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Firefox, it’s not me… it’s you!

In our last post, Mozilla Firefox vs. the World, I mentioned that we’d look at the reasons people had for switching away from Firefox. I posed the question on Twitter, which also flows through Facebook. If anyone listed has issue with me reposting your words, let me know and I’ll remove them.

That said, here’s what people told me. I should note that I consider most (but not all) of these people pretty technologically savvy. Most know their way around web development or programming to some degree. None of them are Aunt Tillie.

3 Strikes, and you're OUT!

John Bailey
I switched from Firefox to Chrome. I just couldn’t stand how much slower firefox got with every update. As well as using like 500+MB memory. Chrome is much snappier. Uses less RAM. Each tab is a separately killable process. So no screwy Javascript in a tab can crash the browser.

Samantha Hawley
I gave up Firefox for Google Chrome. For some reason my Firefox would take a long time to load. Once I downloaded Chrome I noticed it was faster. I don’t know why.

Tom Henrich
I dropped Firefox for Chrome months ago. Chrome is lightning fast compared to the bloat of Firefox, even when you have dozens of tabs open. I still use Firefox at work simply because it’s got more developer-related extensions for debugging (and the Firefox versions work… better), but at home it’s nothing but Chrome. I didn’t even bother installing Firefox when I got a new computer. Just wasn’t worth the hassle.

Dossy Shiobara
Speed, mostly. Firefox has gotten sluggish in 3.x, and the only add-ons I had were Firebug and Greasemonkey. I used to miss Firebug’s Net panel once in a while, but Charles.app is 10x more useful and works for any HTTP client – so I don’t miss it any more. WebKit inspector has proven to be a more than adequate replacement for Firebug, too.

Gary Kramlich
Chrome/Chromium until something faster with better integration (good luck) comes out.

Greg Tarnoff
Chrome for speed when I am surfing. Still use Firefox for dev though.

bEx_x3d
Rarely use Firefox now, it’s painful when i do. Poorly rendered embedded fonts/CSS3 elements, my comp go freezepop, ugly interface.

EtherCycle Design
We dumped Firefox for Chrome in our office 7 weeks ago. Separate tab processes. Native Greasemonkey support. Better search integration. Better Javascript performance. Extensions dont crash.

Paul Conigliaro
I’ve moved on to Safari. I use OS X & wanted a more integrated browser. Services are what pushed me to Safari. And there seemed to be less lag. I also do some development and Safari actually has a really good feature set once enabled. Plus webkit is just fun to play with. Plus I got tired of the upgrade cycle. It’s a browser, I don’t want to beta test it. I just want it to be stable.

M. Kelley
I ditched Firefox and use Chrome on Linux/Mac/Windows. It has less bloat than Firefox. Much faster than any of the Mozilla browsers. I do web dev on there.

Chris Jaure
I gave up Firefox for daily browsing, but it’s still my primary development browser. I use Chrome for browsing. I’d switch back if Firefox were faster and had a single search/address bar. And websockets. Websockets didn’t appear to be working in the Firefox beta (with our existing app, not sure if the API is the same).

Vic Wu
I gave up Firefox for Chrome. I just browse. Firefox was giving me login issues with a handful of sites even with saved cookies. I was unable to get a fix for it.

Andy Kant
I switched from Firefox to Safari for general browsing, still use Firefox as my primary debugger though.

senvara
I went back to IE from Firefox about two years ago.

Philip Crawford
I’ve given up Firefox multiple times for Safari, but I keep going back. I mainly prefer Firefox for dev tools, but it’s a memory hog.


Thanks everyone…. There are some great responses in there. A lot of what people seemed to be saying was that Firefox wasn’t as fast as whatever other browser they are using now. (Chrome seemed to be in the lead over Safari, and I’m still not sure that IE comment wasn’t a joke.)

The one area where Firefox seemed to have an edge was with web development tools/add-ons. This has definitely been one of the reasons I’ve stuck with Firefox over the years, as I’ve found an environment that works for me in Firefox, and it didn’t matter if I was using Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux… Firefox (or Iceweasel) worked pretty much the same on each, providing a similar experience and similar tools.

Feel free to leave a comment explaining why you left Firefox for some other browser.

I know, I still didn’t get into why alternatives to Firefox may not be as good as you think they are, but I will… This post on reasons people switched should hold you over for now.

See Also: Cheap Thrills, Speed Kills… and Mozilla Firefox vs. the World.

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Mozilla Firefox vs. the World

Mozilla Firefox must defeat 7 deadly opponents in order to win the hearts of users…

Wait… that sounds like some movie!

OK, but really, what I wanted to talk about is Firefox. The once darling browser of the digital elite, and how it may have fallen from grace.

Browsers

Mozilla was the first popular open source browser, and it stole market share from Internet Explorer. That’s a win. But eventually Safari came along, and then Chrome. Both Safari and Chrome seem to have a mission to simplify things for the user, which, if you know the history of Firefox, is sort of amusing, as it too came about with the idea that the browser needed to be smaller, simpler, and faster. (At least smaller, simpler, and faster than the Mozilla Suite it was replacing.) It succeeded on all counts, and became quite popular. The “smaller, simpler, and faster” formula was a good one.. and others followed it.

I’m pretty sure both Safari and Chrome suggest that they exist to provide their users the best browsing experience possible, and both continue to work towards that goal. It’s a noble goal, and I applaud it… But I don’t blindly believe it.

At a previous job, we used to have this great user experience game, where we could make the point that anything we did could be justified by the idea that it “provided a better user experience.” For instance, we served large banner ads. How could this provide a better user experience? Well, we would say that without the ads, we’d make no money from the sites, and have to shut them down, so obviously a site with ads provides a better user experience than a site that does not exist.

Now in the case of Safari, I’m fine believing that Apple wanted a really fast browser for Mac OS X. Microsoft had abandoned Internet Explorer, and Apple doesn’t always like to rely on others for things, especially something as basic as web browsing. Along came Safari. For Mac OS X. And eventually for Windows. (But not Linux.)

Google used to put a lot of resources into Firefox, but eventually I think they saw that they too could attempt to control the browsing experience, and along came Chrome. Chrome is the easiest way for you to feed almost everything you do online directly into the Google Tracking Machine. Your search history, your browsing history, your bookmarks… everything. If you completely trust Google with all of your data (and I know many of you do, from email to documents to maps to, pretty much everything else!) then I guess you’re fine. Sign it all over to the Google Machine. I mean, they can’t be evil, right?

Now, competition is a good thing… and Safari and Chrome both came along and had some interesting features, and Firefox caught up with some of them, and is still catching up with some of them, but more recently I’m seeing this trend of people switching away from Firefox, as it has me concerned. It has me concerned because I feel like if people are just switching to another browser because it’s “faster” that it’s like saying “I switched to only eating at McDonalds because it’s cheaper!” and really, that’s a steady diet of yuck.

In another post I’ll examine why alternatives to Firefox may not be as good as you think they are, as well as look at the reasons people gave me for switching away from Firefox.

See Also: Cheap Thrills, Speed Kills… and Firefox, it’s not me… it’s you!.

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Pencil – Prototyping with Firefox

One of the reasons I love Mozilla so much is the diversity of projects that have come out of the technology they’ve created. Take for instance, the Pencil Project, which has a mission to “build a free and open source tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.”

I spent a little time playing with Pencil in Firefox (there’s also a standalone version if you’re using Windows or Linux, made possible by XULRunner) and it’s a nice little prototyping toolbox.

Pencil UI

Here’s what the Pencil UI looks like when run in Firefox on Mac OS X. The left side contains your typical drawing elements, bits, and pieces, and the right side is your canvas.

Pencil Sketchy GUI

Here’s the “Sketchy GUI” collection, which simulates rough sketches of UI elements, allowing you to quickly mock-up what something like a web app control panel might look like.

Pencil Mock-up

Here’s a quick mock-up I did with Pencil. Wow, it looks just like an actual sketched mock-up of a web UI element… pretty amazing, eh?

Pencil Graphic

Pencil also lets you drop images into the canvas and resize and crop them, so you could use it as a quick-n-dirty (somewhat limited) image editing application that runs within Firefox.

There’s much better screen shots at the Pencil site. There’s also guides for users, and developers, and plenty of other stuff to check out, so get prototyping!

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Twitter Kiosk Hacking

The year was 2007. Twitter was still fairly young, and was used by mostly the techie crowd. For BarCampMilwaukee2 I put together a bit of code using Perl, cron, HTML/CSS and ended up with this kiosk-sort of thing that we projected on the wall during the event.

tk000oldapp

Here’s a mock-up of what it looked like. I had just started testing it around August 2007 using the @web414 account on Twitter. Oh, keep in mind that there were some apps do to this sort of thing back then, but most were written in Flash, or AIR or something else that required specific hardware/software that I couldn’t use for whatever reason. Oh, and just a bit of history, I’ve been building kiosks out of old machines since 2002 or so. These are machines that would find no other use, so I do my best to put them to good use.

So for this particular modern-day kiosk experiment, I wanted to use the Eee PC 701 I got in 2007. It’s not my main portable since I got a MacBook, but I still find uses for it. The idea was to have it sit on my desk with a constant stream of Tweets rolling by…

tk001tweetdeck

I’m (currently) running EasyPeasy on the Eee PC, and it can run Adobe AIR apps, so I figured I’d give TweetDeck a try. Sure it’s in beta, but what isn’t, eh? Anyway, while TweetDeck is a nice app, it’s infuriating that it can’t display one really wide column. I know it’s infuriating because it’s a feature people seem to ask for in the support forums. TweetDeck wasn’t doing it for me.

tk002spaz

Next up was Spaz. I really like all the ideas behind Spaz, it’s a nice little application. You can even edit the CSS to tweak the interface. That’s a handy feature!

tk003spaz

I didn’t do much with the CSS tweaking, as I just wasn’t feeling it with Spaz. There was a lot of application UI to deal with, and I didn’t feel like tweaking an AIR app that much. Still, Spaz is nice for what it does. The developer’s blog has some Twitter gripes, but then, who doesn’t!?

tk004buzzbird

Next up was Buzzbird, an XULRunner-based application. If you’ve never hear of XULRunner, it’s basically a method of building applications the same way Firefox and Thunderbird are built, using XUL to create the interface. This is a technology I really wish we would have seen take off a bit more, as it’s great to work with.

tk005buzzbird

Giving the CSS a tweak in Buzzbird was simple. Inside the Buzzbird folder (under Linux) is a chrome folder, and in there is a skin folder, and in there is a classic folder. CSS and images live there.

tk006buzzbird

If you’re using a Mac, you just do the right-click ‘Show Package Contents’ trick and drill down a little bit. Also, if you are using Mac OS X 10.6 Buzzbird does not work (as of my writing this) though it does work on Mac OS X 10.5.

Buzzbird is a nice XULRunner-based application that is multi-platform and open source. The development seems pretty active on it as well. (And just like Spaz, the developer has some Twitter gripes…)

tk007firefox

Next up was… Firefox. I happen to really like Firefox, and one feature I really like is that (on Linux) it has a “kiosk mode” that let’s you hit F11 and it makes all the browser chrome go away, and leaves you with a full-screen view of your browser viewport – no controls – just content. I love that! Especially on the small screen of the Eee PC, which shows just 800×600 resolution. But this isn’t the normal Twitter view, and the normal Twitter view also doesn’t automagically refresh itself, so there’s work to be done. (Note: I finally did find a kiosk extension for Mac OS X, it’s Full Fullscreen.)

tk009addons

First off, we need the page to reload. Believe me, I dug through all sorts of Greasemonkey user scripts claiming to make a page reload, or specifically claiming to make Twitter reload. None of them worked. Maybe they used to, but they didn’t for me. What finally did work was an extension called ReloadEvery. It worked when nothing else would. (Be nice and don’t make it reload too often, remember, every page load uses someone’s resources.)

tk010stylish

So besides ReloadEvery we’ve also got Stylish installed, which lets us easily tweak the CSS for any web site. It’s pretty simple. So after just a little bit of CSS hacking (and I mean a little, I really didn’t spend much time on it) we’ve got a look that minimizes some of the stuff we don’t want to see, and emphasizes more of what we do want to see.

Here’s the CSS for “Twitter Kiosk” I put into Stylish.

/* Twitter Kiosk */

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("twitter.com") {

#logo { display: none !important; }
#status_update_box { display: none !important; }
#header { margin-top: -16px !important; }
#heading { display: none !important; }
#side_base { display: none !important; }
#container { width: 100% !important; }
.subpage { width: 100% !important; }
#timeline { width: 100% !important; }
.status-body { width: 93% !important; }

tk008firefox

It’s not perfect. As you can see the page is still showing the notification of new tweets, and some of the links at the top. I didn’t bother trying to get rid of those bits, but it should be pretty trivial to hide them as well.

tk011eeepc

Anyway, this thing is ready to run, and can just exist on the Eee PC sitting on my desk, or be connected via VGA to a larger external monitor, projector, or television. And best of all, it works in Firefox, which is everywhere, and requires just two extensions, and a little bit of CSS.

So the big question is, can I run it on older hardware with older software? ReloadEvery claims to work as far back as Firefox 1.5, though Stylish claims to requires Firefox 3.0 or higher. Full Fullscreen (for your Mac kiosk) has older versions that should work with older Firefoxes. Firefox 3.x says it needs Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, so that tosses out a lot of older Macs unless you look at Firefox 2.x or older. Still, you can experiment if you wish and see what you can cobble together. Who knows, I just might do that myself. (Maybe even on Linux.)

No matter what you do, have fun and keep on hacking…

Note: This was all written before #newtwitter happened, so I’m not sure any of it will still work. If it does, let me know… thanks!

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Greasemonkey

I’ve uploaded a Greasemonkey script to Userscripts.org. It’s called WebGrader Link Rewriter and it takes the goofy Javascript used by WebGrader.com and makes real links you can click on and open in a new tab/window. I made it because the developers of the site wrote what I consider poor code.

I should note that I contacted the company that develops WebGrader a few weeks back and said I could suggest improvements in their system, and they replied to me pretty welcoming. I have not gotten back to them yet, as I’ve been busy, but writing this script took me about 10 minutes. (Yes, I pretty much copied an existing script someone wrote to fix Haloscan comment links.)

Userscripts.org looks pretty awesome for those of us who want to put fixing sites into our own hands. I would like to be able to choose a license when uploading a script but hey, I’ll forgive that for now. (Maybe it’s all public domain? I dunno…)

I do worry that Greasespot “The weblog about Greasemonkey” hasn’t been updated since May 2007. I hope it’s not abandoned. Then again, I should look around more, since I’m new to this. There is also a wiki at wiki.greasespot.net I should explore.