Reasons Why Firefox Could Become a Top Browser Again

[wiyosaya]

[citation][nom]bartholomew[/nom]I've been using Firefox for years, but sometimes its really slow & freezes occasionally. So for random browsing I use chrome & for important stuff I choose Firefox.[/citation]
If you are on 64-bit Win 7, then Waterfox may be the answer - http://waterfoxproject.org/ It is the 64-bit version of Firefox. I've been using it for a few months, and it seems to work great. It even runs using all the Firefox settings and plug-ins. Personally, I am very happy with Firefox / Waterfox, and will not switch to anything else.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]scannall[/nom]Lately Firefox has been a crashtastic mess. On both my laptop and my desktop. I hope they get it fixed soon. :-/[/citation]

Try uninstalling all versions of FF on your machine and deleting anything left that the uninstaller misses (if it misses anything), including a Firefox folder in the Programs directory of your hard drive. Then install whatever FF version you want (vanilla, Palemoon, Waterfox, etc) and see if the problem persists. I have no crashes at all with any of my browsers and if you do then there is a problem because you shouldn't have such problems either.

[citation][nom]wiyosaya[/nom]If you are on 64-bit Win 7, then Waterfox may be the answer - http://waterfoxproject.org/ It is the 64-bit version of Firefox. I've been using it for a few months, and it seems to work great. It even runs using all the Firefox settings and plug-ins. Personally, I am very happy with Firefox / Waterfox, and will not switch to anything else.[/citation]

There's also the 64 bit Palemoon if we're talking about 64 bit versions of Firefox. Both versions of Palemoon have ad-on compatibility with FF too.

 

[kooldj]

chrome is unexpectedly crashing consistently on my pc, this time around it really did big time freeze on the whole system while browsing just 3 tabs like IE did in past and i had to improperly restart my pc and it didnt even restore the tabs, seriously this browser has lost its stability rep atleast for me, maybe smthing wrong with my pc but why only with chrome
and as far as i know, firefox didnt do any such horrible freezes! infact im finding firefox 11 to be alot more stable than before so im gona stick to it

 

[ivan_chess]

I find the chart funny because the projected numbers add up to 112%.

 

[srap]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]Try uninstalling all versions of FF on your machine and deleting anything left that the uninstaller misses (if it misses anything), including a Firefox folder in the Programs directory of your hard drive. Then install whatever FF version you want (vanilla, Palemoon, Waterfox, etc) and see if the problem persists.[/citation]
The profile folder is always remain untouched, even with uninstalling, that must be deleted after the uninstall of the browser.
Either use Revo uninstaller (what should clear up it too when it uninstalls FF, theoretically), or
1, install the Aurora version of Firefox
2, Help -> Troubleshooting Information
3, Right top corner -> Reset button (it uses the same profile as the stable FF)
4, Uninstall FF Aurora
5, Update Adobe Flash and disable third party plugins and addons (most people ignore these, and usually they are the ones to whine about FF)
6, Enjoy cleaned FF

 

[Guest]

I will not surrender my privacy to Chrome. Love Firefox

 

[Guest]

Maybe Chrome's market share growing is more a sign of their bundling their browser with as many other applications as they can the same as Realplayer did with spyware back in the day. Nahhh, that couldn't be it. At least if you see Firefox installed on a computer you know somebody somewhere made a conscious choice to install it, and didn't just blindly click next and end up with it along with a few useless toolbars and search engines.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]kooldj[/nom]chrome is unexpectedly crashing consistently on my pc, this time around it really did big time freeze on the whole system while browsing just 3 tabs like IE did in past and i had to improperly restart my pc and it didnt even restore the tabs, seriously this browser has lost its stability rep atleast for me, maybe smthing wrong with my pc but why only with chrome and as far as i know, firefox didnt do any such horrible freezes! infact im finding firefox 11 to be alot more stable than before so im gona stick to it[/citation]

Like with any other browser, there is something wrong if Chrome is crashing too. Also, you guys should consider the fact that most browser crashes aren't the fault of the browser, but of bad add-ons, plugins, etc such as a bad/old version of Flash or if you have it, Fox-it PDF reader. You need to make sure that everything, not just the browser, is up to date and that you don't have any add-ons/plug-ins that you don't want to have.

In fact, a crash is rarely the fault of the browser itself.

[citation][nom]Beer Wagon[/nom]Maybe Chrome's market share growing is more a sign of their bundling their browser with as many other applications as they can the same as Realplayer did with spyware back in the day. Nahhh, that couldn't be it. At least if you see Firefox installed on a computer you know somebody somewhere made a conscious choice to install it, and didn't just blindly click next and end up with it along with a few useless toolbars and search engines.[/citation]

Most people with Chrome installed it's themselves too, not through some advertisements in another program or through specific devices that have Chrome pre-installed.

[citation][nom]daiz[/nom]I will not surrender my privacy to Chrome. Love Firefox[/citation]

There are several versions of Chromium that don't have the Google privacy invading *feature* of Chrome. Dragon (by Comodo) and SRWare Iron. Besides that, a few of the security/privacy add-ons in FF also have Chrome compatible versions (although FF still has more and thus wins in that regard). Don't surrender you privacy to Chrome, but I would recommend looking into the Chromium based browsers. Dragon gives you much more control over settings and such that the regular Chrome doesn't even have and I can personally vouch for it. I'm going to try Iron later today.

As for FF, I have Palemoon x32 and x64 on my machine and it's far better than standard FF. Palemoon is noticeably faster than FF (not some minuscule lead that only benchmarks show) on my machine and I'd never trade Dragon for Chrome (Dragon is a little faster, but i can't tell much difference there. However, the increased security and privacy make up for that tenfold). I'm going to try out Waterfox later on too and look into some more FF builds. Most FF builds are Linux only, but there are several for Windows.

None of my browsers ever crash and I keep everything up to date (well, I don't get many of MS's Windows updates, but all of my programs and their dependencies such as Flash are kept up to date). I have some sense of security (not obtusely so, but it's obviously better than most people that don't even know and/or care about their security and/or privacy enough to do something about it) with myself because I have all of my browsers having additional add-ons to improve performance, security, and privacy protection and I have a full compliment of other software (Avast anti-virus, Comodo firewall, Spybot, TOR, and more) to help with security. Also remember, security and privacy protection are mindsets just as much as they are programs to download, if not more so.

 

[_zxzxzx_]

Google is the fat slob that eats eveything up...I'm happy for firefox if everything works for them

 

[gltoms]

The analysis is pretty extensive. I can imagine the amount of research needs to be done for such an analysis. But there are a couple of things that might be overlooked.

Aura is for Chrome OS only. It's a window manager and why does Chrome need a window manager when it sits on other OS's window managers? That's like having another intermediary that slows it down.

And how can the market share of every browser (except IE) grow at a rate not equivalent to the rate IE is dropping? According to the graph extrapolated, at the end of 2012, the total percentage of all browsers has become 106%. Even the total users are growing, the total percentage can remain 100%. I can only say your prediction is too optimistic.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]_zxzxzx_[/nom]Google is the fat slob that eats eveything up...I'm happy for firefox if everything works for them[/citation]

Google is also the one that pays for most of FF's budget.

 

[JonnyDough]

This chart even shows that Firefox is the top browser. A lot of people are still just trying Chrome out, or haven't heard of Firefox yet. They used Google, so by default tried Chrome. IE of course, comes with Windows. Then you have Firefox, who despite not being on a search page, or included as a default browser with an operating system has managed to stay near the top of the usage charts. That tells me its still likely the superior browser. Without it, IE would still be in the stone age, and Google would have had to spend money on researching features instead of just "borrowing" from everyone else.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]JonnyDough[/nom]This chart even shows that Firefox is the top browser. A lot of people are still just trying Chrome out, or haven't heard of Firefox yet. They used Google, so by default tried Chrome. IE of course, comes with Windows. Then you have Firefox, who despite not being on a search page, or included as a default browser with an operating system has managed to stay near the top of the usage charts. That tells me its still likely the superior browser. Without it, IE would still be in the stone age, and Google would have had to spend money on researching features instead of just "borrowing" from everyone else.[/citation]

All of the browsers *borrow* features from other browsers. FF and Chrome both have a lot of features that were in either the other browser or a different browser first. Chrome also has features that aren't present in FF, such as multi-threaded support for highly increased performance with multiple CPU intensive tabs on computers that have CPUs that have multiple threads.

I wouldn't crown any of the browsers as superior until one of them is so much better than the others. FF has more customization and has better graphical acceleration, but Chrome has multi-threaded support and it's apps. They all have their advantages right now. Unless one manages to dominate the others, none of them should be called *superior* as far as I'm concerned.

 

[eddieroolz]

Very good analysis. Indeed, for a while Firefox seemed to be falling just as fast as IE with bad direction and lack of product planning. While the major issues of Firefox (lag, memory hog) still hasn't been completely eliminated the latest version is a lot better than the hog that 4, 5 and 6 was.

 

[ricardois]

I am only using firefox for 3D Youtube navigation , all the rest I use IE. besides that 3D support ony youtube IE is much more stable and lighter to me.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]eddieroolz[/nom]Very good analysis. Indeed, for a while Firefox seemed to be falling just as fast as IE with bad direction and lack of product planning. While the major issues of Firefox (lag, memory hog) still hasn't been completely eliminated the latest version is a lot better than the hog that 4, 5 and 6 was.[/citation]

Open 50 tabs in FF and Chrome. FF will use less memory than Chrome does for it. FF has poor memory management, but it isn't a memory hog except at low tab counts, at which point it still doesn't use enough memory for it to matter.

I have no memory nor lag problems in my Palemoon browsers. I don't use regular FF anymore so I don't know if it has problems that Palemoon doesn't, but Palemoon doesn't lag and it doesn't use too much memory. Unlike Chrome, Opera, and the others, Palemoon and FF become more and more memory efficient as tab count increases. Basically, they almost hit a wall in memory usage at about 1-1.5GB at which point they don't need anymore. Chrome and the others keep sucking up more and more memory as you increase the tab count.

[citation][nom]ricardois[/nom]I am only using firefox for 3D Youtube navigation , all the rest I use IE. besides that 3D support ony youtube IE is much more stable and lighter to me.[/citation]

If there are any stability problems in FF then there is a problem and it's very unlikely that it's the browser's fault. IE is lighter than all other browsers at very low tab counts, but it is the least stable. Perhaps you're running an outdated FF or your version of Flash is outdated or some FF add-ons or plug-ins are outdated.

IE 9 is a decent browser, but it's still not as good as any of the other browsers except for beating Safari on Windows machines (even then, only because Safari for Windows is junk). IE9 gets exponentially more memory hogging and less stable as tab count increases. Going to 40 or 50 tabs, then about half of the tabs will have stability problems.

 

[Guest]

I only switched back to FF because of the ESR support. I now run 10.0.3 ESR at both my office and home. Chrome does not do Citrix or LogMeIn as well or as stably as far as I understand.

FF had better not mess up this ESR thing. In fact it was the ESR that prompted me to upgrade from 3.6.xx to FF 10.x.

FF needs not focus on beating Chrome. I use Chrome with FF. FF just needs to be better than IE. There was a time in late 2011 that I had to go to IE just to have Citrix working properly.

 

[robochump]

FF updates are annoying. Not as bad as Java or adobe but still annoying. Chromes silent upgrades is the best way to go. This is one reason for Chrome gaining market share as well as being more proactive with security.

 

[Mu33rto]

Srware Iron & Opera are great!!!!

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]robochump[/nom]FF updates are annoying. Not as bad as Java or adobe but still annoying. Chromes silent upgrades is the best way to go. This is one reason for Chrome gaining market share as well as being more proactive with security.[/citation]

The problem with silent update is that you might not want it to update, but it will do so anyway. That is why it is often considered a controversial feature. If there is a simple way to turn it on/off then it won't be a problem, but if it's not able to be disabled, then a lot of people may cry foul.

 

[belardo]

Why does the Fox-IE logo used in this article looks like the Fox is molesting IE...?

 

[belardo]

FF still does things wrong... I know it s a small thing, but it still can't save a web page worth crap. Opera, fine. Looks like ff in 2-3 versions will get a revamp look, lighter version with some METRO styling.

LOL, on another website, some people commented that ff 4.x looks like IE9... ugh!

 

[dsebastien]

What is really sad with the enterprise support that Mozilla plans through offer through ESRs is that they don't (yet?) seem to consider providing enterprise grade support around the browser deployment (e.g., msi files, enterprise friendly update system) and its configuration (e.g., Active Directory integration through Administrative Templates).

Being able to ensure that the browser configuration is standardized (e.g., same security settings, proxy usage, etc) and that the configuration is enforced is one of the common requirements that enterprises will have.

At work, our team has chosen to support Google Chrome instead of Mozilla Firefox mainly for those reasons.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]dsebastien[/nom]What is really sad with the enterprise support that Mozilla plans through offer through ESRs is that they don't (yet?) seem to consider providing enterprise grade support around the browser deployment (e.g., msi files, enterprise friendly update system) and its configuration (e.g., Active Directory integration through Administrative Templates).Being able to ensure that the browser configuration is standardized (e.g., same security settings, proxy usage, etc) and that the configuration is enforced is one of the common requirements that enterprises will have.At work, our team has chosen to support Google Chrome instead of Mozilla Firefox mainly for those reasons.[/citation]

Yes, because businesses like Google tracking their every move through Google Chrome. If you want Chrome, I strongly recommend using a derivative of Chromium instead so that Google isn't tracking you. Maybe your business's team should look into Comodo Dragon and/or SRWare Iron if possible. If not, I'd rather use something else instead of Chrome.

Also, I'm not a business owner/worker, so would you explain a little more? FF supports proxys and has security settings, so what about that does FF fail at? Does FF like to allow exceptions where it shouldn't or something like that? Also, what's wrong with FF's updates? All it needs is to restart after an update and that is supposed to change in a few months when FF switches to silent updates like Chrome. It doesn't even lose it's tabs, it just reloads them after the update. Sure, it's a little more annoying than Chrome's silent updating method, but I don't see why it's unfriendly to enterprises.

Perhaps you could clarify further?

 

[wheredahoodat]

I wish someone would drag Mozilla in the modern advertising era. I know that Mozilla doesn't have anywhere near the budgets of Microsoft and Google to media blitz you on TV, but even stuff like outreach on youtube, Mozilla is lagging badly, literally having only a fraction of views and subscribers in contrast to its competitor's youtube channels. The

There is room to plenty of room differentiate itself and to sell the brand. For example Google Chrome is probably Mozilla's greatest threat because it cannibalizes many former Mozilla users, so when Google is repeatedly in the news for privacy concerns, Mozilla can't get its messaging together to take advantage of it?

If Mozilla truly believes that a open web is worth fighting for, then it has to exhibit a certain edge and have enough courage to forcibly explain when necessary what is stake even if it means it may need to step on a few toes.