Monday, July 19, 2004

Who Are You, 4 Percent?

With all the positive reviews Firefox has been getting on CNET/Download thanks to the campaign launched by Asa and Blake Ross, I couldn't help wondering about the 4% of users who give a thumbs down to Firefox. Who are they, and what are they trying to say? As of today, Monday July 19th 7H GMT, there were 54 negative reviews.

These reviews pointed out the following problems with Firefox. Some problems feel silly but they probably should be looked into (I guess most probably have several duplicate bugs, but how have the other ones been resolved?). They are approximately sorted by the number of reviews with that problem.
  • Extension issues: not enough features by default, too many of extensions takes a long time to get a running browser, handling of extensions doesn't work very well. (this is by far the most common complaint. Hopefully the next versions will address this issue.)
  • Link handling in email programs, mostly Outlook (I have this one too)
  • Memory leaks (this one I can understand but not really duplicate)
  • Version 0.8 was better
  • Installation is buggy
  • Some websites don't work well in Firefox (time for some Mozilla evangelism!)
  • Doesn't completely uninstall (I haven't tried it)
  • Upgrading needs uninstalling
  • Cannot install extensions (specifically, spoofstick (?))
  • Support is not good/The forums are down when they are needed (hey, have you donated?)
  • Prone to crashes (can't say I've hit many of them, but maybe I'm not a heavy user?)
Some comments complained about the marketing technique used by the Mozilla foundation on download.com (hey, that's life. Do the same for Opera/Maxthon).

The alternative browser of choice they recommended is Opera, followed by MyIE2 (now Maxthon), Avant and Slim Browser (the last three are IE based).

Finally, some comments seem to have been made in completely bad faith, and seem almost amusing:
  • Firefox is riddled with security holes and installs spyware III
  • Had to format hard drive to uninstall
  • The installer program contains a gif image and a cookie.

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