Mozilla Dev on How to Convert Chrome User to Firefox

[gti88]

Adblock in Chrome is ridiculous. Awkward... thing.

 

[wiyosaya]

On the positive side, he noticed that Mozilla's position as a non-profit organization resonates well and AdBlock Plus is a tool Mozilla needs to promote much more.

I agree with this 100%.

I think they should also promote the "Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus" a Godsend which I find makes stopping the difficult to hide elements significantly easier. You can even block flash embeds with it.

 

[killerchickens]

Ive had more problems with Mozilla not responding and then possibly crashing than any other program I use. After I run it for a while it like to move slow as molasses and cant play videos with out stuttering. Now im using Aurora it seem to run fin so far. I love Adblock.

 

[xenol]

Firefox has one addon that I've yet to see anyone else have in a convenient to set up fashion: Download Sort. Among all the other features I'd like Firefox to have out of the box, this add-on alone (plus No Script) is enough to keep me.

Otherwise... Aside from the occasional hiccups, Firefox always seemed to work just fine on any computer I put it on.

 

[sgtopmobile]

[citation][nom]egmccann[/nom]... too difficult to set up?I seem to recall my experience being "Download. Install. Next, next, next, done." Perhaps they need to drop a "Next" from it? Honestly, I don't see most (average) users going from Chrome -> Firefox. It's still mostly IE they're moving from.Frankly, I think Mozilla's biggest problem is getting people to pronounce their name correctly. I talk to people all day who mention they're running Mozarella, Foxfire, Flamefox and other interesting variations.[/citation]
hahahahahahahah "mozarella" seriusly?? LMFAO

 

[DSpider]

Long time Opera user here. Switched to Firefox a year ago because of it's open source nature (even though I still use Opera exclusively on Windows). It does the job fine.

And why are you complaining about memory for? RAM is dirt cheap! Are you running a GPU-intensive game, a VirtualBox session, Photoshop, a 1080p movie and Firefox at the same time, or what? Unused RAM is wasted RAM. I'm using Arch Linux w/ Openbox, 2 GB RAM DDR3 @ 1333 MHz and it works fine with over 330 open tabs. Heck, ever since I uninstalled "flashplugin" it hasn't crashed on me once. Joined the Youtube HTML5 trial recently (http://www.youtube.com/html5). Not all videos work but they're getting there. Mozilla believes in open standards and being a Linux user I very much respect that.

 

[Guest]

Both Chrome and Firefox support exporting bookmarks to html and importing from html.

 

[NoobNeb]

Firefox seems noticeably slower than chrome :/

 

[salgado18]

[citation][nom]egmccann[/nom]... too difficult to set up?I seem to recall my experience being "Download. Install. Next, next, next, done." Perhaps they need to drop a "Next" from it? Honestly, I don't see most (average) users going from Chrome -> Firefox. It's still mostly IE they're moving from.Frankly, I think Mozilla's biggest problem is getting people to pronounce their name correctly. I talk to people all day who mention they're running Mozarella, Foxfire, Flamefox and other interesting variations.[/citation]
Chrome install has no "Next" button in it. In fact, you agree to the user agreement and it downloads itself, sets it up and opens a window. I really hoped every install was that easy.

Oh, and I've seen people call it just Mozilla, never remembering it's actually called Firefox.

 

[makaveli316]

I'm i the only one that experience a Firefox crash once in 6 months?
All of you complaining about crashes, better check the way you use your computer and stop crying like little girls. I bet you're the same guys that also have problems with drivers, blue screens of death ecc.

 

[Niva]

[citation][nom]bmouring[/nom]I use 64-bit nightly on both Linux and Windows, and o both platforms they've made huge strides in terms of memory consumption (the issue that most see is due to poorly-written extensions, a double-edged sword) while on Linux, Chromium is a crash-prone joke. It's nice to have choices, so to each his or her own.[/citation]

Really? My experience is completely the opposite. Firefox is slow and crashes, I've yet to get a single crash in Chromium (stable) and the thing is blazing fast.

The bookmark stuff which was brought up in the article is a huge deal in favor of Google. I've my bookmarks and preferences synched up to my Google account and whenever I reinstall Chrome I just connect to my google account and BOOM, everything's the same as it was before. This is a HUGE deal for me and probably the #1 reason I now use Chrome over Firefox... nevermind the speed and stability.

That being said I don't see why Firefox couldn't also connect to the Google account and grab my bookmarks from there? Food for thought... if that's not an option they could always create their own cloud service that gives this functionality.

The memory leak that everyone's talking about though... why have I never experienced it? Been using Firefox for at least 8 years and I don't recall it ever consuming all my RAM. Is this a slow leak? I run my computers for months at a time without rebooting or shutting down the browsers.

 

[livebriand]

Look, the issue is that FF tends to break compatibility with addons. Chrome's interface seems to work better. IE9 may be fairly fast, but Chrome is even faster, and IE lacks addons and fails to follow the standards. Maybe Microsoft should dump IE altogether and just include FF with Windows or something. (too bad it's not in their proprietary nature though)

 

[razor512]

They should promote the tab scrolling

Chrome lacks this addon

tab scrolling allows you to simply hold the right mouse button down, then move the mouse wheel up or down to switch through tabs, no need to move the mouse up to the tab bar

 

[razor512]

[citation][nom]NoobNeb[/nom]Firefox seems noticeably slower than chrome[/citation]

for single tab tasks the speed is mostly the same but with multiple tabs, chrome is significantly faster thats because it does load balancing between all available CPU cores

eg try refreshing 20 tabs on firefox, it will take a while and only use 1 core

try the same on chrome and it will use all available CPU cores and only take a fraction of the time.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]otacon72[/nom]Stop having Firefoz crash all the time due to flash STILL and not suck up half a gig of RAM with 3 tabs open and maybe more people would use it.[/citation]

never had it take up that much on 3 tabs, give us real facts on the tabs and stop lieing, and tell us what the tabs are, because a half hour long flash video that bufferes completely takes up more space than... lets say this one. [citation][nom]de5_roy[/nom]reduce memory leaks, better sync, introduce tab isolation or sandboxing or virtualization, lose the !@#$ing numbering and get the old version numbering back, better enterprise support. chrome users might not start using ff but there are always ie users to take away.[/citation]

i have windows crap up because i have to many chrome tabs open, if i have to many firefox only fire fox craps up. who CARE about the numbering, you really have a problem with it being called 7 or 8 instead of 4.15.23.5 for memory, try out memory fox, it works wonders and is why i can have 40+ tabs in chrome open and still barely go over 1.3 gb of memory use.

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]otacon72[/nom]Real facts? Ok... I have FF and IE open to THG, ESPN and CNN right now. IE9 is using 196MB, FF is using 386MB plus another 38MB for plug-in container. Nuff said.. FF sucks.[/citation]

whats takeing up the space than is flash, not firefox itself.
what version of firefox, so we know if its the one of the ones with really bad bloat.

i currently have 8 beta, and... 2mb is use... that cant be right... of, memory fox took it out of memory because of inactivity, its using 530mb with over 500 tabs open, most of them aren't loaded into memory, with about 70 tabs that are. plugin container is at 50mb most of the sites i have up, are no more demanding than this site, but less flash.

 

[tomfreak]

Fix the damn crash issue, I was a FF loyal user(using firefox since IE5), until they keep randomly crash me while I play BF3. now i am a chrome user. Congrats u make me dump u. Mozilla

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]Tomfreak[/nom]Fix the damn crash issue, I was a FF loyal user(using firefox since IE5), until they keep randomly crash me while I play BF3. now i am a chrome user. Congrats u make me dump u. Mozilla[/citation]

congrats, battle field 3 uses a plugin that is crap in mozilla, and its ea's fault, dont blame mozilla, blame ea

 

[nebun]

for some reason Firfox does not work for me anymore, no matter what i do, crashes left and right...i now use ie9 and chrome

 

[Guest]

>if that's not an option they could always create their own cloud service that gives this functionality.
PROTIP: it long exists. It's called Sync.

 

[vladdeh]

The editor's note in the article is pretty STUPID taking into account that Chrome's adblock doesn't work even HALF as good as firefox and it probably never will, clueless.

 

[Guest]

I've tried Chrome and quickly came back to the good ol' foxy. Plug-ins for Chrome suck and so does Google.

 

[DSpider]

[citation][nom]Swapnil99pro[/nom]Long time Opera user here too and I never want to switch from Opera. Don't really know why people BLINDLY prefer software that is 'open-source' - does that even have any meaning for the normal users?Don't forget - Google and Opera ALSO believe in open standards - just like Mozilla. Actually, Google and Opera are far AHEAD of Mozilla at implementing open standards.[/citation]
I disagree. Visit the Youtube HTML5 trial web page using Firefox (http://www.youtube.com/html5) and you'll see this:

Opera doesn't support h.264 and is closed.

Chrome supports h.264 (a patented, closed codec, which may or may not require a license in the future) and is closed (Chromium is open, so I guess it's half an' half).

While Firefox doesn't support h.264 and is open source at the same time. I don't know about you, but it looks to me like Mozilla believes in open standards more.

 

[wlachan]

The truth is the majority of users don't give a shxt about protection. They will use whatever is convenient and then moan about how slow the computer has become. Chrome has Google pushing it to the public but Firefox is all alone. The war has been lost regardless how good FF might be.

 

[DSpider]

That H.264 codec is the sword of Damocles. Because if it hits more usage than Adobe Flash (a very closed source platform which I'm hoping HTML5 will eventually replace), and everybody starts to depend on it, the MPEG-LA consortium that developed it may try to cash in - even though they said it will remain royalty-free for end users but not for encode/decode products.

And according to Wikipedia, the MPEG-LA patents in the US last at least until the year 2027.