"After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!"
I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.
Very few user interfaces have withstood the test of time. There are notable exceptions, of course - the iOS UI, uTorrent, and the Chrome browser immediately come to mind. Other applications and operating systems have continued to evolve their user interface over 18-24 months. In some cases, the evolution is necessary for the sake of usability. Take Android for instance: The UI update in ICS dramatically enhanced usability.
In my experience, the designers of unchanged interfaces put a lot of thought into almost every interaction a user could have with their application/operating system. Armed with the use-cases, the designers invested time and effort in creating the core UI "right", and determined a seamless way to make incremental updates. Chrome and iOS are, again, perfect examples of this concept in action. Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much.
Firefox's UI changed radically in version 4. A good number of users revolted and there was uproar about the theme refresh, but most of the users that stuck around got used to the changes. That they are changing the UI again, only 24 months after the fact, does not reflect very well on the design philosophy behind the 4.0 refresh. Lots of questions come to mind - Did the designers not do adequate research during 4.0? Was the development time-frame too short? Was 4.0 just an interim solution to what they perceived a bigger problem? Are curved tabs really better than rectangular ones? Do I get back a lot of screen real estate? Is this a case of Not-Designed-By-Me syndrome?...
I continue to use Firefox today, partially because I know my way around the application so well but mostly because I trust that Mozilla values my privacy. I do think that they go half the distance sometimes with their privacy measures - "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default, and Firefox accepts and keeps "Third Party Cookies" until they expire. In these specific cases, I understand that these are measures taken to ensure they can keep the lights on at their headquarters. With the impending changes to the UI, I will be using the app only on the basis of my trust in Mozilla. And we all know that trust is a tenuous thing to hang by...
> I do think that they go half the distance sometimes with their privacy measures - "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default, and Firefox accepts and keeps "Third Party Cookies" until they expire.
There's a good reason "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default. If it was checked by default, then advertisers would have the perfect excuse to ignore it: "oh, that's not really the user's preference, they're just sending that header because their browser sends it by default; let's go ahead and track them."
By making it opt-in, we ensure that a site receiving a do-not-track header knows for sure that it represents an active choice on the part of the user.
You may remember that IE was going to turn it on by default. But then Mozilla and the rest of the do-not-track collaborators explained this principle to them and they went back to off-by-default.
The third-party cookie thing, though, I don't have a good explanation for. When I worked at Mozilla I spent a lot of time trying to convince people that we should block third-party cookies by default. (Especially after I started working on Collusion and saw how prevalent they are.) I kept getting the same response: "We can't block 3rd party cookies, it would break the web."
I don't agree with this, obviously. Before pop-up-blocking became the norm in all browsers, you could have made the argument that pop-up-blocking would "break the web" too. I believe 3rd party cookies are a giant security hole, and breaking sites that use them would be a small price to pay for closing it.
But, I couldn't convince Mozilla of that. It's one of the reasons I decided to leave.
> Are curved tabs really better than rectangular ones?
IIRC from the UI design talk where the new "Australis" redesign was introduced internally, the motivation behind the curved tab redesign was to look "friendlier" and more "organic".
One thing the Australis redesign does which I do think is important is that it finally provides a consistent location for add-ons to add buttons. (The status bar used to be this, but it was hidden in Firefox 4 to recover screen space for content.)
The author of this blog (jono_x) has posts showing up as dead. Probably another innocent HN hellbanning victim. This is what he said in his reply:
> I do think that they go half the distance sometimes with their privacy measures - "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default, and Firefox accepts and keeps "Third Party Cookies" until they expire.
There's a good reason "Do Not Track" is unchecked by default. If it was checked by default, then advertisers would have the perfect excuse to ignore it: "oh, that's not really the user's preference, they're just sending that header because their browser sends it by default; let's go ahead and track them."
By making it opt-in, we ensure that a site receiving a do-not-track header knows for sure that it represents an active choice on the part of the user.
You may remember that IE was going to turn it on by default. But then Mozilla and the rest of the do-not-track collaborators explained this principle to them and they went back to off-by-default.
The third-party cookie thing, though, I don't have a good explanation for. When I worked at Mozilla I spent a lot of time trying to convince people that we should block third-party cookies by default. (Especially after I started working on Collusion and saw how prevalent they are.) I kept getting the same response: "We can't block 3rd party cookies, it would break the web."
I don't agree with this, obviously. Before pop-up-blocking became the norm in all browsers, you could have made the argument that pop-up-blocking would "break the web" too. I believe 3rd party cookies are a giant security hole, and breaking sites that use them would be a small price to pay for closing it.
But, I couldn't convince Mozilla of that. It's one of the reasons I decided to leave.
> Are curved tabs really better than rectangular ones?
IIRC from the UI design talk where the new "Australis" redesign was introduced internally, the motivation behind the curved tab redesign was to look "friendlier" and more "organic".
One thing the Australis redesign does which I do think is important is that it finally provides a consistent location for add-ons to add buttons. (The status bar used to be this, but it was hidden in Firefox 4 to recover screen space for content.)
"In my experience, the designers of unchanged interfaces put a lot of thought into almost every interaction a user could have with their application/operating system. Armed with the use-cases, the designers invested time and effort in creating the core UI "right", and determined a seamless way to make incremental updates."
I know that this reply was in the context of Web/Browser/Desktop, however, I deal on a daily basis with some fairly clunky business applications that have pretty gungy UIs (think Visual Basic circa 2000 with lots and lots of tree controls and combo boxes).
Another more specialised business application has had a recent 'face lift' and my colleagues are using it much less because they find it hard to find things that used to be easy.
I know my way round the screens, and I know the shortcuts. I'm dreading a 're-design' of the one I use.
Chrome definitely have changed their UI over time, however the changes have been so small you probably have forgotten (just removing buttons). It's surprising to think about it now, but it used to have a lot more of them.
The incremental changes to Chrome's UI have been subtle, resulting in very little, if any, friction for the user. The point I was making was a UI that is thought-through and well-designed withstands the test of time rather well. Details change but the fundamental interactions retain their familiarity.
As regards the Windows UI, Windows 7 and Vista were different from XP which was different from Win2k which was ... The introduction of Glass, in particular, caused a lot of frustration for users that were upgrading from XP. Drivers were broken, their applications were borked, etc. Windows 7 fixed all of those problems, but a number of companies have not upgraded from XP because they don't want to deal with re-training their users.
In many ways, like Vista is to the Windows brand what the Rapid Release Process is to the Firefox brand. Both ideas caused mass defections to the competition. The jury is still out on how users will react to Metro. The dual-desktop story has two problems: the switch between the Classic and Metro desktops is not very intuitive; people are going to miss the Start Button. I think click-based heat maps should be "a" factor in making UI decisions; not "the" factor in such decisions!
Here are my closing thoughts on why a UI change should be as non-intrusive as possible. In my experience, people hate software because it has a way of making them feel stupid. The reason to be careful with changing the UI and/or removing features is that there is a good chance that the changes will people will feel stupid all over again. This is an invitation for defection to the competition.
The options dialog changed to a page at some point, and the page has now been redesigned. I would class both of those as pretty big, though most users probably don't use it.
>Firefox, Windows (minus Metro), and earlier releases of Android - not so much.
I think Windows interface has withstood the test of time pretty well. The basic UX paradigm is essentially unchanged from Windows 95 with whatever that followed basically being tweaks rather than big changes.
I think that is partly in the same way roman numbers withstood the test of time: being well-known made them appear easier than they are. For example, one annoyance is the rule for what ends up in alt-tab. I work with XP at work and regularly cannot alt-tab to windows I alt-tabbed to seconds ago because they popped up some dialog (or is that only with alerts?)
The rule for what ends up in the task bar also is incomprehensible for mortals. For awhile, every new release of Office managed to introduce a new variation (yes, Word is MDI, but all its windows show up separately being one variation)
I guess that, if you ask users about these features, they will just say "yes, sometimes it does that".
Testing with users inexperienced in both UIs or testing with users who knew pre-ribbon Office well? A reference?
I find it takes a bit of time to find where functions have moved on Office 2010, and I seem to be taking a long time to internalise the 'logic' for finding less used functions. Probably all those years on Office old style.
Can't users who don't like the new-fangled UI just stay on old versions? I know that ultimately creates compatibility headaches, but it at least gives them time to decide to move along.
Hey pg (or other moderators), it would be nice if you could unban jono_x who is the author of this post and signed up to respond to comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jono_x
(For now, you can read them if you set "showdead" in your HN profile.)
I'm banned? (My posts were showing up for me, so I had no idea.)
Did get banned because I broke a rule I wasn't aware of? Or is it that a newly registered account needs to be approved by a moderator before the comments show up?
Yay! You are unbanned now. The spam filtering algorithms are not open source, but I believe they are a bit trigger-happy when it comes to brand new accounts that post a lot of comments at once. My uninformed guess is that you were caught by an overzealous filter.
>The spam filtering algorithms are not open source //
The moderation of this social network is completely opaque and often, it seems, whatever algorithms or feelings the mods use to guide them are wrong. That's probably survivor/selection bias but who's to know ...
jono_x, yes you are banned. Hellbanned specifically, which is why I can't reply to you.
I don't understand why you are banned. Normally it seems like it happens to users who post junk, or who get downvoted a whole lot when they're new. Neither of these apply to you, however, so I'm really not sure.
If you really want to respond, maybe you could do so on your blog, and someone in the thread will link to it.
What killed Firefox for me wasn't just the plugin breakage on updates, but the unnecessary plugin breakage.
For most of my broken plugins, the immediate solution was, "edit the XML file inside the .xpi, and update the maxVersion to include the latest version of Firefox."
Firefox 10 changed this behavior, making plugins assume to be compatible by default, unless set to a strict mode by the plugin author. But Firefox 10 released in January of this year, by which point I had long since moved to Chromium.
It would be funny if people were switching to Chrome because they were tired of updates. Chrome updates _all_the_time_. Also no one gives a hoot about version numbers. I don't think people hate the updates, they hate the nagging popups. There's not really much difference between a browser notification and one of those annoying "I see you've been on my site for 23 seconds, take my survey!!!11" screens.
A prerequisite to a non-annoying rapid release cycle IMO is silent update. It's why we spent the time to get that part of the technology stack working first. I predict user frustration with Firefox will decrease now they've implemented this.
"There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn."
This just isn't true. In a web browser, sure, the UI barely matters. Going through the menus in Firefox or Chrome is rare, enough so that Chrome tends to look different every time I do it.
But for real programs, the UI defines the workflow, and that should be optimized, even at the expense of familiarity. Just be sure that it actually IS better.
So yes, the quoted advice should probably be considered and possibly adopted by FireFox and maybe Chrome. But desktop software shouldn't accept it without a huge dose of salt.
> "There's no UI better than one you already know, and no UI worse than one you thought you knew but now haver to relearn."
Yeah, I guess I was overstating the case for rhetorical purposes. I don't think there's never a UI change that improves on what you already know. Once in a while a new interface comes along that's so much more efficient that it's worth retraining yourself. What I'm trying to say is that these changes are rare. I think designers tend to overestimate the benefit of a change and underestimate the power of habituation.
(P.S. thanks for catching my typo ("haver"). Fixed it.)
I think he is quoting someone with that line but I can't place it. If I remember correctly the purpose of that advice was not to keep you from ever changing your UI, but to instead weigh the cost carefully.
Eh? The UI isn't just the menus! It's the shortcut keys and the ways in which functionality is exposed and a whole lot else.
"In a web browser, sure, the UI barely matters."??? In a web browser, the UI is the ONLY thing that matters. Every browser out there can render a web page. It's how it responds to the user and what it enables you to do that makes all the difference.
The biggest reason I stick with FF is the pentadactyl extension - A browser without decent vi-like controls is intolerable to me, and chrome's equivalent isn't up to par. So I stick with FF, for the UI.
I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is.
When Chrome came out, it was a new product; users had no expectations of "what Chrome is." So Google could do with it essentially whatever they wanted.
Firefox was in a completely different position. When Mozilla moved Firefox to rapid release, the product branded "Firefox" had been in users' hands for seven years -- nine if you count pre-1.0 versions. Over that time, users' expectations of what a product branded "Firefox" was settled into a particular place.
Rapid release was painful because it broke those expectations. Suddenly Firefox didn't behave like people expected a product labeled "Firefox" to behave anymore. It's like opening a bottle labeled "Coke" and having orange juice pour out. "But orange juice is better for you!" Yeah, but that's still not what I expect to get when I open a Coke bottle.
There's a simple way Mozilla could have avoided this: just call the rapid-release product something else. Create a new brand, and put it on a version of the browser that receives updates every six weeks. Call it Fastfox or Frequentfox or really anything other than Firefox. Then encourage users to start moving from Firefox to the new hotness. Make the new product compatible with Firefox extensions, but don't do the version-number compatibility check that Firefox does, so users aren't constantly being prompted to update working addons.
(Yes, both products are the same code under the hood. That doesn't matter. The important thing is that you communicate to users that this is a thing that is something other than Firefox, which resets their expectations.)
Eventually you'd have most users on the new product, since that's where the cool new features that get users excited would be showing up. Curmudgeons and enterprises would stay with boring old Firefox, but that's OK, because you make "Firefox" just a periodic snapshot of Frequentfox development. "Firefox" becomes a legacy brand, maintained for those who care about it. But the new brand is clearly established as the new hotness.
This lets you move your users without violating their expectations. They expect the new product to behave differently, because it's a new product. It's got a different name and everything!
Violent changes in direction for an established product, on the other hand, always tick off users, because they do violence to those users' expectations of what that product is.
It's better to send your well-loved legacy brand gracefully off into the sunset, in other words, than to try and shock new life into it with electric paddles.
You are of course entitled to your opinion but I must disagree. Users don't care what it iss called, they care about being annoyed. Firefox was always nagging you about updates while chrome silently updated in the background. And I personally have never had a chrome update do anything that I noticed immediately (like breaking my addons.)
I disagree about expectations too. Users have a great deal of built in expectations for chrome after having dealt with other browsers for years.
If firefox and chrome switched their update systems, the story we would be hearing would be "I tried chrome and i hated it.", and they probably wouldn't even bother to tell us why (the nagging update system.)
So annoying your users with constant updates, reboots, and breaking functionality is okay as long as you do it from the start? And the way to get people to accept you adding such annoyance to your product is to rebrand it?
No, but if you must move to a more rapid update schedule (as the Firefox developers clearly felt they did to stay competitive with Chrome, since users were screaming against rapid release from practically the moment the plan was announced and they went ahead with it anyway), moving the rapid updates into a new product is less disruptive than shoehorning them into your existing one.
Rapid updates doesn't need to be disruptive, look at Chrome. I don't think Firefox users will miss the Update Dialogue if they removed it, and did silent updates as Chrome. Fragmenting into two apps, and keeping an app with slower update cycle and a crappy update experience, seems bizarre.
Previously, when I went to a new browser experience, I generally went to a new browser.
There was Mosaic. Then Netscape. Then Galeon. Then Konqueror. Then Mozilla. Then Firefox.
Galeon was probably the most jarring of the bunch. It started as a highly power-user friendly advanced (for the time) browser. Then the GNOME project "adopted" it as its default browser ... and instilled it with "simple user" disease. Many features were ripped out, and much of the userbase left in disgust (there are a few postings by Jon Corbet and other at LWN.net I recall). Eventually it was replaced by Epiphany, a pale shadow of the original.
Life would have been better if the rebranding had happened first.
And we'll note that Mozilla has already gone this route several times: Netscape -> Mozilla -> Phoenix -> Firefox. They should have taken this as a new fork as well.
Mozilla kept me from Firefox for years. The idiotic "view source" that actually re-fetched the page made it utterly worthless for development and when the bugs were filed, they were promptly ignored.
That said, with the except of one FF push on OSX that broke Netflix for a few days I've been pleased with the changes. Safari's constant memory leaks drove me nuts, FF leaking memory wasn't as bad but certainly annoyed. They've solved that problem for my usage and having suffered with Chrome "dev tools" I continue to use FF and Firebug for front-end work when need be.
oh galeon, how i miss thee, particularly your sane address bar tab-completion. anyone know if there's anything comparable as a chrome extension or firefox addon?
What was the address-bar tab-completion functionality?
Have you tried Vimperator for Firefox?
Modal, action happens on a status line at the bottom of the screen (allowing you to minimize navigation elements -- no navigation, menu, or toolbars). To open a new tab, type "t <pattern><tab>", where "pattern" is either part of a URL or the title of a page or bookmark. To open Hacker News, for example, I generally type "t hack<tab>". If there are multiple matches, they appear as a list of items you can tab through (or which shrinks as you type additional characters for greater specificity). I like it.
Chrome's navigation is similar, but not quite as slick.
I disagree, and I think you're set on the auto-update in Chrome and Firefox on being equal – they're not. Average Joe doesn't care about a update that brings support for a new css selector – but he cares if that update smacks him in the face. Firefox smacks him in the face, Chrome doesn't.
Hi Smacktoward,
I'm the author of the post and I agree with everything you said here.
How to reach out to new users while keeping your existing users happy is one of the oldest and biggest problems in software development. There's no perfect solution, but I like the suggestion of creating a new product name for the new thing. That can sometimes get you into trouble too, as you end up competing with yourself, Microsoft-style, or get users who are confused about which version they should use. But it might be the least bad option.
I'm not sure most users would move to the new product. Most people stick to the software they use. That might be because they don't want to learn a different interface. But I think, fundamentally, many people don't even want to deal with the existence of alternatives, they're blissfully ignorant of choice and of weighing up- and downsides[1]). I'm the same way with laundry detergent. That's a fickle kind of loyalty, though.
So, if that's true and people stuck with Firefox, you'd have to maintain Firefox between the snapshot releases of Frequentfox. You'd have to push an update at least every time you fix a security issue, which can be pretty often. So you'd still need to figure out a good user experience for dealing with frequent updates. Fortunately, that's a solved problem, and the user doesn't even need to notice you've updated their software.
Of course as you add features and modify/improve the user interface in Frequentfox, your Firefox snapshots will be different enough that you'd still end up alienating users, so you can't go crazy developing Frequentfox, either.
I'm voting for frequent push updates, transparent if they don't change anything significant, and with a gentle introduction to the changes if they do. Big changes should be rare, maybe explain the motivation behind them to the user, and ideally make them option. Despite all the rage, I think the user interface changes from Firefox 3 to trunk weren't all that jarring; significant tweaks more than fundamental reworkings of the UI, the awesome bar is a great example.
> I think the takeaway from this should be slightly different than the one the author found: don't fight users' expectations of what your product is.
That's a fair point, but also true is "don't let your product stagnate by keeping it familiar and unchanging". People get bored with similarity and want new shiny things.
There is something to be said for too much change, and something to be said for too much sameness.
> That's a fair point, but also true is "don't let your product stagnate by keeping it familiar and unchanging". People get bored with similarity and want new shiny things.
I disagree. Users want something new if their current software isn't meeting their needs for whatever reason. But if it is meeting their needs and they know how to use it, then keeping that software the same isn't "stagnation", it's stability.
Whenever I hear users ask for change it's because there's a feature they wish they had or a bug that's annoying them. I've never heard anybody ask for change just for the sake of change, or complain that software was boring because it didn't change.
For games I guess it might make sense to keep changing things up just to keep them fresh, but for productivity software I think "boring, predictable, and functional" is the ideal state. Productivity software isn't supposed to be entertaining, it's supposed to be useful.
> Users want something new if their current software isn't meeting their needs for whatever reason.
What if their need is for something new and shiny?
Have you never heard people say they tried Chrome because it was new and shiny (even the word implies shininess)? Or how about how people want to buy the latest iPad or iPhone, it isn't because the old one isn't "meeting their needs" in some boring sense. They want something new and different.
> Whenever I hear users ask for change it's because there's a feature they wish they had or a bug that's annoying them
That is a very simplistic view of users. Users are human beings - they want conflicting things, both for things to work and be predictable, and for things to be new and interesting.
The right tradeoff is the hard part, not absolute black-and-white principles of "users never want change" or "users always want something new and shiny".
The thing is, even the ESR is only supported for about a year before being completely cut off in favour of a new ESR that has only been available for about 6-12 weeks at that point.
There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more, not least because just evaluating a new version of something critical like an operating system or web browser can be a huge exercise if you're running hundreds of in-house tools on top of them.
While I think it's unrealistic to expect an OSS browser to provide ongoing support for that long, if Mozilla want their product to be taken seriously by enterprise customers then I suspect they're going to need a lot more than a year of security fixes and a lot more than 6-12 weeks of overlap when they want to force an upgrade. It would be interesting to know whether in reality they have gained much from offering the first ESR (which is already coming to end-of-life) in terms of acceptance of the rapid release schedule in larger organisations. Maybe there is a certain size of organisation that is flexible enough to take advantage of a yearly update but can't take the overheads of stuff breaking every six weeks.
> The thing is, even the ESR is only supported for about a year before being completely cut off in favour of a new ESR that has only been available for about 6-12 weeks at that point. There are some large businesses out there who run the same software foundation for a decade or more.
For software like that, a web browser is not the right platform. Web browsers view a shared space which constantly changes and gets updated with new APIs and deprecated APIs and so forth.
If you want decade-long stability, use a platform that is tightly controlled and gives guarantees of backwards compatibility, for example Java or .NET.
For software like that, a web browser is not the right platform. Web browsers view a shared space which constantly changes and gets updated with new APIs and deprecated APIs and so forth.
You seem to be confusing the Internet with corporate intranets. Browsers installed in these kinds of organisations, and the tools they want to use long-term, tend to be based around the latter. Having stability is far more important than being able to use HTML5 local storage and add drop shadows to your titles in CSS. There is a reason that, despite the endless moaning of web developers, many places are still running IE6.
If you want decade-long stability, use a platform that is tightly controlled and gives guarantees of backwards compatibility
They are. Unchanged is about as controlled and backward compatible as you can get!
Anyone who wants to get a replacement browser into these environments for the long term needs to understand that. Anyone who wants to make cloud-based solutions that seek to displace well-established in-house tools needs to understand that, too. It sucks if you want to use the shiny new possibilities of bleeding edge web technology, but the grown-ups aren't interested in an anatomical measuring contest between browser makers about who can be first to ship the next non-standardised, subject-to-change-at-any-time, bug-ridden-anyway feature.
I think Microsoft does understand this, and that's why they are still dominant in large organisations despite appearing to be behind the curve. I think Google have figured it out as well, but when they stopped supporting IE6 in their web apps, it wasn't because they had successfully forced everyone to upgrade, it's because they realised that they never would.
The point is that a browser that can view the modern web is different than one that can run a 10-year old intranet app. These are very different things. I agree with you that corporations sometimes need both.
Since there are open source browsers, you can just save a very old version of them for intranet apps, if you must. But you can't expect a modern browser to still run your old intranet apps, you will need both a legacy browser and a modern one.
The ESR fits somewhere in the middle. It won't run 10 year-old apps, but it will update very slowly so your IT department does not need to constantly verify it (only once a year). Again, for 10-year-old apps, that won't work - you just need to install a 10-year old browser. If you just run it on intranet apps, security isn't a concern so that's fine.
The other thing is that Chrome updates work. They've only broken something once in I think 3 years of daily use at this point (some update unchecked "warn before quitting"). They also don't generally create popups and the update process itself is literally invisible.
Firefox on the other hand... sigh. I really liked that browser, but the updates, and the broken plugins, and the shit memory management, and the developers' heads up their shitty asses denying their shit memory management, and did I mention the enormous memory usage on OSX? Chrome essentially has the same uptime as my laptop, ie months. Firefox required daily restarts with the same browsing patterns. Plus they regularly corrupt the backing file that holds the sites you had open in your browser, so before restarting the browser to get ram back, it's a best practice to copy the location of each and every open tab to a text file.
We got my gf's laptop 8 gigs of ram to accomodate ff and I'm working on talking her into chrome. A browser written by people who know how to use free(3). Plus the updates don't hork random stuff. Plus on the rare occasions I've restarted the browser it has never broken the backing store holding the open tabs.
I quit firefox purely over its tendency to leak my entire RAM and force restarts. I was told at the time, and do believe, that the memory leaking was an addon problem. However... firefox was sold on the idea of addons. When your two main messages are "we're the most convenient browser; just look at all our awesome addons!" and "you can't use the addons, or your computer will implode", you've got a serious problem.
I quit using Firefox due to absolutely horrific memory management and I never used a single add-on ever. It was extremely frustrating because every time I went to a forum seeking help the first and only thing people would do is blame add-ons.
It was so bad that I had to close firefox when I wanted to do anything else. If I played a full screen game it would work great for about half an hour the suddenly it'd chug along at 10fps. Without fail the issue was Firefox deciding to consume 90% CPU. And again this is without installing a single add-on ever.
It may be better today. I don't know. I don't care. I switched to Chrome and haven't looked back since.
Haters-be hate'n.
And how exactly does the one process per tab of chrome address memory issues? Chrome is complete garbage for me after 30ish tabs. Talk about unresponsive...
The great thing about this model is that closing the tabs kills the processes and therefore frees up memory. Last time I used FFx extensively (6 months-1year ago) I could not say the same thing, even after they announced having a pretty major fix for leaks.
This is exactly right. The party line was "it's the addons" forever, anytime you brought up Firefox taking up 900MB of RAM after being open for 3 days. Even with no addons. I was so glad to switch to Chrome when it came out because of that.
And then years later they have the "MemShrink project". Which basically was admitting that they were spouting bullshit about it being addons for years.
I quit Firefox as soon as Chromium for Linux was available. My problem with Firefox wasn't so much the memory leaks (though those were annoying), but rather that it was SLOW. Opening new tabs caused the whole UI to grind to a halt while they rendered....and this wasn't on a slow computer. I've heard that FF has finally been multithreaded, but I haven't really tested it.
This isn't to say Chrome doesn't have its own memory or performance problems. GMail for example will eat up to 1GB of memory eventually before I notice I'm low. I have to actually close the tab (reloading doesn't fix it) and re-open it. It's "only" using 500MB right now...
Please try FF15 when it comes out on August 28. It has a fix that prevents 90%+ of leaks from add-ons. See http://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/05/07/update-on-lea... for some details (and note that all the follow-on problems mentioned in that post have now been fixed).
The problem is not add-ons. Let me repeat that -- THE PROBLEM IS NOT ADD-ONS. I left Firefox about a year ago, once Chrome was good enough, because my plain-vanilla Firefox, with all the tweaks to limit memory usage enabled, would still leak memory until it crashed (my laptop has 1.5GB RAM and Ubuntu; it also had a few GB of swap). Closing tabs did not help either. The only response from Mozilla was 'add-ons.' Chrome does just fine with 30+ tabs open on the same machine.
Any organization that can live in denial for years and years about the core issue with their product is going to die. Mozilla is tightly connected to the web developer community, but has a complete disconnect from the problems facing its actual users. When Firefox shipped, it was a great, light-weight alternative to Mozilla. From my point of view as a user, I haven't seen any substantial improvements since 1.0 shipped in 2004 -- spell check is nice, and given how often it crashes, restoring tabs when the browser is opened is nice -- but that's all. Otherwise, if not for security issues and web site compatibility issues, I'd be on Firefox 1.0 (which worked fine on sub-GHz machines).
Aside from that, virtually all development effort has been aimed at making a better IDE for web developers. I guess that benefits me since, ultimately, I can visit nicer web sites in Chrome.
There are a lot of users here complaining about Firefox memory usage who don't use it anymore.
Which is expected, because why would you stay if you were really bothered?
Comments from an active user, though... I've stuck with Firefox out of habit probably more than anything else, but now most of the things people (including me) were complaining about are already gone -- as of the last update, Firefox with -- sheesh, I guess I have about 100 tabs in 2 windows -- takes up under 500MB after using it all day, and in the morning it starts in a few seconds (they don't force-reload all your open tabs on startup anymore, just the active ones and I think text from the others is cached locally).
Chrome becomes unusable if I try to use it like a to-do list like this, for UI as well as memory reasons; not that I could say easily how much memory Chrome is using at the moment, with 20 tabs; the separate processes defeats seeing that easily, alas (there must a simple way to check, but I haven't tried).
It's quite stable, and even when it was still crashier (last year?) it's been years since I've actually lost my tabs after a crash; they've always been auto-recovered (and it has that nice prompt to let me close the ones I think may be causing trouble before relaunching).
Given different usage patterns, etc., I have no idea if people trying the actual, current FF will want to go back -- but for anyone who left more than a few months ago (especially if you left due to memory footprint) I'd suggest trying it again sometime.
[And I like the more frequent releases, personally -- I always hated the slow release cycle, and feel like they're starting to get into the swing of it now -- but I obviously don't speak for the crowd on this one...]
I don't see how that's a serious problem. An add-on ecosystem can be explained literally as "we let third parties who aren't as skilled as browser-developers develop (optional) parts of our browser." That has both obvious advantages (there are way more developers passing that lower bar, serving many more needs) and obvious drawbacks (a lot of them... can't code very well.)
I had to stop using it at work.. I'd have to restart every 2-3 hours or performance became unbearably slow. The only other "solution" was to remove all my addons, and without the addons there was really no reason to continue using firefox (Firebug was supposedly the main issue, but without firebug I can't do any work)
I never got used to Chrome's Developer Tools. Firebug and a properly working Scrollbar Anywhere / Grab-n-drag (lets you right click anywhere and drag up and down to scroll anywhere in the page) are the only extensions keeping me on Firefox.
The equivalents on Chrome are simply not good enough. I don't know if this is an issue with all Chrome extensions, but Wet Banana / Scrollbar Anywhere on it seem to be running in a low priority and thus have sub-par performance. Scrolling is choppy and doesn't always even initiate, depending on where on the page I right-clicked.
Progress is nice, but unfortunately as a user I don't care too much about progress if the bottom line is the same. Sorry to sound disdainful about your efforts, and I know how hard it is, and I have greatest respect for the efforts of Firefox developers, but the bottom line is - it is (was, last time I checked) still leaking like Eratosthenes' sieve, and still becomes unusable after mere days of work. And even admiration for the product and all the history of it can only hold the user for so long when viable alternative is out there.
To counter your anecdote with another, different anecdote with more numbers in it, back in the days of Firefox 4 and subsequent versions, it would not be unusual for my Firefox to hit 500MB to 1GB of RAM usage after a day of browsing. Right now, my Firefox 15 has been running for a day, and about:memory says the total is 363.26MB. Firefox has slimmed down a lot in the past year.
Sorry, but not that I've seen in any version of Firefox I'm using. Presently ~15 at work (Ubuntu 11.10) and Iceweasel 10 at home. On an 8 GB system, I'm constantly reviewing my browser memory usage and killing/restarting browser sessions on account of memory usage. iceweasel VIRT presently 2163MB.
Sorry, but that's totally nuts.
Mozilla have been claiming "we've solved the memory leak problem" about as long as Microsoft have been claiming "we've solved the virus/security problem", or so it seems. With about the same level of credibility.
I wonder if there are large differences based on usage patterns.
I just finished entering a comment above suggesting people should give it another try; I have 100 or so tabs open and 500MB footprint after using it all day, with version 13 (I just stick with the release update channel) in win7.
In my experience they've very clearly fixed whatever the main memory issue was that affected my experience -- but not yours. Though -- the windows versions may get a bit more testing....
Hmm, I'm no expert. But AFAIK open memory mapped files are counted towards a process's virtual memory (as displayed by utils like 'top' and 'ps). Dunno if FF uses memory mapped files extensively.
There's a utility called 'pmap' that you can use to display the memory mapped files and subtract it from the total etc.
Finding out how much memory a program is using is surprisingly tricky to compute. Good luck.
I would like to believe you, but since every Firefox release is faster than ever and uses less memory, if that were really true Firefox would run on an Atari and be so fast it would literally travel into the future to fetch pages. But that's not the case.
Your assertion is entirely false. Just because something keeps getting larger/faster/smaller doesn't mean it will eventually be arbitrarily large/fast/small. e.g. the sequence 1, 1 + 1/2, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4, 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8,... keeps getting bigger and bigger, but it never goes past 2.
(Futhermore, in my personal experience, Firefox has been using less and less memory.)
Your sequence is growing, albeit at a decreasing rate, so I'm not sure it's a good fit for memory usage. Unless you meant to say the rate at which Firefox is bloating is slowing. I could believe that. But Firefox is claiming memory usage is following a sequence more like 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, ... Which should approach zero.
If you meant your sequence to represent performance, maybe that's what's happening, but then I think they should stop saying "now 1/1024 faster than before" as if it's a reason to upgrade.
That sequence was merely an example of something that is monotonic and bounded, it wasn't chosen to be a model for memory usage or performance or anything like that.
Also, I don't see Mozilla claiming memory usage follows a curve like 1/x. In fact, I don't seem them claiming anything about long term memory usage other than "it's decreasing", which is true, and can be true without implying that the memory usage will eventually be 0.
(Btw, I don't think Mozilla have ever said something as frivolous as "1/1024 faster".)
Sadly though now users have had years of poor memory management burned into their memories. Regardless of if it was FF or the addons, it's associated with FF now and will take time to shed.
Okay, this might sound funny, but Firefox is actually faster than Chrome on my crappy netbook which has about a gig of RAM. Plus, it can handle more tabs (200+, don't ask) without bringing the thing to a screeching halt.
I'm pretty sure you're talking about an earlier version of Firefox -- I agree, there were problems there, but things have gotten much better with the latest versions. I run Firefox Aurora (which is kinda equivalent to Chrome's dev channel) and I haven't seen anything breaking yet.
I've also used Chrome [dev] for a while and while it was pretty good, it also decided to declare that "my user profile was corrupt" after every few days. Not fun. Plus, it could hardly handle 50+ tabs, but I guess that is due to the way the Chromium sandbox and tab threading model works (and the Atom processor in my netbook.)
tl;dr: I run Firefox Aurora (with 200+ tabs) on a netbook with 1 gig of RAM. Where's that memory problem you were talking about?
That matches my experience. Chrome can (according to its internal task manager) easily use over 100MB per tab which adds up quickly. Firefox is much more frugal. And for me Chrome's memory leaks are worse then Firefox's ever were.
If I have more than a handful of tabs open in Chrome then Chrome starts using significantly more than a GB of RAM (in total, across all the separate Chrome processes), while I've currently got a Firefox session that has been open for more than a week, with 30+ tabs, and is using just under 1 GB.
How are you adding together the Chrome processes? Often when you look at the memory usage of a process, it'll incude all the shared libraries it's using. So if you add together multiple processes, you'll multiply the memory used by that shared library by the number of processes you're adding, even though that memory is, well, shared.
Oh. Hadn't realised that, thanks for the info. :) (I am doing it naively, just from the output of ps, so your point applies. Is there an Chrome equivalent for Firefox's about:memory?)
Even so, with many tabs open, my computer hits swap far more under Chrome than Firefox.
Edit: Ah, yep, answered my own question: about:memory works in Chrome too. Using that, I've got Chrome at 360 MB with 5 tabs and 2 extensions, while Firefox is at 900 with 30+ loaded tabs and ~20 extensions.
That may be, but you can get rid of the memory that chrome uses. Just close the tab, which releases that memory - since one tab is run as a separate process which then exits and releases all memory.
With Firefox, you have to restart Firefox. All tabs run in the same process, and memory is generally not released back to the OS when someone just calls free() or delete.
The problem with your suggestion is that they will have to maintain two codebases and support releases for the classic Firefox by proving security patches to them.
Not to mention more headaches for web developers as yet another browser shows up with its own bugs, differing support for standards like HTML5 and CSS3 etc.
Funny, because two codebases exactly what Firefox is doing with FF 10 ESR, but without the renaming. So I don't find his proposition stupid, at the opposite.
And come on, working on different codebases is a usual dev task, and every developer outside Facebook should know how to do that properly. Usually you have your shipped code and your development code, and you want to be at least able to ship a security fix without disclosing your new functionality.
Concerning your last point, if you don't like that you are probably at the wrong place for web developments, where you should at least support a dozen different browsers. For enterprise software, that means one can just support 10 ESR instead of 1x and everything new that comes at each release, possibly breaking the application.
One thing I've not seen anyone bring up in the comments here is Chrome updates just as often as Firefox does. Chrome might even update more often than Firefox does. I don't know because Chrome solved the rapid update problem exceptionally well. Chrome could update every hour and I probably wouldn't even notice, let alone care. Rapid updates in and of themselves are not the problem here.
Here are the two major problems that I see in Mozilla's "rapid updates" process:
1) Interruption of user work process
Firefox freezes for a few seconds at startup to see if there are any updates to the core or plugins. If this were handled in the background in a separate thread that did not freeze the browser, no one would care about it except for privacy advocates who don't want their version number being leaked.
Then there are the popups and request to reboot that also interrupt the user's work process, given that the user has probably been trying to get work done while the download was going on.
2) Stupid versioning
For as long as software version numbers have existed, most vendors have used the major.minor.patch pattern. A change in the major version number usually means a break in the public API, so software vendors provide a different API library for every major version that they release, and they allow plugins to decide what API version to use.
Mozilla decided to increase their _major_ version number for every _patch_. Firefox's latest version 420 or however high they are now should probably be something like 4.2.20.
The stupid numbering will only annoy users who expect Mozilla to follow best software development practices, but it shouldn't affect plugins. If Firefox is doing their updates correctly, they will be exposing a separate API library for every major version update that they've done in their rapid major version update schedule.
Of course, they're doing it wrong. Plugins built for version 4 or version 5 no longer work because FF is only providing the latest API version 420, and only until next week when 421 comes out. Mozilla's solution is for all plugin vendors to update their plugins after every FF update, and for users to wait until the plugin vendors have done this.
There would be no plugin breakage if Mozilla had updated the patch and minor version numbers for non-breaking updates. I've said this on /. but the Moz devs argued that their choice was between rapid major version updates or no updates at all. I find that hard to believe. Something is wrong with their toolkit if they cannot support minor version number updates.
I don't think any of the major web browsers do semantic versioning. Mozilla doesn't increase the major version number for every patch either - they increase it for every scheduled release (ie every 6 weeks). Patch releases (typically security fixes) do increment the patch number.
This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point.
Requesting permission to update throws a significant amount of users. They're typically not capable of determining if the request is legitimate or not, they're fearful of updating things they rely on, and god help them if it's not a one-click update.
Yep, most "consumer-level" end users would prefer to not be asked. I'm probably a bad nerd, but it's even true of me. When I go to my parents house for some holiday or another, I used to meticulously check everything on my mom's computer to make sure it was working well. Now I basically just jam on the manual software update button for everything she has installed that doesn't autoupdate, because she's too afraid or inconvenienced by the manual update button. Everything else, though, is just managing itself and she doesn't notice.
"This is easy to say as someone who has never managed a product, but I feel silent self-update is table stakes for consumer-facing products at this point."
yes, but no. saying that silent self-update is table stakes is missing the point: table stakes from your users' perspective is "shipping software that doesn't need to be consciously maintained."
whether you ship rarely and get the bugs out before you do, or ship frequently but have automatic upgrades that don't break things, doesn't matter.
I was on the verge of abandoning FF on Android until the new upgrade fixed the problems I had with it. So that was a big thumbs-up.
It also came with enough significant UI changes that even as a programmer who's used FF dails since pre-1.0 days, I actually had to stop and RTFM to work out how to use it. That was a catastrophic thumbs-down. Most users wouldn't stand for that level of disruption to their software.
Mozilla has done an amazing job of "one step forwards, two steps back" over the years. Firefox has gone from being the amazing browser I recommended to everyone to try to a browser I'm almost embarassed to admit I use.
I really hope the fixes they say they have in the pipeline live up to their promises and fix the issues they still have. But even if they do, if Mozilla don't stop their trend of fixing bugs but breaking the UI, it just won't matter in the end.
BTW, you're being downvoted (not by me, though it's tempting) because at least a few of those are untrue.
edit: Chrome is still faster on Android for me, addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox, and I don't find the memory management to be any better. It's still horrendously slow in Linux and on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what.
addons and extensions break all the time for me in Firefox
Which ones? I haven't had a broken extension in months (since Firefox 10), and I use quite a few.
on my work machine with 12GB of ram it just freezes no matter what
Are you implying Firefox is using 12G on your machine?
To be honest, I think what's happening is that one of those "extensions that keeps breaking" is crap and what is using all that memory. Real Firefox has none of the problems you describe (very vaguely and without specifics), so it's hard to take you seriously - let alone see how it could be fixed.
The problem isn't about 'rapid release cycles', but about the UX design of the update process. Even before the rapid release cycles, Firefox would check for add-on updates every time it was started. Chrome's update mechanism is completely seamless and invisible and requires zero user attention.
Which, ironically, is almost as bad, when you suddenly realize that you basically let Chrome change the UI, and there's no way to return to the UI you once knew.
Except that Chrome has never really changed it's UI. The presentation at the end of Google's 2012 IO Day 2 keynote actually timelapses through the UI. The only change is the removal of the home button outside of general micro-tweaks.
"Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need."
This is the hardest lesson, and what I need to remember most. As a developer I really do like to tinker with new software (most of the time), but as a rule users do not and we had best not forget it!
I knew the firefox updates annoyed me but I had no idea they bothered the general population just as much. I actually switched to chrome because of the memory leak in firebug so I didn't have quite the same experience.
I recently slammed into this as well. I'm am far from being a "real" developer, but I do occasionally write software for work on my own time. I spent a couple of weeks laying out a simple gui and getting all the pieces to work. I then "released" it to the office, and after seeing people clumsily poke through the menus, I decided that they must have been laid out poorly. So I rearranged everything, and redid a lot of the graphics, and swapped the versions without telling anyone. I received a crap storm of negative feedback. Ended up having to write a guide for how to use everything, and then still didn't learn my lesson! I thought X would function way better if combined with Y, etc, etc.. Pushed another version with some new features and some feature removed, and again, a torrent of confused coworkers asking me where things went.
The only good decision I made was to stop messing with it... which is hard. Each time I see people interact with it I feel there is a glaringly obvious change that needs to be made to ultimately benifit the user. But alas, I leave it be.
Here's what I think Mozilla/Firefox should have done before starting the rapid release cycle:
1. Migrate all extensions to restartless/JetPack. Extensions for Firefox are very powerful but may sometimes break when new versions are released, which then the compatibility check feature is introduced to "solve" this. Before the rapid release cycle, I've already seen some users reluctant to update and would wait for extensions to be updated first before updating to new version of Firefox. So now with this cycle, it just annoys them further. If all extensions were done in a more standard (and simpler) extension API first, this would have reduce the impact on the upgrading process. Users don't have to worry so much if the extensions that they depend on, would break.
2. Remove 3rd-party themes and embrace the 'Personas' (simpler themes/skins). Or at least improve theme development into something more standardized like JetPack. Since the Mozilla days, theme development hasn't change much. Extensions have JetPack, but themes have nothing (Personas is entirely a different thing). The case with themes is exactly the same as extensions. I know some users wouldn't upgrade to Firefox because the theme is not updated yet. I'm not sure if anyone still install custom Firefox themes, but themes played a decent role in attracting users (from IE?) in the early days.
3. Implement Electrolysis (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). From my observation, the real problem with Firefox is not the memory usage but its slowness. When users notice that the browser is getting slower (slow startup, slow tab-switching, slow UI response), they probably look at the number of tabs, try to find out the problem and saw that huge GBs of memory used. Firefox is now better at memory management, but the problem is still there. I'm not 100% sure about the implementation details; I'm thinking that if Firefox has Chrome-like multi-process architecture, the interface would be more responsive and memory management would be even better.
So, after this, implement rapid release cycle, enabled by default for new users/installs and prompt existing users to optionally opt in. Make the update process unobtrusive and it would be a win-win situation for everyone.
(I created one of the first 3rd-party themes for Firefox, since the Phoenix days.)
3. Implement Electrolysis (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis). From my observation, the real problem with Firefox is not the memory usage but its slowness.
Electrolysis does nothing to solve this, which is why it was abandoned.
I'm thinking that if Firefox has Chrome-like multi-process architecture, the interface would be more responsive and memory management would be even better.
Memory usage is far worse with multi-process, it's one reason Firefox uses less memory than Chrome.
At least, it could make the UI more responsive. Even though multi-process may use more memory, I think it's easier to reclaim/cleanup unused memory when for example, closing a tab.
I hate firefox updates because I use it infrequently enough that I have to update just about every time I open it. Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it. Makes me not even want to turn the thing on.
So, note to developers: Frequent updates drive your infrequent users crazy.
For sure, though they might not notice as much since its not every time they turn it on. I play some games that do weekly updates and they largely haven't been as annoying since i play them consistently. I'm sure this varies depending on personality though.
> Also on this list is my Playstation3, which wants me to do system update and a software title update on the rare occasion I try to use it.
The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot. Since most people leave it connected to the power socket, I wonder why they don't wake it sometime and do all the updates and go back to being powered off.
> The Xbox 360 also does constant updates that need a reboot.
however, unlike the PS3, 360 updates tend to take 30 seconds to a minute, except for big things like the NXE and the whatever-the-newest-Dashboard-thing-is-called; PS3 updates can take anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour and a half (literally, that's how long it took my PS3 to patch out-of-box the first time I started it.)
again, even if you're doing the same thing as your competitors, there is a lot of space to do it poorly. :)
The big problem with Firefox updates for me, and this predates the rapid release BS, is that they occur when you launch Firefox, wasting your time precisely when you're in a hurry. If they just waited until you were idle and then updated in the background they'd be hugely better. (Extra points for figuring out if compatible versions of plugins are available yet first, downloading them too, etc.)
1. The download/restart takes forever and interrupts your work with a bunch of intrusive dialog boxes.
This is a valid complaint. Firefox did rapid release before it perfected the update process to be fully automatic and silent, that definitely caused some users issues. Mozilla has recognized that publicly and taken responsibility for that decision - and meanwhile fixed the update process as well as launched an extended support release version of Firefox that updates far less frequently.
2. The update may break stuff that you counted on, either by removing features you were using, or by breaking compatibility with other software you use. Maybe the developers never tested your use case, or worse - they tested for it but decdided it didn't matter because only 2% of users used it. Tough luck to you if you're one of those 2%.
This point is ironic - because the claim is that users are switching to Chrome, which is the inventor of the 6-week update process. Chrome's 6-week updates can break websites or features that you rely on (I heard devs complain about breakage in the plugin interfaces for examples), just like Firefox's 6-week updates can.
When you update software every 6 weeks, and you make those updates real updates (not small security updates), then you risk breaking stuff for users. If you don't like that, you can't use either Chrome or Firefox. You might prefer IE, Safari and Opera which are slower-updating (there is also the Firefox extended support release as mentioned before).
So yes, the Firefox implementation of rapid release did not begin 100% smoothly, issues were admitted and worked on. But if you argue against the principle of rapid release, then you can't say in the same breath that users are leaving one rapid release browser (Firefox) for another (Chrome).
Side note, there is definite anecdotal evidence for users leaving Firefox for Chrome over rapid release. But there is also anecdotal evidence of users moving in other directions. Looking at the browser market share statistics, Firefox has declined a little and stabilized, with most of the previous decline coming from users of Firefox 3.6, not the modern rapid release versions. Of course the anecdotal stuff could still be right - perhaps 3.6 users move to the modern version, and some modern version people leave for another browser. But it's hard to differentiate that from people just leaving 3.6 directly (and people on modern versions being happy and staying), the data is hard to interpret.
"All software sucks. Users would be a lot happier if they had to use a lot less of it."
I think this is the single most important thing in this article and cannot be stressed enough.
Anybody that has ever had to interact with users knows this, but for developers this is very hard to believe, they choose not to see it.
Most people see software (i.e. "computers") as a tool to get some work done, or to get some entertainment. The work and the entertainment are the goal, and if it were possible to achieve it without using any software, they would do it.
Even technical-types think about software this way, not even knowing that they're doing it. Think about this: we mostly put up with complicated software and in-your-face software that's not contributing to our work or entertainment because we are learning something. Learning is just another goal that's not really the software itself. Once we notice that we aren't learning much anymore, the aforementioned software becomes a pain to use.
This is a lot of analysis when the answer seems very simple and is hidden in the article: Firefox Updates weren't done as well as Chrome Updates, which is why they weren't popular.
I've been using Chrome for years (after using FF for years). With Chrome, I never realize there are updates. The idea of updating Chrome just doesn't enter into my consciousness. So the fact that they update all-the-friggin'-time doesn't matter to me - it never registers in my mind.
With FF, every update I would realize it. So even if the updates were just a popup "hey, we've updated", doing it once every two months will cause me to acknowledge their updating once every 2 months. Which I don't want to do, because I don't care, at all about Firefox updating. I just want to browse the web.
I guess I'm in the minority in that I liked the updates: it was like getting a suprise gift ... but the incompatibility w/ the latest version of flash has forced me, unfortunately, to move on.
It's not even necessarily Mozilla's fault, but my other browers don't have this issue. I'm trying out Opera for the umpteenth time ... it always eventually disappoints, but I'm going to give it another go.
I agree with everything he's written. I was a diehard Firefox fan. The plethora of releases was annoying in itself - it's a damn browser, fer chrissake. Mature technology. Removing all the buttons so it looks like Chrome isn't improvement, it's just change.
But even then I stuck with it until they managed to break it completely. Loading a page with a lot of external links would take, literally, five minutes. I tried disabling all my plugins, disabling javascript, etc, etc. No joy. Finally I gave up and downloaded Chrome.
I still use Firefox at work, but only because I'm using an OS for which there's no Chrome.
> Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn't want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent.
To me, this is the most important. Usually, people prefer the original to the copy...
IMO, trying to catch up with (or just copy) Chrome all the times gives the messages to the users that they should use the original...
Never had any problems with Firefox updates. Switched to Chrome because Firefox leaked memory like crazy and because unusable after less than a week of work. I use browser quite intensively and keep tens of tabs open at all time. Firefox seems to be unable to deal with it. I suffered for years but once Chrome got decent extensions that was it.
How long has it been since you tried Firefox? Its memory consumption has improved a lot recently. And FF15 will prevent the vast majority of add-on leaks (which was the biggest remaining problem).
>I have not had an extension break since FF7 (now on FF14)
It's been my experience that extensions don't 'break' (i.e. stop working as expected) as much as they self validate against the currently running version of FF and refuse to load unless the developer has flagged it as workable.
Every time a major release comes out, half of my plugins are disabled. Then, I go and download the compatability reporter plugin (which gives you the option to override the version check), and 9 times out of 10, every single plugin works fine.
Also, what did you mean "how Chrome hides everything"? I'll admit the plugin system isnt near as robust, but for web development, I'm in passionate love with the Chrome/ium developer tools.
I believe it was Firefox 12 or 13 that made add-one compatible by default. Except for add-ons with binary parts, I don't think you should find so many turned off with each update now.
I'm still trying to figure out why the "add-ons" you install appear in "extensions" window and what's the difference between an extension and an addon. I can search and install Firebug but can disable/remove it from extension section.
"Extensions" are things like AdBlock Plus and NoScript. "Plug-ins" are things like Flash. "add-ons" is a term that covers both extensions and plug-ins. That's why the add-ons manager has tabs for both "extensions" and "plug-ins".
To confuse the issue, people very frequently use "add-on" when they really mean "extension".
Isn't that really because Mozilla don't make the extension vs addon vs plugin distinction clear themselves?
If you go to the Firefox add-ons in about:addons and do a search for an addon called "flash" then a link to the [Adobe] flash plugin isn't presented (as either best match nor name match). It's got to be amongst the top 10 addons used surely?? Certainly one of the top 10 for the keyword "flash". So?
In short Mozilla don't make it clear to users so how should a user be expected to see the difference? Is there a real difference or is it just an arbitrary Firefox UI distinction?
1. Memory bloat on Firefox. It's ridiculous that I have to restart the browser every day or more often just to get back more memory.
2. Plugin breakage. I'm sure it's better now but too little too late?
3. Separate processes for each tab and speed. Chrome FEELS faster even if it might not be, but it's amazing that if one tab crashes the whole browser doesn't.
#2 appears to be much better, but if Mozilla implements #3, then #1 won't see so bad and I would definitely consider using it again more often.
Mozilla has already said they will never implement 3 because it's pointless. Separate processes per tab make the browser slower, not faster. Crash resilience is obtained through sandboxing the plugins that were crashing in the first place (hi Flash!), instead of entire browser instances. It's one of the reasons Firefox uses less memory than Chrome.
I get a Firefox update every single day because I'm on the Nightly. If people would quit complaining and embrace the rapid upgrade cycle, we can advance the web at an accelerated pace. Almost half the people on the Internet are getting an upgrade every 6 weeks. The next three years could see as much change as the last 10, for example.
Btw,yes I understand we have legacy browsers and they won't get the full experience, but when they finally do, they'll get that better browser.
The number one issue with Firefox is the fact the developers who make the changes and the people who tell the developers to make the changes do not listen. It's the same issue with the Wordpress development team as well, both open source projects being led in the wrong direction ignoring absolutely everything the community asks for.
Firefox used to be completely about open source in the sense of the meaning; change what users want changed, add in features the users want added in, but then Firefox got popular and didn't have to try as hard to impress people any more and the downward spiral continued.
I'm one of those people that switched to Chrome. I only switched about 6 months ago because I had hope that Firefox would come to their senses and fix their damn browser, but it never happened. Chrome has it down-pat in terms of backwards compatibility for plugins and themes and no memory issues.
The number one complaint I had with Firefox is the plugins I needed to do my job and keep myself entertained were being blamed for the memory issues of Firefox when it has been a known problem in Firefox for sometime. Every few releases the Mozilla team touts new memory optimisation fixes that will make the browser more stable, but the browser still feels clunky and buggy.
Fair enough the developers of Firefox addons should be doing their part in terms of proper memory management (releasing memory when not needed, etc) but seriously addons are Javascript, HTML and CSS mostly and Mozilla should have worked out a way to effectively auto manage memory even for really bad plugins. I know the Aurora channel supposedly has a fix for the bad plugin behaviour issues, but the whole poor addon memory management issue has been an issue with Firefox since the really early days (around version 1.5 I believe). For years Mozilla denied any memory issues with the browser, it wasn't until a little while ago when the market share started dropping of Firefox that they started feigning interest in the memory management issues.
Excellent article, with one quote in particular that seems to make a well-grounded, broader point:
> I have another theory, too: When software companies get to a certain size, they start taking their users for granted. They start treating their users as pawns in a battle against some other company. Faceless millions. Gotta copy everything the other company does, or risk falling behind. So they end up doing everything the other company does whether the users want it or not, and probably doing a crappy job to boot.
> In our case, we started thinking of everything in terms of the battle against Google Chrome. Oh no, Chrome is doing such-and-such; we'd better do something equivalent or we'll fall behind! We thought we needed a rapid update process like Chrome. We were jealous of their rapid update capability, which let them deploy improvements to users continuously. We had to "catch up" with Chrome's updating capability.
> Credit where it's due: the way Google handled Chrome updates was very, very smart. They recognized that updates are one of the hardest things to get right, so they solved that problem first, before releasing version 1. The first release of Chrome was little more than an empty box of a browser, but it was wrapped around an excellent updating system. This let them gradually transform that empty box into a full-featured browser, without the users ever realizing they were getting updates.
> Firefox did not do such a good job with rapid releases. I've written before about the specific mistakes we made, so I won't go into detail again. To summarize: we did the updates in a very intrusive way, requiring lots of user attention, which made people annoyed because it happened so often. When people restarted after an update to find no visible difference, they wondered what was so important about that update. (Remember the rule that the benefit of the update needs to outweigh the pain? We broke that rule.) Worse yet, we didn't do enough to preserve add-on compatibility, making the updates extremely disruptive to people who depended on certain add-ons; and we kept going with our old version-numbering scheme even though the meaning of the numbers had changed completely, leading to mass confusion.
This reminds me of certain OS races: Microsoft trying to upgrade its 16-bit, cooperative multitasking Windows 3.1, and then ditching it for a new model based on NT, while Apple flounders with the Mac OS's 6 to 9, until it finally got a reasonable architecture with OSX - leading to Microsoft floundering with Vista. But the problem here is the opposite - the difficulty in competing is the same, but the two companies were reluctant to recognise the edge the competitor's system had on theirs until it was costly to fix.
Funny thing, I recently came across my first Chrome update failure - from 19 to 20 on OSX. The instructions to try to resolve the issue involved going into odd directories and deleting entries. This made for a oddly microsoftian feeling fixup process, which, in the end, didn't fix the problem. The only fix was a fresh download of Chrome. Makes one wonder if the Chrome project could be wandering from it's original reliable because it's simple, fast, & self updating to a state more like Firefox.
Yes, frequent updates, especially those that break plugins, suck massively. Each update is a huge leap of dread into the "well, what's going to break this time" sea.
The biggest single fault I've got with Firerfox (running FF13) isn't updates, it's memory usage. It still leaks massively, and pretty much requires a daily restart. State preservation is good enough that this doesn't matter a whole lot, but the change I'd like to see is one in which a small handful of tabs (I may easily run over 100) are considered "current and active" (foreground, pinned apps), and the rest function more as a stateful bookmark. Which, given that on crash recovery I tend to leave tabs unrefreshed until I actually open them, they largely are.
State-tracking in browsers really sucks. I've begun using the vimperator plugin, and it does a hugely awesome job of helping with this, mostly in the close/undo mode that handles history, and in being able to do partial matches and tab-completion (based on history and bookmarks) when opening new tabs / navigating to a page.
Chrome isn't all that hot. It's fast, it offers a different broken memory model (groups of tabs run in isolated processes, but consume much more memory on a per-tab basis), and it plays well with Google's own Web properties.
But it lacks the extension flexibility Firefox has (especially UI tweaks such as Vimperator, Tree-style Tabs / Tabkit (sadly incompatible with recent releases), and Remove it Permanently) which I find highly useful,
As for updates: call it old age, call it maturity, but I prefer things not change, especially UIs. Much of the greatest frustration and outcry on Linux has been over desktop UI metaphors (GNOME and KDE especially), and Microsoft is rapidly heading into the same fray. As much as I dislike actually using the Mac interface, I have to admit that Apple have kept it highly consistent for the 11 years of OS X. Yes, we can eventually get over it, but big changes should happen very infrequently, and then be left alone for a goodly while. If you need a sandpit to play in, fork a conceptual project, and realize that your userbase for this will be very different from the mainstream, though it may provide some valuable insights.
Frequently interrupting my workflow really, really, really sucks, more than you can possibly imagine. It's one of the joys of running on Debian GNU/Linux -- so long as you're on stable, big changes are infrequent and small changes are all but invisible. Best of both worlds.
IF you are going to rely on a plugin architecture, THEN get the damned baseline worked out and keep it stable. Screwing with APIs pains everyone. It screws your users and your developer community.
I'm becoming of the opinion that we want a bifurcation of the browser. There's an app platform, for Web 2.0 stuff, where it's really necessary. And there's something closer to ePub / Readability / Readability Redux / Instapaper, which presents deep textual content in a format that's both device-appropriate and highly nondistracting. When I find myself using Chrome with the Developer Tools window open, editing page and style elements as I go, something is very, very wrong with the Web.
the change I'd like to see is one in which a small handful of tabs (I may easily run over 100) are considered "current and active" (foreground, pinned apps), and the rest function more as a stateful bookmark. Which, given that on crash recovery I tend to leave tabs unrefreshed until I actually open them, they largely are.
That's exactly how I use tabs: I've got 77 tabs open right now, grouped into 9 different topic groups in Firefox's "Panorama" mode. Most of them are collections of information about some particular topic or other that I don't need most of the time, but when I next switch back to working on that topic I'd hate to have to find them all again. Almost none of those tabs are currently loaded into memory. In Firefox's preferences, I have "Tabs" → "Don't load tabs until selected" ticked, which means that, well, open background tabs don't load the page in question until I switch to them the first time. I think in an upcoming version of Firefox, that option is ticked by default.
I'm always surprised with peoples experience with Firefox memory usage of recent, it has been excellent for me. I can sometimes get upto 200+ tabs, while only sitting on 1.5GB of used memory. This is in Linux, but most of the memory-handling code shouldn't be that different between OSs in terms of GC algorithms.
As for restartless extensions, I think mozilla should really push people to switch their extensions to use the api. The other advantage is version independence, which helps with some of users pains of firefox.
I still don't understand why there is almost no push towards restartless extensions on the AMO site apart from one "restartless" badge for addons. The front page[0] has literally no mention of them. For a while, they didn't have too many restartless add-ons. Recently, they've been getting more popular; Adblock Plus added restartless support a while back, after much work, and there are quite a few others [1]. It would be a decent time to start featuring these much more prominently, if not exclusively.
I had severe memory problems. Then on upgrade to, I think it was, FF11 firefox became so crash-prone that it was crashing on about every fifth page. Even "safe mode" wouldn't help.
Then I created a new profile and it was amazing. FF has been running without crashes since (not one) and memory usage seems well balanced.
I can't be the only person who 1) totally doesn't understand why these exist (I strongly suspect they're a hangover from DOS-based MS Windows without proper user accounts), and 2) how to manage them (there are no profile management tools within Firefox that I'm aware).
I use Kubuntu with a single user shared with my wife. Profiles mean we can easily have different FF set ups. I could do this through separate users but dont want extra administrative overhead.
I've heard of others using this as a way to keep a slim browser but still have a swiss-army webdev browser for working with.
It's not the profile system that was broken it was some user settings that were dragged in through the upgrades from version 3 (when I last replaced the profile).
Even less to just click an alternate icon in the app menu.
You wouldn't need to do user switching per se anyway. You could just "su" with the other users ID. It's the things like fixing a printer adjustment twice. Getting a password so I can fix something or share a file. Fine in a supported env. but for home I'm happy sharing the same user (but not with the kids!).
Which, given the lack of CLI invocation of the browser by virtually anyone (I freaking live in bash and I still launch my browser via a window manager icon) makes me think it's highly underutilized.
Mostly, Firefox profiles mean I can't reliably generically script actions on my Firefox configuration (given there's some arbitrary random string involved).
As someone who converted from Firefox to Chrome, I think this mostly sums it up pretty well. Especially the part about being community-driven and then not listening to the community.
I see others have also mentioned memory-usage and that is also a fair point. At some point, Firefox would have memory leaks so huge that it spent most of its CPU time constantly trying to GC, slowing to a complete halt.
And then, just like with the updates, you had to restart. Restarting Firefox was a pain. But somehow restarting Chrome when updates come along is not. Why is that?
My desktop is a quad-core system with hyper-threading. That's 8 logical cores for the machine if utilized correctly. By Chrome having a process-per-tab model and Firefox not, everything else being the same Chrome can reduce its startup times to 12.5% of that of Firefox. It's an order of magnitude improvement.
You don't care about restarting Chrome because it just takes one second and you are back where you started. Firefox takes almost 10. That's way beyond annoying your users.
When you are the browser spending ages doing a restart, you're not in a position to force updates on your users.
Another thing which I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, which has been broken in Firefox since the very first releases is the add-on and add-on compatibility checking. It's retarded and I cannot believe it hasn't been fixed yet.
The typical Firefox update process goes like this: 1. Firefox informs you there is an update and you need to restart. 2. You accept a restart 3. Firefox shuts down, updates, and restarts. 4. upon restart after the update has been installed, it checks if your addons are compatible. WTF?!?
Usually that works out fine, but every now and then it doesn't. And then it's too late. That's retarded.
Why on earth would you check compatibility when it is already too late to do something about it? The process should be re-ordered. Compatibility checking should be done first. Then Firefox could say "There is an update and all your add-ons are compatible. Would you like to update now?".
A simple re-ordering of things it already does would have solved one of the two biggest issues people have with the update-mechanism. Why hasn't this been done already?
I'm a Chrome convert now, but I keep coming back to Firefox to see if things have improved, because I really believe in what Firefox stands for and what it represents. Unfortunately, I keep coming back to Chrome because for me, it just feels like a better browser.
I did the exact same thing last year. Tried switching back from Chrome to FF and using FireBug again. FF kept crashing on me. Gave it two days, switched back to Chrome.
The worst thing about Firefox updates is that... they didn't work for me. On my Debian box, I had to manually download and install each new version. That, and Firefox crashing several times a day without giving me a clue about what happened, what I could have done to fix the issue and the bug-report process always failing to submit reports, made me think that Firefox's days as a better browser had long passed. I'm a happy Opera user now. Opera's update system is integrated into Debian's.
Is it just me or is firefox's update system completely broken? I am using some firefox 3.x version because the software-updater never finds a new version (and i do not wish to download a new executable). This is on OSX. On ubuntu, because updates are controlled via apt, i'm again forced to use ancient firefox versions.
The last time i had a successful update was during the 1.5 days.
I mostly use windows 8 now, and firefox there simply does not works! Maybe it is only on my machine, I don't know, and I don't really care anymore. I really wanted to test the new non-memory eating firefox, but if tabs are disappearing, and flickering in a weird way (some random image appears instead of the tabs), than I can't use it.
Hi, author of the post here. I never anticipated HN-style traffic on my personal blog. My poor lighttpd server couldn't handle it. I just rebooted; should work now.
Chrome uses courgette, now if it actually became a standalone project that could be used outside of google (you need to jump through their frankly stupid build system) I'm sure it would see adoption.
Courgette is very cool, but all it does is make updates smaller, which is only one part of making updates less annoying. Also, Google was sued in 2009 for patent infringement for the algorithm, which likely makes other people nervous about using it. I'm not sure if or how that was resolved.
I went back to Firefox for a bit when Ubiquity was under active development. I've never seen a new drop-in user interface add so much to my productivity...
"After years of aspiring to improve software usability, I've come to the extremely humbling realization that the single best thing most companies could do to improve usability is to stop changing the UI so often!"
I wish I could ink this command onto the right hand of programmers (and program managers) everywhere.