Bogomil Shopov – Бого

Why Mozilla sucks? Fosdem 2010

I just send my proposal to Brian for FOSDEM 2010’s Mozilla room and I need some help. Be ready … please turn your sense of humour ON.

The topic is … Why Mozilla sucks?

When I ask my friends and colleagues and even some ordinary people – why don’t you crazy people like Firefox/ Thunderbird/ Raindrop/(name your favourite Mozilla project), I receive a lot of different answers.

So, can you answer the question? Help me to improve my talk and maybe I will owe a beer :))))

Shoot now !

You can write here in English, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Romanian, Russian , German and French languages. Please do !

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77 responses to “Why Mozilla sucks? Fosdem 2010”

  1. gudata Avatar
    gudata

    Here is what I think about Firefox

    http://www.gudasoft.com/english/fun/08/28/113/firefox-is-not-a-browser-it-is-os/2008

    Reply
    1. Bogo Avatar
      Bogo

      @gudata -Thanks

      Reply
  2. Twitted by planetmozilla

    […] This post was Twitted by planetmozilla […]

    Reply
  3. Mozilla Does Suck Avatar
    Mozilla Does Suck

    Firefox grew too large, too slow and too complicated. Safari and Chrome are much superior for people who just want a browser, not a load of plugins and advanced (but often useless in practice) features.

    If you like working on advanced features, follow Chrome team. They work on DNS pre-fetching and multiprocess architecture while Mozilla lags behind (those happened to be in works for some Firefox 3.7, but Chrome had it many months ago).

    UI is a complete mess, and plugins add substantially to that. UI themes for 4.0 are a step in the right direction, but when it is going to be released? Late 2010? Again, Mozilla lags behind.

    In general, Firefox become new Internet Explorer in a way that in it’s quest for being totally mainstream, it rendered itself slow, bloated and lost it’s innovation edge.

    Reply
  4. uberVU – social comments

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by bo_go: Can you help me, please. Why Mozilla sucks #fosdem http://mozgull.bogomil.info/?p=80…

    Reply
  5. ArpitNext Avatar
    ArpitNext

    Agree. Firefox needs speed.

    @gudata: agree with you too: Firefox is not just a browser – It is an OS :)

    Reply
  6. David Naylor Avatar
    David Naylor

    Mozilla sucks at …

    – Communicating through the press how much *faster* Firefox has become since 1.0

    – Delivering releases “on time”. The mental image that some people have of Chrome leaping ahead of Firefox is not helped by Firefox releases never hitting their target dates.

    Reply
  7. Teoli Avatar
    Teoli

    The biggest problem with Mozilla is that most work seems half-finished.

    Example:
    1) Tracemonkey: looks good, but looks stalled
    2) ACID3: most work done, but SVG:fonts look stalled
    3) About:tabs, ctrl-tab UI look promising, but stalled.

    Lot of communication on the beginning of the projects (TM, UI-related), but when they are near completion, no more blogging.

    What are the current steps for TM (new conservative GC, PIC) and what the expected gain?
    What about SVG:Fonts?
    What About:tabs, ctrl-tab, ?

    It would be good to have a quaterly feedback from each team, in a blog way (analysis of what has been done, of the current situation and the next step).

    Reply
  8. Tomer Cohen Avatar
    Tomer Cohen

    People are starting to see better options than using Firefox. Some complain about lack of performance and OS integrity (Chrome, Linux), and others are [still] complaining on website compatibility issues (IE users, Windows-only/IE plugins).

    Before getting new features, it is about time to hold on and listen to users complains. It will make Mozilla products even better.

    Reply
  9. Jeff Avatar
    Jeff

    I get the impression that teams are stretched too thin working on too many projects.

    Reply
  10. Kurt Avatar
    Kurt

    1) Too many developers always away going to some stupid conference.
    2) Too many developers live in too many different times zones and it take days to have a conversation.
    2) Too many crappy bug reports that the developers have to spend too much time decoding and probing users for more details.
    3) Related to #2, too many users using bugzilla as a support forum.

    Reply
  11. Matic Avatar
    Matic

    – The UI is very ugly. Firefox 4 UI mockups look great, but according to the latest news, we won’t see that interface for more than a year. This is unacceptable.
    – Delays with releases.
    – People still using Firefox 2.x and 3.x. Everyone should be at the latest version.
    – Apparently it’s not automatically updating for non-administrator accounts on Windows.
    – Windows 7 (beta and final) have been out for more than a year and we still don’t have any integration with the new taskbar.
    – No mouse gestures by default. They should be included by default and explained to people somehow.

    Reply
  12. Saurabh Thakur Avatar
    Saurabh Thakur

    It doesn’t have by pass proxy for local addresses like ie or opera

    And, In which relase will be Mozilla 2.0 incorporated, so that it will be faster than any other browsers

    Reply
  13. Kelly Clowers Avatar
    Kelly Clowers

    Mozilla sucks at…

    Really good Linux support. (this one I am very serious about)

    (mostly just griping, I don’t expect anything to come of it)
    Having TM terms that are usable under the DFSG.
    Letting Mozilla (SeaMonkey) have its proper name.
    Designing new UI. Looking anything like Chrome is a bad idea.

    Don’t listen to “it’s slow and bloated” people. They wouldn’t know the difference between “fast and functional” and “slow and bloated” if it smacked them in the face.

    Reply
  14. Aldo Nogueira Avatar
    Aldo Nogueira

    Firefox sucks, because:
    * it is much slower than any WebKit-based browser. The rendering speed in some sites like planet.ubuntu.com (… i’ve just tested in FF 3.5.6 and it is not so slow)
    * it freezes for a while downloading a page in a another tab
    * it still has menus (menus seems so old-fashioned nowadays) (I take them out with an add-on)
    * its Linux UI is not so well polished as Mac’s Firefox
    * it consumes lots of memory
    * it does not integrate very well with the desktop in Gnome or KDE. Notifications should use the system’s method
    * its mouse scroll are captured by flash

    Actually, I love Firefox, but there is always room for improvement.

    Reply
  15. Alex Avatar
    Alex

    My biggest problem with Firefox is how slow it is. Mostly startup. I can start 3 other browsers in the time it takes FX to load.

    Reply
  16. testboy Avatar
    testboy

    Because this bug still has not been fixed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55696

    After more than 9 years and after all other browsers (even IE!) have implemented this functionality… still not fixed in Mozilla.

    Reply
  17. Robert Nyman Avatar
    Robert Nyman

    Hi,

    Sorry for linking elsewhere, but i wrote a long blog post about the current issues of Firefox, and what could be done to improve them:

    http://robertnyman.com/2009/10/08/help-making-firefox-better-share-your-thoughts/

    See you at FOSDEM!

    Reply
  18. Bali Avatar
    Bali

    Speaking as an ordinary user. I don’t know why some people say that Firefox is slow. Whatever some benchmarks say, I never actually notice that it would be any slower than e.g. Chrome, even though I have a 4+ yr old laptop that wasn’t considered a powerful machine even when new. However, I do notice that it takes much much much longer to start up, and that bothers me a *lot*. A few percent of improvement in startup time won’t cut it, it’ll need to be reduced to a small fraction of what it currently is.

    Reply
  19. Tony Mechelynck Avatar
    Tony Mechelynck

    So Mozilla sucks? Maybe. So did Monica Lewinski. But IE screws you all the way from here to Timbuktu, and that’s worse.

    Now seriously: Periodically (let’s say for a minute or two several times an hour) Sm2 exhibits a total freeze (browser, mailer and chat, at least, and using as much CPU as it can get). But if I wait, it gets out of it. How serious is that? Not enough to scare me away to some other application; now you judge for yourself. Maybe it’s the price I pay for the advantages of the Suite concept.

    Reply
  20. Peter Lairo Avatar
    Peter Lairo

    Biggest.suckage.ever:

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=250539

    Runner-up:

    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391057

    And: No decent feed reader. Best add-on is AWOL:

    https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=22003

    Reply
  21. Nathan Avatar
    Nathan

    For the average person Mozilla Firefox or any other application “sucks” simply because it is not what they are used to.

    Just today I was at a local computer store and overheard a woman wanting to exchange a new Macintosh for a Windows PC. She told the sales person she needed a Windows computer and used “Dell” previously, but followed that by saying she only used it for browsing the web and writing documents in MS-Office. Chances are the Mac could have done everything she wanted, but she obviously did not have the time or desire to learn something different. Giving her a Mac would be equivalent to giving her the Chinese language version of Windows. (and since this site seems to encourage multiple languages, I should point out that here in the US people generally only know English and are offended at the suggestion they should learn anything else)

    Unfortunately there is no real solution to that. At best, one could turn whatever product in to a clone of what someone is used to – but then you make users who are used to the old product unhappy.

    Were you looking for specific technical aspects that “suck” to address?

    Reply
  22. voracity Avatar
    voracity

    Right now, the top issue is: Speed!! Startup speed. New window speed. DOM speeds. And Javascript speed in parts, too.

    If startup speed in particular isn’t comparable to Chrome’s soon, 2010 will be the year of Chrome, and it will inevitably become the more dominant browser in a couple of years after that. And no quickload nonsense. Quickload = automatic defeat.

    I also partly agree with Teoli (for TM, anyway).

    Reply
  23. Adam Avatar
    Adam

    1. Development seems to not give a poop about the Acid 3 test.
    2. Even though it is ahead of Webkit in many ways.. it appears Webkit is being developed at a faster pace
    3. Firefox’s vision seems to have gone away.. There used to be roadmaps with big goals and features that everybody wanted to see coming.. now it just sorta appears like Dick Chenney when nobody cares.
    4. The website system is a mess. Mozilla.com Mozilla.org, getfirefox, spreadfirefox.. Usually I never know what page to refer people to to get their stuff done.
    5. Lots of news comes from… people scanning the updated wiki page? Is that the best way to find news these days?

    Reply
  24. Ken Saunders Avatar
    Ken Saunders

    With Mozilla products/projects? Or Mozilla itself?

    Firefox:
    I just don’t have any complaints whatsoever. I don’t experience any speed issues (rendering or app start), it rarely to never crashes and when it has, it has been due to website issues, not Firefox ones. The memory issue never bothered or greatly affected me either. I run my primary profile pretty hard and on average have 85 extensions enabled.
    If there was a better browser, I’d be using it. It’s that simple.

    Thunderbird:
    I’ve been a loyal user and supporter since 1.0 but not being able to easily create an account manually myself and avoid the account setup wizard has kept me from migrating to 3.0. All of the new features are great, but they are useless without me being able to directly setup my (Google Apps) mail accounts without hurdles.

    Thunderbird also really needs to catch up on integrating social networking activities. Perhaps I just need to learn more about the future of Thunderbird to see if the plans are to just keep it a dedicated email/news client and not a major communications tool/platform. I know that communications are what Mozilla Messaging is all about, but I see Thunderbird lagging.

    As long as it took to get 3.0 released (and I understand why), we could have gotten a default calendar feature or at least had Lightning ready to go when 3.0 was released. RSS in Thunderbird is no joy either.
    I love Thunderbird just about as much as Firefox and use it as often, so I’m a bit disappointed right now.

    I love all of the other Mozilla projects such as mobile, AMO, QMO, the upcoming Drumbeat, Labs and so on.

    Mozilla:
    Hmmm, tough to say without offending anyone I suppose.
    Mozillians are without a doubt the coolest cats on the planet and that I’ve ever met. I’ve made some really good and close friends. Mozillian’s passion, dedication, loyalty, and selflessness are unmatched imo by any other organization or corporation, but over the past few years I believe that the grassroots feel has diminished and most things come off more as corporate programs rather than community team efforts.

    Mozilla cares about, and takes VERY good care of their contributors, it isn’t that. It just doesn’t feel the same as a few years ago.
    I suppose that it all started when SFx went from more of a place where fans and users would come together to discuss and celebrate Firefox and Mozilla and to collaborate on ideas and goals to “spread the word” to more of a place where finished projects are promoted.
    The focus was taken away from individuals and conversations.

    A lot of it has to do with how Mozilla has grown and spread out and how it has had to become, and stay more competitive than just a few years ago and there’s nothing wrong with that, it just doesn’t feel like the tight-knit family that it used to.
    This happens with all families that grow and expand, but I’d like to see us pull together closer again.

    Reply
  25. Jason Oster Avatar
    Jason Oster

    I’ll keep my response short and sweet. :)

    Mozilla sucks because users do not understand the nature of bugs. “Firefox sucks because it is *buggy” — By this logic, all software sucks; All software has bugs.

    *Bugs include crashes, user-visible “weirdness”, perceived memory leaks, perceived performance impacts, perceived bloat, real memory leaks, performance issues, and bloat. To name just a few.

    David Naylor nailed it (no pun intended!) with “communication.”

    Reply
  26. Gerv Avatar
    Gerv

    Let’s make sure everything on the list is actually true, OK? :-) For example, Firefox already does DNS prefetching, and has done for quite a long time.

    Also, if you are going to call Firefox “bloated” or “too large”, be sure to define what you mean (size on disk? size in memory?) and let us know what you’d like to take out so it can slim down. :-)

    I think Firefox sucks because it regularly freezes for short periods on my (fairly new) X200 laptop running Ubuntu Linux. Thunderbird sucks because any time I search using Gloda, the same thing happens. The previous search gave me results in the blink of an eye. Gloda takes five seconds to populate the dropdown of choices I might want to do the search on, and another five seconds to actually do the search.

    Gerv

    Reply
  27. Aleksandar Avatar
    Aleksandar

    Ok the 1. problem is ram , in my school all who was asked sad that ,
    then there is a some network problems with our wireless networks and that is all , I think in my school 80% internet users use firefox .

    Reply
  28. gadu linux Avatar
    gadu linux

    1) slow at startup
    2) half finished products (ex. Prism on Linux had horribile bugs for more than a year)

    Reply
  29. kveel Avatar
    kveel

    Because they whined with Opera about browser ballot screen, Opera sucks more thought, but their innovations balances it.

    Reply
  30. Alexander Avatar
    Alexander

    What?Mozzila is the best,explorer to old,google chrome to stupid.In Romania mozzila has the best speed ever.And is very good for who knows to use ,not for old people:))Everywhere i reinstall windows,firefox is there.For all!

    Reply
  31. Henrik Gemal Avatar
    Henrik Gemal

    Thunderbird: Use same login info on outgoing smtp as incoming. Outlook Express has this.

    Reply
  32. Aaron Leventhal Avatar
    Aaron Leventhal

    Try to build a web app with a rich text editor, using contenteditable. IE, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera “just work”. Mozilla is terribly buggy. You’ll spend many days tracking down hacks just to make stuff work in Mozilla.

    What sucks is that this is just basic web platform support. The editor and probably some other areas of the platform are quite old and brittle now and no one wants to touch them for fear of making things worse. I was involved in the Mozilla project for years so I know what the politics were around spending resources on, and finding maintainers for, the older modules. IMO it’s a bad sign if there is no plan to test and fix the basics of the platform. Quality-wise we should be on par with the others. There used to be a pride in having the best quality, and in forcing the others to have high quality.

    Reply
  33. Ken Saunders Avatar
    Ken Saunders

    “People still using Firefox 2.x and 3.x. Everyone should be at the latest version.” Matic

    Man, I totally agree. That is why Mozilla sucks.
    I criticize Microsoft about the fact that they haven’t done enough to get people to upgrade from their broken ass browser (yet they do for Win7 and Bing) and that they support 3 versions yet anyone who keeps site stats can see that there’s still too many people using Fx2 (despite it being unsupported), and way too many using Fx 3. That’s insulting to all who dumped their lives into Fx 3.5.
    Mozilla is about moving people and the Web forward yet there are millions using old versions of Firefox.

    I don’t have any issues with release timelines. If a product isn’t ready, it isn’t ready. MS releases crap that isn’t quite ready for primetime just to meet corporate deadlines. I don’t see Mozilla ever doing the same.

    Reply
  34. Emil Ivanov Avatar
    Emil Ivanov

    I think the main problem is that the reports filled in bugzilla system are taking too long for fixing. There are bugs like 10 years old and in that time other browsers like Chrome are implementing a lot of things already filled in bugzilla.

    There are bugs which sit there and nobody is taking them serious, like the stop/reload button (Opera, Safari, Chrome they all have it before Firefox), the bug 243244 was wontfixed in 2004… and guess what 2 years later appears the same bug 343396 and it will land probably on 3.7, this is silly 6 years lost only on this thing! I remember the page zoom functionality bug 4821 filled in 1999 and resolved in 2007, 8 years! Now one really nasty bug 90268 which is restarting the plugins on the page and this is from 2001 still not fixed and even no patch, so far 9 years! Hope to see the last bug fixed with Electrolysis.

    These are just a few examples. I didnt mentioned the polish bugs, they are a lot, nobody of the responsible people is taking care of this except Alex Faaborg, but he is a designer not developer!

    BTW I respect Chrome for their competition and understand a part of why they created their project! Because Mozilla is slow, its not only about the Firefox rendering speed, this is the end result, its about a lot more things, like the decisions what to implement and fix in Firefox.

    Mozilla is slow at decisions, thats my answer of your question.

    There have to be better system with priorities or something. If the dev team dont want or are not sure to implement something they can make official extensions (like the stop/reload thing above) supported by Mozilla and when such extension becomes very popular to implement it in the browser. Maybe Mozilla Labs can do that. That way getting feedback from users will be far more better than “wait to see what the competition will do”, this is “lagging” the browser after the competition.

    Reply
  35. Ronald Money Avatar
    Ronald Money

    I have been a dedicated Firefox user since forever. Why is it that just as soon as everything starts working like it should, they introduce a new version and then it’s back to the same old crap. Absolutely nothing can be downloaded as far as the add ons. No themes, no alerts, NOTHING.
    So for now, my opinion remains the same. . . Firefox is sucking again!!!!

    Reply
  36. Stoyan Galev Avatar
    Stoyan Galev

    Firefox е един невероятен браузер но има един сериозен недостатък, много бавно стартира и много RAM използва. Трябва да се оптимизира процеса на зареждане.

    Reply
  37. Web Gravity Avatar
    Web Gravity

    Основния недостатък е бавното първоначално зареждане и огромните системни ресурси, които са необходими. След първоначално зареждане е мъка докато напиша URL – лагва здраво и ме изнервя. Затова спрях да го ползвам и сега съм на Safari и от време на време на Chrome. Трябва сериозно да се поработи, за да си върне блясъка и славата FF, иначе бях голям фен, но просто не мога да си върша нормално работата в момента, сори FF

    Reply
  38. Twitted by Falkowata

    […] This post was Twitted by Falkowata […]

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  39. Stanimir Jordanov Avatar
    Stanimir Jordanov

    Firefox is my favorite browser. However it starts too slowly. Uses too much RAM. JavaScript VM is visibly slower than the one used in google chrome (V8). It requires restart for every plugin install or update (again this is not the case with google chrome – at least I’ve used plugin installation without restart there)

    Reply
  40. rene Avatar
    rene

    The biggest problem with FF is that it has become humongous in terms of system resources (disk & ram & cpu) for what it does. Leaving it open with a couple of windows and several tabs in each window is enough to noticeably slow down anything else you run.

    FF suffers from a slow rendering engine – anything on webkit is a lot faster and more responsive.

    FF suffers from the “more features is good” syndrome. more features is almost always A Bad Thing!
    This goes for many of the plugins for FF as well; too many of them that do essentially the same tasks, most are complete nonsense and an utter waste of time. If you want to program a plugin, for god’s sake, try to be a bit more creative than make the gazillianth youtube download plugin…

    FF suffers from too much input from programmers. 99.9999% of your users are not programmers and don’t give a damn about many of the advanced features. and that percentage will only grow exponentially as the user-base grows.

    To understand what is wrong with FF, take a close look at Safari and Chrome. IMHO Google got the “spartan in features, but lean, fast, stable and does what i need to do without a fuss” almost perfectly right.

    Reply
  41. Weekly Browsers Recap, January 4th

    […] Why Mozilla sucks? Fosdem 2010 […]

    Reply
  42. Tiago Sá Avatar
    Tiago Sá

    I love everything mozilla, so I don’t know how important my contribution is, but I believe anything “something sucks!” is more important and interesting than anything “something rocks!”. So, if I were to complain about mozilla, I’d complain about how big they’ve grown and how that has affected their development rates. It’s not REALLY their fault, but Firefox 3.5 is the most used browser in the world, and it shows in their development: even being open source, it’s still slow to come out with new versions. And then when you consider the other projects, they are even slower! Maybe all the manpower is being allocated for the more important and used Firefox?

    Which leads me to another issue: extensions as part of the browser from the ground up. If you have any clue about how Firefox is made, you surely know extensions are an intrinsic part of the browser. Not only because users get to use the features they want (instead of being force-fed features they don’t want, opera style!), but because there are features that are not implemented in Firefox, but could be, because they are more fitting for an extension. There are multiple extensions that are made by important programmers of the core team, and if they wanted to get them into Firefox, they would, but it wouldn’t really work. They prefer to leave firefox as lean and clean as possible and let the user add what he wants. Which leads to multiple issues:

    – poor perception of the browser’s advantages from the consumer’s side: in the light of all the flashiness and kewl features of other new modern browsers, Firefox doesn’t seem to offer much. It was originally released when the only real competition was IE and Opera, both closed source, but now we also have chrome, and IE is getting cleaner, and Opera is getting marketing people working for them, and Safari started being just a reasonably sized piece of crap, instead of a humongous mountain off sh*t. And the public is enticed to try something else. Long gone are the times where choosing IE was “the safe choice”. Not, the safe choice is actually Firefox, and if the uninterested internet user suddenly starts to care what browser he uses, he won’t search for extensions: he will install other browsers! Mind you, they mostly come back again because, after all, it’s just flashiness and kewl, little else. Firefox’s unique selling point (USP for short) is still very much unique (although it will probably soon not be, since chrome is starting to get extensions): total customization. But the advantages of such USP aren’t obvious, and people tend to take a long time to “get” Firefox;

    – poor display of the available extensions: I started using Firefox when the 1.5 version came out. I actually started using the 1.0 version because my language wasn’t available in the new version, but that was for about two days. And back then, there were about 1000 extensions, and only 25% of them were of any actual use, and then only a few of those were very good. Now, we have multiple thousands of extensions and themes for the thing, and there are so many of them that are good, it’s hard to tell the public what’s hot and what’s not. Recommending some of them is outdated, at best, and AMO (short for addons.mozilla.org) doesn’t seem to want to change the state of things: a complete overhaul of how they approach extension distribution is in order. Urgently please. I have a bit of experience in web design, so I can see a few ways they could pursue to get there, but it’s certainly a matter of discussion;

    – colors: mozila’s projects lack colors in their design, and that’s kind of… well, sad. I am not gay at all (in the old sense of the word) but colors are a powerful weapon in evoking “cute!” in someone’s mind without actually making anything “cute”. No major browser has gone to the cute approach, but I think it’s something they should consider. We’re not talking hello kitty here, we’re talking something much more simple and basic: playing with color schemes and building an identity out of them. I love art deco, for example, why don’t they build something based on that? It’s very chic if you ask me :P

    Reply
  43. Daniel Hendrycks Avatar
    Daniel Hendrycks

    Firefox- It is slow and insecure, it is relient on plug-ins and extensions which in turn slow the browser down (I know, Firefox can get slower?!) and make it unstable. Very buggy also. Bad SVG support and other standards. Firefox will only show new toys off first but it lacks many good ‘ol standards. No time is taken to fix bugs, 99% of hte focus is towards the next version. Why not a few months of just bug fixes? Tell me, how can a browser be so great if it isn’t safe, fast, and not bug infested? The only way people can get the features they want is by degrading their browser with extensions. Gecko sucks in general.

    Mozilla- They claim their browser is an innovation but they never give credit to those that actually innovate. E.g. They never once mentioned Opera Link when they where talking about Weave. They also made people believe Firefox is the fastest various times. You’re a corperation but you only show that you are a foundation to sound nice and not greedy. “Who said the corp is greedy?” Well the foundation pumps money into the corp. Also in an interview with Mitchell Baker she said Mozilla was started to gain the maximum revenue possible. You also try and sound like you are the coolest out there. “Join Mozilla, You know you want to.” “Why settle for good when there’s awesome?” Firefox is my gripe.

    Reply
  44. Tobi Avatar
    Tobi

    I love FF and I really don’t get what people like Safari for. I remember my friend installed 4.0 and it crashed on every second page with flash.

    Why FF sucks

    – If JS is executed, FF freezes. Or at least it got worse since Trace Monkey.

    – Yeah start up time is really bad

    – People should be (more or less) forced to update between versions

    – Also direct updates from like 3.0.5 directly to 3.5.6 (not 3.0.5 –> 3.0.1x –> 3.5.6).. well at least for the future

    – A good and easy tutorial page would be necessary (who needs the new feature stuff?) What people need are simple things like using the middle mouse button to open links in new tabs or how to use RSS-Feeds

    Well about Thunderbird

    My dad was using Windows Mail, for a while it has been freezing quite often. I wanted to install Thunderbird, but it couldn’t import the Mails from there (well that was 3 months ago). I mean this Mail-client was shipped with Vista!

    Reply
  45. Reaper Avatar
    Reaper

    I don’t like Firefox for the simple reason that it is bloated, buggy and slow. It had an issue where it would run up 100% processor usage and one with problems rendering anything I changed multiple version till I got fed up. It’s Chrome or Opera, I would never give Firefox another shot.

    Reply
  46. bogas04 Avatar
    bogas04

    Firefox is gr8 , but mozilla does a wrong job every time by giving a wrong deadline for releases , due to this our anticipation turns into hate.

    Reply
  47. Old Nick Avatar
    Old Nick

    FF is not so bad, and definitely better than any IE.
    Here is my dislike list for FF:
    * start-up time (no comments)
    * UI (ugly)(4.0 looks promising)
    * support for several versions(i.e. 3.0.x and 3.5.x) I do not see any sense in making 3.0.6 then 3.0.7 when there is already a more progressive 3.5.x, instead of releasing 3.0.7, suggest update to 3.5.7 or smth.

    P.S. Prefer to use Opera as my default browser.

    Reply
  48. Chrom Avatar
    Chrom

    Nice to see that most complaints are ungrounded and just a handful even have some form of background information.

    @Peter Lairo
    Sage is buggy anyway, you should try Brief instead :)
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/4578

    @Dan
    Why mention Operas syncing stuff when introducing Weave when Firefox already had syncing capabilities at least a year before through extensions?

    Reply
  49. aleks Avatar
    aleks

    I have a TERRIBLE problem with FF, despite being a fanatic lover and user for over 5 years now.

    It freezes. If I try to open a webpage with just a tad more images than usual; or an rss aggregator (I use Netvibes) with more links; or if I open more tabs (8-10), it just freezes. It still wouldn’t be THAT bad, if it was affecting only the browser, but by freezing, it blocks my entire computer. And nothing but a forceful restart (via the start button) works – I can’t make a single thing work otherwise. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t do any good to my computer to restart it so often in that violent manner :-((

    I have to open certain pages I know do this to FF through different browser (Opera in my case), but I can never fully foresee which page will do this in advance.

    I’ve tried everything: upgraded the FF, then went and uninstalled it completely, deleted every trace of it (files, folders, etc) and installed it anew, run any type of scanner I could think of. There’s no virus in my computer, no adware, nothing wrong – but my FF freezes. It won’t make me use another browser (apart from the cases I mentioned), but it’s still frustrating and annoying.

    But when it works, it works better than anything else. I still love it – and advertise/propagate it – to death, no matter what.

    Reply
  50. Faith Avatar
    Faith

    It eats 50% of my RAM…This is crazy just for an explorer…

    Reply
  51. naoan Avatar
    naoan

    – No paste and go, yes this helps me immensely from staying away from keyboard most of the time.
    – No built-in note, not even with add-on, I mean a decent one.
    – No built-in mouse gesture, we shouldn’t need an add-on for this.
    – Wasteful estate of default UI, using add-on to make this light actually adding startup time for me, ironically.
    – No download manager, impossible to resume.

    That’s all above shouldn’t be achieved using add-on and risk getting bloated with memory leak and startup time. And yes I mainly use Opera but sometimes play around with FF and certain add-on on certain site.

    Reply
  52. Luigi Fulk Avatar
    Luigi Fulk

    I simply wanted to add a comment here to say thanks for you very nice ideas. Blogs are troublesome to run and time consuming therefore I appreciate when I see well written material. Your time isn’t going to waste with your posts. Thanks so much and carry on You’ll defintely reach your goals! have a great day!

    Reply
  53. Chrom Avatar
    Chrom

    @naoan

    This is about the organization Mozilla and its projects, but I guess you’re talking about their Firefox project.

    1.
    Just middle-click the favicon to the left of the location bar and away you go.
    An alternative, which sadly is the default on Linux, set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to true in about:config and you can middle-click in the content area and get the same result.
    Note that, sadly, neither solution will do a quick search if the clipboard contains an invalid URL.

    2.
    Why? Why not just open a lightweight text editor in the background? Also, this request would be more appropriate for SeaMonkey the suite rather than Firefox the web browser.

    3.
    I really don’t think this is something a browser should do. This is something that should be supplied by the operating system, if at all. Just buy a new mouse instead, just about all of them come with at least six buttons nowadays.
    If you’re interested in earlier discussions on this then check Bug #76537 on Mozilla’s Bugzilla.

    4.
    I can think of two extensions needed for this, Hide Caption and Hide Menubar. The second being deprecated as this is now built-in to fit in with other applications on Windows, which hide the menubar by default. Neither add any form of load or startup time.
    Stylish could also be counted, for easier handling of chrome customizations made through CSS.

    5.
    How many years have it been since you last tried Firefox??

    Reply
  54. Amy Avatar
    Amy

    For some reason, without my knowledge, Thunderbird decided to be my default email client–even though it WAS NOT set up with my primary email address. For a long while, it was playing nicely with my other email client. Then, it decided to be a bully and took over as default email client–literally. AND, Mozilla doesn’t have an option to reset its bully program. Once it takes over, it WON’T play nice and let me decide which program I want as my default email client. I was already using my other email program as my default client. Mozilla’s programers obviously don’t care that they don’t give people any decision in the matter. Yo, Mozilla, remember all the hotwater Microsoft was when it attached programs with its OS and didn’t give people the right to opt out of programs they didn’t want?

    AND, Mozilla obviously doesn’t WANT any real contact with real people who use their program, because they ASSUME that their so-called “knowledge base” or FAQ answers all the questions anyone could ever possibly ask. They leave no possible way to actually contact Mozilla or ask for real technical support.

    There is no option on the start up menu to turn Thunderbird off on the start up menu. That option simply doesn’t exist. I know, because I had some tech support here who couldn’t find a way to beat this bully into submission. Thunderbird insists on having its own way about being the default email client and doesn’t care what the computer operator wants. That is like a school yard bully or gang banger mentality. People should have the right to opt out of having Thunderbird as the default bully, if it’s not associated with the user’s primary email account. The programmers obviously don’t see it this way, and they obviously don’t want to hear from people who actually use their program.

    Reply
  55. Adrianer Avatar
    Adrianer

    From a Mozilla developer perspective, what really sucks is the Mozilla Developer Center:
    After the switch from MediaWiki do DekiWiki the site is nearly unusable. We were told, that all the glitches will be gone soon, but I hear that for now nearly 1.5 years and you still are not able to use it in any comfortable way.

    Examples:
    -why are the search results on MDC displayed so badly that I have to click and scroll and read for hours until I find what I’m looking for?!
    -why do I see Chinese(sic!) results in my search results?!
    -why do I have to learn a yet new syntax to edit articles in MDC?!
    -and so on. See more of such annoying bugs here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=519025

    Reply
  56. kron Avatar
    kron

    It looks awful on Vista/7 and isn’t native GTK/Qt on GNU/Linux.

    Reply
  57. Why Mozilla sucks – part 2 | Mozgull

    […] start to read all comments about Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla projects for my talk at FOSDEM. (or for any other Mozilla event, if it will be not […]

    Reply
  58. sowatever567 Avatar
    sowatever567

    Firefox is slower than Chrome. That is why I love Chrome.

    Reply
  59. Tollef Fog Heen Avatar
    Tollef Fog Heen

    The only one of the suite which I use is firefox (or rather, iceweasel). My main gripe is it is slow and memory hungry. Fix that and I’ll be much happier.

    Reply
  60. calendarick Avatar
    calendarick

    Thunderbird and Lightning need a better support for syncing with mobile devices (read: phones, smartphones)
    I know there s some 3 party solutions for linux, but on windows i m stuck to the program that phonemakers deliver. Those usually only support the usual Microsoft suspects and sometimes Lotus.
    If i wanna sync my mozillaish PIM-thingy with my mobile i have to do so via a webserver (second best economically, ecologically and with many phones still second best at results)
    I admit that Thunderbird shouldnt start to build in support for diferent mobiel devices, but i guess offering a WELL DOCUMENTED API would help alot to motivate phone makers do add support (once the calendar apps have reached 1.0 this might be possible?)
    I d go a step further and suggest to consider to at least build in syncml support. that would cover a lot of phones actually.
    And other use cases!

    Reply
  61. Ray Avatar
    Ray

    I am concerned by the level of arrogance and elitism that many developers exhibit from time to time. For example, when they introduce something new–geolocation, jetpack, personnas, the complete overhaul of the default theme–they should expect a push-back from long time users. Instead, they seem to take offense at these comments to the point of ignoring and/or avoiding serious discussions about the issues.

    Few, if any, developers monitor the mozillazine forums. Those with blogs often moderate their comment areas and do not approve comments that they do not like. An example is not approving negative comments about the safety and security concerns of integrating geolocation into Firefox.

    Geolocation is an API that can provide the location of the user–an actual physical location of a mobile user–to a web site or other web connection/person they are in contact with. While it has been implemented according to international standards meaning no information is provided unless the user approves it first, it remains on the user’s installation/device whether he or she wants it there or not. More importantly, there is no stated advantage to having geolocation integrated into the browser meaning there is no reason why geolocation cannot be a stand-alone add-on or option that a safety- and security-conscious user can opt against installing.

    Try bringing this subject up in the comments section on a blog pushing geolocation. Do not hold your breathe waiting for it get approved.

    My opinion is that geolocation is being pushed by one or more benefactors of Mozilla–Google comes to mind and who is, by the way, the developer of a geolocation API. I do not care if this is the truth. What I care about is Mozilla being open about why they are integrating geolocation into Firefox especially when they cannot provide a technical reason why integration is superior to an add-on or an optional installation.

    To boil down the responses, geolocation will be a wonderful new feature so you should just trust the technology. On several occasions, NASA just “trusted” the technology. How’d that work out for the Apollo One crew and the two space shuttles that were lost? Remember Murphy of Murphy’s Law. Murphy was an optimist. He understood that despite people’s best efforts, something can still go wrong, thus it is better to be prepared for the possible failure rather than think it won’t fail. Mozilla is not preparing for the possible failure of geolocation and making it not just a pref that can be turned off, but, instead, making it something that the user can opt to not install in the first place.

    A browsing of the mozillazine forums and Planet Mozilla blogs will provide a number of posts and/or comments expressing displeasure with the apparent move to Jetpack for extension development fearing that this will reduce the extensibility and creative that is seen as possible with XUL. You can find similar controversy with the proposed changes to the default theme and the potential new headaches this may mean for those who make their own theme.

    Why I am mentioning these controversies is that the original mission of Firefox–as I understood it–was to be a lean, fast, safe, secure and highly customizable and extensible web browsing alternative to IE which was at the time none of these. Microsoft let IE slide as they took web browsing for granted and thus opened the door for Firefox, Opera and other browsers. Now, it seems as though Mozilla is taking the web browser market for granted–ignoring the users’ feedback–and moving Firefox towards a similar conformity that still marks IE.

    Reply
  62. James Avatar
    James

    Why does Mozilla suck? Because the NSS developers aren’t interested in breaking the PKIX SSL cert oligopoly by implementing RFC 5054, TLS/SRP. Because a history feature I implemented (storing referrer) was forgotten in the conversion to Places. Because Firefox pauses while scrolling a text webpage. Because Gecko leaks X memory so I have to restart X (or get more RAM – I now have 6GB just to run Iceweasel and Iceape). Because your trademark policy is stupid. Because there’s no .msi installer. Because you let projects silenty die – anyone remember ScreamingMonkey or the new Linux embedding API? How about Mozilla 2, the uberplatform to save Gecko and the web? Haven’t heard anything about those in a while. Because the preferences menu item changes between platforms. Bug numbers and links blog posts extolling undelivered features available on request.

    Reply
  63. Philipp Avatar
    Philipp

    It has been said before, but must be said again: MDC! API documentation inside a wiki simply does not work. XULPlanet was shut down, and replaced by a horribly slow Minddev wiki, which has no real search function (only Google and site:developer.mozilla.org gives you good search results), which uses HTTPS for no reason other than to make it even slower, which is down a couple hours every week and has no real structure (well, it’s a wiki, I know …).

    Documentation IS important and it would be so much easier for developers to get things done if I wouldn’t have to grep + google all the time.

    Reply
  64. raychje Avatar
    raychje

    Old bugs do NOT get fixed!

    There are ~ 1200 bugs that are marked as “New” that have not been touched in over FIVE years. Why should a person bother filing a bug when there is a strong probability NOTHING will get done to fix it.

    There needs to be a bug fix release of Firefox that ONLY fixes old bugs. A bug marked as “New” is a real bug and should be fixed. As bugs age there priority should increase. New features are great, but old features need to be improved as well.

    Reply
  65. Robyn Wiles Avatar
    Robyn Wiles

    Thunderbird can’t migrate its own files from one HDD to another automatically. It gives options for the competition but not for their own client! How shocking is that?

    Reply
  66. Marc Diethelm Avatar
    Marc Diethelm

    Mozilla SUCKS because XUL was never completed, formalized or versioned and is unusable to create precisely designed cross platform GUIs other than a browser. Endless CSS hacks are needed to get kinda close to that goal. Mozilla the platform never materialized (apparently in order to ensure the survival of Firefox. Resources were and are limited).

    Mozilla SUCKS because Fennec has no implementation in Java for mobiles.

    I love Mozilla.

    Reply
  67. Janson Avatar
    Janson

    I’m yet to get a single mail reassuring me that my bug has been fixed. Numerous crashes. I’ve always made effort to type details about the crash. I just pray and keep using Firefox. Hope my crashes are fixed sub-rosa.

    Startup time is unpardonable. ’nuff said.

    And firefox is bottom heavy, obese even. It just doesn’t go away when i close it. The process runs in my Task Manager forever.

    I’m averagely literate and so have no problem in navigating the SUMO. But could i expect it from my bright yet old-school grandpa?

    Why would any sane netbook user install firefox?

    Add-ons guys are great though. They are geniuses, their apllications mirror my mind and most of them always painstakingly answer my dumb e-mails asking them questions. In fact add-ons are single greatest the reason i love firefox. Community, rightly, is the strength of the fox.

    Reply
  68. James Avatar
    James

    So how did your FOSDEM talk go? Are the slides or a recording available?

    Reply
    1. Bogo Avatar
      Bogo

      It was not approved.

      Reply
  69. Kyle Avatar
    Kyle

    Well, whenever I use anything flash / shockwave. Firefox decides its going to screw up all of the sudden. Make all my bookmark icons , the reload button, the stop loading button, the home button, the forward a page button, the back a page button, and my add on-s vanish until I close out of it so it can tell me I have Firefox already running but not responding then make me shut down my computer log back in and have the whole thing start over again.

    Reply
  70. Pham Huy Anh Avatar
    Pham Huy Anh

    Hi, technically Mozilla stuff may “suck” but the idea of open plugin and everything is free is great.

    BTW, I have to admit that XUL “is reinvent the wheel”.

    Reply
  71. YemSalat Avatar
    YemSalat

    I do not like FF simply because its help system is very user-unfriendly.

    I love its F12 feature which is way better then any other browser can offer (and this is being said by an Opera fan)

    Ok to make a long sory short – I just downloaded v4 which is about a month old to the date. At startup it asked me if I want to import all my bookmarks from Opera. “Yay!” I thought.
    However the process was not a straight line – it offered me about 5 or 7 different “Operas”
    (“ProgramFiles Opera”, “OperaBookmarks”, “OperaWhatever”…)
    So I just chose the one that said “Opera”. Then FF showed me a message, something like: “Congratulations you successfully imported: _blank_”
    Nothing was imported.

    Ok, I thought “I just need to import it from another Opera option…”
    Click on the main menu – nothing about importing there.

    I go to the help center, type my problem, it immidiatelly finds an answer.
    And guess what the answer is:

    “You can easily import all your stuff from other browsers – just click on the ‘Import’ option in the main menu”

    Very nice, thank you…

    PS
    Who designed this textbox? Its background replicates the typing-cursor color, very difficult to navigate.

    Reply
  72. null Avatar
    null

    Mozilla sucks, they are not able to write fast software.

    Cannot be compared with superiority of chrome.
    Firefox and Thunderbird suck big time.

    Reply
  73. Name Avatar
    Name

    Firefox is equivalent to a use and throw item, good for initial use. I eventually learn’t i made a big blunder choosing Firefox. It cannot stop irritating popups and block ads even with ad block plus installed. It just cannot handle multiple tabs/windows playing flash/video content of different formats – crashed every single time when i tried to do so. The plug-in container thing does not go off even after closing browser. Some times there is a message like “Firefox is already running….x y z” but you cannot find the browser anywhere on the screen!! Every time a download starts, the download manager comes onto the front instead of running silently in background…When accessing a page from history,few days before, the highlighted history automatically shifts to present after opening the page, instead of staying there at the earlier date opened. This is very irritating and you have to open that past date in history repeatedly if you are searching for some page from it. There are many other problems like the ones above which were sufficient for me to dump this browser.

    Reply
  74. flash crash Avatar
    flash crash

    Mozilla continues to turn out a browser that crashes with Flash. Then, they do not help. No help. Nada. You can read cries for help all over the internet. No help from Mozilla.

    NO help from Mozilla.

    Mozilla sucks.

    No help from MOZILLA!

    Mozilla sucks.

    NO HELP from Mozilla.

    MOZILLA SUCKS!

    Reply
  75. Richard Neva Avatar
    Richard Neva

    OK, I have tried Mozilla before and always quit and dissolved it from my computer. This time, today I had Mozilla with Google for a browser and things were moving along. Then tonight I noticed my browser had changed! Yeah, no more Google when I hit the Mozilla button! I get AVG browser and I have had my times with those assholes too. I fooled around for awhile on the computer trying to rid it of that AVG browser which was terrible of course. Not that Google is that great but at least you have a chance of getting what you want with them, not so with AVG. I finally uploaded Google Gold or something like that and it was a browser much to my surprise! It works for me and when I hit the Google circle I am in like Flin! Of course I had to wipe Mozilla off the computer, that was of no use to me anymore. When I went into my registry on my computer I discovered so many kernels of AVG I could not count them and they would not delete! But as soon as Mozilla was gone they vanished too. What does that say about Mozilla? Think about that.

    Reply

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