“Maybe you’re not a fanboy, but you sure are acting it.” I love the internet today, where if you express a negative view on anything (even stuff you use personally everyday) you are labeled a fan boy.

I am actually tweaked at some of the GUI changes they have made. They made the download manager have better functionality, but completely ruined the UI. FF2 had a decent UI but the some functionality (pause/resume) didn’t work. Now in FF3 all of the functionality works great but the UI looks like an alpha-level placeholder. Have you even tried FF3?

And explain to me again how extensions being broken by Mozilla (by releasing a new Firefox) every year is a good thing? I would never want to develop a FF extension just because I’d have to redo/fix it every year. It is a terrible platform as far as stability is concerned.

Would you really consider the ability to save to PDF (in addition to HTML) bloat? Especially when the code is already there. How many times do you order some thing or go to some other web page that tells you to “print this for your records”? I have a PDF printer installed just so I can print those to PDF and save some paper. It’d be really nice to just save to PDF, like Word and OpenOffice can.

“The trajectory they have now is the right way to go, focusing on improving speed and memory usage.” So you are basically saying it is ok for them to just improve speed and memory usage and not do anything else? Is there really nowhere left to improve the browser? No. And again, why should the memory reductions and speed improvements break all of the extensions? Because that is basically what FF3 has done; better speed/memory, broken extensions.

Again, Netscape just sat on their browser making trivial improvements and Microsoft wiped the floor with them. You can say what you will about Microsoft, but they can be damn strong competitors. If Mozilla wants to stay above 10% market share they are going to have to bring their “A game” every release, and I don’t think they are.

“How much time passes between each major version of Firefox – a year?”

This works against you, not for you. Just because Mozilla calls something version 2 or version 3 doesn’t imply that it has huge improvements (or is the equivalent of what that kind of nomenclature means for the rest of the software industry). So how “fast” they are with version releases doesn’t support their case if not much changes. It’s more misleading than anything.

“most users could care less about saving to a pdf file… all it serves to do is increase Firefox’s memory footprint.”

PDF is used extensively everywhere in academia and business. I really think the burden of proof is on your shoulders to show how exactly “most users could care less.” And as for the memory footprint, I’ll just quote the bolded section from the article above:

“The code is all there except for a user interface to expose the functionality to the user!”

I think the memory footprint would be extremely minimal at worst. By the way, I’ve been using Firefox for years now and don’t do much in IE.

You’re upset at Mozilla because the GUI hasn’t changed? Because plug-ins break between major versions? How much time passes between each major version of Firefox – a year? Suck it up. And you complain in the other article that extensions don’t work in Firefox 3 BETA. There’s a reason it’s called the beta. As soon as the final release is out, developers will be scrambling (and are already scrambling) to make their plug-ins compatible. Many of my plug-ins work already, such as the StumbleUpon toolbar, Firebug, Chatzilla, and Adblock Plus.

The whole point of add-ons is that it doesn’t come with the browser and bloat it for those who don’t want it. Believe it or not, most users could care less about saving to a pdf file. Unless you pay an arm and leg for the Adobe software, you can’t edit the file, and all it serves to do is increase Firefox’s memory footprint. The trajectory they have now is the right way to go, focusing on improving speed and memory usage.

IE8 is basically Microsoft’s attempt to catch up to Firefox, not surpass it. They were excited just to see that it meet web standards – Firefox has been rendering pages correctly for years.

About the developer edition, Mozilla has already done similar things such as the Campus Edition: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/add-ons/campus/ – most developers are smart enough to download the plug-ins anyways. It’s just a matter of 3 or 4 searches, not really a big deal.

BUT WHAT’S THIS? IE8 CAN LET YOU LOOK UP MAPS FROM A WEBPAGE? Perfect for stalking others, maybe. Have fun with that.

To make matters worse, extensions have to be modify (often quite significantly) to work on each new version of FF. So even if XYZ extension was working great with FF2 there may be a new bug in the FF3 version.

This is a very interesting point to draw a parallel to the IE vs Netscape fight. Netscape 4 was good when it came out, but then they just kind of sat on the product as Microsoft dramatically improved IE. Eventually there was no point to using Netscape. Mozilla has been sitting on FF (more or less) since version 1.0 (which was good) and it is going to take more than visual refreshing and some very subtle functionality enhancements for FF to just keep its market share.

And anytime I think of trying a new browser instead, I’m annoyed that I can’t get the plugins I need.