Tag: mozilla

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Web414 Persona for Firefox

Personas are the easiest way to theme Firefox. Got Firefox? Visit getpersonas.com and it’ll get you started.

And for you Web414 fans, you can install the Web414 Persona.

If you wanna go “Persona Crazy” you can install Personas Plus for easy access to over 60,000 personas.

Web414 Persona

Here’s what the Web414 Persona looks like in the Firefox 4 beta. (Don’t worry, it also works in Firefox 3.6.x as well.)

web414persontop

Here’s a close-up showing the logo treatment as it appears in the header. (It looks better in Firefox 4 than Firefox 3.)

Building this personal took almost no time… the only delay was waiting for approval, which took about a day. (While I was waiting I investigated hosting the persona on my own server, but there’s a lot of Javascript hackery to make that happen that I didn’t feel like getting into.)

I may build more personas if I get time, or maybe I’ll dig into Enhanced Personas. :)

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Mozilla Crash Reports

The Mozilla folks make it pretty easy to send them crash reports… In fact, I think it was Netscape that first implemented a way for the browser to easily submit a report when something went wrong and your browser crashed.

I did find some instructions for reporting a crash bug in Chrome, and of course Safari can also send crash reports. Hopefully this makes for better software in the future.

In digging into all the crash reporting, I found that Mozilla actually publishes the results they get. Head on over to their crash-stats site and take a look.

Mozilla Crash Reporting

You can do custom queries for a few different Mozilla products, so in this screen shot I chose the current stable version of Firefox running on Mac OS X. Hmmm, looks like the Flash Player caused the most crashes…

I couldn’t find if Google or Apple has anything like this, but if they don’t, they should think about it… There’s some great data in there.

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Cheap Thrills, Speed Kills…

I’m told I need to make some arguments to convince people that speed is not everything. I’ll attempt to do that here.

Should I even mention a time when almost all browsers were named after cars? No? OK, good… Let’s talk about cars then. When choosing a car do you typically go to the car dealer, and ask for the fastest car they have? That sounds like a great idea, I mean, you’re in a hurry, you have a need for speed, and you can’t drive 55, so you want the fastest engine they’ve got. It makes sense.

Now that you’ve got your really fast car, you might also wonder how safe it is. Will it protect you from harm? What if the locks don’t work, and it’s not very secure, and people can just open the doors, and rummage through all the stuff you leave in your car… your shopping receipts, the playlist on your iPod, you know, stuff you might think is sort of personal, and you’re not OK with sharing.

Apache / IIS

Many years ago (I know, I start a lot of stories like that) there was a sort of competition between web server software, and this competition often looked at the speed of which a server could serve pages. That made sense to a lot of people, because, you know, you want your pages served fast. The competitors were Microsoft IIS and Apache’s HTTP Server. In many speed tests, IIS was the winner. If you based everything on speed, IIS would have been the clear choice. Now, that would have meant you ran your web serving platform on Windows, because that’s the only place IIS ran. You also would have most likely restricted your code to ASP or maybe ColdFusion, but you probably would not have even considered PHP or Perl, or any of those “weird open source” languages. It sort of made sense that IIS would be really fast on Windows, as both products were developed by Microsoft, and if anyone could make then work together, and run fast, it would be Microsoft. I mean, I’m not suggesting that Microsoft would use undocumented API calls and what not in the development of IIS, right? Right. I’m sure the Apache Software Foundation wanted to put out a fast web server, but they were also very concerned with conforming to the standards and specifications published by the W3C and the IETF and other organizations that were working towards building the web, and they were also putting out web server software that ran on many different platforms, some of which I’d bet you may not have even heard of. There were also a number of great modules you could add to Apache to make it do great things. I worked with Apache and IIS, and I definitely preferred Apache.

Oh, did I mention Apache’s HTTP Server was also open source? While Microsoft could do whatever they wanted to with IIS, including kill it off at any point, or completely re-write it, or force you to pay exorbitant fees for it, Apache was open source. If you didn’t like where it was headed, you were free to take the code and do your own thing. Or hire someone to do it. Open source is like that… it sort of serves as an insurance policy for the future.

The Apache Software Foundation has been a non-profit organization since 1999, and I believe the web has flourished and grown in no small part because of that. I’m not saying that Microsoft IIS or lighttpd don’t have a place in the world, as they surely do, as do other choices, but I’m grateful for the work the Apache folks have done, as they’ve made it possible for myself and others to do so much over the years to help move the web to where it is today.

But I know.. you all want the fastest damn browser your money can buy… regardless of the other features which may matter today, or in the future.

See Also: Firefox, it’s not me… it’s you! and Mozilla Firefox vs. the World.

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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!.