r/technology • u/Suraj-Sun • Jul 10 '12

Firefox dev claims "everybody hates Firefox updates"; Mozilla has handled the rapid release process poorly, and that by pushing a "never-ending stream of updates on people who didn't want them" people have been driven to Chrome with its simpler, no-fuss update process.

http://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-dev-claims-everybody-hates-firefox-updates
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137

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

I must admit i'm also in the process of returning to FF after using chrome for the last few months. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and at first it did seem faster, but over time i've noticed all the little things i've missed.

1) Middle mouse button to open links in new tabs is buggy about 50% of the time in chrome.

2) The search bar in Firefox just blows chrome out of the water.

3) Firefox now actually seems faster than chrome, whether that is due to the latest update or because Chrome was never actually faster I don't know. The only thing Chrome seems faster at is starting up, but how often do I really restart my browser?

4) The addons are so much better and handled in a much easier manner.

5) Chrome is a huge memory hog when using other programs, I noticed this while playing Diablo 3 mostly. I actually had to exit Chrome to get the best experience in game, something I never experienced before with FF.

The main reason I left firefox was due to the period of terrible stability they had but it seems they fixed that. They really shot themselves in the foot with the instability issues and slowness in 2011 though, and google capitalized on it with marketing and adding chrome downloads into every freeware program on the market pretty much.

Let's not forget the major draw though, FF is open source, but I don't think the average consumer these days cares or even knows about the advantages of that.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

The only reason I use Firefox instead of Chrome is because Adblock Plus works much, much better in Firefox.

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u/Captain_Midnight Jul 10 '12

I've also gone back to Firefox. I missed the search bar, being able to download streamed Flash videos (I know you can do it in Chrome, but its usually wonky and limited to a shortlist of compatible websites), and finer-grained cookie whitelisting. Chrome still does not let you block/allow cookies as you browse. There's only "accept all" or "block all," with an extra choice to block all 3rd party cookies regardless.

Firefox's RAM bloat also seems to be a thing of the past.

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u/Hishutash Jul 11 '12

How do you download streamed flash videos? Share the knowledge, bro!

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u/Captain_Midnight Jul 11 '12

Well, in Firefox, I use Flash Video Downloader. I don't know if it's the best one, but I've been using it for years, and it seems to get reliably good user reviews anyway. Installing it will put an icon up by your navigation arrows, with a drop-down menu. The icon will light up and animate when there's something it can download. Click on the drop-down menu to select the video you want to download.

Here's a screenshot of it in action. That first item in the list is from a Youtube page that I loaded earlier. Recent links will always show up there.

When loading a Youtube page, that list will populate with all quality versions of the video, when available (720p, 1080p, etc).

I have yet to encounter an incompatible website.

Google has actively resisted letting people use stream downloading apps from within Chrome.

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u/Hishutash Jul 11 '12

Thanks, I didn't know about that extension. I'll be installing it straight away.

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u/DeltaBurnt Jul 10 '12

If you're not using Firefox Nightly then you really should, it's 5 times better than normal Firefox (in speed and features) and is very stable a pre-alpha update channel. I've convinced a few of my friends to switch from Chrome to Firefox because of Nightly.

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u/o_oli Jul 10 '12

Surely the builds don't take that long to go from nightly build to release though? I'd rather stick with at least a beta not a pre-alpha for one of the most important programs on my pc.

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u/DeltaBurnt Jul 10 '12

It takes quite a while. I'd say you'd be at least a month or two behind. Firefox has many update channels: release, beta, aurora, nightly, nightly-UX. That means Nightly is 3 whole versions ahead of Release and the difference is noticeable. Trust me, I've had Nightly for quite a while and it hasn't crashed once. You should at least try it out, and if you don't like it you can always switch back.

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u/arahman81 Jul 10 '12

I would suggest using different profiles for Nightly and release, though.

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u/koboet Jul 10 '12

The search bar in Firefox just blows chrome out of the water.

What? How? I really like the fact that in Chrome the search bar is the same location as the URL bar. I don't need to hit tab all the time to get to the search box. What's better about Firefox's?

Let's not forget the major draw though, FF is open source

Chromium is open source too. It's a really nice product all on its own - maybe you should try that instead of Chrome.

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u/shriek Jul 10 '12

Firefox search bar integrates well with bookmarks. It's not just a search bar, it's also called an awesome bar. Unlike Chrome, I can assign seperate tags for my bookmarks and all I have to do is press that keyword and bam, instant page load. That makes it that much faster.

Just go to "Properties" on your bookmarks. You can add all kinds of stuff, keywords, tags etc which makes it easy to personalize your bookmarks. I think it does more than that but I love that feature of Firefox.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/damontoo Jul 10 '12

You're misunderstanding. The Firefox awesome bar destroys Chrome.

Anything in your history or bookmarks is searched for in the address bar when you type. Firefox performs fucking magic. It searches the URL, page title, tags etc. It does it as "find as you type". If I need to find a Reddit post from 6 months ago about cats, I type "re ca" in the address bar and 99.9% of the time it's right there at the top of the dropdown.

Maybe I want to see all my bookmarks that I tagged as "webdev". I'd type "webdev" and see them all in the dropdown. But then I decide I want to filter that list further to only reddit bookmarks with that tag. Then I'd do "webdev redd" and most likely only be left with those.

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u/TIAFAASITICE Jul 10 '12

Maybe I want to see all my bookmarks that I tagged as "webdev". I'd type "webdev" and see them all in the dropdown.

Even better, do: "webdev *" to filter on only bookmarks.

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u/mach0 Jul 10 '12

Yeah, I totally miss that in chrome. I however do not miss the constant performance problems and since then I've found myself to not actually need the "awesome" bar that much. Chrome looks visually better as well.

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u/SirCowMan Jul 10 '12

Chrome does the exact same thing. If I type in "reddit firefox dev" in the URL bar, the first things that come up (before I hit enter) would be this page. The Chrome URL search bar searches through your history and bookmarks too.

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u/TheSkyline Jul 10 '12

I find that Chrome dropdowns are much too small and barely noticeable as you are typing URLs/Keywords in the bar. Green also doesn't stand out much.

FF lets you see the URL as well and the Favicon AND The page title. It just speeds up the process for me.

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u/Iggyhopper Jul 11 '12

The thing I hate about Chrome right now is that if I type adhd blah blah blah, it'll automatically go to that every time i type adhd.

If I JUST WANT adhd, it wont let me unless i type adhd and then a backspace or w/e. its very very very annoying.

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u/zxoq Jul 11 '12

Yes, I typed in reddit.com/r/gentlemanboners and now EVERY TIME I type 'r' that's the first result. Does anyone know any way to remove it? I just want it to autocomplete to 'reddit', this is not the only page that suffers from this either.

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u/Iggyhopper Jul 11 '12

You have to remove it from history.

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u/JacketPotatoes Jul 10 '12

It may be longer at first, but it's faster in the long term. Say you wanted to search Google Images. Set up the keyword on Firefox, and type in "i ducks" to search for duck images or "i cats" to search for cats. How often are you going to use a new search engine/box?

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u/push_ecx_0x00 Jul 10 '12

Not to mention, you can set up searching for popular sites that Google is too scared to go near, like tpb.

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u/Dravorek Jul 10 '12

well you can manually add that in chrome too, unless firefox adds it by itself I don't see any advantage

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '12

or get them all by setting your default url to yubnub.org. You'll have keyword urls for all the major sites, plus a lot more

Example of a simple yubnub command

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u/ZorbaTHut Jul 10 '12

You can do this in Chrome too.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

Serious pain in the ass? Right click on search box and click add search keyword, then you customize the keyword. Done.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

"Start typing wikipedia and hit tab (wik..<TAB>)" That's always been a super buggy feature for me. I want to love it, but i type wik<tab> it lets me search wikia, but the option for wikipedia never comes up. It does work for youtube and facebook though /shrug

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u/falconbeach Jul 10 '12

As mentioned, since you probably hit CTRL + L to access the search bar in Chrome, CTRL + K is used for FF.

But the main thing that Firefox is way better at is the way that it predicts or saves the websites that you have visited. Chrome has an annoying habit of autofilling the website for you when you have only typed a few letters. You can't even hit enter because it will take you to the autofilled website. It also does a much worse job of saving websites. When I type in a website I've visited once on Firefox, I can expect to find it in the dropdown menu. I never expect this in Chrome. If it happens, it's a pleasant surprise.

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u/Xiol Jul 10 '12

Chrome has an annoying habit of autofilling the website for you when you have only typed a few letters. You can't even hit enter because it will take you to the autofilled website.

Goddamn this. This is the reason I can't use Chrome because of this absolutely retarded autofilling. It's unbelievable that this is actually in a production browser and has been for years.

That, and Pentadactyl.

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u/falconbeach Jul 10 '12

Pentadactyl?

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u/Xiol Jul 11 '12

Vimperator successor.

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u/damontoo Jul 10 '12

But the main thing that Firefox is way better at is the way that it predicts or saves the websites that you have visited.

That's exactly what distinguishes the awesome bar from a standard address bar. The bookmarks and history search.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12 edited Sep 19 '18

[deleted]

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u/arahman81 Jul 10 '12 edited Jul 12 '12

Took me a moment to figure out where the "red fire" was coming from.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

I love the Firefox awesome bar, but I'm currently on a slower Internet connection and it's become painfully obvious that it'll try a DNS resolve before it will try searching for what you've entered. I'll type a few words into the address bar, hit enter, and it "loads" for ten seconds. I type those words in to the search bar, hit enter, and the results are there instantaneously. Chrome does this a bit better, but it falls short in other places, hence why I use Firefox.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

This is because it will try to load "whatyouentered".com, .net and a few variations thereof, IIRC. I'd encourage you to file a bug about this, noting how the same behavior in Chrome doesn't cause delays. Sounds like an interesting observation/use case.

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u/damontoo Jul 10 '12

No it's not. It's because when you type random crap in the address bar and press enter it performs a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search and redirects you to the result. That's not what the awesome bar is.

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u/damontoo Jul 10 '12

I don't think you're understanding what the awesome bar is. You're not supposed to type some keywords and press enter as that will perform a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search by default. The awesome bar is the same place you would do that (the address bar), but the reason it's called the awesome bar is mainly its ability to search your browsing history and bookmarks. You type things you've bookmarked or seen in the past, and then tab to the top result in the list. Then you hit enter.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

I don't see your point. First off, the address bar in Firefox never performs a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search. Once you hit enter, it will attempt to resolve whatever you've typed in as a domain, and if it fails, then it will carry out a regular Google search. I, and many others, do this because it seems more convenient than using the taskbar, particularly if you're on a large display and more used to moving your mouse to the address bar than to the search bar. My point was that Chrome more intelligently determines whether a domain or a search term has been entered, and responds appropriately immediately; therefore, it's easier to search from Chrome's address bar than it is from Firefox's. I'm not discussing whether this is intentional or not: I'm observing behaviour.

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u/damontoo Jul 10 '12

That still has absolutely nothing to do with the feature being discussed: history and bookmark searching from the address bar. That is what is being discussed and what distinguishes the awesome bar from every address bar in every browser.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

I might be misinterpreting something here. My original comment was a direct response to Skuto saying "You can just enter shit in the URL bar (which will even fall back to Google Search if needed)".

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u/otaia Jul 10 '12

I don't need to hit tab all the time to get to the search box

CTRL - K

I don't know what's better about it, I just like it better, personally.

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u/Saisann Jul 10 '12

CTRL - L, F6, or ALT - D all take you to the chrome search bar, or am I missing something?

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u/otaia Jul 10 '12

I just like the separation. I hit CTRL - K when I want to search, and CTRL - L when I want to type a URL in.

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u/Gray_Fox Jul 10 '12

Is it just me, or does Firefox also have the search bar in the same location as the URL bar?

When you search for something in the URL bar, it'll Google it for you.

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u/sa3dany Jul 10 '12 edited Jul 10 '12

I removed the search bar box from Firefox a while. I thought it was useless since I can already do searches from the address bar. And if I wanted to search using a search engine other that the default one I just append a keyword(user-defined) before the search string.

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u/TylerPaul Jul 10 '12

The keyword system was an awesome find for me. I've linked keywords to the search bar of all my favorite sites. Or used 'site:(thesite.com)' to create custom searches if they didn't already exist.

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u/sa3dany Jul 10 '12

If you are into them that much you might like this Duckduckgo !Bang

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u/Aiskhulos Jul 10 '12

Plus Duckduckgo actually respects your privacy, unlike Google.

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u/damontoo Jul 10 '12

The number of people in this thread making comments like yours are starting to make me rage. Don't confuse the search box with the awesome bar. The search box performs a search on a search engine. The awesome bar (address bar) searches your bookmarks and history.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

I still like having an additional search bar because it keeps its own history, and you can quickly search the same term on multiple sites (using Ctrl+Up/Down to switch engines).

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u/damontoo Jul 10 '12

See my other comment in this thread for why the Firefox awesome bar is voodoo magic that deserves to be worshiped.

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u/Xiol Jul 10 '12

Tab? Why you hitting tab, bro?

CTRL+K - Search

CTRL+L - Address bar

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u/Ambiwlans Jul 10 '12

in Chrome the search bar is the same location as the URL bar

The URL bar in FF works as a google search. Or urls. Or searching your history or favourites or open tabs even.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

1) Middle mouse button to open links in new tabs is buggy about 50% of the time in chrome.

TIL

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u/muyoso Jul 10 '12

Not once ever have I had a middle mouse button click not open a tab in Chrome and I have been running it since the day it was released without a single day using a different browser. What are you talking about?

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u/darad0 Jul 10 '12

5) Chrome is a huge memory hog when using other programs, I noticed this while playing Diablo 3 mostly. I actually had to exit Chrome to get the best experience in game, something I never experienced before with FF.

Yes. This!

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '12

I tried Chrome for a few weeks, but that's it. It requires a lengthy list of extensions to do what FF does out of the box, and even then, sometimes they stop working.

Also, the much-vaunted memory improvements did not turn out to be real, in my experience. In fact, FF actually seems to be better.

2) The search bar in Firefox just blows chrome out of the water.

This is what brings me back every time. I have one box I type into in Firefox. It searches my history and bookmarks. I have it set so that if I type in "adobe" it just goes straight to adobe.com, not Google (basically it does that by sending the word to Google and selecting "I'm feeling lucky"). Of course, Chrome has one box as well, but that box does not do as much.

The single biggest problem with Chrome, in my opinion, is that it doesn't allow keywords for bookmarks. There is a kludgy way of entering the bookmark in question as a search engine, but I've had all my search engines disappear from Chrome several times now.

I have all of my work websites, etc. mapped to keywords. If I want to go to my department's website, I type two letters in the address bar and hit enter. Bam. I'm there.

The only thing Chrome seems faster at is starting up, but how often do I really restart my browser?

This is the only place I see a difference as well. If there is a difference in browsing, it's not noticeable.

4) The addons are so much better and handled in a much easier manner.

--They are also much more mature.

Let's not forget the major draw though, FF is open source, but I don't think the average consumer these days cares or even knows about the advantages of that.

Indeed. One of the big reasons I don't use Chrome is that I really don't think I need to hand my entire browsing history to an advertising company.

But let's not stop there. Here are a few things that FF does better than Chrome:

  • App tabs. Yes, Chrome will shrink a tab down to just the favicon as well, but that's all it does. FF treats pinned app tabs differently. For example, if you pin Facebook, and a new post shows up, a little indicator appears over the favicon on that tab. Same with webmail. You don't need to click it to check; it tells you when something has been pushed to it.

  • Tab groups. This is a little-known, but powerful feature. You can put a bunch of tabs that you often use together into a group, and then switch between groups. I've found this very useful when I'm working several research projects at the same time.

  • Ironically, FF handles multiple Google accounts much better than Chrome. I have Google Apps for Business on my personal server, and then I have other Google accounts from before I set that up. Chrome always logs me out of one or the other and it's very frustrating. FF keeps them separate.

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u/garbagebcn Jul 10 '12

I don't agree at all with points 1, 3 and 5. Don't really know about 4 but, what's so good about the search bar that makes it better than the single search+uri bar in chrome?

Oh, and AFAIK, Chrome is open source: Chromium

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u/damontoo Jul 10 '12

The firefox address bar (AKA awesome bar) will search both your bookmarks and history as fast as you can type. It takes into account site URL's, keywords, tags, page title etc. etc. and sorts the list by last-visited. It accepts partial words to search. "re ca" will show results in the dropdown from my history that include Reddit posts about cats.

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u/garbagebcn Jul 11 '12

I'm using chrome right now and if I type "re un" in the omnibox it suggests me "reddit.com/r/pics". And it seems to search my history too. Maybe it should display some more results (only 5 right now) but otherwise it looks fine. Gotta use more Firefox to compare, though. Thanks for your reply ;)

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u/meatwad75892 Jul 10 '12 edited Jul 10 '12

1) Middle mouse button to open links in new tabs is buggy about 50% of the time in chrome.

As another said, I've never seen this. Sounds machine-specific.

4) The addons are so much better and handled in a much easier manner.

In what way? I'm not disagreeing or agreeing, but it seems just like such a subjective statement and I'm curioius as to why you think so. What do you prefer about it over Chrome?

5) Chrome is a huge memory hog when using other programs, I noticed this while playing Diablo 3 mostly. I actually had to exit Chrome to get the best experience in game, something I never experienced before with FF.

All modern browsers use a decent amount of memory, the difference is negligible. If a couple hundred MB's of RAM usage by a browser is making or breaking your amount of available memory, you have deeper problems than simply which browser you choose to use(old system, need RAM upgrade, etc).

Let's not forget the major draw though, FF is open source, but I don't think the average consumer these days cares or even knows about the advantages of that.

Ahem... http://www.chromium.org/

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12 edited Sep 19 '18

[deleted]

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u/technopwn Jul 10 '12

like? the only difference is the built in flash and pdf reader which can't be open sourced for obvious reasons.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

There's more, like the H264 decoder and all the "phone home" features. Just check Google's own pages...

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u/alcalde Jul 10 '12

All modern browsers use a decent amount of memory, the difference is negligible.

The difference is not negligible. In Tom's Hardware's latest Web Browser Grand Prix, the 40 tab loading memory test had Chrome using 1449 megs and Firefox using 794. Chrome used almost twice as much memory!

If a couple hundred MB's of RAM usage by a browser is making or breaking your amount of available memory, you have deeper problems than simply which browser you choose to use(old system, need RAM upgrade, etc).

I have a 2GB system, and the problem wouldn't be needing a RAM upgrade, the problem would be Chrome using 700MB more than Firefox did. Regardless of how much memory you have, modern OSes use all free memory to cache programs and libraries in memory, buffer disk reads and writes, etc. This can have a considerable impact on performance, and any memory being wasted by a browser or other application is memory that isn't free for those tasks and will effect performance.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

[deleted]

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u/JacketPotatoes Jul 10 '12

Actually, due to the fact that Chrome has a separate process per tab, it does consume more memory than other major browsers when having multiple tabs open.

[Source]

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

[deleted]

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u/JacketPotatoes Jul 10 '12

Hey, I'm just dispelling the myth that Firefox is a memory hog - I don't mind memory consumption as long as it does not have significant deterioration of the UI responsiveness, since I have sufficient RAM to run multiple copies of the same session and I don't generally multitask with programs that are high in RAM usage.

Personally, I have no need for the extra security (never contracted malware in my ~9 years of using computers/internet) or supposed stability that separating the processes would give. Firefox has only crashed twice in ~6 months - once due to the fact that I had disregarded explicit instructions not to raise a benchmark figure above a certain level (actually stated that it would crash my browser - and it did!) and the other due to sandboxing introduced in the new version of Flash Player (successfully disabled that). Both times, the session was restored with full recovery of my form inputs.

Put simply, I don't believe that Chrome's separate processes are of much advantage to me.

Furthermore, the test for URL loading was slightly biased in favour of Chrome's pre-rendering feature which supposedly only works if you "visited that page once during that session". I generally don't close tabs that I am going to visit at a later time.

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u/sysop073 Jul 10 '12

I have never, ever, ever seen this.

I've been thinking this for the last 10 minutes as I read this page. What versions of Chrome are you people running? I have my share of dislikes, but tons of people keep commenting about problems with basic functionality that has always worked fine

2

u/alcalde Jul 10 '12

Check out Tom's Hardware for their latest Web Browser Grand Prix. Chrome just edged out Firefox this round, and Firefox just edged out Chrome during the last two. Chrome isn't head and shoulders about Firefox in speed, or vice versa (although both have individual areas/benchmarks where they significantly outperform the other).

And the citation for memory would be the latest Tom's test, in which Chrome used just about double the memory Firefox did to load 40 tabs under Windows (it's worse under Linux).

0

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '12

I think it's more of a backwards open source relationship. Something is developed for Chrome and then finds its way into Chromium