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by Turing_Machine 5307 days ago
"Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons"

You'd have a point here if Firefox hadn't started blithely breaking everyone's add-ons by bumping the version number about 5 times per week. Okay, that's hyperbole -- I know it wasn't that often, but the point is that a "rapid release schedule" comes with real costs.

If you have 500MM users, and the mean user time to adapt to a trivial new release is 5 minutes (a gross underestimate if add-ons have broken), you've just wasted 16 million hours of user time. Just because that cost doesn't appear as a line item in the Mozilla Foundation's budget doesn't mean it isn't real.

I used Firefox for years because of the rich add-on community. When it started being more trouble than it was worth to update the add-ons (or find/write new ones, if the old one hadn't been updated), I switched to Chrome. It's unlikely that I'll be back.
2 comments
notatoad 5307 days ago
If the cost of frequent updates is breaking add ons that aren't actively maintained, I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. The majority of the slowness criticisms that ff receives seem to be caused by add ons.
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Turing_Machine 5307 days ago
It's not unreasonable to expect an add-on to work for more than six weeks, especially when there hasn't actually been any real, significant change in the base software. I'd bet the (unpaid) add-on authors are getting pretty tired of this as well -- they're the ones who have to deal with the emails from unhappy users.
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limi 5306 days ago
It's currently fixed in the Nightly and Aurora channels, and will make it to mainstream Firefox very soon: http://theunfocused.net/2011/11/19/solving-firefoxs-add-on-c...
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gkoberger 5307 days ago
This is my biggest complaint about Firefox, and I'm a) an add-on developer in my personal time and b) a Mozilla employee who spends 40+ hours a week working on addons.mozilla.org. I swear we're working on fixing it :)

In the meantime, sorry it's been a hassle. I wish we hadn't switched to rapid release without fixing add-on compatibility. We honestly didn't realize how hard it would be to get right.

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