Has Firefox been sabotaged?

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Hey,

I used to love Firefox. For so long it was easily the best browser and I loved how robust it used to be.

The last few builds have been awful though, especially the latest - in the sense that it keeps freezing, has significant issues with Flash and Java, among other deal-breaking issues. It's not just me either, it's happening across the board and I just feel gutted for Firefox. I've recently decided to migrate to Chrome myself even though I said I wouldn't as I find it too bare bones (And I am literally lost with the menu buttons at the top of the screen) - but it's become unusable for me.

What happened? Did the regular devs walk away from the project or something or has it been somehow subverted?

If you hate it, give Opera a try. I've noticed that since Firefox has gone to a rolling release schedule, they current versions don't take up a lot of memory rescources, but are processor intensive, much like Chrome.

I've had problems with Firefox today. It kept insisting a particular webpage didn't exist when I knew it did. Tried opening the same link in Chrome and it worked fine. Back to Firefox, nope, page still didn't exist. Had to clear down the browser cache and all history - then Firefox worked again. Looks like today's "upgrade" to 16.0.1 broke something.

I gather that even 16.0.1 was a hasty release due to a botched 16.0 release which had a major security flaw in it. Thankfully Mozilla pulled that before many people got caught out. Firefox is increasingly behaving like a sack of bricks.

Which OS? Are people having this problem with Linux?

16 seems to have issues.

The releases prior to around 2 years ago had issues with performance and bloat. I hope by "how it used to be" you don't mean that.

15 seemed mostly good to me (except on Android, which is slow).

I'm doing some hardcore JS development and think what you will but the smoothest, most consistently good performance I'm seeing is coming in this order from best to worst:

Internet Explorer 9 (no, I'm serious)
Opera 12
Chrome 22
Firefox 15
Safari 5 on Mac OS
Safari on iOS

The most bug free browser has been Chrome. They are well ahead of Firefox on bugs. Opera is also ahead of Firefox, and the consistent high performance of their JS engine took me quite by surprise. The only reason I can think of to choose Firefox over Opera right now is plugin support? Although I don't normally use any plugins.

The only area where IE 9 lags is in standards support, as usual. The gap is closing though.

I'm still on Windows Vista (same laptop since September 2007) and have the same types of problems. Admittedly, Internet Explorer isn't much better (and no, I don't even know what version I'm on--I refuse to update since I barely use it).

I thought it was just my computer being 5 years old. Guess not.

Today my computer froze while I was opening tabs on Firefox. At first I thought the end of the line for it was near, but this would explain it.

Ah, Firefox. I haven't touched it since they got out the version inflator, around 4. Realistically, would they even be at Firefox 6 had the version scheme not been totally botched?

But in my opinion, yes. Firefox should have never played catchup with version numbers and rushed development. It was atop the curve anyway, its just that Chrome is developed not only on an open source base, but is also sped along by Google. I realize that Mozilla is also a company, but I don't feel they have the same scale as Google. :B

IMO Firefox wasn't actually good until around the same time they started using the weird versioning. I don't agree with it either. But since around that time Firefox uses a fraction as much system memory, is significantly faster, and is a smaller download. They obviously changed something for the better. They needed to or Chrome was going to kill them. Same thing with Opera, which as of late is seriously fast. Actually I think this also drove the serious improvements to IE9. We owe Google.

I just wrote a fast optimized Perlin noise generator in JS (a direct port of Ken Perlin's Java code is sloooooow), and the times I'm getting for a 512x512 slice of 3D Perlin noise on a late model MacBook Pro running Windows 7:

IE 9: 190ms
Opera 12: 135ms
Firefox 16: 130ms
Chrome 22: 24ms
Chrome on Nexus 7: 200-400ms (varies wildly)

My version of the noise function is relatively light on math and heavy on array lookups. I am using a Uint8Array where available, i.e. everything but IE.

Stack depth is extremely shallow, only two levels. Ken Perlin's implementation has a deep stack and unnecessary copying, which resulted in around 500ms on Chrome and 4000ms on Firefox. Optimizing everything else but leaving the deep stack put me at 120ms on Chrome and 1500ms on Firefox. Firefox suffers heavily with a large number of function calls; Chrome doesn't. IE suffers most heavily with the copying - that made the difference between 250ms and 4000ms.

I completely agree. I've had trouble with Flash and Java too, and freezing...and all these bloody updates!! ! It never used to be this way.

Firefox used to be my pretty sweetheart, but she has turned into Kirsty Allie.

ruveyn

What website uses Java!??

Firefox has crashed at least 5 times today.

I don't know how much of it is because my computer is reaching the beginning of the end already (*sigh* how I can get attached to objects lol), but it might also be a problem with Firefox.

But the number 1 reason I use Firefox above other browsers, namely Chrome, is AdblockPlus. So if it comes to the worst, and I switch browsers, do you guys know another one, faster than Firefox, and that works with AdblockPlus or some equivalent to it? (something worth noting; a lot of adblockers use some sort of blacklist and automatically block them; I do not want that. I like having control over the process, right clicking an and and telling AdBlock to make it go away, or opening the list of all the loaded components in a certain webpage and shutting them down from there, so whatever I choose it should be able to do those) And thanks!

Chrome has Adblock Plus. It works just fine for me.

there are some embedded chat clients and security features that use java,

as well as some conceptual sites but those are of less importance