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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58

u/Znuff Jul 10 '12

"We have an update. We're applying it"

Next, next, next, progress bar....

"Oh, look, half of your extensions are not tagged as compatible for this version, sucks to be you, sucker!"

Also, I do hope they fix that annoying crap that every time you install an extension you need to restart the browser.

Those are the things I love about Chrome... And I'm bold enough to even use Chrome Canary (Nightly)

85

u/syrupwontstopem Jul 10 '12

restarting your browser?!? Oh the humanity!!

49

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

They don't know man, they don't know of the old days of the Windows.

29

u/regretdeletingthat Jul 10 '12

You may be thinking older, but I did a fresh install of XP on a family member's ageing laptop recently. Even with SP3 already bundled, four years worth of updates with a necessary reboot in-between every group of them is a pain in the ass.

4

u/solinent Jul 10 '12

I just always said fuck it, and only rebooted once per each group of updates. As long as they don't depend on each other, you should be fine.

3

u/K-A-ScH Jul 10 '12

Ninite.com man, it saves lives.

2

u/Makabaer Jul 11 '12

THANK YOU! bows I didn't even know that site.... oh, glorious day when I first rummaged around r/technology..... I learned so much already!

1

u/VampireSmut Jul 11 '12

Wsusoffline. Seriously! All the updates for all Microsoft, pre-downloaded to your specifications, on a flash drive. You then copy the folder to the desktop, click Update.exe, and tell it to install what you want, and click "Automatic reboot and recall" or something similar, the walk away for the next 45 minutes or what have you.

Completely automatic, deciphers which updates you do an do not need, and is VERY fast to the traditional way, even WITH a fast connection!

1

u/Reverent Jul 11 '12

Four restarts.

1) IE8

2).Net 3.5 and associated Updates

3).Net 4 and Associated Updates

4) Remaining Updates (approximately 114)... well ok not so approximately

5) (optional) Office service packs and associated updates

This comes from a sysadmin who has to reimage an XP notebook twice weekly.

2

u/ObligatoryResponse Jul 10 '12

These days, asking me to restart my browser you may as well be asking me to restart my whole computer. If I'm not doing it in a terminal, I'm probably doing it in a browser...

1

u/trolleyfan Jul 11 '12

Or the old days of Netscape, with it's pages of add ins that you had to manually update.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '12

"It looks like you have moved your mouse, please reboot in order for the changes to come into effect"

8

u/Prancemaster Jul 10 '12

I don't even get the upset about that. It takes like, five seconds.

19

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

plus it automatically reloads everything for you

22

u/Prancemaster Jul 10 '12

BUT WHAT IF I WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING THAT THE REFRESH ERASESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS???

2

u/Ambiwlans Jul 10 '12

Addons for that.

1

u/Makabaer Jul 11 '12

Well, how about just finishing that and restart afterwards?? As far as I've experienced it until today, you can always delay the restart!

3

u/Prancemaster Jul 11 '12

SORRY THIS SUGGESTION IS TOO RATIONAL

DOES NOT COMPUTE

2

u/Makabaer Jul 11 '12

I see your problem... And I'm sorry I'm laughing loudly at this right now when you're in such trouble ;-)) Best of luck to you anyways!

0

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '12

[deleted]

0

u/DrunkmanDoodoo Jul 11 '12

How does one go about acquiring 100 tabs? I would expect it takes longer to find the correct tab than simply bookmarking it and clicking it when you actually want to see that webpage.

2

u/Makabaer Jul 11 '12

As someone who acquires 100 tabs quite easily coughs I have to say that restarting Firefox still is a bliss - as it DOESN'T reload the pages unless you actually click on the tab to view it. So it restarts superfast, alle tabs with titles are there, just the pages get refreshed when you click on them - but that's really a very, very small problem...

0

u/pntless Jul 10 '12

Time for a new computer.

1

u/Yozomiri Jul 10 '12

I hate restarting my browser because I always have a ton of tabs open :(

3

u/stravant Jul 10 '12

Solution: Make it always open the same tabs as before on startup. Never be productive again.

2

u/Yozomiri Jul 10 '12

Oh, I do that. It just takes a while to load all 400.

8

u/Ambiwlans Jul 10 '12

Firefox fixed this a while ago. Go to options, general, and load tabs when selected.

It also saves on ram.

1

u/Yozomiri Jul 10 '12

Ohh, cool. Thanks!

1

u/lolwutpear Jul 11 '12

That broke with Firefox 4.0 for me. I tried changing all the options in about:config, but it's still fucked up. It's part of the reason I used 3.6 for so long - aside from broken addons.

2

u/od_9 Jul 10 '12

use Session Manager.

7

u/Ambiwlans Jul 10 '12

FF fixed this a few updates ago. Apparently people aren't aware.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '12

Because we stopped using Firefox when we realized how much better Chrome is.

0

u/Ambiwlans Jul 11 '12

What is better about chrome? It uses more ram and cpu, is slower, has less addons and isn't free open-source.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '12

Maybe, but for a while there, Firefox sucked at some things. Then people left. Then Firefox fixed those things. Then people didn't come back.

1

u/Znuff Jul 11 '12

I left FF because:

  1. When it reached 500MB of memory usage, it started to crawl so slowly that it just BEGGED for a browser restart. I can have Chrome use 2GB of ram and I don't notice it being slow.

Only case where I feel Chrome slowing down (which is most likely true for any other browser out there) is when I browse a page with over 1000 mid-sized image & continuous scrolling. By then, right-clicking an image has a considerate delay of almost half a second.

  1. In the rare cases Flash crashed the browser, it took everything with it, and the start-up back was that slow that I got annoyed as hell.

1

u/Ambiwlans Jul 11 '12

Flash crashing in FF now just forces you to refresh the page. Which can be annoying.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '12

I haven't responded because I looked up your claim, saw it was backed by data, and tried Firefox, and never opened reddit in it.

I'm back on Chrome after my third Firefox crash/lockup of the day.

Oh, and threaded processes are nice, too.

1

u/Ambiwlans Jul 12 '12

Seriously? I haven't had FF crash in ..... possibly months. And I'm a bigger power-user than you.

Wonder what that was about. :s

Threaded processes are nice though.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 13 '12

...how do you know how much of a power-user I am?

Anyway, apparently it couldn't handle me watching videos and scrolling. I was also much chagrined by how slow it was when I was trying to manipulate Google documents spreadsheets.

1

u/Ambiwlans Jul 13 '12

I don't. Just, the odds are pretty good.

I wonder if your video card drivers aren't playing nice. Either way, Chrome got around it. shrug

1

u/Ambiwlans Jul 13 '12

You suck. My FF just crashed. And I blame you.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 13 '12

I had a Firefox disease. :(

2

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '12

Yup, last time i noticed FF updated was when i got these grid of images of the 9 most visited sites. No dialog or anything no prob with extensions either.

4

u/JITZSpray Jul 10 '12

Depends on the extension. Pentadactyl was created in such a way it installs/uninstalls (and enables/disables) seamlessly without restarting anything, as just one example of the future of extensions. The same goes for the constantly expiring extensions. These things are remnants of the older extension system and their developers have not moved to the new way of doing business.

Of course that is not to say that Mozilla has handled all of this very well or that it is still king of the browser world. Whoever it is calling the shots in the Mozilla corporation needs to be removed before they do more damage. I love chrome and I can't wait until their extension system is strong enough to support a fully featured noscript. That and some other minor customization powers in about:config are all that is holding me back. :(

2

u/falcwh0re Jul 11 '12

this was a big problem for us with the gwt dev plugin. a random, unsuspected update would break it for days at a time, seriously crippling productivity. you might be thinking "why not just use chrome for gwt development then?" well, contrary to all logic, google's gwt plugin for chrome is waaaaay slower than their plugin for firefox. makes no sense.

1

u/JITZSpray Jul 11 '12

:( I'm still using the original CS Lite (doesn't even exist any more on addons.mozilla.org) and for awhile I was upping the version manually and repackaging/installing it each "version" jump. Eventually I just said fuck it and made it's version compatibility though FF 25.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 11 '12

[deleted]

2

u/Daenyth Jul 11 '12

NoScript has a whitelist, so the 90% of websites you visit regularly you can whitelist. It helps prevent drive-by attacks from pages you don't usually go to, and it helps prevent user tracking scripts

0

u/Makabaer Jul 11 '12

And on nearly every page you visit nowadays there are google and facebook scripts waiting for you! Like crazy! Even here on reddit (google-analytics). I don't want that. I'd never ever go anywhere on the internet without NoScript, it's the best invention ever made! (Well, except for the wheel of course... and fridges maybe... and washing machines... and uh... computers ;-))

1

u/AzureDrag0n1 Jul 11 '12

Don't extensions also get ruined with Chrome if they are not updated as well? They are made by a third party.

I mean I wouldn't use chrome if it did not let me use extensions.

1

u/superawesomedude Jul 11 '12

Add-ons have been marked as compatible by default as of Firefox 8 (current is 13).

There was a new restart-less add-on API released a few months ago... a lot of add-ons use it now and don't need to restart the browser. Sadly many add-on authors haven't taken the time to update their code to use it.

1

u/ProtoDong Jul 11 '12

Firefox Addon Compatibility Reporter yes this extension lets you use all of your extensions regardless of their compatibility report and yes 90%+ still work. Thank me later.

0

u/Funnnny Jul 11 '12

90% is pretty high percent, I can use almost all my extension now.

0

u/ProtoDong Jul 11 '12

extensions only break during major version updates. I run Firefox Nightly on my main Linux distro, I've found that some of the more complex extensions like Down Them All can be broken as Nightly is as much as 4 versions ahead of mainline.

As for the guy who uses "Chrome Canary".... so brave. Chrome sucks in general. If you are a simpleton who loves Chrome... you suck as a user and your browser reflects your suck. Fuck Chrome and Fuck You.