(Also) In defense of Firefox

LWN is running a story (for subscribers only) called "In Defense of Firefox" where they explain the fsync issue with FF3.

I've been pretty vocal in the past criticizing Mozilla's Linux story during the Firefox 2 era, and it would be easy to jump on that bandwagon again ... but I won't. In fact, after speaking to Mozilla folks at Lugradio USA, FOSSCamp and the Ubuntu Developer Summit, I am absolutely convinced that Mozilla is doing the right thing with regard to the Linux version.

I find it ironic that we whined about how terrible FF2 was in Linux, and then the Mozilla folks made a conscious effort to improve the Firefox experience ... and they ran into a nasty bug, and all of a sudden people revert to flaming the project.

One of the best parts of my job is working with upstream developers. I know for a fact that there are engineers working at Mozilla and at distributions (not just Ubuntu) working to fix the problem and not just during work hours; lots of them are working weekends and afterhours to fix these problems.

Sure, Mozilla isn't perfect, but if you look at the improvements in FF3 over FF2 I will /glady/ give them the benefit of the doubt and trust them to fix the problem. Sure, FF3 has some problems, there are still some extensions that haven't been ported and in Hardy we're still shipping a beta (by the way, final FF3 will be available once it's final), but as someone who had deploy FF1 and 1.5 in production I can tell you that FF3 is absolutely fantastic.

On a more humorous note, people online have mentioned that Mozilla didn't catch the bug until the last minute because "... it never showed up on Mac OSX". I think that's funny as hell...

Comments

[Bla]

You dont seem to get the point.. people is not complaining because of the bug but because they wont fix it before 3.0..

Webkit, the way to go

[Jonas]

No, "Bla", YOU don't get the point. Mozilla just said they wouldn't make an RC2 specifically for this, because they know the patch to be safe, so they would just have linux distributors include the patch in their builds of firefox 3.0 final!

Now they happen to be making an RC2 for other reasons, and they are including this patch in it, so the official firefox 3.0 source will also include this fix, but even if they hadn't, any linux distro you installed that included firefox 3.0.0.0 would NOT suffer from this bug! Because the distro's build of firefox would include the patch anyway! Mozilla encouraged this.

[Lucian]

They did make an effort for linux support, but it's natural not to care that much about it. If they did, firefox wouldn't be so alien in kde. And they would've tested it on linux themselves, as their primary browser. Using OS X to develop is no excuse.

[Jonas]

"they would've tested it on linux themselves" ... "Using OS X to develop"??? WTF are you talking about? most of the core mozilla hackers are linux users!

[Andreas Nilsson]

Lucian: We all know that's our own fault, as Linux as a ISV platform is shit.
Partly because of stupid micro-brands, and partly because of bad interaction between different toolkits and other technologies. We need to clean this mess up sooner than later (and some work is indeed underway to do this).

My experience from working with the Mozilla UI dudes has been great. They care a lot about the small details and threat Linux as a important platform.

[Vadim P.]

This does not help. Firefox still maintains it's own dictionary (so it doesn't use my default one), and, it doesn't have the SCIM which *every other program* has. Which is *extremely* annoying, because I have to copy/paste or drag text from other apps.

Integration? Lolno.

[David]

FF is open source. Linux is open source. Integrate it yourself, release it to everyone, and bask in the glory of improving FF for Linux.

[Igor]

I don't know Jorge,

After having the experience where a Mozilla developer says: "We are improving Firefox in all the OS" and forget about Linux in the entire post, I'm kinda disappointed...

If you use Firefox 3 in OS X or Windows, you'll notice that it works better than in Linux, even memory management is better.

The Firefox Linux look and feel is not _native_ and does not looks very GKTish even in Firefox3. They just seams to not care about it... look at the theme in OS X or Windows. What they did on Linux? Changed the Icons, and the tabs(btw, are not looking like GTK tabs)... even the HTML UI controls are kinda weird.

And yes, I'm a Firefox user in Ubuntu, but just because there's no _better_ browser out there(basically for retentions and speed)... but flash keeps crashing my Firefox and not my other browsers.

[Vadim P.]

Exactly, David. "do it yourself or stfu, because people on linux can and windows & mac users can't, so we'll do it for them. but not you - here's the source code, have fun".

[Daniel]

> do it yourself or stfu, because people on linux can and
> windows & mac users can't, so we'll do it for them. but
> not you - here's the source code, have fun

@Vadim -- wait, are you saying Firefox *does* integrate with the OS's native dictionary on Windows & Mac? (but not Linux)

[Jeff Walden]

As I understand there's integration with the OS X dictionary as a side effect of native widgets (but I could be wrong). Windows doesn't have a dictionary last I knew. Part of the dictionary problem is that people still haven't quite settled on a universal dictionary library for Linux, so you write off people with any choice you make -- except if you bundle your own, which happens so everyone benefits.

[Stephen]

I don't run Winders at home, but at work, well, i take what they give me.

So, in the new job, i've got this IE7 thingy. It has tabbed browsing, and some of the other familiar features. But it's like going to McDonalds for a good hamburger. Really, all you get is a hamburger-like experience that makes you want to go home, fire up the back yard grill and make the real thing. Sill, it might be an improvement over ie6. Or it would be if it worked on the internal web sites, which are so often pointlessly ie6-centric, and all-other-browsers-dehanced. Why companies do this sort of thing to themselves is beyond my limited understanding. I mean, if it was just due to lazy individuals, then why don't my own sites break horribly when i change browsers? No. It's got to be something else. More sinister or stupid. And what's the deal that i can't have ie6 and ie7 installed on the same box? At least i can have ie7 and firefox.

All of a sudden, Firefox is looking flawless again. It is the gold standard, after all.

[Mojo]

great post