Last night, Firefox 3.5 crashed and I finally had enough ….
Last night, Firefox 3.5 crashed and I finally had enough …. didn’t even bother to start it again, today.
I’m finding Firefox as a browser, for whatever reason, is so unstable, has crashed so often, no matter how much Firefox is updated, it’s become fundamentally unusable for me, and this has been the case of multiple computers and operating systems.
Google Chrome, which I haven’t used much, performs much, much better and is far more stable - and boy, is it fast. Plus Google Chrome is now releasing extensions - see The First Google Chrome Extensions: Block Ads, Check PageRank, and Use IE8 Accelerators in Read/Write Web including Page Rank for Chrome and Cleeki, an extension that delivers the functionality of IE8’s Accelerators to other browsers, a list that now includes Chrome.
Fast …. means a lot now.
This week (I call it a task because it’s not the kind of activity one wants to do often) updating some Web Analytics site tracking code across 180 profiles in WebTrends was cut down to 1/8th the time to do and with much less effort and mental fatigue.
That means a lot to me …. THANKS GOOGLE CHROME!!!!
You want to know what I care about? I care about not wasting my life with stupid tasks that take 10 times longer because of lousy programming or unstable components - seeing my valuable time going down the drain because. The WebTrends interface is bad enough- they clearly didn’t care much for people working on the system - they appear into just selling their product - usability went down the drain.
But .. even a product as messed up as WebTrends 8.5 is, is still usable, but not with Firefox - the union of the two - or even IE6, makes administration tasks almost unbearable - mental cruelty, that’s what it is.
Using Firefox, each profile takes approximately 6 minutes to update as the browser is extremely slow to render WebTrends and often crashes in process - even at version 3.5, with built in memory mangement. IE 6 was a little better, at least it’s more stable, but it’s just as slow. IE 8, I haven’t tried for the same tasks, so to be fair, I don’t know if it would be better, or not than IE6 or FF for this.
How about Google Chrome ?
NO CRASHES and I can update WebTrends profile in about 40 seconds - with little effort!!
Ok, thank you Google for doing something that makes my life better - Chrome is much better, overall to work on any kind of complex task than the other browsers - it’s more stable, faster - and overall, better, for almost any kind of task. The results below from StatCounter - are just for the United States
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share
The reason this is important is I don’t have time or bandwidth to spend on a crashing browser - just as Steve Rubel is saying we’ve reached our maximum bandwidth - I don’t have time for stuff that whastes time, eating up my attention - and I don’t have time for products that keep crashing, for years - like that. At some point, the idea Firefox is going to fix their problems is no longer believeable, just in the same way the Detroit (GM, Ford, Chysler, etc) were going to fix their problems - you just believe them - that’s partly why the GM went under, I think.
While the best overall stats I can get don’t show Google Chrome’s gain in marketshare - if I, a loyal Firefox user for a few years, can get this fed up with Firefox, it means Firefox is probably reaching a threshold where users are considering an alternative.
By now, if by Firefox 3.5, they can’t ensure their platform is stable, they never will - not sure if it’s becuase Firefox is Open Sourced, or if it is a problem with memory and operating system, and anyone who is using Windows XP, or anything else than Vista - is getting zinged … I don’t know and I don’t care, anymore.
The last time I got fed up with anything this bad was MyYahoo! RSS Reader - I used it a few years back to read my RSS Feeds till I found it was too slow and unusable - I had seen Google Reader, back in 2006, had just emerged and once I started using Google Reader - I never went back to MyYahoo!
So now I’ve publically said - that Firefox stinks for me as a browser - I’m sure a lot of people will tell me - that’s not the case. But a lot of others will say it is - I thought to look in SM2 Techrigy (still awiting Radian6 to turn my access back on again) and what I’m seeing (doing a simple search just on “Firefox”):
The reaction to Firefox right now, seems way more positive than negative, but let’s take a closer look ….. at “firefox crashes” and “firefox problems” as searches
Here’s how I categorize the results
Negative - http://twitter.com/adarel/status/2180881254 http://twitter.com/restill/status/2003280793 and http://www.copykatchat.com/showthread.php?t=42731&page=2 seem to highlight that a browser that doesn’t work affects the applications that run in it - it’s possible my bad experiences with Firefox might spread to what I have running in it (like Facebook and Twitter) - and while that hasen’t happened for me, it appears to have happened for some others.
Positive
When I looked more at the “positive” responses in tone, I realized many weren’t positive and Techrigy can’t really get at the meaning of much of what it’s processing - so it’s guessing that something with postive “tone” is postive - but if there is positive tone in a tweet - or message board thread - it may be positive about something else, not Firefox. In fact, I found little evidence that Firefox was much liked by anyone - but then again, I’m not really that interested in knowing that it’s just my laptops where it’s crashing, and everyone else’s are stable.
The lesson in all of this - we can separate the delivery mechanism from the product - but in cases where the browser is the problem, it can spill over and you can find yourself frustrated with what your working on.
But more important - the lesson for me is that I don’t have time in my life to whaste on products that don’t work for me - and if they work well for others, that’s fine (I’m sure Firefox is working well for a lot of people - but not everyone - and I bet, more and more people are getting fed up).
So how to I prove that? How do I prove that more and more people are getting fed up with Firefox? Google Insights for Search -
My guess is, and being a loyal Firefox user - I noticed, but didn’t take note of exactly when Firefox began to crash more than usual, and what version introduced the problem - that since early 2008, the problems with Firefox have been noticed and ….. not fixed.
If I’m correct - in 18 months, essentially - Firefox has done nothing to actually fix these problems, in spite of all the updates they’ve had….. and the perception of being ineffectual has stuck - it would take a lot to turn that around for me now.
For all i know it has nothing to do with Firefox, maybe it’s Microsoft who has complicated the OS in such a way that Firefox is at a disadvantage in creating a stable version that runs on many of the older OS that Microsoft has out there - again, I don’t care, anymore.
Yes, there are some things I still need Firefox for, like Zemanta, and a few other plugins - but I’ll be using Chrome a lot more now, and Firefox, a lot less.
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I’m fed up with Firefox, moving to Google Chrome
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