I know Mozilla cannot please everyone, and I understand you are probably not going to change your convictions, but I think your attitude towards this browser and their work is pretty rude.
Mozilla, fighting against a current to open source the only proprietary competition to Internet Explorer in its day, has spent over a decade improving a lot of old, ugly code, and making not just a good (maybe not great to you, even if it is to me; I will try to word it fairly) browser, but a spate of technological advances and solid policy positions.
Chrome and Google might be the new hotness, but I respect how much Mozilla has done with Firefox, and how they take their time to make the right choices (to them, you might not agree; that is ok).
And if you think moving the whole underlying architecture of a widely distributed browser is an easier milestone than changing a skin that runs an easily prototyped UI in Javascript (XULRunner), I strongly encourage you to download the source, read the very solid documentation, talk to the community, and compile.
I know your attitude re Firefox is commonplace, but as a younger hacker I am disappointed how people think their more-than-a-decade long project to build a browser is just not fast enough.
Now only if they would get their crap together with the X11 server ...
I can't actually use Firefox because of two very annoying problems.
* Hitching and lagging coinciding with dumping tons of garbage into my syslog [1]
* A six year old bug whereby duplicate SSL certs result in a page not being able to be viewed. No override, no nothing. [2]
Meanwhile, the Chrome UI is minimal but fast, and doesn't seem to have fallen victim to the "redesign for redesign's sake" that seems to be plaguing many open source projects (Australis is downright ghastly), my required plugins work without the lag, and bugs that hamper basic functionality don't sit around unfixed for half a decade! Or even a full decade in some cases!! [3]
Maybe I sound entitled, but that second bug in particular is downright infuriating (HP iLO simply cannot be used), and the fact that it's been sitting untouched has unfortunate implications for the dev culture at Mozilla. And don't say it's been forgotten about in a backlog either - read the history and you'll see instances of tickets being marked a duplicate of this one, so the awareness is there.
Firefox may be an amazing hammer, but I can't use it and can't recommend anybody else does either until it stops embedding splinters in my hands.
I wonder how many of those will affect basic functionality and not have a realistic workaround.
I mean, we're not talking about something taking a couple of extra clicks here. We're not talking about a minor annoyance. We're talking about affected webpages being completely unviewable. Full stop. Just like that.
I am still using Firefox day to day, and I have been using it since its Phoenix days. So i know well how it well it did in the old days against IE.
But doing good in the past simply doesn't mean everything. May be people hold different standard. But to me and a lot of others, Firefox today is the slowest browser of all, be it Safari on the Mac, IE on Windows, or Chrome/Opera on all Platform.
And just a reminder Chrome was released on September 2008. And in many ways Firefox still cant match Chrome snappiness. 6 years! That is an awfully long period in tech industry.
Mozilla, fighting against a current to open source the only proprietary competition to Internet Explorer in its day, has spent over a decade improving a lot of old, ugly code, and making not just a good (maybe not great to you, even if it is to me; I will try to word it fairly) browser, but a spate of technological advances and solid policy positions.
Chrome and Google might be the new hotness, but I respect how much Mozilla has done with Firefox, and how they take their time to make the right choices (to them, you might not agree; that is ok).
And if you think moving the whole underlying architecture of a widely distributed browser is an easier milestone than changing a skin that runs an easily prototyped UI in Javascript (XULRunner), I strongly encourage you to download the source, read the very solid documentation, talk to the community, and compile.
I know your attitude re Firefox is commonplace, but as a younger hacker I am disappointed how people think their more-than-a-decade long project to build a browser is just not fast enough.
Now only if they would get their crap together with the X11 server ...
(Yes, that was a joke, just to be clear.)