I’ve loved Firefox since the day I installed it. I was an early member of Spreadfirefox.com and have been evangelising it prior to version 1. I even had my name in the New York Times as part of an advert for Firefox 1.0.
Sadly, almost four years later I’ve just switched. It was a tough decision — four years is a long time to be committed to one browser. Once in a while I’d pop open Safari, Opera or Flock but I’d always go back to Firefox a few days later.
Recently Firefox has been grinding to a halt on my machine. I’m used to waiting for my loved ones to get ready — it’s part of any normal relationship (just ask anyone who is married). It bothers, even irritates you but the wait is usually worth it. You know that there is always something exciting just beyond the next tab. So you make excuses — maybe it’s OS X 10.5. Maybe it’s some nasty plugin (I’ve removed most of them). Maybe it’s just because someone cut up five undersea cables in the region. Whatever it is, it would take seconds to switch between tabs. I spend a large chunk of my day on the interweb so those seconds add up. I knew I had to change but was putting it off in the hope that Firefox would suddenly become more responsive to my needs.
When I saw Haroon’s post on Webkit I knew that things would have to change. Haroon is probably the only person I know who is online more than me so his is serious recommendation. I downloaded the nightly dev build and was blown away with the speed and stability.
And thus my love affair with Firefox ended, sadly on February 14.
Of course, I may sneak back for a little love when Firefox 3.0 is released…
I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.something with 10.4 and it’s great.
Maybe it’s 10.5 that’s the problem?
Thank G*d you never mentioned Yuchsplorer.
I am also a recent convert to Firefox ver. 2.0.0.12 – but nowhere near the skill and understanding levels of you guys. Compaared to IE7 – well, Firefox is lightyears ahead in all respects. But is there anything I should particularly watch out for?
I had a disciple of Firefox for a while. Starting with the days of netscape. But now i have reluctantly switched to Internet explorer 7. Starnge as it may sound but i’m enjoying the experience..
I’m on 2.x with 10.5 – I’ve just downloaded the Firefox 3 beta build and will see how that pans out.
I read this, and I shared your joy at Firefox after my beloved Netscape grew lumps. And now that Firefox is getting lumps too, I uninstalled it and put Opera in instead. Four hours later Opera was uninstalled and Firefox reinstalled. Welcome back, Firefox! And all my passwords etc.
Heh. I’ll give Firefox 3 beta a try tomorrow and report back. So far I’ve discovered one or two small bugs in webkit but that is natural since I’m using a dev build.
The most important thing if you switch – Apple+Shift+Arrows allows you to switch between tabs in Safari/Webkit.
FireFox 3 is better. I’m running Beta 3. It has some bugs, but it’s Faster than 2.
I also use Flock. IE7 as seldom as possible.
I unistalled FireFox 2. It started to crash, possibly because of all the extensions I loaded.
I’m now running Webkit dev build and Firefox 3 beta. It is working out well running two beta browsers – when things don’t work in one I jump to the other. Both have a couple of small bugs but I will fight on…
I use Camino and Safari on my Mac because Firefox frequently has to be “force quit”. I haven’t had it on my system since one of the Tiger updates. Safari and Camino work beautifully in Leopard, they’re not so bloated with useless extensions and pointless interface tweaks and they haven’t crashed on me yet.
I’m not a cyber geek and tend to stay with the same software till it crashes on me. I’m still with firefox on my pc after parting with IE but derive much greater joy from safari on my mac which just gets better and better every new OS, the only catch is that it also gets costlier but honestly less hassles and no nasty bugs so far!
I read your post, but it wasn’t until I saw a piece by Seth Weintraub http://blogs.computerworld.com/safari_is_about_to_get_crazy_fast that I actually downloaded & installed the latest webkit nightly build.
This is impressive! I might just put Flock on the backburner for a while (got tired of Firefox crashing on OS X 10.4)
Tks for the first mention
You may be my new web hero, my friend. I too have sung the “Firefox blues” since 1.5.0.7 which was the only stable version for me that I kept going back to until the 2.0.0.9 I have now. (And I backed up to this from the latest version with the “12″ which was the latest Firefox “crasher”.) I just downloaded the Nightly Dev Build and will try it. Heretofore I’ve seen Safari mostly mentioned as a step-child in the browser war so I’d never tried it. With so much disappointment and trouble past I can’t see ‘Fox 3.0 or any other version raising my interest unless wow’d buy 98% of the web community.
Wehn 2.0 came out and obliterated my web browsing experience I started and kept a bug-reporting issue ongoing on Mozillazine with various unknowns on the development team who turned out to be haughty, hostile jerks that demanded I jump through scores of hoops to do my own troubleshooting of THE CODE they were to fix! When i found they’d dissed others who posted the same issues before me and never resolved the problems, I told em forget it and rolled back to 1.5 and waited.
I’ve really had good experience with tabbed-browsing IE clones (the no-longer supported “Crazy Browser” is what I have now which hasn’t yet caused a problem) but IE security issues make me not use it as default.
Mohamed,
WOW, WOW, and SUPER WOW! Safari redefines “LIGHTNING fast” regarding anything on the internet!!! It makes my web navigation as fast as I imagine it would be if I had 4 Gig of ram in my pc! ( I only have 512M). I got the nightly build from your link but since I’d never used Safari and had nothing to upgrade it to , I downloaded ver. 3.0.4 (523.15) from their website.
Some of the Ffox-type add-ons will surely be added before long by capable coders who see safari worthy of being at the top of the Web Browser heap.
Thanks greatly for the introduction. WOW!
Just to give you some feedback a month on – I now use Safari as my default browser…although I do miss some of my Firefox plugins.