I think it's more like "tough love" than hate. If I bitch about Firefox, it's because I want to love Firefox, but I can't. That pisses me off. If I didn't care about it, like the way I don't care about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera, I wouldn't talk about it, like I never talk about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera.
I checked your comments and you certainly aren't a regular Mozilla flamer, so I'll take what you say here at face value.
The thing that frustrates me is how many other people come out of the woodwork on any Mozilla or Firefox related post to give the story, "I used to love Firefox but it uses too much memory so I switched to Chrome and now I'm so happy". My opinion is Google has some amazing marketing and social skills to power that kind of sentiment shift. The big thing that rarely comes up in those threads is that Mozilla is a community. There are memory bugs that have been open in bugzilla for years, but there have been various people in the community working on them, sometimes in their spare time, for years as well. You look at the scope of the project, and it isn't small. It certainly isn't a hack project someone can commit a quick patch to in a day.. There are certainly paid Mozilla employees working on the code base every day, but the number doesn't compare with any of the other major browser vendors. The FirefoxFlippers™ rarely ever follow up with something like, "I tried to look at the problem and realized what a difficult thing memory management is so I took the easy path and decided to let some profit based vendor do it for me and hope that they treat me well."
My personal and probably bias experience is that I have never felt a memory issue. I tend to run a lot of add-ons and I only rarely keep a lot of tabs open because I prefer to follow a pattern of opening up a bunch of things then working my way back down to zero. I feel that most memory issues are related to bad add-ons, bad plug-ins, or bad websites, and I am very happy with the new about:memory stats that show up in Aurora. I just hope that some of the FirefoxFlippers™ who aren't just trolling for Google might take a moment to try out their easily repeatable excessive memory use-cases and drop us a line so we can work together with the community to get rid of them.
I'll now take my downmodding for ranting on a post with a comment that is only tangentially related to the topic. :/
>There are memory bugs that have been open in bugzilla for years
As one of those who used to love Firefox (back when it was marketed as being "light and fast") and now has switched to Chrome, I think this is really where the hate towards Firefox comes from. Mozilla apparently makes enough money that they can continually increase the scope of their company, while at the same time years-old memory bugs are left to linger.
Firefox became popular precisely because they were the anti-microsoft and anti-netscape browser. They have succeeded in taking netscape's place as the slow bloated web browser.
There are a lot of things that "the consumer" doesn't care about. Some of those are things that Mozilla feels are very important and we spend time trying to show people why.
Mozilla doesn't make a browser to maximize their profits by taking as much from "the consumer" as they can get away with. If we try to compete with the other vendors on those terms, I agree we will fail.
I hope that there continue to be enough people whose goals align with Mozilla, and that together we can work on improving not only Firefox but the web. As we do that, then we will be able to help more of those uncaring consumers.
This sits among the more passive-aggressive posts I've seen in a while.
Mozilla makes a browser. It is evaluated in comparison with other browsers. It does not matter who makes those other browsers or why--and it's not like the primary contenders are "maximizing their profits" off of it anyway! The WebKit guys aren't "maximizing their profits" by writing WebKit. Google isn't "maximizing their profits" by using WebKit in Chrome. There may be some knock-on benefits for Google, but it's certainly not directly making them cartloads of money. But what they have done is written a very, very fine browser.
I was a Mozilla user well before Firefox--heck, when Mozilla Suite was EOLed I was a SeaMonkey user for a while. And then I left. Why? Because Mozilla's browser stopped being worth my time. The competition blew past XULRunner (lol) and Gecko (ouch) and Mozilla simply has not caught up. Maybe the memory issues have been fixed in recent years; I wouldn't know because the reason I won't go back now is performance and compatibility. Lofty goals that we poor benighted consumers don't "get" are nice to have, but bringing them up because your browser can't hack what WebKit can doesn't excuse it from not being able to do so.
It is notable and both sad and funny that the only time you get the "people don't understand what we're doing!" spiel is when you don't have people singing hosannahs to your greatness. If you want them, compete successfully. Don't come around whining that people switched away because the things that matter to them were inadequately addressed by your development team. Because that's solely and singularly on you guys. I want you guys to do well. I truly, honestly do. Right now? You don't compete, so I avoid Firefox. Sorry.
I was trying not to be aggressive and still make some points that were important to me. Reviewing the post, I'll concede it has a passive-aggressive tone. I apologize.
I understand what you're getting all, and all I can say is... <sigh /> Actually I don't even know where to start. I am a big Firefox advocate in many ways... I've been on the Mozilla bandwagon since they were numbering releases as M1, M2, M3, etc. I think I started using Mozilla at about M2 or M3 or back in like 1999. I don't take the idea of abandoning Mozilla lightly, but by the same token... I have too much going on, and not enough time, to desire to jump into the Firefox code myself and start hacking. My perception is that it's a huge, complex code-base, that would require a lot of historical domain knowledge, and/or a huge effort in time to understand, before one could make a meaningful contribution.
Coupled with the attitude of a lot of the top Mozilla leadership have demonstrated over the years (that is, arrogant, dismissive, abrasive, and unwelcoming), I don't feel much desire to jump in and help, as much as I'd otherwise like to.
Then Chrome comes along, and - for whatever reason - doesn't seem to have the kinds of memory issues that Firefox has become notorious for. It's awfully compelling to say "let me just use this thing that just works, as opposed to fighting with Firefox."
My personal and probably bias experience is that I have never felt a memory issue. I tend to run a lot of add-ons and I only rarely keep a lot of tabs open because I prefer to follow a pattern of opening up a bunch of things then working my way back down to zero.
To be fair, this is part of what makes this difficult for the FF team. There are always people like you who say they never see these issues, and there are always people who do see them, and are so frustrated with them that they give up. And there doesn't seem to be much rime or reason to the whole thing. I've heard the "bad plugins" explanation before, I've heard "you don't understand the output from top," I've heard "it's not a memory leak, that's by design... it's the way we cache images," etc., etc. But at the end of the day, for some people, in some releases, Firefox has consistently had a problem with sucking up, and holding onto, memory like it was going out of style.
For a while, when the going word was "it's memory fragmentation that's causing the problem" they did seem to make a lot of progress. I remember a bunch of FF 3.x builds over the span of a few months, where the problems did seem to go away (or at least mostly). But somehow they always seem to come back eventually. <sigh />
I dunno... I'm rooting for the Firefox devs to get this figured out for once and all one day. And if they do, I'd probably switch back to Firefox. But to get back to the main point of this whole discussion... I'd rather see them spending their cycles on this issue, than adding features, building an OS, and all this other stuff.
I hope I made it clear enough in my first reply that while your post was the one I chose to thread off of, I do believe that you weren't griping just for the sake of it and I take your interest in the Mozilla mission and frustration with the memory issue as sincere.
I believe there are lots of reasons that different people run into a memory issue, and I believe that while the Firefox devs have tackled some of them, there are plenty of other opportunities. I hear what you are saying about the difficulty in communication, although I would hedge that just a bit by saying that a lot of the abrasive communication isn't from true "leadership", and even the leadership people can get on edge from having to deal with too many people complaining and not contributing when they see the corp of volunteers working as hard as they can. :)
I'll reiterate, given my specialization in metrics, I love the new about:memory feature and also the Telemetry project. These two projects will give us useful tools to be able to accurately measure memory consumption on a variety of platforms for users who feel the memory problems as well as those who don't.
If you have some time, try out a nightly or aurora. If nightly, then opting in to Telemetry will submit the data to us. If aurora, then you can visit about:memory and either submit a bug or feedback with what you find. I and the firefox devs would greatly appreciate it.
I'll reiterate, given my specialization in metrics, I love the new about:memory feature and also the Telemetry project. These two projects will give us useful tools to be able to accurately measure memory consumption on a variety of platforms for users who feel the memory problems as well as those who don't.
If you have some time, try out a nightly or aurora. If nightly, then opting in to Telemetry will submit the data to us. If aurora, then you can visit about:memory and either submit a bug or feedback with what you find. I and the firefox devs would greatly appreciate it.
Cool, I'll look into that. I've been doing some "have two different browsers running at once" stuff lately, so I could test being logged into something as two different users... so that's given me an excuse to at least fire up one Firefox window. I'll look into grabbing a nightly and play with that little. Maybe I'll even gradually start using it more if it's stable enough.
