Is Firefox Burning Out? - Comments Page 2

I am using FF version 21 (portable of course) because I like the classic interface.
I intend to keep using it, as long as possible

I love firefox and would hate to see it disappear. It takes a lot less space than explorer does , is faster, and more secure, as far as I'm concerned. Any rebuttal?

For quite sometime now IE has had an option in the upper right hand corner saying, "Install the new Firefox." Maybe they are dipping their fingers into the Firefox pot.

There are two reasons I still use Firefox:
1 - I am addicted to some of its add-ons
2 - I don't really see anything better (not even Chrome)

I used to be a Firefox fan about 5 years ago, and has since switched to Chrome because at that time Firefox became very bloated and consumed lots of resources to run and slowed down my internet surfing experience significantly. Unfortunately, now Chrome is suffering from the same problem and also becomes a memory hog. However, because of the many useful productivity add-ons to Chrome which I have to use every day that I am stuck with it for the foreseeable future. If Firefox wants to regain leadership, it has to become lighter and have a much smaller memory footprint.

I have used Firefox for years, after I finally let go of Internet Explorer, but in the last 6 months, something has gone wrong. The more I updated, the worse it got. They started changing things, my links stopped opening, and extentions quit working. I have downloaded Chrome, and it is my go-to when Firefox starts acting up. I like everything about Firefox, but they have to start listening to their customers, and fix these, more every day, aggravations.

I changed from Chrome because it was virtually impossible to regain my Bookmarks after a very simple slip of the typing finger. Their service in this regard is completely swamped by Firefox who have the most desirable and simplest system ever devised for History, Bookmarks and Downloads.

However, I have been close to going back to Chrome due to the number of times I get "(Firefox not responding)" and WILL if it gets any worse. They tell us to go back to 'DefauLt' Yeah Yeah Yeah - heard it all before - to cure the problem. I just believe that the risk of losing my treasured Bookmarks is too great - WHAT SHALL I DO?

Like you Bob, I use all three (Firefox, IE, Chrome). Surprisingly, I still find a few sites that only work well with IE, especially since I normally block 3rd party cookies.

Roboform (my password filler) works much better with Firefox than Chrome. Similarly, I have a number of other add-ons on Firefox that aren't available on Chrome.

Chrome used to be much faster than Firefox. But my latest tests find them about the same and often Firefox is faster. Certainly startup time is much faster now with Firefox than Chrome.

Yes: Classic Theme Restorer, one-click zoom.

No: something gums up performance on Huffingtonpost's main page; scrolling is painful and inconsistent.
Sometimes a video won't display, probably because of Flash or something.
Memory hog. Fox is using 554MB with only one tab for askbobrankin.com.

I use one of those "other" browsers only when I have to, which is very seldom.

I just loaded three tabs in Chrome (askbobrankin, YouTube, Paypal). Taskmanager shows eight instances of chrome.exe using 575MB. Dropping back to askbobrankin.com, there are 6 instances using 483MB. And when I close Chrome's single tab, the program exits! (@$%$^#&!!)

Aside: what fathead came up with this idea of frameless windows?

If you use Chrome, you are playing into the hands of GOOGLE.

If you are experiencing problems or difficulty with any browser you'll find there are alternatives based on the underlying "core browser engine".
For Firefox a good alternative is Pale Moon and for Chrome I've been using Slim Jet. Both are excellent choices and very customizable.

I have five different web browsers loaded onto my desktop computer (I believe in redundancy), but my main browser has become Chrome. I'm just a wee bit suspicious of the safety of Microsoft IE, but sometimes I end up using it because I run into a web page which doesn't play well with the others. I used to be a heavy Firefox user, but uninstalled it after the Brendan Eich incident. I then switched to Pale Moon, a Firefox offshoot, and still use it sometimes, but it seems to crash a lot more frequently than Chrome.

I suspect that the pressured resignation of Eich had a more significant impact on Firefox than it would seem on the surface. Logically the number of people who (like me) would abandon Firefox for political reasons is a tiny percentage of the universe of Firefox users, and should have no discernible impact on the statistics. But that small segment consisted of a lot of hard-core technologists and early adopters who were offended by the cowardly actions of Mozilla in forcing out a founder over an entirely unrelated expression of his free speech. Previously they were evangelists for Firefox, and in many cases had an inordinate influence in promoting it onto various platforms and multiple business computer installations. That excitement and energy was abruptly cut off. The long-term effect may be hard to quantify, but I think it is more important than many people realize.

Accordingly, I and many other people feel a certain degree of schadenfreude over Firefox's decline and potential demise.

Another open-source product that will suffer and die so the proprietary software giants can tell us what we can and cannot do. Shades of OpenOffice.

I have been a faithful user of FF for years and hope it stays around. I never liked IE and tried Chrome but FF remains my favorite. I'll stick to it to the very end.

There's another browser based on Mozilla. It's the Pale Moon browser. It looks like Firefox prior to FF using that Australis desktop. I immediately get rid of that awful desktop using an Add-on called Classic Theme Restorer. I've made Pale Moon my default browser, and you can even migrate your FF bookmarks and settings to it and Pale Moon is a lot faster than all the other browsers.

I don't like Chrome because it loads at system start-up automatically.

I use both Firefox and Google Chrome. I use IE once in a while when I have probs getting a web page to load just to check if it is the browser or the site that has a problem. I like Firefox in that it has many features that are more secure than Chrome of IE. The fact that it is Open Source is a plus for the browser. One downside of Google that I don't like is the one log in for several sites at the same time. Given the choice, I would switch to Firefox and abandon Chrome and IE. Google has too many requirements to access personal info in order to use many features.

I have FF, Chrome and IE on my laptop. I used FF for many years in preference to IE, but over time, Chrome became an acceptable substitute.

The final straw was, as mentioned earlier in the thread by BSOH, Brendan Eich. (I don't agree with his views, but I thought the treatment he received was unconscionable. There was no evidence that his private beliefs carried over into his professional life.) I still use FF occasionally, but I don't feel good about it.

A note to Frank Cizak - don't assume "contains errors" is BS. 15 years ago, when I worked in QA at an SAS dot-com, I made a point of running the site manually with Netscape (even after we stopped supporting it) because it supported the HTML spec (MS felt free to depart from it wherever they wanted), and would identify errors which IE would paper over, including "Script error on page". When the developers switched from IE to Firefox, of course, they typically found the errors during development.

But there's another Mozilla browser you didn't mention - SeaMonkey. No idea how they came up with the name, but it's the successor to Netscape Communicator, with browser, email and HTML editor in one integrated package. I doubt it's state of the art, although when I use it I have no problems. The HTML editor ("Edit Page" and "Publish") is very handy when editing a web site, and the WYSWIG panel is easy enough to use that for simple web sites I've developed, I have people download Sea Monkey to maintain the sites and modify content.

In the early days, I switched to (and was very impressed with) Chrome - until I discovered the hard way how it was tracking me. I went to Firefox, but was not happy with its memory usage and occasional slowness, until I dumped all the extensions (on my work PC, which had limited memory). I've been using Safari on my Mac system, and older IE versions on the PC, but I may change back to Firefox if it has truly effective privacy functionality - otherwise I'll bite the bullet and write my own Safari plug-in.

Still, even though I don't use it, I prefer knowing it's around if I want to use it. It would be a shame for it to go away.

I love Firefox and would really hate to see it go, because none of the others are acceptable. Chrome is NOTfaster, on my computers, and has unacceptable privacy issues. When I occasionaly have to use another browser for some reason, I am always disappointed, for the same reasons as Charley. Roboform doesn't work as well or at all, the add-ons I need aren't available, and I get the same results on speed tests. Chrome is never better than equal to Firefox and is usually slower. I suppose we had all better get to promoting Firefox to everyone we know who doesn't already use it.

This is a suggestion for Bali Rob's issue of saving bookmarks. I used to have the same concern, and it is happily solved by Xmarks, which is browser independent and platform independent. One feature I particularly like about it is that it stores all the history of your bookmarks to allow you to revert back any one of the older bookmarks whenever you wish.