Comments on: Why I hate Mozilla Firefox…

By: MillaN

MillaN — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:38:40 +0000

Exactly right. FaceBook is great example. And all similar, JavaScript heavy websites, are mostly unusable on FF under x64 OS.

By: Paul D

Paul D — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:27:49 +0000

I run FF on XP64 and I hate it. For several years FF has been getting worse in terms of stability and speed, and the Mozilla folks do not seem to care. Each version (I am now on 3.5) keeps whatever problems were in the previous release and then piles on some new problem.

Of late trying to load FaceBook is unbearably slow, and while FB may have its problems, this is not their fault. Opera loads the identical FB pages in seconds or less whereas FF can take minutes, yes minutes, to load, for example, my Inbox. WTF?

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 17:02:33 +0000

You can do the same with Firefox 3.5

By: MillaN

MillaN — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:05:39 +0000

Biggest Firefox problem is very poor performance on 64bit OS. But this is 100% Mozilla fault, because 64bit OS are much stable than 32bit, and all other 32bit browsers (Opera, Safari, IE7, IE8 and Chrome) are stable. Firefox in may case works stable only without extensions, and without them Firefox is worthless.

By: Josh Straub

Josh Straub — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:57:32 +0000

I’m surprised to read this. I am the heaviest tab user of anyone I have ever met. I usually run 30-50 tabs or more for months at a time, in BOTH Google Chrome and Firefox 3 (now 3.5). So I usually have almost 100 tabs open on my system altogether.

Firefox hasn’t crashed on me in years! And I run about 10 Addons including Firebug. Maybe the difference is that I run rock solid Windows 2000 instead of breakneck 64bit OS?

Google Chrome is good but its unique “seperate process per tab” model results in a massive increase in memory usage. Firefox uses 300-500MB RAM on my system with all those tabs, Google Chrome will hit 1GB+.

Chrome has crashed on me only a few times but it’s not even supported officially on Windows 2000 so I don’t complain.

If you guys are getting Firefox crashes with no add-ons (or just Firebug) then you have something seriously wrong. I would lean towards the 64 bit.

By: MillaN

MillaN — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:13:07 +0000

Safari 4 on Windows isn’t nearly as fast as Opera and Chrome are, but it’s a stable browsers. Unfortunately, Mac is not an options for me.

By: sambit

sambit — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:43:43 +0000

you should consider trying safari..

and you should certainly consider a mac OS and not windows 64bit!!!
(notice how is said mac OS and not apple computer

im using the new ubuntu on my laptop and firefox 3.5 is worse than 3.0 in terms of performance…

but since you like faster/more stable browsers.. in my experience safari 4 is nicer than chrome

By: MillaN

MillaN — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:00:23 +0000

Unfortunately for Mozilla developers 64bit OS systems are used much more everyday, and Firefox is the only browser that I know about right now that’s not working as it should on 64bit OS.

Also, Firefox 3.5 behaves very strangely depending on extensions installed. I managed to remove many thing, reinstall browser until made it work stable enough to work for a while. But that’s not good enough. Mozilla must take stability problem seriously.

By: Stefan

Stefan — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:49:39 +0000

I’m experiencing the same problems as i’m also using FF on Xp64. There are so many memory leaks since v2.0 that i every day think about switching back to my beloved Opera.

Actually, i don’t think the Dev team at Mozilla cares about any of that problems as they just appear on rarely used systems. But i don’t think it’s such a problem to exit FF correctly if you hit the big [X]..

By: Leila

Leila — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:42:46 +0000

I dropped Firefox the day Google Chrome came out. Google Chrome let me move a tab from a Window to other, a very useful feature when you work with two monitors.

By: MillaN

MillaN — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 22:12:44 +0000

At this point Chrome and Opera are miles ahead of Firefox. On my AMD Phenom 4xCore with 8GB RAM, Chrome opens in under 0.3 seconds, Opera need 0.5 seconds, IE8 is at 1.2 second, and Firefox 3.5.1 on 4.6 seconds (Firefox 3.0 needs more then 7 seconds). And on my laptop (Intel CoreDuo with 4GB RAM), differences are even bigger. Also, Firebug contributes to most of the JavaScript related crashes in FF3 and FF3.5 in my experience.

The only 2 reasons for Firefox to be ahead in terms of use is the Firefox hype that’s obviously still strong and not so good marketing for Chrome and Opera.

By: Shamasis Bhattacharya

Shamasis Bhattacharya — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:32:59 +0000

I saw this “FireFox going to Ashes” phenomenon too. I had started with FireFox 1.x in those days and with every new release, I could see the change. With time, FireFox got slower and slower.

With 15 add-ons, I complained less as I knew not whom to blame!

However, the fact that FireFox is regularly crashing on many JavaScript heavy websites (jQuery in particular) and that too many tabs (more than 10) are causing it to freeze, is more than enough for me to have switched to Chrome as my primary browser.

It is simply unbelievable to see Chrome start in under a seccond under heavy system load, whereas loading FireFox even after having it in memory takes over 5 seconds!

I have my office desktop, two laptops, home desktop … everywhere it is the same story.

Take it as a warning bell Mozilla Corp.

By: Robert Puglisi

Robert Puglisi — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:54:50 +0000

I concur. Firefox began “hanging’ on my iMac 64 with 3.0.10 and is in perpetual hang with 3.5.2. I now use Opera, Safari and Camino. Best feature of Camino is that I can copy and paste text and images into my emails. Firefox is a dead issue for me now. Safari is slower than Camino and Opera. Opera is fastest by far.

By: MillaN

MillaN — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:23:51 +0000

I am slowly giving up on Firefox. As soon as Opera completes work on Dragonfly and implement all things I need, I will uninstall Firefox and use only a portable version for testing. Opera not being open source is not a big problem, as long is free and works fine. Although I would be prepared to pay for it even.

By: shakaran

shakaran — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:20:59 +0000

I use FF 3.5.2 on Ubuntu and it also is slower. But Opera isnt Open Source, so I never use it.

I wait better releases, it is my hope.