Mozilla’s Dave Mason, when asked by derStandard.at what the most scary part of Firefox’ roadmap is: “It has to be Firefox OS which is a huge step for Mozilla. It is exciting and scary at the same time. This is the first time we had to partner with some other companies to get to the end results so that’s a hard transition for us.” I commend Mozilla for attempting this. I’ve been trying out Firefox on my Nexus 7 today, and it’s really, really good (save for the interface, which needs some serious Holo love). If this is an indication for what Firefox OS is going to be like – good on ‘m.
Committed to producing an open product on cheap devices. I want one.
No doubt we will see a flurry of litigation from Apple when the products hit the market, but I’m confident this will fail, even in the US in the medium / long run.
When Firefox for Android came out, I dropped the Android browser like a hot potato. I tried Chrome for Android, but I like Firefox better.
I do use firefox on the desktop – but on android I still prefer opera mobile. It has recently grown into a good alternative, though.
Firefox Mobile has improved but it still needs work.
* It uses 16 bit colour, so colour banding is at times really evident. It looks nasty. It’s 2012, nothing should still be using 16 bit colour. To my knowledge every other browser uses 32 bit colour.
* The UI/UX on a phone is pretty bad, whoever designed it is thinking in the mind set of a desktop and not a phone. With a mobile phone the fingers are typically near the bottom of the screen, if I want to press something I have to physically move my hand rather than just my thumb. They really need to take a look at the UI/UX of Safari or Opera Mobile.
That said, the same UI/UX when used on a Nexus 7 isn’t as bad as the hands are typically near the top half of the screen when it is being held.
Chrome for mobile has a similar problem, a lot of the UI elements are at the top. Fine for a tablet but bad for a mobile phone.
In my personal opinion the best mobile UI/UX is Opera Mobile. That said, Opera Mobile on a Nexus 7 is awful. Because the UI is fricking tiny on the screen. (my guess is they haven’t updated it yet)
This is from someone who has Google Chrome, Opera Mobile and Mozilla Firefox (Beta, Aurora and Nightly) installed on his phone and tablet. I tend to alternate between browsers, I use opera mobile mostly on my phone. And I use Chrome and Firefox mostly on my tablet.
I would really appreciate it if they would concentrate on that Firefox is. A freaking Browser. They have alot of potential but they seem to do anything else than improving Firefox…
Don’t you think the work they are doing to optimize their code on mobile devices will improve all their products?
Sometimes, you don’t solve your problems by working head-on on them, like you don’t improve code by hiring more programmers to work on it. Like the Linux kernel history shows, working on side-projects may bring unexpected benefits.
Nope, because ARM and X86 are frankly as different as they can possibly be. while a few tricks might port over I’m betting most won’t, the arches are just too different.
Personally I’d just be happy if they’d do something about their damned near constant CPU spiking. I’ve tried regular, ESR, and PaleMoon and frankly ALL of the gecko browsers are prone to CPU spiking, especially on low power or older chips. launch a new tab? 100% spike, scroll? Adds a 20%-30% CPU spike. This is my results on both an AMD Spempron 1.8GHz single and an AMD E350 Fusion dual, in both cases it spikes B.A.D. Compare this to anything based on webkit, Chrome, Chromium, Comodo dragon…no major spikes. The webkit browsers use a little more memory but a LOT less CPU, and since the memory is powered no matter what but CPU spikes mean more power i personally would rather them use more memory.
So I wish them luck on MozOS but I’ve already moved most of my customers on X86 to Comodo Dragon or Chromium. I think its a shame but the other poster was right, it seems like ever since Chrome suddenly exploded on the scene the guys at Moz have been doing everything to ape Google (down to MozOS) except building a decent browser.
I believe they would love to do that too, but they have realized that leaving mobile space to Apple, Google and MS will endanger open web in the long term.
They need to give mobile device integrated web apis a fighting chance on the real devices, but that requires an OS layer they control.
They have carriers on their side, as they see proprietary apps as a way of locking users to any given platform and that takes the control away from them. They need an open middle-ware that is exchangeable between platforms. They have tried already with WAC, this is a 2nd attempt.
FF OS will be pushed by carriers (that’s quite opposite to WP currently) and if enough ground is taken, app devs will take a notice and start supporting its web apis. Tizen is in fact another path to the same result and I expect it will be kept compatible with each other. When the number of apps is significant carriers and their partners will start to push Apple and Google to put the compatible middle-ware on their devices. After that is successful FFOS may be laid to rest serving as a reference impl.
Also, this graphic may put things in a bit more context:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/.a/6a00e0097e337c88330176171e…
I don’t get why Mozilla wants to put resources into a browser OS, when by the success of Chrome it’s crystal-clear that nobody wants such a thing.
Seriously, I have been a Firefox enthousiast for 10 years. I remember getting my hands on it as a teenager when it was still called Phoenix. I remember how I used to advocate Firefox to my nerdy friends and my family. But it’s getting harder and harder to stay on this ship. Firefox crashes all the time on Windows 7. And no, it’s not always Flash player. Sometimes Firefox itself even closes randomly and I lose my entire session, even when just reading an ASCII man page for a UNIX-command online! It’s becoming more and more unusable as the years go by! If the Firefox team is not going to get its priorities straight soon instead of this Szeleney-like behavior and actually make Firefox a joy to use again, I’m afraid that after all this time Firefox and me will have to part ways. And that makes me sad.
I’m not denying your experience and I’ve read comments from a few other people having the same experience, but this Firefox behavior is a mystery to me. On several low and high end systems, Windows 7 and XP powered I’ve never encountered anything like that. Maybe it’s some corner case or something specific to a certain usage pattern?
As always, experiences may vary. But I feel that Mozilla is under an ostrich effect. They are losing a lot more people over these issues as you might think. I even know a handful of old study buddies telling me they switched to Chrome from Firefox because of performance issues, and now with the stability issues and Chrome add-ons it’s hard to stay positive about Firefox next to Chrome.
While I personally switched over to Comodo Dragon if you want to keep FF and figure out WTH is causing the crashes here is what you do:
Go download a program called “Dependency Walker” which is just a zipped .exe, nothing to install, and run it. When it starts point it to the FF .exe and I bet you’ll find several RED entries on the list below the main window. Those red entries are .DLLs that FF is trying to call the DW can’t find which means FF can’t find them either. I wouldn’t be surprised if on one of the bazillion updates FF has had lately one or more .DLLs got screwed and its causing the browser to crash.
That said look into Comodo Dragon. It’ll copy your bookmarks and passwords from FF if you wish, is rock solid stable no matter how many updates come out (I’ve updated mine from 6-20 without a hassle), supports the most used extensions like ABP and readability, supports low rights mode in Win 7 for safer browsing (even after 6 years FF still doesn’t support LRM) and it has some nice optional security features like Comodo Secure DNS and site inspector.
Like you I was an old school FF user, and used the Moz Suite before that. But ever since Chrome came out the quality of FF has just gone downhill IMHO and after one freeze too many I tried around a dozen different browsers before settling on Dragon. While I’ll always look fondly back on my time with FF my customers come to me expecting me to recommend the best most reliable tool for the job and FF just ain’t it anymore.
Coming from someone who has no issues with Firefox at the moment but has had in the past, have you tried to empty the cache, and if it doesn’t work delete your user profile ? (Should be somewhere in AppData, be careful that all settings and extensions will be lost)
I remember that a few times in the past, I suddenly experienced lots of Firefox crashes and had to perform this last operation to restore sanity. This was not caused by browser updates in most cases, so my personal guess is that the combinations of frequent hardware failures and unjournalized filesystems that I had at the time is to blame for this.
Also, if this does not solve the problem and you have extensions installed, you may want to try disabling those one by one and see if some are to blame for this.
Edited 2012-08-14 06:54 UTC
Wow all those hundreds of millions of users must be really stupid to put up with a constantly crashing browser!
That statement really sounds stupid doesn’t it? How about I change your quote to what you wanted to say: “Firefox crashes all the time for me. I hate that and I am going to change browsers.”
Given that they didn’t even manage to rework Firefox’s architecture to allow a process per website (a la Chrome), I would trust a Firefox OS as much as Windows95 i.e. not at all.
Judging by the description, they do use seperate processes:
The b2g process may spawn a number of low-rights “content processes”. These are where web applications and other web content are loaded. These process communicate with the main Gecko server process through IPDL, a message-passing system.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Architecture
Basically, what Chrome does.
There are many reasons why Mozilla didn’t change their architecture. The most important one is obviously compatibility with existing code. With B2G they didn’t have that limitation.
Edited 2012-08-13 13:22 UTC
Oh, please. Why do you think nobody did it before Chrome? That solution is not better than the other: there are tradeoffs. One-process-per-tab is using a lot of ressources and makes it more difficult for add-ons to modify a webpage (e.g. Adblock in firefox blocks ads before they begin to download whereas Adblock in Chrome only hides/discharges them after they load).
Why do you want Firefox to look more like Chrome (which, alas, is the trend)? Use Chrome.
Chrome has a setting to use one process for everything, so in low memory condition you can use this if you want.
There should be two kind of add-ons, in-process flexible but unsafe and out-of-process: safer but less flexible.
I do, but I like Firefox too, I’d like it even better if they fixed the browser.
Strange I don’t think there’s much wrong with Firefox. Stable, pretty fast, has the best addons, and served from an impartial vendor – what more could you ask for?
Improved security from one process per website? Chrome is the benchmark for security..
And for “pretty fast” I disagree: Chrome is much more responsive..
But I agree very much with the rest, especially with the “best addons”: there’s nothing equivalent to “tree style tabs” on Chrome..
Chrome automatically includes flash, your argument is invalid
Actually low rights mode on Vista and 7 means YOUR argument is invalid sir. LRM has been out for 6 years now and FF has YET to support anything but running in the higher permissions of the user. Anybody worth their salt will tell you a program should ALWAYS run with the absolute least permissions it can and still function and that isn’t FF and hasn’t been FF for 6 years now.
So trying to say that because Chrome includes Flash (which every FF user will install into FF anyway, thus negating you entire argument) means its less safe than FF when one runs at a much lower permission level? Epic fail.
Although I think one process per website is a great idea, I’ve found Chrome tends to eat a lot memory in doing so. Personally Firefox is good enough. I used Chrome for a couple of years before moving back to Firefox, I don’t anything that will make me want to switch again.
As a side note my main problem I’m having is Flash instability. Honestly if it wasn’t for YouTube I would have uninstalled it long ago.
That’s a different matter. Firefox OS != Firefox.
You actually NEED one process per application.
That’s what provides protected memory.
Unless you think Win3.11 and 95 are better than WinXP and above, for example.