My Firefox experiment
At the advice of others, I’ve decided to give Firefox a one week trial (I’ve been an IE user since version 3 or 4 took me off of Netscape). I was willing to make the switch simply because IE is really, really slow. To be honest, the “usual suspect” list of reasons didn’t factor into the discussion for me:
- Security – I think that once you turn off ActiveX for public sites (the IE default for a long time now), IE gets a lot more secure. Firefox has its share of security issues, and I think a switch for security gets you little advantage in the long run.
- Stability – IE 8 has been rock solid for me. Even when Flash acts up, IE just closes the tab and if it keeps happening, IE stops it from loading on that page. Meanwhile, my Firefox using friends have been complaining about stability issues and memory leaks since version 1. In fact, it was a friend telling me that Firefox 3.6 really handles the crashing a leakages that encouraged me to try it out.
- Add ons – From what I can tell, much of the problems that plague Firefox are actually problems with add ons. So for someone to tell me that I should move to Firefox for the add ons is really not a ringing endorsement.
For me, the user experience (UX) is everything, and IE 8 has been a good user experience. Firefox’s crashing and memory leakages have been showstoppers for me, the bad UX from those issues offset any positives. But with these issues solved, Firefox became a legitimate option for me. I am now at the end of a week of usage, and I’ve found a lot to like, and a lot to dislike. I am not sure if it is enough to convince me to make the switch permanent.
PROS
- Speed – Firefox is noticeably faster than IE. I like that the most.
- Form field handling – Some sites (Facebook, WordPress’ editor that I am using right now) do not handle vertical scrolling in IE properly, and they work fine in Firefox.
- Spell checking – I love it.
CONS
- Tab handling – Firefox may have invented tabs, but IE handles them much, much more nicely in terms of grouping them with colors and where newly opened tabs appear. I found an add on that seems to make the tabs better, but it does not work with the most recent versions of Firefox.
- OneNote integration – IE’s “Send to OneNote” is much more useful than just printing to OneNote from Firefox.
- Facebook – I hate to say it, but I use Facebook a lot. And it seems to work much better in IE than Firefox, other than the large textbox issue that I have in IE.
- UI – The Firefox UI really reminds me of an X11 app, and that is not a compliment.
- Accelerators – I got very used to the “accelerators” (especially “Map with Bing”) in IE, and I miss them in Firefox. Yes, there are similar items in Firefox via add ons, but they invariably use Google services when I prefer Bing (especially maps, where Google Maps have burned me too many times).
If I could give IE 8 the spell check and speed of Firefox, or if Firefox had the better tab handling and OneNote integration, I would be happy. For me, both browsers meet my needs on the really big UX stuff now (security, crashing, resource leaks), so the details are what are important. And right now, I don’t think either browser is so superior to the other than I won’t miss something from the other.
I think what I will do is give Chrome a similar one week trial, and perhaps Opera as well. While I am not convinced that switching browsers will revolutionize my life, I do spend enough time in one for it to make my life easier or more difficult.
J.Ja
Stick with what works best.
As for me, I still like FF 3.6.6 over Chrome. Plugins used:
o Noscript
o Adblock
o Nightly Tester Tools
o Firebug
o Web Developer
o Ubiquity
o Firefox Sync (Formerly Weave)
My base system is, naturally, Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS and the ‘icing on the cake’ is that by default Ubuntu includes an AppArmor (sandbox) profile for Firefox, so, unlike Windows, there is NO possibility for any nasties to get a toehold on Linux.
Also, for my website, I’ve switched from openSUSE to Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS and Plone CMS.
Plone is THE most secure webserver on the market. Take a few minutes to read Plone’s security overview:
http://plone.org/products/plone/security/overview
It’s currently running behind an Apache proxy and CacheFu.
Be safe.
Thanks Justin.
Dietrich
http://dtschmitz.com
P.S.
If Firefox is good enough for IBM, it’s good enough for me.
Read Bob Sutor’s piece:
http://www.sutor.com/c/2010/07/ibm-moving-to-firefox-as-default-browser/
If you think FF is fast, you should try Chrome. It is even faster loading, seems to be more forgiving and takes up much less head room at the top for menus, tabs, etc. Chrome tells you when you need a plug in and retrieves it for you. FF is vastly customizable, but Chrome is not far behind. Chrome works great in Facebook also. I have yet to find a web site that is would not display. If you are running an older XP system that is a bit taxed on memory, Chrome is the way to go.
I have been a Firefox advocate since before it was Firefox, but there are big problems these days.
Let me give one example that illustrates the lack of care, professionalism, and finish that has crept back into the product over the past few years. What was once a finished product increasingly has rough edges.
If you ever want to print a web page, don’t count on Firefox to do it. Firefox’s printing support is horrible. The “print preview” doesn’t even show what you’re going to get. Firefox often cuts off huge parts of the content, including the right sides of many pages, and simply doesn’t print that part. Meanwhile, IE has great printing support. I have to open the URL in IE just to print. Little things mean a lot.
The most recent incremental release, 3.6.6. was released solely to help people who are playing Farmville. The patch does not enhance standards compliance, but only sets a particular timer to be slightly longer for the sole purpose of making Farmville work. What a crock. The betas of 3.6.7 have updates that are actually important, so hopefully we will get back to business soon.
While Firefox can seem fast, it is actually pretty slow in Javascript performance compared to other browsers. This is even though the designer of Javascript is the one who writes Firefox’s Javascript engine. Additionally, Firefox’s is slow to download large files via HTTP and other protocols. Don’t bother filing a bug report. See below.
The main advantage of Firefox is the configurability. I hate many of the choices made by the Firefox elite for default settings over the years, but I just change them to how I like it with a startup.js file, which is a configuration file for about:config settings that can be copied into place for any new Firefox installation. If you dislike the way you do work in Firefox you can probably change that in a setting or with an extension.
Many of the Firefox developers are spending more time working for Google and Chrome/Chromium these days than they are on Firefox.
It’s not clear what the future of Firefox will be. Firefox’s organization, Mozilla, receives most of its revenue directly from Google in return for making Google Firefox user’s default choice for search. With Chrome/Chromium now starting to eat up Firefox’s market share, it is likely that Google will continue to emphasize its own Chrome over and above all other browsers, including Firefox. Mozilla’s revenue will dry up, further confining the product to its eventual fate.
What made Firefox great was how it pushed the other web browsers (especially IE) into conforming with standards. This has turned the WWW from a fad into a mainstay for “web applications” and now the web platform itself is a credible competitor to Microsoft’s dominant OS, Windows. These days, if anyone suggested that Windows enjoyed a monopoly on computer platforms, the only reaction would be chuckles. It’s no coincidence that the latest version of Windows is the best one in years. Microsoft has competition now.
With the advent of IE 9 alpha, it is clear that Microsoft’s next web browser will be nearly or more standards-compliant that Firefox. And it will probably run faster. It will be one more reason to not bother with Firefox.
The big reasons to use Firefox right now are the extensions NoScript and Flashblock (disabling or enabling Javascript and Flash Player per site and on demand). Once that type of functionality comes to browsers like IE and Opera, Firefox’s competitive advantage will start to sink.
As a former Firefox/Mozilla volunteer, I got sick and tired of the bungling by the managers of the project. Many legitimate bug reports have been denied on Bugzilla, sometimes rudely, to the detriment of the product. It would probably be helpful to Firefox users if Mozilla and the Firefox developers saw their market share take a dip, as reality might then slap some sense back into them.
Bruce -
Funny enough, I just got done spending more than a day with Chrome (http://www.formortals.com/my-experiments-with-chrome-opera/). I loved it, but the way it sticks the tabs on the title bar was a showstopper for me. It’s a shame that they don’t make that a simple toggle in the options. If they did, it would be my browser without a doubt.
J.Ja
Check out the Tab Mix Plus addon – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122
You might also like these extensions – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/lifehacker_musthaves
Iain -
THANK YOU. Firefox’s tabs are now usable! I would still like to see coloring of tabs like IE does (I’ve searched for such an add on without finding it), but the unread color is almost good enough. I think I’ll make Firefox my default again now.
J.Ja
When people stop by complaining their PC is very slow, I just install Firefox on their machines and show to them how fast it works now. Which world are you in Justin?
Firefox does have annoyances, most of which are fixed via simple add-ons. So no, it is not great out of the box, but it works just great without any unsolved issue.
I don’t think I ever claimed that IE 8 is zippy. In fact, I cite Firefox’s speed (at least in 3.6) as a major advantage over IE 8. When I get a few free minutes, I’m going to re-try a week with Firefox with the add on that makes the tab situation tolerable.
J.Ja
Justin,
You may also wish to try a unique tab manager add-on called Tree Style Tabs. I understand it’s not for everyone, but if you run a lot of tabs at once, I think it’s a much better UI metaphor to run it at the side of your browser window, than to use the default row of tabs at the top.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/
Also, others have pointed out FireBug is a great tool for any mildly complex web development and debugging. It does add enough overhead to the browser though that I run with it turned off when I’m not explicitly using it.
Finally, a great tool that’s on my “must install” list for Firefox is Prefbar. Essentially it lets you customize whatever checkboxes, comboboxes, etc you wish right in the browser’s toolbar. Want to create a dropdown box with a pre-populated list of user agents that you can change on the fly? No problem. Want to be able to toggle javascript on or off with a checkbox? Or images? Or Java or Flash? Also no problem. Want to turn off referrers? Easy. Change your browser size to reflect what it would look like at 1024×768 with the click of a button? Done.
If you can find a setting for it in the bowels of Firefox’s about:config, you can easily create a UI control for it in Prefbar.
http://prefbar.mozdev.org/
@william Richards
I’ll take a look at Tree Style Tabs; seeing as few Web sites actually use more than 50% of the screen on a large display (my main screen is 1920 x 1200), losing some of the side of the screen to that isn’t the worst thing in the world.
I’ve been a big user of Firebug for a while, up until not long ago, cross site testing and Firebug were the only reasons I would ever start Firefox.
J.Ja
@Justin James
Not to be overly nitpicky, but Tabs originated with Opera, not Firefox or Mozilla. Actually, if you want a feature rich browser, Opera is that. The problem is that they just don’t use the familiar shortcut keys that I am familiar with. But Opera isn’t a bad browser in my opinion, just not familiar enough.
When I tried Opera, I liked it. Sadly, it has the same big problem Chrome has, putting the tabs in the title bar. That’s a dealbreaker for me!
J.Ja
I use Firefox with NoScript and All-in-One Gestures. IE/Chrome/Opera/etc don’t have direct, comparable equivalents.
I like Firefox most of all because of its memory footprint and stability. If you are seeing a browser performance increase with Firefox, it may be due to these highly important factors as well.
I made the switch to Chrome. I also missed the OneNote integration. But, I got Send to OneNote working in Chrome. Basically it involves opening a page using the IE Tab extension and piggy-backing off of the IE OneNote add-in. Works like a champ.
Full instructions here:
http://thingsthatshouldbeeasy.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-chrome-send-to-onenote.html
-Eugene
You wanted a spellchecker for IE…
http://iespell.com/
I’ve used it for years and love it!