A little late to the party due to not having had the time to listen to it upon release …
This is a “reply” to the “fixing Mozilla” topic:
What surprises me to no end is that you guys (the Bad Voltage team) don’t seem to see the reason why Firefox, and not so much “Mozilla” as in “the Foundation”, is “enacting the Titanic”. The reasons why Firefox is on a steady decline are sooo painfully plain obvious if you would actually ask a few “power users” (yes, I got the memo of you guys that we are a “unwelcome mob” in your eyes). Here are just a few key elements why I can’t stand Firefox anymore:
Sidenote: I’m still using Firefox from time-to-time as a “portable” installation that doesn’t integrate with the system at all whenever I need a decent laugh.
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Firefox? More like a LameDuck
I have about the same amount of extensions on Chrome (5) which I used to use on Firefox (7 - “Omnibar” is not needed with Chromium/Chrome and same goes for “NoScript”). Chrome loads-up in “an instant” (2 secs? 3 secs?) while Firefox takes at least trice the time. Even with the “Prefetch” (Windows) cache cleared Firefox loses to Chromium/Chrome in terms of startup-speed at about the same launch-time difference.
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Crashing here, crashing there, crashing, crashing everywhere
I’m actually using Chrome across the board (Linux and Windows - without a “Google Sign-in”) because for as long as Adobe Crash… err… Flash “matters” (not talkin’ YouTube) it happens to be the only browser on Linux that runs a recent version of Flash thanks to Google’s integrated “pepperflash”. While I know about the existence of the flash pluggie (and pepperflash-wrappers for Firefox) for Linux the Linux version Adobe themselves offers is not only “EoL since eternity and two more days” but also as old as a proverbial IBM PC XT is nowadays. Also, Flash is just crash-happy in Firefox while I yet have to see Chrome giving me any trouble in this regard. Apart from that, with Chrome I don’t have to do anything to have and update “Flash” … with Firefox I need to download and install it and “import” the Adobe Updater bloatware along with it for updating the plug-in because it can’t be deselected (thank you, Crapdobe).
Another thing is that Firefox is horribly buggy (and I don’t mean the memory-leak Mozilla obviously can’t fix). For example … many months ago I browsed a wallpapers site in the search for a few new wallpapers, and at some point Firefox began to behave odd. I later on found out that once I browsed “enough” images (didn’t really bother counting how many) the browser would suddenly start crawling until being restarted.
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Browser spam
The “advertisement spam” Mozilla added into the Firefox startpage is THE reason why we (read: a lot of my friends and myself) bid Firefox a “GDIAF” (Go Die In A Fire - for the ones not familiar with Urban Dictionary ;)). WHY in the ninth circle of hell would I want totally retarded animations spam (which are loaded off the net!) on the Firefox startpage bug the living hell outta me? WHY in hell’s rock-bottom do I want that idiotic “Messages from Mozilla” (meaning the “Did you know? Firefox is the browser not giving a single F about not annoying you to hell-and-back” message, and related messages, below the search-bar on the Firefox startpage) spam (also loaded off the net!). Thank you, Crapzilla, for feeding my “hosts” file and enjoy your ban.
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Countless, moronic, side-projects - more than I care to recall
If there’s one thing where Mozilla really excels then it is “losing themselves in countless side-projects which are either totally irrelevant or are of no value at all”. As an example about “time perfectly wasted for something totally irrelevant” just see the “Personas” thing … I yet have to meet someone being older than 9 years to have ever used that “feature”. Same goes for a lot of other things Mozilla “stuffed” into the browser over the years … in most cases it was a “nice try, but no one ever cared about it”.
Instead of focusing on their “core values” (a sleek, fast, browser) all they really came to care about is to stuff the duck as hard as they can (see “Hello” (why would I need a “IM” in my browser? There’s Pidgin…) or “Save on Pocket” (WHY? WHY has this to be a integral part of the browser? I don’t need that. IF I would need something like that I would install a “Save to OneNote” or “Save to Google Keep” or “Save to Evernote” or similar add-on. This is not “inovation”, this is just yet another case of “stuffing the lame duck even more”.
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"Not invented here"
Speaking about “stuffing the duck” … Mozilla isn’t really inventing anymore, all they really do is try to keep up with the competition. “Auralis”(?) is just Mozilla copy-catting the looks of Chromium/Chrome (and please note that I don’t have any problems with the new UI - I actually like it to some extent) instead of coming up with their own genuine design (on a quick glance you can’t tell if it’s Chromium/Chrome or Firefox … you need to have at least a second look on the screen to spot the difference). I feel the same way about that totally needless “Hello” thing … this feels like a attempt to catch up to “Hangouts” from Google (which, on Chrome, is a plug and not a integrated part of the browser.
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64-Bit is for poor people
One really needs to applaud Mozilla’s epically lacking efforts to get a 64-Bit browser out of the door (on Windows, that is). Contrary to Mozilla’s “PR wank” from the past (“you don’t gain anything from having a 64-Bit browser”) projects like Waterfox or Palemoon do actually ship STABLE working 64-Bit versions for YEARS now (eat that, Crapzilla!). Internet Explorer was available as a 64-Bit version starting with Windows Vista (or had XP x64 Edition also a 64-Bit IE version? Can’t recall.), Chrome is available as a 64-Bit version, Waterfox and Palemoon are also already available as 64-Bit for years now. Well, guess who still hasn’t realized the times we live in? And yes, I remember some statement from Mozilla about "we look forward to ship a x64 version of Firefox with version 38/39 - back in the days of the early 30’s - which now got “slightly” redacted to "maybe with version 41/42… maybe 43… maybe 44… maybe 45… […] maybe Googolplex^Grey’s Number).
Seems like hobbyists, at least on Windows because Firefox on Linux “amd64” was always a native “amd64” binary, are doing a better job at delivering “what the unwashed mob” wants than the coding monkeys at Mozilla.
To wrap it up… while there a tons and tons more reasons why Firefox turned into the Titanic (slow but steadily declining) it mainly comes down to a totally “headless” management. Which brings us to the conclusion about “How to fix Mozilla”…
Quite easy: Pull a “Ubuntu Community Council” and fire the morons in charge of the project because they obviously lost oversight and direction quite some time ago and replace them with guys (or gals) having a vision to where Firefox should go and put the wreck back on track.
Delivering a “state-of-the-art” browser (and not just talkin’ hot air about it) browser and maybe modifiying the misson statement from “keeping the web open” to “keeping the web open and secure” (by making Firefox THE reference browser to protect you from “secret service perverts gone totally wild and beyond control”) would be something to make Firefox a hot topic again … things like stuffing the duck and enforcing signed add-ons and annoying one with startpage spam (is there a MozillaBlock Plus already?) and pestering me with “New Tabpage” suggestions" and thinking about turning evil and eating up the user telemetry data to sell it off to advertisement companies (read: turning into a Google-ish datamine) isn’t helping regain adoption … and while we power users, who once helped to spread the word and therefore make Firefox popular, are no longer a welcome mob … win us back and you could gain traction again… you won’t make due with your fanboys (that are the ones which are a “unviable business model”, not us power users who actually adopt new tech first <— at that annoying Brit of the Bad Voltage crew which name always escapes me. Learn to speak clearly and understandly first, Sir, before trying to insult the ones who once were dumb enough to help the project for which you deem them “unviable” become popular).
Anyway, that are just my somewhat lengthy two cents to the topic - not that it would matter at all or that I wouldn’t have my “pet peeves” with Chromium/Chrome as well.
EDIT: For clarification…
The “startpage animations” are loaded off the net and cached locally - though every new animation sequence they push upon you will, yet again, waste your bandwidth for the sole reason of annoying you.
Some goes for the “The more you know” messages… loaded off the net and cached locally, though the fact remains that they are using my data for something I don’t even want to see in the first place… if I would want a lecture I’d happily go and read up one of the PR webpages.
Yes, I’m aware that both could be prevented by “about:blank”, but that defeats the “Restore previous session” button of the startpage (unless I’m blind and the features hides someplace else) in case the Duck had keeled over again and needed resurrection via a expensive restoration spell - hence why I ban their spam domains via “hosts”.