That's my assessment so far. I realize posting an apostate opinion such as this is a good way to get my site hacked by a sixteen year old, but I'm going to write the rest of this anyway. I'm only doing so because I care about the product.
Let me first make this clear: I still think it's a great piece of software. It's much better than the current Internet Explorer. I wouldn't have the
Get Firefox ad on my site if I didn't believe this. I try not to answer criticisms before they are made, but I also want to counter the all-too-obvious "half of your site is about Windbg for Pete's sake, why don't you help fix the bugs in Firefox rather than complain?"
The reason is because I am a
user of Firefox. I don't
want to fix the bugs. If Firefox is successful in the long-term, the percentage of users capable of following the
Mozilla C++ Portability Guide will be statistically insignificant. The percentage of users that will even bother to submit bugs will also be practically zero.
And lastly (before I start bitching), I appreciate how difficult it is to implement something like automatic updates. The fact that this has been done across platforms this quickly is no small feat. Kudos to those responsible.
CrashesIt has crashed on me a few times. 1.0 did that maybe twice in the six months I used it. I uninstalled a beta version of 1.5 because the crashes made it unusable. I submitted the errors, but evidently not all of them were fixed.
Broken ExtensionsMany of the extensions I was using stopped working. Although I think this may be by design, I am considering it a bug. (I'm a
user, remember?) I would go so far as to say that it's a showstopping bug due to the extent to which I became dependent on some of those extensions. So why would the extensions stop working? I can think of a few reasons, which I'll list without having any idea which is the truth:
- They made breaking changes to their extension API.
- They require the developer of the extension to "certify" that it works with the current version of Firefox, or something like that.
Whatever the real reason is, this is just stupid. I don't lose the Google toolbar if I upgrade Internet Explorer, so as a user I don't understand why I should lose my extensions if I upgrade Firefox.
OdditiesEvery few times I open 1.5, this happens:
That's it. That's the whole window. If I try to expand it I get this:
Control ProblemsAs I type this, the focus is set to a textbox on a web page. When I type Ctrl+B or Ctrl+I to try to turn bold or italics on, the bookmarks sidebar expands and collapses instead. The control I am using should have its javascript handler executed in this case. This previously worked fine.
I assume Ctrl+B is supposed to do that if no control has focus, but Ctrl+I is a bit of a mystery to me.
Unfixed ProblemsOverall, the problems that were not fixed are really the ones that bother me the most. I think
improvements to back and forward button performance are terrific and everything, but to be honest I never ever noticed a problem there. I haven't exactly been dragging my tabs around like a madman, either. The time would have been much better spent fixing this longstanding issue:
My favorite icons are bleeding all over each other. My whole bookmarks tree is like this. The point of favorite icons is to allow the user to quickly scan the list and choose a link without needing to read the text. While this bug exists, Firefox is less usable than it would be if it had no support for favorite icons at all.
The initial startup time is also often abysmal. I have written about this in the past for other applications--startup time is very important and just does not get enough attention in a lot of open source products. The myth that
"Microsoft uses undocumented API's to make their applications load faster" may have something to do with this.
It's fixable, people. Fix it.A criticism of open source software is that problems rarely get fixed unless someone thinks it's
fun to do so. A fallacy, perhaps, but it has not been proven wrong by this case.