Comment by Pacabel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pacabel | Hacker News Reader

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Can you please address why we haven't seen much progress, even after so many years?

You and others involved with Firefox may choose to deny it, but a lot of people still find recent versions of Firefox to be slow and/or to suffer from stability problems.

For example, just look at the discussion at Slashdot today about the Firefox 31 release:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/07/22/1918237/firefox-31-r...

Here are some comments that specifically mention Firefox being slow and/or unstable:

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5438731&cid=4751105...

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5438731&cid=4751077...

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5438731&cid=4751091...

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5438731&cid=4751127...

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5438731&cid=4751144...

Whenever Firefox is discussed, those kinds of comments seem to be quite common. While some may choose to brush them off, to me it indicates that Firefox has some real problems, and these problems just aren't being fixed. We wouldn't see people continually bringing up these problems if they truly had been fixed.

I have never denied anything and I do not appreciate you making such accusations toward me. Having said that, I have a few remarks about this post:

1) People making vague complaints on discussion forums or social media is not going to get the right information to the right people. We can't fix problems by spending all our time scavenging (HN|reddit|slashdot|whatever) for complaints. Even if we could, they wouldn't contain enough information to act on them. It's super important for the community to help us out: If you are having performance problems, you absolutely need to be filing them at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided

2) Just like any other type of bug, we cannot do anything about people's problems unless we know what is wrong. Ideally we would have information about the user's hardware and OS, which extensions they have installed (and better yet, is it reproducible with no extensions at all), steps to reproduce and diagnostic information to help us.

about:memory and the Gecko profiler (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...) are essential tools that we provide for diagnosing this stuff. If you're savvy enough to be reading HN, you're savvy enough to use those, and you should attach output from those tools to the memory/perf bugs that you file.

3) For people who are not tech savvy, we try our best to analyze telemetry information on their behalf, but for privacy reasons we only do so on the release channel if users opt in. The more users that opt in to telemetry, the better the data that we receive.

4) Finally, IMHO many people need to come to grips with the fact that modern web browsers are much more complex and capable than their pioneers were. I see lots of complaining from people who want their browser to have the same memory footprint as Netscape 2.0 and that just isn't reasonable.

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