32 Comments

Dear Firefox Browser, I Hate You!

Dec 6, 2005
by

I’ll save you the long drawn out rant I’ve been brewing in my head for the past year or so and just get to the point. Well, not really, I’m still going to rant like a madman, but I’ll spit out the point right now.

I hate Firefox! Because…

As a hack-ish web developer from way back when (pre-tables), I honestly thought that the day Netscrape, sorry Netscape died that I would finally be free of cross-browser compatibility testing.

But noooooooooooooooooooo!

Here comes Firefox, all fast and pretty and streamlined and powerful, walking into my world with about 25% of my readers following, causing me to first panic, then do what I hate most…

Cross-browser compatibility testing.

Just the sound of those words make my skull contract around my brain, causing me to flashback to 1998, working on a website template for Ernst & Young, wondering why I can’t get the rollover javascripting to work in IE and Nutscrape, err, Netscape.

Oh the fun I used to have, sitting there hour after hour, testing a page in IE, then in THAT other browser, hoping and praying it would work the same; look the same. F5 (refresh). Dang! Still broken. Somebody grab the javascript book and see what I am doing wrong? The properties are null??? What?

Now here I am today in 2005, with even less modern web development skills, attempting to not only create browser-compliant pages in IE and FF, but with Movable Type embedded tags in between. As we speak, I have my trusted designer guru fiddling about in this template, fixing it for Firefox. How does it look?

I’m about done with my rant. I will leave you with my dream. I dream of a day when we see a complete standardized method of web browsing. Where everything appears exactly the same with the same coding techniques.

A man can dream, can’t he?

About Jim Kukral

You can find Jim on Twitter: @JimKukral.

Filed under: Online Publishing
  • http://www.wolf-howl.com graywolf

    The key is to design to standards in firefox and then tweak in IE. You'll save time, energy and frustration.

  • http://www.revenews.com Jim Kukral

    I get what you're saying, that is the best way. However, when you really think about it, what does that prove about Internet Explorer today against FF, which is true for IE against Netscape…

    It proves that IE is the more "flexible" application. Able to more easily deal with incompatibilities and "go with the flow".

  • http://adjungle.com Brad Waller

    Our experience has been that IE is the one that breaks and is less "flexible". I just found a page yesterday that nobody noticed was a bit off in IE. Don't worry, Jim. Once IE comes out with tabbed browsing, Firefox will have some competition…

  • http://www.revenews.com Jim Kukral

    I agree with that thought Brad. However, why should I develop for the minority of my users browser preference first?

  • passing by

    If that enough making you hate ff, what about after you update to ie7 then you need to fine a standalone ie6 to test your site, and one day you found that ie6 standalone can not give you the same result of the real ie6, so you have to install visual machine then xp or whatever just to test your page in the real ie6 environment! That is not the end. Ie8 is coming out soon! We all will have to test it in 6, 7 and 8 !!!

    If you dream of a day “when we see a complete standardized method of web browsing.”

    I would recommend you try whatever you can to kill IE!!!

  • long time web dev

    I've been developing websites for more than a decade. These sites have been both internal and external, high volume (1 million plus unique visits per month) and low volume (personal sites).

    While I think it's good that IE has some competition to push innovation. I have to say that most commonly, in my experience, FireFox 2 and higher tends to break functionality or render things improperly. For example, I have been working on a fairly complex Flash application that is embedded in an page laiden with AJAX interactions. It works fine in EVERY BROWSER (Safari, IE, Opera) EXCEPT for FireFox 2 and higher. FireFox 2 and higher has the "feature" of not allowing functions on embedded plugins. That's but one example of problems I've run into where Firefox deviates from the norm of what other browsers are capable of (not just IE). I've had plenty of CSS handling issues with it as well.

    I wish they'd catch up to IE and start innovating again, but for now they seem to be stagnant with nothing more than UI upgrades for their latest versions.

    FF carries with it a strange amount of fanboys that I'm not fond of either. With irrational arguments about how it's "better than IE"…

    ..I'm not saying IE is better than FF… I'm just saying FF is a pain is the ass for web developers, and in the day and age of AJAX and "Web 2.0" Firefox is really hurting progress more than it's helping.

    … it should be noted that I'm posting from FireFox 2.0. ;)

  • http://www.wayneporter.com Wayne Porter

    Could always go Ubuntu and be highly irregular. :)

    I too have noticed some weird behaviors with FF 2.0

    -wayne

  • aiii

    firefox is the same old netcrap browser who broke the web a decade ago and then commited suicide.

    It came back to brake it once again, -firefox is nothing but a revived netcrap zombie and a crashing shitload.

  • Dosta

    I came to this site after I googled "i hate firefox". Do I need to say anything else…

  • olek

    gosh… i am also here after googling: "I HATE FIREFOX". It is comforting that I am not alone…

  • Reb

    Just happened to end up on this page, and I wanted add my opinion, I hate FireFox!! It always screws up my site! And not only mine! I don't know much about browsers but from what I understand they say it is faster yeah of coarse it is! It doesn't support half of the codes and scripts! It just ignores them! Cut here and cut there at that point there isn't much left for the browser to read! IE is full of problems too it isn't perfect but at least it gives me satisfaction, it shows my site as it was meant to be seen! Web designers put a lot of work into their sites and it is frustrating when you view it on FF and it looks terrible! Unless you like an ordinary site, with no special effects,

    Ugly non matching scrollbars, buttons that don't hover with css, then FF is not for you, if you are creative and work hard to create a site that seems perfect only on IE, all your work goes down the drain for the idiots that use FF.

    Unless FF improves and becomes more flexible, I will continue hating it!

    I hate testing on different browsers, you can't have them all perfect, I only wish that one day they will all work pretty much the same, no more head aches and that would be the end of this nightmare!

  • http://www.skygawker.com Sky

    Wow, when I first came to this page, I thought it was a parody or some kind of joke. Cross-browser compatibility is a bad thing? I thought it had to be some kind of tongue-in-cheek anti-monopoly message.

    But I gather that you're serious.

    Wow. Right. Clearly everyone should have to use the same browser that YOU prefer, right? How much is Bill Gates paying you?

    Also, compatibility issues work both ways. I'm redesigning my website now and was distraught to see that the CSS that renders uniformly in FF2, Opera 9, and Konqueror (haven't been able to check Safari yet) is a MESS in IE7. I'm going to have to write a whole new stylesheet just for IE7. I have really come to feel IE is a plague on web designers. The way I found this site, actually, was that I was searching for 'I hate Internet Explorer' out of frustration and found scads and scads of angry web designers; then, out of curiosity, I searched for 'I hate Firefox' and found very few. This was one, so I took a look.

  • Bill

    Yes, I hate FireFox too. I really don't need another browser to support.

    At one stage, the IE usage was in the 90%s. IE was the standard. Here comes FF and talks about standards. All of a sudden, we have to follow some standard that previously no one had to know anything about. As a web developer, how would anyone expect me to enjoy this change?

    Besides, what does FF do that IE doesn't ? Tabs!!! Big deal. IE does that too now but that's not the point. I hate tabs too.

  • http://bitememanga.com/ Hen

    How could you possibly hate tabs!? If it weren't for tabs I would kill myself.

  • Chris

    I Hate Firefox

  • sunil

    I used to love firefox, but its so slow to start up with the extensions that I'm using, And its no excuse to blame it on the extensions, that I'm uninstalling it now. Firefox team you've lost it! get your priorities right and make the extensions second priority after the browser starts up.

  • Mary

    Googled I HATE FIREFOX and found you, Please tell me what to do I am 48 years old new to computers my children got me this, all it does is crash and it uses 27,000 bites whenever I look at my task manager on my windows 2000 it sucks all the power and I am on dialup. if I use explorer 6 it cruises but 6 sucks to.I don't know what to do I uninstalled a shitload of programs even java and firewall!!!

  • Lee Davis

    I heartily agree with you, chief. Firefox sucks dirty ass as far as I'm concerned. I'm over here busy tearing all my hair out trying to find out why my background effect javascript won't work in any version of Firefox when it works on Safari, Opera, Chrome and (GASP!) IE (6, 7, and 8 I might add). Oh, use the Error Console, you say? Good effin' luck trying to figure out just what they mean (and Google won't be your friend on this one – trust me please). It doesn't matter that I validated both my XHTML + CSS via the ass gags @ W3C or stumbled on some things that helped me streamline the coding (and still stay valid by W3C standards). Firefox is a crappy excuse for a browser – PERIOD. Standards? Got nothing to do with it. The structure of my webpage is curiously uniform in FF2/3, being similar to the layout expressed within the browser environments of Safari, Opera, Chrome and IE (6, 7, and 8) and as stated before passed according to the specs of XHTML 1.0 STRICT (and after multiple validations back-to-back of BOTH XHTML + CSS). All you FF fanboys can blaze an over-sized moosecock – I wish that the FF team would do a collective hara-kiri and take this piece of crap off the market. I'm close to a year in pursuit of x-browser and FF refuses to lineup

    with any recognizable grasp of reality. FF, you suck -DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • http://www.limetastic.co.uk Sam

    Just do what I did, have a link saying "browser compatibility" and drop all support for Firefox, it's seriously rubbish! And what angers me the most is I live in the Uk and the European union (twats with nothing better to do with there time) have tried to sue microsoft for browser domination! wtf, microsoft offer a product that comes with media player and ie, if you dont like it get lost and go buy a mac, it's like saying i want a sandwich but you dont provide one witout bread! what the hell. and whats more is they have made microsoft take wmp and ie out of there new windows 7 in eu countrys so we're going to get people who arn't sure on how to use pc's (just the basics) such as grandads and grandma's that just use the basics confuzed because they have no ie or wmp! Well done european union, well done. add that to the pointless laws dictionary.

    Sorry for the rant, it just anoys me when govt's get involved with crap they shouldnt get involved in. Ms is a private company, LEAVE THEM ALONE!

    Ms and Win 7 and office 2010 rock! so before you go to firefox or buy a mac wait a bit, vista was a bit of a mistake but they've learnt!

  • Ronnie Two Shoes

    Sorry I don't have an URL so I don't know if this comment will be loaded here but: I used to develop my own web pages and gave up in frustration because of all the extra programming I had to do in JavaScript to make things load properly in IE. Oh, it was great for IE browsers if you used something like Frontpage, but all the proprietary stuff from Micro$oft wouldn't load properly in any other browser.

    Having said that, I hate Firefocks because they have gotten large and confusing – like some other browsers which will remain nameless. It used to be simple, beautiful and fast, but that mantle now rests proudly on Opera's shoulders. Sure, there is a learning curve, but Opera does so much more than either of the big two. For example, who else has the super handy Notes feature? Who else has email included in the browser?

    It started one day when I upgraded ('there is a firefox upgrade available') to the latest Firefox and found that my browser experience had slowed to a CRAWL. So, I banged around, changing this and that and ended by going to oldapps.com and reinstalling an older version of Firefox. That didn't work. So, thoroughly annoyed by this time i had wasted, I started looking for an alternative. Downloaded Opera and tested it against Firefox. Lo and Behold, Opera was actually faster.

    What I really want is a new browser called 'OldHippy' which only loads sites which hate the government and the main stream media and has lots of links on where to find organically grown grass. You know, grass which was grown in a forest meadow miles away from any kind of fertilizer or fertilizing pooliticians. Too much to ask I suppose.

  • Ronnie Two Shoes

    Yeah, and since we're on the subject, as sunil said 'its so slow to start up with the extensions that I’m using' AND the last time I went to the addons page I couldn't even find the foxit reader addon. It might be there, but I searched for 20 minutes with no results. (and i installed it from foxit reader but it didn't work properly)

    AND the addons section of their website used to come with recommendations and comments clearly displayed for anyone to investigate. But now, when I typed 'pdf' into their addons search engine, Foxit didn't even show and when I investigated the first thing that did show (i forget what it was, but it was pdf related ('come around and see some Puerto Rican girls like we used to') and looked at the comments on that addon, it turned out that 50% of the people who had installed it found it a waste of time. How helpful is that Firefox? First addon, which one might assume was recommended, is actually a pos!

    One thing i did like about firefox was that it has the 'view in IE' addon which will correctly render pages made by poozle brained IE developers for poozle brained IE sites. I don't know if Opera has that or not, but my guess is yes.

    Enough ranting. Thanks for your patience.

  • Ronnie Two Shoes

    PS: I don't suppose this is an AA meeting with M$ as the 'higher power'?

    Sorry, I must be in the wrong group.

  • nibah

    i hate firefox to bitssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    it is so slow the idiot

  • http://beopoint.com Partty

    IE sux and FF sux too! Why after FF1 nobody thought "Hey guys we have some market, let's make this browser more stable and see how it goos", but no! They try to innovate! Why should they be standards compatible? Probably 95% compatible is enough for someone, but I don't think the developers will agree! After all my experience I found the perfect browsers, the browsers in which everything works like it's spoused to work every time – Chrome and Opera. The only problem is that not everything written for the first works for the other.

    In conclusion I'll say that the chromium project is better than the FF. I'm waiting for HTML5 implementation! ;)

  • amber

    It's amazing to know that I am surrounded by people who hate Mozilla as much as I do and just like many others, I ended up on this website by Googling 'hate firefox'

    The reason being is simply because this anti-browser lost a whole load of my bookmarks, yet managed to only keep one and some from my Bookmarks toolbar below the URL address bar.

  • nox

    I hate Firefox too… It uses up to 1GB of RAM with just 4-5 tabs open. I don't have a lot of extensions, because i don't need it, but damned fox still uses lots of my RAM.

    Why?

  • firefox hater

     i hate really firefox more than IE6. chrome rocks, thanks to Google.

  • Didge

    I bloody hate it too!  And I came here after Googling “I HATE FIREFOX” as well.  I’m so sick of its flaws EVERY single time there’s an update!  Something is continuously not working right!  I am SO sick of it!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Breco-Ridgway/100000039862795 Breco Ridgway

    you have messed up my computer

  • Hasib

    i too hate Firefox  

  • SC

    I hate Firefox too! It’s always friggin crashing!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I too, googled I hate firefox. With IE8, I had no problems with crashes. But a majority of programs, I’m a part of, suggest using firefox, for better workability.  Not!!!! Crash crash crash… should be name the Firefox Crash Browser!!

  • Azmandius

    I am a real Firefox hater! Damn you Firefox makers claiming you’ve created a good alternative to IE and other browsers, but in fact you done shit!