try and attract or otherwise develop
talent? Perhaps their current model is insufficient.

It's interesting to see that Mozilla has become more involved with Samsung as
a technology development partner. Perhaps that is one model.

~~~
pja
The Mozilla Foundation gets $300 million annually from Google: They can
certainly afford to pay some developers Google level salaries if they choose
to.

~~~
numbsafari
Okay, so if it isn't about the money, then what is the reason for losing so
many developers to Google?

Or is the idea that Mozilla has been losing key people to Google (as mentioned
in the OP) not legitimate?

~~~
Ygg2
If I am to hypothesize, I'd say they are tired of Mozilla's way of doing
stuff. But I have to ask to put some hard data behind this, because I hear it
a lot, and I don't see much evidence for it.

------
paulrouget
We are working on multiprocess tabs (again). We paused our effort a couple of
years ago for _Firefox Desktop_. Some other things were more important (we
fixed most of our memory issues and improved the global responsiveness of
Firefox). And some work was needed before getting multiprocess tabs ready in
Firefox Desktop:

\- we managed to get multiprocess tabs working for Firefox on Android and for
Firefox OS. The inner architecture is now here. Basically, it was easier to
start with mobile.

\- we worked hard on an even-more threaded architecture in Gecko ("Off-Main-
Thread everything"). This makes Firefox much more snappier these days, and
this will make things easier for a full multiprocess browser.

So now, with all that done, we are restarting our work on multiprocess tabs on
Firefox Desktop.

A multiprocess architecture will probably improve the responsiveness of
Firefox, but keep in mind that this is not a magic bullet. Improvements can be
made in other areas. Firefox 24 is much more responsive than before and will
get more and more snappier in the months to come.

Also - on a related note: "we need a more parallel browser"
[http://dbaron.org/log/20120827-specification-
style](http://dbaron.org/log/20120827-specification-style)

~~~
ksec
It is just Mozilla has far to few resources and doing far too many things at
the same time.

I wish Rust and Servo would come faster.

------
jzwinck
Chrome was years behind Firefox, too:
[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=143)
\- from at least 2008 thorough 2012 there was no proper color management in
Chrome, while Firefox had it. This was a deal-breaker for some users.
Eventually Chrome copied what Firefox had for many years. It goes both ways.

~~~
artmageddon
> no proper color management in Chrome

Can you elaborate on this? I'm relatively new at it, but I write code for a
color science company so I'm curious as to what you mean.

Edit: I'm also reading _halfcamerageek_ 's URL:
[http://cameratico.com/guides/web-browser-color-management-
gu...](http://cameratico.com/guides/web-browser-color-management-guide/)

~~~
halfcamerageek
Take a look at my comment below. Page elements and untagged images are
rendered on the full display gamut. If you have a wide gamut display, like my
30" Dell, everything looks super saturated.

The correct behavior would be to interpret all page elements and untagged
images as being in the sRGB color space. This is what the W3C recommends and
Firefox follows.

------
jakub_g
With all the nice items recently implemented in Chrome and all the lagging
behind and alleged slowness of Firefox, I still see "aw, snap! crash!" in
Chrome an order of magnitude more frequently on my screen than Firefox crash
reports.

However the slowness of Firefox when Firebug is on when loading resource-heavy
pages starts really bothering me.

~~~
artmageddon
I just switched back to Chrome again from Waterfox. It's crazy how even with
only a few tabs open(Facebook, a few HN threads, some reddit and YouTube),
Waterfox alone will bring my Core i7 with 8GB of RAM to a crawl. Even before I
switched to Chrome, I was using IE 10 in tandem with Waterfox so that it
wouldn't bog down my system so much.

Edit: Maybe it's just me? I'll have a look at my settings. Thanks!!

~~~
leviathant
Browse to about:memory in that bogged down Firefox and find out exactly what's
bogging it down. As a web developer, Firefox is my main browser on an i7 8gb
Win 8 machine and I can't remember any single time I've seen the browser
bogged down.

~~~
mccr8
On an 8gb machine, the browsing being bogged down probably doesn't have
anything to do with memory usage. To figure out what is making everything
slow, you need to use the built-in profiler with Nightly. I was able to use it
to track down browser slowness I very occasionally see to a particular line of
code on Facebook.

------
unicornporn
I like to use tabs and I usually have lots of tabs open. After getting used to
Tree Style Tab [1], using any browser without vertical tab arrangement (in
trees) is a PITA. There actually was a crippled vertical tabs feature (named
"side tabs") in Chrome, but the developers eventually removed it [2]. One of
the best things with Firefox for me is that it allows for these more low level
changes of browser behavior and UI.

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-se/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-se/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

[2] [http://www.techerator.com/2011/11/a-fond-farewell-to-
vertica...](http://www.techerator.com/2011/11/a-fond-farewell-to-vertical-
tabs-in-google-chrome/)

------
snowwrestler
I will say this for Firefox--the recent work to fix memory leaks has created a
HUGE improvement. I often have dozens of browser windows or tabs open for days
at a time, since I just sleep my laptop between work sessions. Firefox is now
as stable and snappy as any other browser over such time frame. It's really a
great improvement.

------
nathan_long
Assuming these criticisms are all valid, this quote is important:

>> The fact that we have an open-source browser created by a non-profit
organization only looking to make the web a better is great for the web.
That’s why it’s a shame Mozilla has allowed Firefox to fall so far behind.

We should be asking "how can we help make/keep Firefox a strong competitor?"

------
PavlovsCat
Well, Chrome can't even be installed without being a pig about it -- no way to
set the installation location, no option to disable the background updates or
keeping the last few versions of Chrome around. I guess it's okay if you don't
really do much with your computer though, and don't mind the resources wasted
on Chrome being needy. (e.g. I have old school DSL with 100 kb per second; I
like to _choose_ when I want a browser update, and it's hardly hi-tech to
allow for that)

~~~
PavlovsCat
And to the downmodders: granted, I only speak from personal experience, but
from that I speak. Since I stopped using Chrome (both regular and canary), and
stick to Opera, Firefox and FF Aurora, I can basically do whatever I want.
Having 20 websites open in Opera, a bunch more in FF, and a video running in
VLC or Renoise playing a song -- while playing L4D2 in a window, _zero
problems_ , even with my crappy GPU and otherwise good, but not crazy specs.
With Chrome in the picture hard crashes were the norm for me.

------
tiles
"If Mozilla can’t turn Firefox into a modern browser because of all the legacy
code getting in the way, perhaps we need a Phoenix 2.0."

That sounds like Servo [1] to me. That would also be a much more forward-
thinking approach to Electrolysis than fully separating the old Mozilla
codebase. Firefox is also competing very well with Chrome in JavaScript speed.
[2]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo)
[2] [http://arewefastyet.com/](http://arewefastyet.com/)

~~~
klez
Direct link to the Servo wikipedia page:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(layout_engine)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_\(layout_engine\))

~~~
ksec
Oh God... MPL 2.0 again. Why Cant Mozilla just Switch to Apache 2.0

------
h2s
According to Snowden's leaked Prism slides, Google was brought into the NSA
fold on the 14th of January 2009. So Firefox is well over 4 years behind
Chrome in that respect as well. Get your act together, Mozilla!

~~~
cglace
Seriously? Can't there be one discussion on here that isn't about Snowden or
Prism?

~~~
Djehngo
So long at people get karma for lazy low-content references to whatever cause
everyone is swept up in they won't stop posting them.

~~~
mbel
As long as they are getting substantial amounts of karma for it, I suppose
that's what most of the people want to read.

------
dbaupp
It's nice to see a Firefox vs Chrome article that _doesn 't_ mention memory
usage.

The App store idea isn't _that_ dissimilar to the add-ons Firefox has had
essentially since it was born (along with a central repository), especially
since Firefox add-ons can do so much more with the browser. Admittedly,
there's no concept of money with the add-ons, which makes them almost useless
as a way to build a business.

------
mmuro
Here's why I don't care: I like Firefox better.

~~~
sobering
Hear, hear.

------
sp332
The first point is odd. I got one of the original Cr-48 Chromebooks, and the
current tab would always stutter when other tabs were loading. I installed
stock Ubuntu and Firefox on it and I never had that problem. Just lately, in
the past year or so, I've noticed the same problem in FF. With all the
optimizations they've been making, I can't think what would have changed that
behavior.

~~~
mtgx
That's probably just Atom being slow as hell.

~~~
sp332
Not that I'm disagreeing :) but it happens on my desktop too.

------
AshleysBrain
Mozilla are leading the way in other areas. Firefox OS is _entirely_ based on
HTML5 - even the UI. Mozilla invented asm.js, an open, backwards-compatible
and fascinating alternative to Google's proprietary Chrome-only Native Client
technology. They've done a lot with emscripten to compile large native engines
to the web, complete with WebGL and Web Audio support. Chrome looks to follow
Mozilla's lead by adding asm.js support to V8.

I agree Firefox are overall more behind, but they are still an innovative
company coming up with some fantastic tech. The main reason they're behind is
probably because their codebase is pretty old, back from the days when they
were busy saving us from IE6.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Mozilla invented asm.js, an open, backwards-compatible and fascinating
> alternative to Google's proprietary Chrome-only Native Client technology.

Native Client isn't proprietary, its open -- no other browser vendor has
adopted it, but that doesn't change the fact that its open. Backward
compatible _is_ a real issue with asm.js vs. NaCl, there is no reason to
obscure the real issue by throwing a fake one in with it.

~~~
AshleysBrain
Oh, fair dos. But I think asm.js is so much of a better idea that there's no
reason to support NaCl - asm.js does everything it's supposed to do but
better. I think it was a pretty nice move from Mozilla.

~~~
dragonwriter
> But I think asm.js is so much of a better idea that there's no reason to
> support NaCl - asm.js does everything it's supposed to do but better.

A key focus of NaCl and asm.js is performance, and IIRC most benchmarks are
showing NaCl with somewhere between a 25%-33% additional overhead over native
C, and asm.js with somewhere in the neighborhood of 100% additional overhead,
so I don't think I can quite agree that asm.js does everything NaCl is
supposed to do but better.

That said, the other advantages are there, and the performance gap may close.

~~~
pcwalton
Those statistics are misleading. The asm.js numbers count compilation time,
while the PNaCl numbers don't.

~~~
dragonwriter
If you've got statistics that show asm.js is equal or better including
compilation time, I'm sure lots of people would like to see them.

------
Gmo
"No Multi-Process Architecture"

This is a feature, and I like it.

The rest is just flamebait.

~~~
vy8vWJlco
And there is a simple solution to that (poor multi-core utilization): go back
to a one-window, one process model (go back, as in delete a lot of unnecessary
code); forget the browser tabs - let the OS handle multitasking and let the
window manager handle the windows.

~~~
randallu
The hard stuff isn't the window system/widget integration, it's having
multiple processes open for the same domain (or iframes in different
processes) and mediating access to local storage/IDB/cookie jar/network
cache/etc.

It was only very recently that WebKit2 handled most of this stuff -- up until
then they just had a single WebProcess (I think Safari on Mavericks is the
first multi-WebProcess browser Apple have shipped). So it's a hard problem and
isn't due to some lack of competence that Mozilla have been slow to adapt.
FxOS is fully multiprocess afaik.

Actually getting the rendered page image into a window owned by another
process is easy: windows and X let you host HWNDs and Windows from other
processes (if you choose to allow your WebProcesses access to the window
server) or you could draw into a shared memory segment. The hard stuff is all
of the regular browser hard stuff.

~~~
vy8vWJlco
I can't accept your complicated worldview. Iframes, for example, don't need to
be new processes. One process - one window - one DOM. The only new process
should be the rendering canvas/window. An iframe, or any nested resources can
re-use cookies associated with a window/process, including caching. In order
to persist tokens/cookies/cache between processes you hand them their own copy
when you spin them up and write them out to a common, re-usable place when you
close, but for the most part I consider browser statefulness to be more like a
flaw than a feature (I constantly clear my cookies, form data, and history).
how about a "save session" button, rather than the default being to cache
objects and cookies in some common blocking profile that only allows one
session and that, when it crashes, it all comes down... If you really want to
share, you wrap those services up in a library - which is closer to the
present model - but you have to know that in doing so you are making it harder
to isolate things when they fail... And isn't that what's wrong with most
browsers?

------
gnosis
I've been a long-time user of Opera, who switched back to Firefox and then
back to Opera a couple of times.

Opera has been consistently _much_ faster and better designed than Firefox.
But it has one major, glaring fault: it's closed-source. I just don't trust
closed-source software anymore. I also had concerns about privacy-invading
directions Opera was taking (such as sending all of one's keystrokes to a
search engine as you typed them in an address bar search -- your typing rate
could be used to aid the search engines in uniquely identifying you). So I
switched back to Firefox and have been using it steadily for a few years now.

With Pentadactyl, Firefox is much more usable in many ways than Opera was.
Though even Pentadactyl can't make up for some of Firefox's ingrained faults,
such as it's atrocious bookmark manager, or Firefox's incredible slowness.

I refuse to use Chrome on principle, because it spies on its users by default.
This behavior can supposedly be disabled, but I have serious ethical
objections to any browser that starts out in that state, and is associated
with a spyware company like Google. Chromium is better in that at least it
doesn't start out by spying on you, but it still lacks addons that are as
capable as Firefox's Pentadactyl and NoScript.

Most recently I've started migrating as much as possible away from all of
these bloated browsers. On 99% of the websites I visit, I now use w3m embedded
in emacs. This integration gives me far more power than even Pentadactyl in
Firefox, and it's far faster than any of the popular browsers.

w3m's main weakness is that it can't handle Javascript, but that's a strength
too -- as I don't have to worry about Javascript exploits.. and 99% of the
websites I care about don't require Javascript to function.

I am happy to get what I care about most: the content -- usually in plain-text
format. And for the few sites I care about which annoyingly insist on using
Javascript for full functionality, I can always use the other browsers as a
backup. This approach might be a bit extreme for most people, but it works
well for me.

------
Sharlin
It seems the author is either simplifying things too much in their text or
does not know what threads are. Not having multiple processes does not mean a
program cannot execute things in parallel, and Firefox uses threads liberally.
As far as I know, the multi-process architecture of Chrome is mostly about
sandboxing, not performance.

------
mistercow
>The future is an ever-increasing amount of CPU cores, and computer programs
will have to become capable of doing more work in parallel to take advantage
of all this processing power.

The idea that multiprocess browsing is somehow related to multicore computers
is a myth. In almost all use cases, there is virtually no performance benefit
whatsoever to loading separate tabs in separate processes. This is because
most web pages do essentially no work while in the background.

------
diegocg
So I could play the same game and say that Chrome is years behind because it
usually shows up as the top memory hog when benchmarked against other
browsers, including IE.

------
NameNickHN
In theory it might be so but when I open a large number of tabs in Chrome it
becomes sluggish. Not so in Firefox.

------
bhz
Chrome really needs to add tagging of bookmarks. I know there are many people
who say it does not need it, but they are wrong, it does. I know that it does
because every time I have to dig, search and poke around looking for a link in
Chrome that has something to do with 'x' and 'y', but 'x' and 'y' are not in
the url or title of the page, I can't find it. If I had the ability to tag the
url with 'x' and 'y' all I would have to do is is type "x y" (like you can in
Firefox) and the link would be there. Do any of you know why does Chrome not
have this feature already?

------
doktrin
And yet, despite all that, the following two concerns will probably keep me
returning to FF :

1\. Vimperator (neither of the Chrome equivalents comes close, IMHO)

2\. My slowly declining trust in Google

I do wish FF would support multiple tabs a little better, though.

------
darkarmani
Without all the add-ons that make browsing useful, it doesn't really matter
how far "ahead" chrome is.

------
pcwalton
"There’s no indication that anyone is working on sandboxing the Windows
desktop version of Firefox at the moment."

Yes, they are. The comment quoted is from 2012.

"Comments on Firefox’s bug tracker indicate that developers will be looking at
sandboxing the Windows 8 Modern Firefox app, Firefox OS, and experimental
Servo browser on OS X"

"will be looking at" is misleading. Servo is sandboxed, today. Both at the OS
level (through the same sandboxing primitives that Chromium uses) and through
Rust's memory safety features, for two layers of defense.

------
brudgers
...and if open source software is the future, the Firefox is lightyears
ahead...

I use Firefox - on Windows. I am not a Gnuist. I use Firefox because there are
some areas where my interests and those of Microsoft and Google are not
sufficiently aligned to justify using their software in lieu of convienent
alternatives. The desktop browser is currently one of them.

As an aside, I don't really want my browser sucking up as much CPU bandwidth
as it can.

~~~
lmm
Open source Chrome exists.

------
throwaway420
Firefox still feels a tad slower than Chrome, but it's normally fast enough.

The big problem I have with Firefox is developing extensions. Developing
browser extensions in Chrome vs building them in Firefox is like night and
day. While I'm not an expert, I've built a few extensions for each browser.

Building one in Chrome has been a very pleasant experience for me - the
documentation is good and up to date and things work very logically.

But developing Firefox extensions is an exercise in complete frustration.
Documentation is hard to find and out of date. Functionality that is needed is
frequently changed and deprecated. Common things are made difficult and
frustrating. There are code examples found all over the web, but most of them
are out of date.

Purely speaking with my developer hat, I would not build another Firefox
extension if not absolutely required to for a specific project. And I dislike
a lot of Google's policies and love Mozilla's nature, but I think Google is
clearly much further ahead in terms of offering a pleasant development
experience.

I don't know what the answer is, but for me personally Firefox isn't working.

------
Nursie
I love FF and use FF mainly because of the range of plugins available.

However I agree there are problems with it. One of them is disk access - if
you have a machine (say a netbook) with a slow disk, firefox seems to stop
responding for a few seconds every once in a while. This is exacerbated by an
ever growing places.sqlite, but still happens even with that flushed regularly
(or chattr +i'd)

~~~
dblohm7
Mozilla's Performance Team is doing a lot of work on eliminating I/O from the
main thread which is the cause of many of these problems. We're also assisting
other teams with this as well.

In fact, right now I am working on adding a new feature to the Gecko Profiler
that identifies such I/O and makes it easy for platform devs to easily
pinpoint the offending code.

~~~
Nursie
Awesome, glad to hear it, it's been a bit of a bug-bear of mine for ages.

If you're anything to do with the mobile/android team, could you tell them
their policy of aggressively unloading background tabs is annoying and that it
frequently seems to screw up when you hit the back button, either jumping back
too far or going to previous ...err... forks in the history tree.

------
ajays
Also: Firefox seems to discourage you from messing with cookies. For example:
I can't select cookies by TLD. I have to painstakingly go through the list,
clicking each host and clicking "Remove". Compare the cooking management
functionality with the next tab over, password management. There you can
filter the list as you want. So it is possible.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Both Chrome and Firefox utterly loose out against Opera in that department,
where you can actually _edit_ the cookies, without jumping through any
"expert" hoops. Admittedly I don't think I ever used that for anything but
debugging, but I still think it's a nice touch, and I am sure someone out
there learned a thing or two about websites and browsing just by studying the
Opera config dialog.

------
rcirka
I use firefox mainly for hierarchical vertical tabs (tree style tab plugin). I
often have up to 50 tabs open at once, which is unmanageable in ie/chrome.
Also session manager is amazing, never have to worry about losing tabs. I also
like how firefox loads tabs on demand, unlike chrome which opens them all when
you open the browser.

------
kaoD
I began using Firefox a long time ago (when it was called Phoenix) but
switched to Chrome.

A couple months ago I switched back to Firefox because Chrome lost my open tab
session in some cases (hard crashes when loading the old session), due to
privacy issues and because it often triggered long swaps (locking the process)
when dealing with lots of tabs (I usually have like 50-60 tabs open in several
windows). Also because I support Mozilla's values.

Unfortunately I'm not very happy either. Alongside the issues commented here,
I noticed these problems:

\- Sometimes it just goes to 25% CPU usage and the browser becomes _really_
slow. The only choice is to close all windows and open Firefox again.

\- Multimonitor and Flash sucks. I'm not sure if this is Firefox or Flash's
fault, but it often chooses one window as its parent, regardless of where the
tab with the Flash content is located. Clicking/hovering the embedded object
fails when the object thinks I'm in the wrong monitor. Also, going fullscreen
usually pops the window in the wrong monitor.

\- The JS PDF viewer is slow as hell (I once spent 5 minutes waiting for it to
zoom, and I couldn't close it because I feared losing some changes in other
tab). Firefox's JS engine is quite slow in and of itself, who thought it would
be a good idea to embed a JS PDF viewer?

\- Extensions take _ages_ to be updated in the Addons repository (especially
compared to Chrome) which frustrates extension developers and users. I
personally know a developer who had to move away from it and tell users to
update the extensions themselves.

\- When a JS script is locked, the whole browser locks.

\- If you close a window by mistake, there's no way to bring it back, so say
bye to your precious browsing experience. "Undo last tab close" only works in
tabs within that window! So frustrating. _EDIT:_ apparently this is possible,
check
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5905649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5905649).

\- The latest contributions seem to focus on how to be more like Chrome, and
less about providing users a better product[^1].

\- Did you ever need to mess with _about:config_? Black magic.

\- Tab groups suck. They're useless and there's no way to disable them once
you activate it by mistake. You have to mess up with _about:config_ (see
above). Talk about a great UI.

They completely lost the track on what users need. We don't need another
Chrome clone nor cool UI changes in each new version (especially when they get
them so wrong). They probably spend lots of hours tweaking things that didn't
need tweaking. What's wrong with the current UI that needed such a big
overhaul? We need a browser that works, not one that looks like Chrome.

Mozilla, making Firefox look like Chrome won't make users switch back from
Chrome. If people want Chrome, they'll stay in Chrome. Period. Get rid of
termites before painting the house.

[^1] E.g. [http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill](http://limi.net/checkboxes-
that-kill) or the new UI which is a ripoff of Chrome's. I can see his point
about the "checkboxes kill", but removing features with perfectly fine use-
cases instead of moving them to an advanced config page is never a good idea.
How about an usable _about:config_ alternative? "We designed a bad UI for
advanced features... lets get rid of those features instead of fixing the
issue!"

~~~
bengillies
It's the really small things that annoy me about Firefox. For example, in
gmail, when writing an email, I can't hit cmd+right arrow to go to the end of
a line. And because links are set to open in a new window, I can't cmd+click
them to open them in the background.

~~~
olog-hai
Agreed about the small things. I'll never understand why they decided to put
the ctrl+F find dialog at the very bottom of the window. It trips me up almost
every time I use Firefox, which isn't often. The vast majority of computer
users are not conditioned to look down immediately after invoking find.

~~~
takluyver
Out of interest, where are you conditioned to look? I prefer an in-window find
bar to a dialog getting in my way, and I use programs with the find bar at the
bottom (Firefox, Libreoffice) more often than ones with it at the top (Chrome,
gedit). For me, the position isn't an issue, as I notice the movement wherever
it occurs on my screen.

------
lucb1e
> many of its changes have simply been copying the way Google Chrome works

Yeah all car manufacturers copy each other as well. They all got steering
wheels and other things that we expect of modern cars.

I don't think the fast release cycle nor the copied UI is an improvement, but
they should take from Chrome whatever they think is an improvement. In fact, I
believe Opera was the first to use this UI and you could just say that Chrome
is lagging behind Opera, if you follow the twisted logic of howtogeek, but I
might be mistaken on who was really the first.

~~~
lucb1e
Oh and nevermind that Chrome uses Firefox' NSS.

------
daleharvey
You can install webapps from the marketplace on firefox desktop now (in
nightly at least)

Firefox OS has a multiprocess architecture, I believe the main problem for
desktop is plugins / backwards compatibility

------
ksec
It has been a long time since I managed to push Firefox down to its kneels
again. Ever since i got my Core i5 and a Crucial SSD, Firefox has been ( or
any Apps ) snappy. Chrome was still noticeable faster on my machine. But the
difference were small enough.

Today i was research on topics and shopping around for price. It has been a
long time i have had more then 150 Tabs opened. Many of those has lots of
image as well. Firefox nearly slow to crawl. Scrolling was no longer smooth,
nothing were snappy.

------
desigooner
Kind of OT: With the latest Chrome update on Mac OS X, the tabs just freeze if
I try to load a JS heavy site like Facebook, Youtube, etc. and as a result, I
have to just close the tab. Any pointers on remedying this?

I started using Firefox again and everything works except for some reason, I
cannot login to Twitter. After entering the details, and clicking the Login
button, I'm redirected back to the login page. I can view tweets just fine
(without being logged in).

------
shadowmint
Swapped to firefox when chrome went crazy and completely stopped working on
OSX a while ago
([https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=175341](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=175341)
I believe; became completely unusable I suppose is a better description) I
swapped back to firefox for the first time in like 2 years.

Still there. Loving it. _shrug_

------
ds9
My criteria are different from this guy's. My baseline requirements are: OSS,
maximum configurability, minimum conflict of interest on the part of the
vendor.

A proprietary product of a data-mining company? Seriously? It's comical that
the writer even bothers to mention "security" in such an unsecurable context.

Moz + Noscript + Request Policy is not perfect, but a lot closer to my ideal
than Chrome.

------
barrkel
Tree style tabs. That is all.

------
IanMalcolm
I still use Firefox mainly because of Pentadactyl. If there was a proper
alternative for chrome I'd switch back.

That, and the whole privacy thing.

------
marizcombinator
Firefox is an excellent browser, but falls behind chrome because (in addition)
insists with some poor design decisions.

Three layers on top (buttons, tabs, url-bar), imagine if I enable bookmarks :P

Darker than others... forget the hacker look, come to the light

Simple tasks easy to do with Chrome web inspector are way more complicated in
Firefox

Too many buttons, too many options (people like simplicity)

------
ksec
Firefox Development speed is slow. Few things that they are working on,

GGC, Generational GC, Hopefully there will be less pauses in Heavy GC Web
Apps.

Necko - Their Network Engine that is now causing 30-40% of janks. Will get
rewritten.

And there new Graphics Layer that god knows what happen to it.

Sigh..

------
cromwellian
Chrome DevTools are much better. I recently had to use Firefox's devtools, and
they're woefully behind both in UI, capability, and speed.

~~~
bti
This is so true. Compared to Chrome's, Firefox's tools are just so clunky and
an eyesore. I love the fact that Google is putting so much work into their
tools and constantly improving them. I will give Firefox credit for having 3D
view, that's pretty cool.

------
euroclydon
Chrome won me over with their custom window. I'm unwilling to give up a title
bar of useless space to go back to Firefox.

