Comments on: Changes Between Firefox 2 and 3

By: Harry

Harry — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:43:18 +0000

Is the response rate really troubling? It looks a bit like an instance of the 1:10:100 rule.

A study of Yahoo groups participation (in 2006) gave a roughly similar pattern:

http://www.elatable.com/blog/2006/02/17/creators-synthesizers-and-consumers/

By: Hescott

Hescott — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 10:25:54 +0000

Hey, I think you should absolutely add “Localisation” to the reasons for uninstalling the browser — combined with what locale the user was on, this would show when localisations are in bad shape.

By: Gru

Gru — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:34:12 +0000

Crashes can be due to binary extensions, too. I am very satisfied with Fx3’s stability. But then I usually don’t keep the browser open for 4+ hours …

By: palmiche

palmiche — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:40:22 +0000

A month ago I posted bug 449919 about FF3 perf compared to FF2. My guess is something got messed up in the rendering. FF3 is more stable, etc. but is so sloooooow. No matter how many JS optimizations you get they’re worth nothing if an HTML-only page slows down your browser.

By: Simon Geard

Simon Geard — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:46:48 +0000

Sean – I’ve found the opposite myself, with regard to crashing. FF3 crashes very rarely, much less so than FF2…

By: Sean Hogan

Sean Hogan — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:15:13 +0000

RE: Performance
In my experience FF2 is more predictable:
- It uses a lot of memory, slows down and eventually crashes.
- Or I restart it because it gets too slow.
- Occasionally it crashes (or stalls) on a certain page, but that is fairly repeatable.

FF3 doesn’t chew through as much memory nor get as slow, but it crashes more frequently.
The worst thing is that after a lot of page views it starts to exhibit unreliable behavior, including
- page refreshes stop working, or are unreliable
- navigating to a new page fails, or it might require pasting the link into a new tab

By: Simon Geard

Simon Geard — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:24:48 +0000

Oh, and the comments form on this blog is awful. With no text captions next to all the fields (just small and vague icons), I had to use firebug to work out what each one was meant to be. Not really a very good look…

By: Simon Geard

Simon Geard — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:21:48 +0000

Might the low response rate not be just that people uninstalling a program have no particular interest in filling out a survey? Seems a more likely explanation than lack of localisation…

By: Gru

Gru — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:24:06 +0000

Actually Fx3 does seem slower/laggier in several areas. Most annoying is when it continuously accesses the hard disk (e.g. Fx2 was usable as soon as the main window came up. With Fx3, even after the main window has appeared, I have to wait for the disk thrashing to stop before it becomes responsive.)

Also, if you try Fx3 on a really slow machine (e.g. an old PII), it will feel really slower than Fx2 … I wouldn’t recommend Fx3 for people with old computers …

By: Jesse Ruderman

Jesse Ruderman — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:43:44 +0000

The word “performance” might be too geeky. How about “Browser speed”?