Unfaithful to Firefox
While pausing for a bit of a break from working on theme for a blog, I thought I would give some insight as to why I am currently being unfaithful to my favorite tried and true browser, Mozilla Firefox. I am sure that comes as a little bit of a shock to some of the folks that read me regularly, as historically I have been such a huge fan. I even own the bag with the Firefox logo on for my laptop transportation needs (note, it was a gift, but I have carried proudly most of the time all the same). So what exactly is going on that is leading to astray, to actually click and surf with other browsers that have historically been of less repute?
The biggest thing is of course the update cycle. And by that, I am not complaining about the more rapid updates of late, as I actually think that is a good thing. Especially when you consider just how much more rapid the various tools that make the internet what it is today have been coming out. No, I am complaining about the lack of things being fixed.
In particular, my biggest complaint is about the memory leaks and slowness of the browser experience. I think the later, the slowness, is directly caused by the former, the memory leaks, though I can not say that for sure. However, I can say that if you leave Firefox open for very long and do a lot of browsing, which I seem to do at various times, it will quickly reach a point where you will have literal pauses that have everything frozen up in your browser for a short period of time. The frozen state will usually occur when refreshing a page or loading additional data (like load older posts on Facebook), but sometimes just more generally. Additionally, these short freeze ups tend to get longer the more you go along browser.
During the time of doing this, you can, you desire to look at system statistics and see larger and larger portions of memory being allocated to the Firefox program. Generally this occurs even if you are closing windows and tabs mind you, hence memory loss.
I know some of you are thinking that first all I must be running a few hundred plugins, some of which are misbehaving and the root cause of my complaint. To which I will have to counter that I typically only run about four plugins on Firefox (and admit that one of those is the only reason I have not switched over to Chrome – as it is not available there). And just to make sure, I have taken all plugins out of play and within a days worth of browsing, had similar results.
Now, what really gets me about this process is that the fine folks at Mozilla know of this issue. In fact, it has been known for several of the past “major” releases. Indication is that it will be fixed in either the next release or the one after that. But come on, if you know about the problem for a long time, instead of fixing and adding somethings that very few people care about – fix the one big problem that is driving people to your competitors. It is so bad, that only are folks moving to Chrome, but a few technically minded friends are going back to Internet Explorer based on speed combined with the recent seemingly much better job IE is doing versus various intrusion attempts.
Bottom line is this, if not for the one plugin I would be turning off Firefox as a regular browser and only using for testing purposes. I think they better wake up and smell the coffee or end up going the way of Netscape in regards to market share in the worse case and the least loosing hard gained market share back to IE or to Chrome instead.
** – Image is Firefox logo.
