Why I Don’t Use Firefox: Temptation

Unlike just about every other person on this earth who isn’t a n00b, I don’t use Firefox. I look at this as the result of five crucial reasons…

1. Cocoa

I know this sounds ‘spoiled’, but one of the major reasons I don’t use Firefox is that the controls (buttons, text boxes, radio buttons, progress bars) aren’t of Cocoa origin. IF you don’t know, when Apple introduced Mac OS X in 2001/2, they had two modern APIs: Carbon and Cocoa. These two options give developers a migration path–Classic Mac OS applications can have moderate work done to port them to OS X (aka “Carbonization”). But when a developer does this, they don’t have access to many of the improvements that OS X brought, one of them being the new interface controls. To sum this up, Firefox is not a Cocoa app. (just remember, as of OS X Leopard (10.5) Finder is still a Carbon app, it’s just had a lot of work done) Firefox just doesn’t feel right.

2. Bookmarks

I know I’ll get a lot of guff for this, but Firefox lacks a lot of the bookmarking features I’ve grown to love from Safari and Chrome. Firefox has this ancient metaphor for organizing bookmarks (it reminds me of early IE and Netscape).

3. Speed

This is a controversial and sensitive issue: in my experience on both slow, fast, and OMG-fast, Firefox just doesn’t perform as well as other browsers. On faster machines Webkit (webkit.org for more information) is significantly faster. On slower machines (say G3′s, G4′s, P3′s, and early P4′s) I find that (I’m gonna get a lot of hurt for this) Opera is the fastest. I’ve heard that new versions of Firefox are going to be faster: this issue is in the fundamental makeup of the rendering engine, Gecko is an ancient pile of code from the early days of the web in which computers weren’t quad core, hyper-threaded, and of many giga-hertz. Gecko was designed to be highly serial and to work with dial-up connections. On the other hand, Webkit-the core of Safari and Chrome, is a modern engine which is multi-threaded, stable, and build for high-speed connections.

4. Mac OS X load time

I have found that of all of the major browsers (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Webkit, Flock) Firefox is heading up the rear (it’s slow.) On my machine Firefox takes nine bounces and then two seconds to load, whereas Safari takes two bounces and one second. This is really subjective and not as important as I’m making it seem… how many times do you re-open your browser?

5. Temptation

This is both part of why I (would) love and (do) dislike Firefox: extensions. Extensions allow users to pick and chose ways to customize their internet experience. (such as my favorite, Googlepedia, which shows a related Wikipedia article to the right of your Google search results.) The problem with all of the great extensions is that you have to have them all… and this makes Firefox much less stable, slows it down, and makes it take longer to open. When I’m in my favorite browser (Webkit on Mac, Chrome on Windows) I live without these, but when I can have them, I am tempted to get ‘em all. Admitting you have a problem is the first step to solving it.

I know these are just the rantings of some kid, but the point is that Firefox has a long way to go to please me, and rather than simply bashing Firefox with blank statements like “Firefox sucks!” or “Firefox is pwned!!!!”, I’m offering tips to improve the experience as a whole of Firefox for everyone’s gain.