The problem is simple. The speed at which web apps have entered the mainstream has been faster than the browsers can iterate. Browsers are no longer just "browsers", they are full fledged application platforms now.
Give the browsers more time to catch up...
Firefox 3 has already cut a their memory "foot print" by a large amount.
Handing over $100 a month to a developer for a browser isn't going to improve the performance of it, competition between the 4 main browser developers and the fight for marketshare is what's going to drive the improvements in stability, the innovation, and the overall software quality.
Currently you have Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Apple all developing browsers, it's an incredibly competitive market and the rate of change (and improvement) is already extremely high.
Drew
· 1 year ago
As we move forward we are only going to be more reliant on our browsers... For me FF crashes about 10 times per day... I would be willing to pay over $100 for a reliable browser any day of the week... I assume most of the people reading this also spend the majority of their time online, so I am very surprised most are unwilling to pay?
craig c
· 1 year ago
The solution is simple people - try Opera (v9.5).
Yes, it lacks the extensions of FF. But it's way faster.
Use it as your primary browser, and use a bare-bones FF install for everything else (when you an extension or there's a non-Opera website).
AC
· 1 year ago
If a browser could guarantee the removal of all ads, pop-ups, etc. without any kind of performance hit, I'd gladly pay for it!
jc
· 1 year ago
I have been having the same problems with firefox after a recent upgrade. Explorer is always slow to load. I recently tried to uninstall everything not useful and I tried uninstalling Adobe Flash, which made everything really fast and cripples malware. However, you can't view videos, so I re-installed it through firefox and it seems to be a bit better.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
I've been documenting the Safari -> WP posting bug since first trying Safari when it made it to the Windows platform. It still isn't fixed which in my opinion is just plain stupid
Josh
· 1 year ago
Browsers are hugely complex applications. There are literally millions of things that could go wrong while rendering twenty websites, and at least that's an order of magnitude below the number of sites I browse each day. But today's browsers are actually (if you look back in time) the most stable, fast, compliant, and useable browsers ever. If you've been using the Firefox 3 BETA and are crashing less than the released version of Fx2, when it and Safari 3.1 are both blazingly fast in comparison to their predecessors and use less memory, when Opera is free and as good as ever, when with Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft is making a concerted effort towards efficiency and standards-compliance... what more could you ask for? The competition is fierce but good-natured, people are rushing to fix all the problems you're complaining about, and the days in which developers had to rewrite web pages for everyone are pretty much over. I mean, I understand your concerns... but if you think that the current state of the browser market, which is the best that it's ever been, is poor, I fear you'll never be satisfied.
CountRob
· 1 year ago
You get what you pay for. A $650 installation of Adobe Fireworks will kick GIMP's (free) ass.
With the exception of Windows/Linux, nearly all proprietary software is better than that LGPL freeware crap.
I think Mozilla should do what MySQl does: Have 2 versions of their software. One is free, the other costs money but is a more polished, "super" version.
Josh
· 1 year ago
Why? They already have plenty of resources. They frequently offer jobs to people who spend enough time working on the codebase. There are people employed in many companies to do work on its code. I don't see how they could possibly do a better job of it than they actually are--the paying-for-a-browser model is pretty much dead, and if by its very nature proprietary software were superior Internet Explorer would be the best browser available. That said, I'm pretty sure you can place a bounty on specific bugs, if you so choose, so I guess in that sense you could pay for an improved experience.
silvrstar
· 1 year ago
@CountRob, love the attitude, but you can't be half-serious about having a 'super' version. The fallout would be so big that most would switch back to IE7-8.
And what kind of article is this without mentioning Opera? It has been one of the first browsers, and oh most successful commercially (not free) until it saw that you can't compete with 'close to good' and 'free'. Just because browser usage statistics show it around 2% doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Do your homework.
SuezanneCBaskerville
· 1 year ago
Try the last release of Opera 8. That seemed to work alright for me.
About Firefox, are you loading it up with extensions? That might account for crashing.
If you haven't tried Maxthon Classic and Maxthon 2, that might be worth trying.
Firefox 3 beta 5 seems to work pretty well to me.
Flock does fine, it's what I'm using.
I spend a lot of time time surfing, with lots of tabs open, sometimes multiple browsers with lots of tabs on each, sometimes on multiple computers, and I don't find the browsers crash all that much.
I'm fairly easily aggravated. Perhaps it's the not the browsers but the machine, operating system, network connection, etc.?
Ling
· 1 year ago
I think you're missing the point. Paying for your browser is what got you into this mess. If it had been free, instead of being bundled with Windows, you would by now had a lot of options, with open source browsers competing with each other and things getting progressively better.
Peter
· 1 year ago
Firefox needs to stop adding new trinkets and just concentrate on making the existing version work.
Less is more.
Free Firefox: free Stable Firefox: $25
Herrin
· 1 year ago
I think the problem in your case, isn't so much the browser as it is the OS. Vista, to be honest is a glossy version of windows without the stability and extended bug testing that XP has had.
For example Firefox on OS X is about as stable an experience as any of the others it just has more features and is supposed to be safer too.
Which brings up the risk of using a new OS on the internet all the time.
It is true that more and more we are all living on our Browsers though and the Internet is only growing in its reach into our daily life.
What happens if the Electricity gets turned off? Arghhh!!
Nexeus Fatale
· 1 year ago
So I have to pay for net access and then pay for something to surf the net with? Opera tried this and it just did not work at all. What's even worse is that any "pay for" browser will immediate be killed by Safari or IE (depending on your OS).
All Comments
Give the browsers more time to catch up...
Firefox 3 has already cut a their memory "foot print" by a large amount.
http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-mem...
Currently you have Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Apple all developing browsers, it's an incredibly competitive market and the rate of change (and improvement) is already extremely high.
Yes, it lacks the extensions of FF. But it's way faster.
Use it as your primary browser, and use a bare-bones FF install for everything else (when you an extension or there's a non-Opera website).
With the exception of Windows/Linux, nearly all proprietary software is better than that LGPL freeware crap.
I think Mozilla should do what MySQl does: Have 2 versions of their software. One is free, the other costs money but is a more polished, "super" version.
And what kind of article is this without mentioning Opera? It has been one of the first browsers, and oh most successful commercially (not free) until it saw that you can't compete with 'close to good' and 'free'. Just because browser usage statistics show it around 2% doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Do your homework.
About Firefox, are you loading it up with extensions? That might account for crashing.
If you haven't tried Maxthon Classic and Maxthon 2, that might be worth trying.
Firefox 3 beta 5 seems to work pretty well to me.
Flock does fine, it's what I'm using.
I spend a lot of time time surfing, with lots of tabs open, sometimes multiple browsers with lots of tabs on each, sometimes on multiple computers, and I don't find the browsers crash all that much.
I'm fairly easily aggravated. Perhaps it's the not the browsers but the machine, operating system, network connection, etc.?
Less is more.
Free Firefox: free
Stable Firefox: $25
For example Firefox on OS X is about as stable an experience as any of the others it just has more features and is supposed to be safer too.
Which brings up the risk of using a new OS on the internet all the time.
It is true that more and more we are all living on our Browsers though and the Internet is only growing in its reach into our daily life.
What happens if the Electricity gets turned off? Arghhh!!
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