Saturday, March 26, 2011

A letter to firefox

Dear Firefox,


The last six years have been great, do you remember that time you took 25% of the Global web browser market share for the first time? or when you first made tabbed browsing all the rage? If not for you, IE6 may have set the standard for the next generation of browsers and HTML5 would be a pipe dream. ActiveX might still seem like a reasonable technology!

You've been so good to me too, the mixture of flexibility, raw performance and consistency across windows and linux were refreshing and while I must admit to you now I've tried everything from Midori to IE9 behind your back, normally, I've always come back to you. How could I get away from your plug-ins? I loved how well ad-block worked and how I could redirect my downloads. It all was so unique and wrapped in a customizable UI.

Around the 3rd time you'd changed things up I noticed you'd put on some weight and much hadn't really improved about you, but you were still awesome compared to everything else I'd tried...then...then I tried Chrome. It grew on me and when I discovered its syncing abilities...I started to pack my things.

I lingered at the door in hopes that Firefox 4, the new you based on a new version of Gecko, would win me back but your sync falls short. Your ability to move around tabs just isn't slick enough and its really just the old you with things Chrome was giving me months before.

I'm sorry to say it but Firefox, its over between us and I hope we can still be friends. I've heard that you are looking at a more aggressive release schedule for your updates and if you do become all that you can be, then maybe we can try this again.


-A long time firefox user