A bad reputation sticks [LWN.net]

A bad reputation sticks

Posted Jul 7, 2012 10:21 UTC (Sat) by jpnp (subscriber, #63341)
In reply to: DiCarlo: Everybody hates Firefox updates by Fowl
Parent article: DiCarlo: Everybody hates Firefox updates

That's kind of what reputation is like. Once you've lost it, its gone.

Mozilla were warned when they switched to this chrome-like release schedule that this would happen, but their focus was on trying to get speed improvements out quickly to avoid being far behind in the benchmarks. Sustaining their existing strong points wasn't a consideration.

My experience is that the ecosystem of extensions has shrunk. Some I used to use were abandoned; now when I search for addons I often find something I could have used, if it hadn't stopped working 5 versions ago. Developers who in the past could successfully maintain an extension with a little effort every year or so, got driven away from the community.

It's true, those still running break less with new versions (firebug seems to update every time I start the browser to keep up). It's happened by selection within the shrinking pool.

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A bad reputation sticks

Posted Jul 7, 2012 17:06 UTC (Sat) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

As you said, the big ones that everyone uses have the resources to check and update. Many of these update even more frequently than firefox because of their huge user communities.

But a lot of the small specialty extensions are gone. I wouldn't be surprised if half the extensions that existed back in Firefox 3 days are gone at this point because of lack of maintenance.

Mozilla forgot their strengths, most people I know aren't out reading browser benchmarks, they are using the software for features and UI and that's what they keep breaking/changing.