6 ms·

Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser. If that's insightful or useful comments hit me... I really don't understand this hate towa

by joakin 15y ago

Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser. If that's insightful or useful comments hit me... I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around lately. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that talks about other projects. If you dont like Firefox its fine, but it's a wonderful project with millions of users and that cannot be denied. Sending my opinion to oblivion because of pointing how unrelated the firefox rant comments are to the article makes no sense.

norswap 15y ago
Building an os is hard stuff, and if you can't produce a browser without memory leaks (or a caching strategy I can't possibly start to fathom), you're not headed in the right direction.
- rpearl 15y ago
  http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 ...etc... Guess Google shouldn't be writing an OS either? I have three points with this post. My first is that, despite the extremely good marketing, Chrome has faults just like any other large piece of software. The point is that they have good engineers on the problems. So does Mozilla. My second is claim is that a Firefox-based solution is good for the web. Even if it isn't as successful as Android, it will open up the web more! Android is a farce of open source (I cannot get the kernel code running on my phone. That is a blatant GPL violation. Nobody is doing anything about it. I cannot get the Android userland code running on my tablet. That is just not open source.) At the moment, Android is scarcely more open than iOS. My last claim is that many of the "memory leaks" in Firefox are either caching--memory which is not being used is memory which is being wasted--and those which are truly memory leaks tend to be from binary extensions. The new extension SDK should mitigate this, since it is sandboxed JS code instead, from what I understand (disclaimer: i do not work on the extension API, nor do I write extensions, and I could by way off here.)
  - zobzu 15y ago
    Unfortunately it's the new black to hit on Firefox/Mozilla. I fear this leads to a Google-monopoly that would be bad for everyone.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    Honestly yes. Google should not be writing an OS either. But lets be fair here, Google has waaaay more resources than Mozilla (hell, most of Mozillas resources come from Google...), and a comparison between Chrome and Firefox shows that.
    - rpearl 15y ago
      There is a law of decreasing returns when it comes to "resources". That is to say, an engineer only makes so much, and throwing additional engineers at a single project only gains you so much, and the gains of each additional engineer are far less. And the comparison between Chrome and Firefox shows... nothing? In my usage, Firefox works fine and Chrome swaps like hell and crashes even when I can get it working. Clearly other people have different experiences, but I can't reproduce them. And you would not argue that IE6 was better than Firefox 1.0, I am sure. Microsoft had waaaay more resources than Mozilla then too. That is not indicative of failure.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        "And you would not argue that IE6 was better than Firefox 1.0, I am sure. Microsoft had waaaay more resources than Mozilla then too. That is not indicative of failure." At the time, Microsoft was not providing shit for resources to the IE team (by that time they had already creamed netscape), so really that's just another example of how insufficient resources will starve a browser project.
f7u12 15y ago
I'd have to trust Mozilla to keep up in the browser space before I considered using an OS developed by them.
mindcrime 15y ago
I think it's more like "tough love" than hate. If I bitch about Firefox, it's because I want to love Firefox, but I can't. That pisses me off. If I didn't care about it, like the way I don't care about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera, I wouldn't talk about it, like I never talk about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera.
- DEinspanjer 15y ago
  I checked your comments and you certainly aren't a regular Mozilla flamer, so I'll take what you say here at face value. The thing that frustrates me is how many other people come out of the woodwork on any Mozilla or Firefox related post to give the story, "I used to love Firefox but it uses too much memory so I switched to Chrome and now I'm so happy". My opinion is Google has some amazing marketing and social skills to power that kind of sentiment shift. The big thing that rarely comes up in those threads is that Mozilla is a community. There are memory bugs that have been open in bugzilla for years, but there have been various people in the community working on them, sometimes in their spare time, for years as well. You look at the scope of the project, and it isn't small. It certainly isn't a hack project someone can commit a quick patch to in a day.. There are certainly paid Mozilla employees working on the code base every day, but the number doesn't compare with any of the other major browser vendors. The FirefoxFlippers™ rarely ever follow up with something like, "I tried to look at the problem and realized what a difficult thing memory management is so I took the easy path and decided to let some profit based vendor do it for me and hope that they treat me well." My personal and probably bias experience is that I have never felt a memory issue. I tend to run a lot of add-ons and I only rarely keep a lot of tabs open because I prefer to follow a pattern of opening up a bunch of things then working my way back down to zero. I feel that most memory issues are related to bad add-ons, bad plug-ins, or bad websites, and I am very happy with the new about:memory stats that show up in Aurora. I just hope that some of the FirefoxFlippers™ who aren't just trolling for Google might take a moment to try out their easily repeatable excessive memory use-cases and drop us a line so we can work together with the community to get rid of them. I'll now take my downmodding for ranting on a post with a comment that is only tangentially related to the topic. :/
  - 15y ago
pnathan 15y ago
Honestly? Because Firefox performance is atrocious, and that is the single most salient point from the Mozilla project.
- ootachi 15y ago
  Have any evidence that Firefox performance is "atrocious"? Firefox JavaScript is faster than any other browser except Chrome (and beats Chrome on some apps like JSLint), and it has GPU acceleration while Chrome does not.
  - pnathan 15y ago
    It runs like a lame dog, in total. No, I don't have benchmarks. I was astonished at the relative speed Chrome had a good while ago, and I switched over. It might be as simple as good UX engineering to enhance perception of performance while other things happen in the background. I have no idea. But on {Win|Mac|Linux}, Chrome just zooms.
hn_decay 15y ago
I am in complete agreement. And quite honestly it grows tiring actually refuting the various anti-Firefox rants with actual fact -- it is a bit of a hobbyhorse of some people while they cheer on whatever team they're waving the flag of. It honestly must be emotionally exhausting to work for Mozilla projects. For all of the incredible work they have done (Firefox is the reason Apple still exists...I'll argue that point if anyone would like), there are so many anti-Firefox fanboys who appear in every single Mozilla discussion to express their ridiculous anecdotes or to make uninformed, naive performance observations.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  I wonder what your theory is on how these "anti-Firefox fanbois" are created? I used to be a "Pro-Firefox fanboi", had the apparel and everything. Now I no longer use it and on occasion like to publicly comment about my new dislike of it. Since the facts are apparently not on my side, what is going on here?
  - hn_decay 15y ago
    Firefox was once the "I'm ahead of you" browser of choice for people who need to be propped up by their choices (of software or hardware). Eventually it got popular enough that some subsection of those people had to move on, generally to Chrome. Eventually the same nonsense will happen with Chrome (the loudmouths deriding it publicly for being yesterday's news). So, essentially, browser hipsters.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      Cool theory, except my bicycle has a respectable number of gears and I think Lady Gaga is pretty good. Face it, people bitch about Firefox because they legitimately had bad user eperiances. Your attitude doesn't suprize me though, it seems to be one held by Mozilla devs too.
      - pcwalton 15y ago
        I am a Mozilla dev. I certainly don't hold the attitude that there's something wrong with you if you don't like Firefox. Rather, I'm interested to hear about your bad user experience so that we can improve.

by joakin 15y ago

norswap 15y ago

Building an os is hard stuff, and if you can't produce a browser without memory leaks (or a caching strategy I can't possibly start to fathom), you're not headed in the right direction.

rpearl 15y ago
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 ...etc... Guess Google shouldn't be writing an OS either? I have three points with this post. My first is that, despite the extremely good marketing, Chrome has faults just like any other large piece of software. The point is that they have good engineers on the problems. So does Mozilla. My second is claim is that a Firefox-based solution is good for the web. Even if it isn't as successful as Android, it will open up the web more! Android is a farce of open source (I cannot get the kernel code running on my phone. That is a blatant GPL violation. Nobody is doing anything about it. I cannot get the Android userland code running on my tablet. That is just not open source.) At the moment, Android is scarcely more open than iOS. My last claim is that many of the "memory leaks" in Firefox are either caching--memory which is not being used is memory which is being wasted--and those which are truly memory leaks tend to be from binary extensions. The new extension SDK should mitigate this, since it is sandboxed JS code instead, from what I understand (disclaimer: i do not work on the extension API, nor do I write extensions, and I could by way off here.)
- zobzu 15y ago
  Unfortunately it's the new black to hit on Firefox/Mozilla. I fear this leads to a Google-monopoly that would be bad for everyone.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  Honestly yes. Google should not be writing an OS either. But lets be fair here, Google has waaaay more resources than Mozilla (hell, most of Mozillas resources come from Google...), and a comparison between Chrome and Firefox shows that.
  - rpearl 15y ago
    There is a law of decreasing returns when it comes to "resources". That is to say, an engineer only makes so much, and throwing additional engineers at a single project only gains you so much, and the gains of each additional engineer are far less. And the comparison between Chrome and Firefox shows... nothing? In my usage, Firefox works fine and Chrome swaps like hell and crashes even when I can get it working. Clearly other people have different experiences, but I can't reproduce them. And you would not argue that IE6 was better than Firefox 1.0, I am sure. Microsoft had waaaay more resources than Mozilla then too. That is not indicative of failure.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      "And you would not argue that IE6 was better than Firefox 1.0, I am sure. Microsoft had waaaay more resources than Mozilla then too. That is not indicative of failure." At the time, Microsoft was not providing shit for resources to the IE team (by that time they had already creamed netscape), so really that's just another example of how insufficient resources will starve a browser project.

f7u12 15y ago

I'd have to trust Mozilla to keep up in the browser space before I considered using an OS developed by them.

mindcrime 15y ago

I think it's more like "tough love" than hate. If I bitch about Firefox, it's because I want to love Firefox, but I can't. That pisses me off. If I didn't care about it, like the way I don't care about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera, I wouldn't talk about it, like I never talk about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera.

DEinspanjer 15y ago
I checked your comments and you certainly aren't a regular Mozilla flamer, so I'll take what you say here at face value. The thing that frustrates me is how many other people come out of the woodwork on any Mozilla or Firefox related post to give the story, "I used to love Firefox but it uses too much memory so I switched to Chrome and now I'm so happy". My opinion is Google has some amazing marketing and social skills to power that kind of sentiment shift. The big thing that rarely comes up in those threads is that Mozilla is a community. There are memory bugs that have been open in bugzilla for years, but there have been various people in the community working on them, sometimes in their spare time, for years as well. You look at the scope of the project, and it isn't small. It certainly isn't a hack project someone can commit a quick patch to in a day.. There are certainly paid Mozilla employees working on the code base every day, but the number doesn't compare with any of the other major browser vendors. The FirefoxFlippers™ rarely ever follow up with something like, "I tried to look at the problem and realized what a difficult thing memory management is so I took the easy path and decided to let some profit based vendor do it for me and hope that they treat me well." My personal and probably bias experience is that I have never felt a memory issue. I tend to run a lot of add-ons and I only rarely keep a lot of tabs open because I prefer to follow a pattern of opening up a bunch of things then working my way back down to zero. I feel that most memory issues are related to bad add-ons, bad plug-ins, or bad websites, and I am very happy with the new about:memory stats that show up in Aurora. I just hope that some of the FirefoxFlippers™ who aren't just trolling for Google might take a moment to try out their easily repeatable excessive memory use-cases and drop us a line so we can work together with the community to get rid of them. I'll now take my downmodding for ranting on a post with a comment that is only tangentially related to the topic. :/
- 15y ago

pnathan 15y ago

Honestly? Because Firefox performance is atrocious, and that is the single most salient point from the Mozilla project.

ootachi 15y ago
Have any evidence that Firefox performance is "atrocious"? Firefox JavaScript is faster than any other browser except Chrome (and beats Chrome on some apps like JSLint), and it has GPU acceleration while Chrome does not.
- pnathan 15y ago
  It runs like a lame dog, in total. No, I don't have benchmarks. I was astonished at the relative speed Chrome had a good while ago, and I switched over. It might be as simple as good UX engineering to enhance perception of performance while other things happen in the background. I have no idea. But on {Win|Mac|Linux}, Chrome just zooms.

hn_decay 15y ago

I am in complete agreement. And quite honestly it grows tiring actually refuting the various anti-Firefox rants with actual fact -- it is a bit of a hobbyhorse of some people while they cheer on whatever team they're waving the flag of. It honestly must be emotionally exhausting to work for Mozilla projects. For all of the incredible work they have done (Firefox is the reason Apple still exists...I'll argue that point if anyone would like), there are so many anti-Firefox fanboys who appear in every single Mozilla discussion to express their ridiculous anecdotes or to make uninformed, naive performance observations.

burgerbrain 15y ago
I wonder what your theory is on how these "anti-Firefox fanbois" are created? I used to be a "Pro-Firefox fanboi", had the apparel and everything. Now I no longer use it and on occasion like to publicly comment about my new dislike of it. Since the facts are apparently not on my side, what is going on here?
- hn_decay 15y ago
  Firefox was once the "I'm ahead of you" browser of choice for people who need to be propped up by their choices (of software or hardware). Eventually it got popular enough that some subsection of those people had to move on, generally to Chrome. Eventually the same nonsense will happen with Chrome (the loudmouths deriding it publicly for being yesterday's news). So, essentially, browser hipsters.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    Cool theory, except my bicycle has a respectable number of gears and I think Lady Gaga is pretty good. Face it, people bitch about Firefox because they legitimately had bad user eperiances. Your attitude doesn't suprize me though, it seems to be one held by Mozilla devs too.
    - pcwalton 15y ago
      I am a Mozilla dev. I certainly don't hold the attitude that there's something wrong with you if you don't like Firefox. Rather, I'm interested to hear about your bad user experience so that we can improve.