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Mozilla Firefox Complaints

According to statistics compiled by W3Schools and StatCounter, Mozilla Firefox is the second most popular browser in the world as of August 2011. During the last decade, Firefox has seen its usage grow each year and at one point, it seemed possible that Firefox might someday pass Internet Explorer as the leader of the browsing world. However, the last few years has seen the rapid development and improvement of several Internet Explorer alternatives that have shown, by virtue of their adoption, that Firefox is not without its faults.

  1. Resources Usage

    • Excessive CPU and memory usage is by far the biggest complaint about the Firefox Web browser. With multiple tabs opened and various extensions installed, Firefox can quickly eat up a massive percentage of your available resources. The worst culprit is poorly written extensions. While the ability to customize your Web browser to do anything is a major draw for users, many extensions are written by amateur developers using inefficient or incorrect code. This can lead to a phenomenon called "memory leak" wherein Firefox memory usage rises exponentially until it becomes completely unresponsive.

    Feature Creep

    • When Firefox began to make inroads on Internet Explorer, it was touted as a simple browser that focused strictly on the basics. If you needed your browser to do more, you could do so by installing extensions that add features missing in Firefox. The default configuration of Firefox was designed to be fast and simple. Over the years, many features that were previously extensions have been built in to Firefox causing some to suggest that the browser has become bloated. Features like browser sync, tab groups and Web developer tools are now built into the browser. As a consequence, Firefox preferences are a bit more complicated and the installation file has grown in size.

    Website Compatibility

    • Although Firefox is a highly compliant browser that adheres to Web standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, there are many websites that do not function correctly when loaded in Firefox. While this incompatibility is often caused by website designs that attempt to bridge shortcomings in Internet Explorer, the end effect is that many users who rely on certain websites for business purposes cannot regularly use Firefox. Moreover, with Windows, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer holding dominant positions in the business world, many websites include ActiveX controls that leverage Microsoft technology in order to present highly dynamic and multimedia rich content. Since Firefox -- and all other browsers outside of Internet Explorer -- cannot run ActiveX, these websites are virtually inaccessible through Firefox.

    Sub-par Rendering Speed

    • According to independent browser speed tests conducted in early 2011 by PC World and Gizmodo, Firefox is outperformed in page and JavaScript rendering by Google Chrome and Opera. In other tests, Safari has been shown to be faster than Firefox by these measures as well. As the Web continues to blossom into an app-driven ecosystem, browsing speed becomes a more critical aspect of the Web browser you use.

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