Was Firefox 2 a mistake?
p2pnet.net News:- Was releasing Mozilla’s new, much heralded Firefox 2 a big mistake?
Listvine thinks so.
In a post featuring nine reason not to use it, “Despite great fanfare, new features, and a growing user base, many problems are already surfacing with the new release of the Firefox browser,” says Listvine . “While some were already underwhelmed with the now-released product, and disputed the 2.0 badge, it seemed that the development was following the Mozilla Roadmap quite closely.”
What kind of problems? Here’s how
The new theme is too bulky, inconsistent on different platforms, and inferior to the highly refined and very user friendly theme of 1.5 (this is despite late efforts by Mozilla to spruce up the icon set and improve consistency)
Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem. The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released by Google, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risks.
The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features
There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions of Firefox. While this can, to some degree, be expected, the loss of this huge user contributed extension base is a non-trivial problem with Firefox 2.0, and could be a deal breaker for some people all by itself
The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox
There are reported problems with the CSS engine in Firefox 2.0, affecting various websites, and making certain features unavailable to surfers. Notable among these is a continued problem with certain aspects of Yahoo! mail
Reports indicate that episodes of random freezing during use are worse with the 2.0 version, though a cause has not yet been isolated
Numerous users have reported that the History bar is buggy, and that in some instances – for unknown reasons – will not display recent items when the history menu is opened as a side panel
RSS feed handling has taken a step backwards, and is inferior to that of IE7.
And ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes agrees with many of the Listvine criticisms, among them the moans about random freezes, memory leaks and the ntiphishing filter. Here’s what he says:
The random freeze issue is apparent to me on two systems (both where Firefox 1.5 had previously been installed and behaved well). Session restore helps to save the day, but that’s no excuse. The crashing is such a problem that it’s just easier for me to use IE7.
Memory leaks are also present, and actually seem worse under Firefox 2.0 than under 1.x. I was hoping to find these fixed and I’m disappointed to find they aren’t.
On a more serious note, complaints that the antiphishing filter is weak seem justified. I’ve thrown a number of dodgy phishing sites at Firefox 2.0 and its detect rate is appallingly low. Some people claim that any antiphishing filter is better than no antiphishing filter, but I disagree – at best this feature seems to offer users little more than false hope and at worst a false sense of security. By comparison, the antiphishing filter in IE7 seems a lot better and was able to flag as suspicious all the phishing sites I tested it with.
But does Kingsley-Hughes suggest you should avoid Firefox 2?
“No way,” he says. “If you stick with 1.5.x then you’re going to be at risk from unpatched vulnerabilities. The only way to go is up to 2.0 and keep downloading updates as they become available.”
And, FWIW, p2pnet reader Chris Ovenden says he was experiencing severe resource hogging in 1.5.x. But that now, “seems to have gone away, and (luckily) haven’t seen the freezing issue, although I have been testing since the first RC became available,” he states, continuing:
Obviously this affects some people and is serious, but I have no doubt a fix for this will be released soon.
As for extension incompatibilities, this was a minor irritant a few weeks ago but most of the twenty or so extensions I use had been updated by the official relase, and all are now up to date. FF2.0 has a nifty new feature where incompatible extensions are disabled, but the browser searches for and downloads compatible versions when it starts up, thus saving both the need to manually search for them and a restart afterwards.
Meanwhile, IE7 was released with a couple of security of vulnerabilities and a fairly long list of known display bugs. (Although now the bug reporting mechanism has been closed…) The IE team have done well to come so far in a short time, but they haven’t caught up yet. It’s a shame they had to build on top of existing buggy code.
For people who found the Firefox upgrade lacklustre, may I suggest the Flock browser?
Also See:
Listvine – 9 Reasons Not to Upgrade to Firefox 2.0, October 25, 2006
ZDNet – Is Firefox 2.0 a dud?, October 30, 2006
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October 30th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
FWIW, I was experiencing severe resource hogging in 1.5.x which now seems to have gone away, and (luckily) haven’t seen the freezing issue, although I have been testing since the first RC became available. Obvioulsy this affects some people and is serious, but I have no doubt a fix for this will be released soon.
As for extension incompatibilities, this was a minor irritant a few weeks ago but most of the twenty or so extensions I use had been updated by the official relase, and all are now up to date. FF2.0 has a nifty new feature where incompatible extensions are disabled, but the browser searches for and downloads compatible versions when it starts up, thus saving both the need to manually search for them and a restart afterwards.
Meanwhile, IE7 was released with a couple of security of vulnerabilities and a fairly long list of known display bugs. (Although now the bug reporting mechanism has been closed…) The IE team have done well to come so far in a short time, but they haven’t caught up yet. It’s a shame they had to build on top of existing buggy code.
For people who found the Firefox upgrade lacklustre, may I suggest the Flock browser (www.flock.com)?
October 30th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Admittedly, I’ve been an on-the-fence browser user for the past couple of years — being unable to decide between Firefox, MSIE and Maxthon browser.
Firefox 2.0 does have its problems, as mentioned in this article — but it will inevitably come with an array of updates and bug-fixes.
Never the less, I think I’ve made my decision to stick with Firefox for the time being — FF2.0 has a lot of the features which had previously thrown me off using earlier versions.
It’s an evolving application — and no, I don’t think we’re taking two steps backwards with FF2.0
- Bauer
October 31st, 2006 at 1:18 am
I experienced the freezing issue (which is memory leak) numerous times. When this caused actual loss of information, I restarted the computer for like the 5th time since getting FF2 and then downgraded to 1.5.7. The other issues I have with 2.0 is the Mac-style themes do not work with it (aesthetic issue, considering the rest of my XP looks just like a Mac mostly).
I’m impressed with IE7 overall, but that still has a long way to go. I’m glad they improved the tab interface since beta 1. Neat is that IE Tab for Firefox loads IE6, just in case I need it for web development.
I hope a fix will be coming out soon, I was expecting it within days, rather than developers and users acting as if they don’t exist just because they don’t receive those problems. When the fix is official and is confirmed by others as working without the memory leaking issue, I will then upgrade again. By then, my favorite Mac theme will hopefully be done for 2.0.