Firefox, the browser for the rest of them, hit version 3.0 yesterday.
I say this because although I updated to version 3 as soon as the prompt appeared on screen, I don’t use Firefox much. And the reason is that it’s entirely built with non-native widgets, it looks unnatural and damn, if it isn’t really slow as well. I’m running a dual-core 2.4 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM so nothing is ‘slow’ in any real sense. Firefox just feels sluggish. From selecting a button to dropping an in-window menu. I updated and kept it in my apps folder because you never know when some poorly designed web site will work better in Firefox than Safari. It’s rare but it happens (and yes, I keep a Wine bottle of Internet Explorer 6 for Windows installed for exactly the same reason).
Jack Shedd jumps in with this on his blog, Big Contrarian:
But fuck me if it’s not a lie. First, Firefox actually lags behind Safari in terms of web standards support. So if it was created to promote innovation, it must be more a “do as I say, not as I do†situation. In which case, they should also claim that it was created to help cure cancer. That’d look great in a feature chart.
The truth is that Firefox is not a great browser, it’s just better than Internet Explorer (I say this while using a Windows machine during the day). The very fact that I’m stuck using Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6.02 here is a different story but I’m sure I’d go mad without Firefox tabs. But that’s on Windows. On my laptop it’s a different story. I have Safari, Firefox and Opera, all updated to the latest levels yet if you look at my browsing, Firefox and Opera are distant in terms of usage.
Getting Firefox rendering without the crap UI means going to Camino. Camino is a much leaner browser, the mozilla rendering engine wrapped in Cocoa widgets.
Why is this all important though?
Firefox and Safari have, to be honest, more in common than we’d think and it’s a shame that they feel they have to make up nonsense in order to get ahead. Both browsers have a vested interest in the web being standards-based and ridding the world of everything proprietary in a browser (and yes, though it pains me, I think making web sites iPhone-optimised is a big mistake – aim for ‘Mobile Optimised’?)
I’m running a December ’07 MacBook with 1GB of RAM and Firefox is the last application I’d have to complain about, albeit I don’t use any extensions.
The standards compliance argument from my perspective was firmly mooted when the various vendors involved (specifically Apple) started pulling off this kind of shite and basically turned a quest for uniformity into some pointless arms race/pissing contest.
Which leaves general useability. Firefox renders more sites correctly than Safari for me (and this after trying several times to switch), is perfectly responsive, and since the start of the 3.0 betas hasn’t crashed on me once (that’s several months now).
In the meantime Safari is severely lagging behind in certain features I simply can’t live without on the modern web. Most prominently, I don’t believe there is any way to get it to persist Javascript state as part of my history, so I get annoying things like clicking on a ticker item on the BBC news front page, then clicking back, results in me having to wait 10-15 seconds while the ticker redraws all the items I’ve already clicked before bringing me to one I haven’t, etc. This is an essential every-day-of-my-life workflow.
The only irkful thing left is the pugly new style toolbar, but at least we finally have Cocao style form fields. When it comes down to it, I don’t spend my days staring at the prefs UI or even the bookmarks manager. Firefox is a window onto the web, and from where I’m standing moaning about general UI consistency of a web browser, while 95% of your screen estate is taken up with frequently Kafkaesque interpretations of Nielsen, is a bit like moaning about how nonuniform the dirt on the side of the road is as viewed from one’s car, as they motor down a country lane that’s just suffered from a 100 tonne slurry spillage. 🙂
For some reason my link to Hixie didn’t work. Here it is: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1206756775&count=1
Considering that Safari is more standards compliant than Firefox, it means the sites you visit are less than compliant and may be ‘designed for Firefox’.
I don’t think the hixie ‘hack’ proves anything. When you provide a flawed test that has no possible fix then you expect hacks. It took negotiation and a fix to the test to resolve it.
Your opinion on what makes a good UI is exactly that (and that alone) and we can agree to disagree. You are, of course, completely free to use any UI you like. I don’t think that ticker redraws are something that’s going to keep me up at night because it’s such a small part of my work.
I admit publicly, Firefox is a pain to use. Compared to Safari, the UI is sluggish. This isn’t about UI consistency – I’m not remotely talking about UI consistency – it’s about getting stuff done. It’s about whether or not the application feels like it’s running in syrup. Firefox likes the syrup. Safari less so. I demand responsiveness in my apps so Firefox loses. *punt*
Firefox remains a memory hog as well throughout the beta period and, surprise surprise, in release as well. Maybe this is the reason for the sluggishness? Who knows but my pattern of use now has Firefox so out of my consciousness that it’s only used for the edge case sites that don’t render properly elsewhere.
Kudos for the ‘Kafkaesque interpretations of Nielsen’ – makes you sound edumacated!
As a web developer, Firefox gives me much more feedback about what I’ve done wrong in my site, through use of things like Firebug. However, I use Safari day-to-day and as the first port of call for development for all the same reasons that mj outlines, the primary one being: it’s just faster.
There are some features I’d like Safari to have (a plugin API for one) but like yourself, I just use it as a window to the web. I switched away from Firefox when I saw how slow it was when compared with Safari 3.0 for precisely that reason.
Without the massive ecology of extensions Firefox would probably be useless to me.
I use the WebDeveloper and Firebug extensions daily at work and the web seems a strange place to me without NoScript, FlashBlock and AdBlock Plus. These are all invaluable to my online experience.
Even on a dual-core AMD64 box w/2GB RAM I have to remember to quit FF at the end of the day otherwise everything slows to a crawl. Firefox is an Epic Fail in this context.
So, in essence, it’s nothing to do with the browser. It’s the extensions. And if the extensions were elsewhere, so would the users.
Man, Firefox is a dawg.
Yep, if the extensions were available on another (preferably “free”) browser I’d have no reason to stick with the Ice Weasel.