Firefox Drops the Ball on Windows 7

This post isn't unique in any way you'd notice, but I am writing it across 3 different browsers.  I recently just installed Windows 7 and am very happy with the overhaul it went through.  However, this is not about Windows 7, this is about alternative browsers.

When Firefox was released for Windows, it gained immediate popularity as a good alternative to Internet Explorer.  It was faster, easier to work with, easy to develop plugins for, and was not nearly the target IE was in terms of malicious attacks.  However, in my experience, as software engineering projects grow, they start to run into exactly the same problems that Windows has as it grew.  Code becomes touched by more and more people and more and more mistakes get buried or their errors listed as 'one-offs' and therefore not worth the time or money to properly patch.

Firefox has notably let me down in Windows lately due to apparent memory leaks.  If I leave my Firefox window open, the amount of memory it holds seems to grow and grow even when I'm not browsing.  This coupled with it's habit of abruptly failing with no way to reproduce the error leads me to believe that Firefox has just gotten too big for its own good.  This was IE's problem (also coupled with backwards compatibility with notoriously vulnerable ActiveX) and now it seems Firefox has fallen into the same pit.  On top of that Firefox is single-threaded.  This means that if a page script goes into an infinite loop or one particular page renderer fails the whole browser crashes, not just the page that caused the crash.

When IE8 came out it was a vast improvement over any previous version of IE.  Multi-threading (also available in earlier IE's) allowed a page script to fail without it killing your browser and their plugin system was expanded to include 'accelerators' which allow a site to improve its speed on IE8 specifically by defining how the browser should interact with the site rather than the site adhering to the general standard of the internet (which there is none).

I only mention Chrome after IE8 because it still seems a bit buggy at times; though only when viewing web-pages; the actual program works smoothly.  However it is still a vast improvement over Firefox.  Instead of multi-threading, Chrome uses a Multi-Process model so that every single tab is its own running program, each of which can take over the job of organizing the window together should one process fail.  On top of that it's quick and conveniently uses IE's internet setting for proxy's so you can easily switch between them.  It also has a concept of accelerators via Google Gears, which allow Google Chrome to communicate efficiently with Web 2.0 applications much like IE's accelerators (for the record, Google Gears was first implemented in Firefox as a plugin far before IE's accelerators).  All together Chrome is a solid alternative browser if you can't deal with how IE organizes bookmarks, and other UI aspects.

Finally comes the finale.  I still had every browser installed up until a few days ago.  Each one did its own thing its own way.  Firefox was still easier to work with than IE but would crash.  IE wouldn't crash on me anymore but was difficult to work with.  Chrome was the easiest to work with and wouldn't crash, but was buggy when loading certain sites.

When I installed Windows 7 I immediately came to the conclusion I wasn't going to deal with Firefox anymore.  The big feature change in Windows 7 is the improved task bar which doubles both as a window list and a quick-launch bar where you can pin applications.  They also implement 'jump menus' which allow each application to keep a list of recent files (in its domain rather than a global list of recent files) as well as other actions which can be pinned.  For example, when you right click the IE8 icon on the new task bar, it offers you a list of pinned websites, recent sites you've visited as well as a button to open a new tab or start a new 'in-private' session.  Also when you hover over the icon IE8 will show you visual thumbnails of all windows AND TABS that are open in IE8 for you to simply click on.  

Now for the 3rd party browser.  Chrome does one thing at a time it seems.  Currently you can pin web urls to the jump menu and open  new tabs and new 'in-cognito' tabs from the jump menu.  The only thing it's missing is the individual tab thumbnails; it still does the individual windows as their own thumbnails, but no tabs like IE8.  

Firefox did nothing.  Windows 7 was released in beta ages ago, available to MSDN account holders since the beta, and available in its final release state to MSDN account holder more than a month before the release date.  What was Firefox doing?  They could've easily developed the jump menu feature and probably could've beat Chrome to the punch on the tab-thumbnails, but they didn't.

Firefox has started to drag its feet as of late.  A buggy interface, slower than normal browsing, leaky memory, and abrupt failures have become the rule rather than the exception it seems.  This is not just my experience with it on Windows either; I've had the exact same issue when working with it in Ubuntu.  Chrome was a bit buggy at first but seems to have resolved that issue and is all over 7's new taskbar; IE8 is still somewhat harder to work with but doesn't crash anymore and is faster than previous IE's.  Firefox has dropped the ball, possibly for the last time, but  I acknoledge the possibility that Chrome could fall victim to IE and Firefox's fate and that Firefox could come back much like IE did with IE8.

For the moment though, Firefox is dead to me.  I'm uninstall it (for the first time ever) from my OS and sticking with the much improved Internet Explorer.