Firefox: I Loved You Once Upon a Time

Published

April 24, 2013

7 Comments

Although we’re already four months into this 2013 year I was looking through some development documents for Chrome and I happened upon an implementation that made me think about Firefox, an old love of mine.

I’ll admit it, for most of my professional life I have used Firefox – the switch happened a few years ago to Google Chrome as my primary browser, but all through college and my early professional years I used Firefox. Ah, sweet, sweet memories.

Then something happened where development with it really plummeted and things just started getting weird. I know that’s not much of a technical explanation, but with the growth and quality of the Chrome Browser I ultimately left Firefox behind.

Anyways, I was simply curious to see what happened last year with Firefox and naturally Mozilla had created an infographic just for me:

Huh. These numbers look impressive but it won’t make me switch back, but it is neat to see a browser giant and the work that they’ve done in the past year.

Do you have fond memories of Firefox? Or, perhaps it’s still your primary browser? What’s keeping you there? What am I missing out on?

There are 7 comments

April 24, 2013 #

Shane Gowland

I went through a similar Firefox divorce several years back. I think the issues Mozilla had with shipping version 4.0 killed it.

4.0 was; from an ‘underlying platform’ perspective, almost a complete rewrite. I remember over a year and eight or nine beta releases passing before 4.0 was finally pushed to stable – by that time, Google had already iterated on Chrome dozens of time, leaving 4.0 obsolete on arrival. The year spent cleaning their codebase put Mozilla seriously behind.

That said; the improvements to Firefox in the past year (especially those taking place in the “UX” builds) show that Firefox is finally catching up again. I guess the future of Firefox is something we can all look forward to seeing.
April 24, 2013 #

David Decker

Firefox was, is and will be my primary browser. Period. Also in the ancient days, whent it still was Mosaic, Netscape, Mozilla Suite… :-). It’s THAT tool that I use the most – every little day!

To be honest, I never really understood why so many users switched to Chrome. Chrome is really awesome product, for sure. However, it is still very resource hungry, not only on Linux.

Firefox team only made one mistake, and that was not switching to the current development project that began with FF 4 back in 2011. Had they done this one year earlier, not so many users would have switched.

All the last versions really rock, performance and feature wise! Also its web developer tools are the best in my opinion!
April 24, 2013 #

Paul G.

Interesting, Firefox was always my primary browser, even when it was in development and known as Phoenix – always preferred that name 🙂

Then Chrome came out with its rapid release cycles and charged ahead. And I switched.

But as of about 6+ months ago I moved back to Firefox. It’s just runs better for me.

Chrome is constantly changing and I feel like a better tester for them. It hangs for ages on the dev console very often, and eats resources like Firefox did back around version 6~8.

I love Firefox again. Worth checking it out if you made the switch. I use both browsers for spreading resources and multiple logins, but Firefox is my main one.
April 24, 2013 #

DJ

I’ve Firefox since its “Phoenix” days and continue to use it. It’s certainly had some bad times over the years but I always adjusted along the way, even downgrading a few times because of some terrible “fixes” or “enhancements” in a new version.

The main reasons I continue to use it is familiarity, addons, and workflow. I’ve used Firefox for so long I know where everything is installed (including addons), how it works, how to customize and tweak everything (couldn’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent inside about:config), how to troubleshoot problems (is it FF or an addon?), placing icons where they work best for me, organizing menus to my liking, etc. It’s highly configurable, unlike Chrome.

I gave Chrome an honest 30 day attempt but it just didn’t work for me. Too strict in many respects (Google always thinks they know what’s best for users), many addons aren’t available and the ones that are don’t work the same in most instances. It absolutely slowed my workflow and caused a level of aggravation I couldn’t stand. Not because it’s a bad product; Chrome just isn’t “ready for me.”

Firefox has come a long way and since ~ version 17 has plain rocked for me. There’s some very cool stuff in the pipe up through V23 I’m looking forward to as well. I won’t be going to another browser anytime in the near future, if at all.

DJ

P.S. about:config and install.rdf files are your Firefox friend. Grasp those and the little things that occasionally crop up are pretty easy to deal with, and if for some reason that doesn’t work a fix will be in the pipe soon enough.
April 24, 2013 #

Sean Patterson

A few years back (I’m not sure when) the performance in Firefox seemed to take a huge hit for some reason. Maybe it was all the plugins (though I wasn’t running many) or something else. This seemed to continue when I migrated over to OSX as my primary OS.

Along the same time Chrome became mature, and had a wonderful HTML inspection/dev tool that was pretty close to having Firebug built in and I made the switch.
April 24, 2013 #

Richard Poulin III

I have already made the switch to Chrome but still use Firfox for specific add-on or the multiple profiles. Chrome does the multiple profiles as well – just need to export everything over. Chrome is much faster and I have better display on the web. The only draw back to Chrome is I have such a pain displaying things default in English. I won’t complain too much about it, but I have to fight to keep things in English since I live overseas.
April 26, 2013 #

MaAnna

I teach WordPress using a sceen share app and get to see just how many things my clients can’t do using every other browser besides FireFox, including staying glitch and crash free. It’s the only browser for managing WordPress for me. Safari is the next best and only misses the ability to click and drag images to another size. Chrome is the glitchiest. And don’t get me started in IE.

How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?