Those of you who follow Dara, either via her Crime and the Forces of Evil blog, her LJ or Dreamwidth mirrors, or her social networks, will have already seen her post Mozilla and Firefox Careen into a Ditch, in which she recounts going into it a bit with Mozilla’s OpenStandards Twitter account–about why in gods’ names they chose to show some support for Gamergate.
Since Dara put that post up, the Daily Dot picked up on it, and y’all may note–some of Dara’s tweets are in fact cited in that article.
The Mary Sue’s picked up on the story as well, right over here.
It shouldn’t take any of you all much of a stretch of the imagination to guess that I’m with Dara on this. The whole Gamergate debacle is something many, many other people besides me have decried, so I’m not going to get into that here–I have nothing new to contribute to that that y’all haven’t probably already read.
What I will say is that Mozilla has disappointed me here. While I cannot bail entirely on using Firefox, due to having to keep it around for purposes of day job testing, I can and have decided to make Safari and Chrome my primary browsers for personal use. Firefox had already irritated me with its constant memory leaks on OS X, as well as its breaking of Disqus-based comments on several sites I regularly visit (like the Mary Sue, Kevin and Kell, and Ensign Sue). Way back when, when it first launched its system of fast updates, it also made my life difficult at work since Selenium had trouble keeping up with its rapid-fire changes. Which is a pain in the ass when much of your job depends upon automated browser testing.
On the other hand, I liked Firefox’s smart bookmarks, which was a handy way for me to hit RSS feeds of a couple of sites like the BBC and the Seattle Times, whenever I wanted to read news–I could pick and choose which articles I wanted to read. And I had been planning to switch my primary browser on my laptop back to Firefox if I saw any sign that they’d fixed the Disqus problem, despite the memory leaks being annoying enough that I’d had to install a plugin whose express purpose was to alert me to restart Firefox once it passed a certain level of memory consumption.
(Pro tip: if your damn browser needs its user community to write a plugin to fix an ongoing problem FOR YOU, you’re doing your development wrong.)
But now? I’m done. Safari gets to be my permanent main browser now.
Comments
26 responses to “Bye Firefox, it was nice knowing you”
Ok, what’s gamergate?
Ira: Oh man trying to condense this down into a short explanation is tough. Best thing I can do is to point you at the Wikipedia writeup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
It is, overall, a great big unpleasant mess and has made life very difficult for women who are prominent in gaming: notably Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu.
A quick scan of the article looks like it’s a huge singularity of wankers and butthurt.
It’s particularly epic butthurt, yes, but with an added toxic layer of harassment. 🙁
That would be part of the wankers.
Wired has links to the original chat logs showing how it was built for harassment: http://wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-09/10/gamergate-chat-logs
I normally use Chrome. My work won’t let us use it. Our web apps _have_ to be compatible with IE, but I prefer almost anything else. At work, that means Firefox… But I grumble. I read Dara’s exchange…
Yeah. I use a whole mess of browsers at work just because I _have_ to, for web testing. But for my personal purposes it’s Safari now, on my laptop. At work on my boxes there it’ll usually be Chrome.
I don’t know if anyone has asked work if we can install Safari. It runs fine on Windows…
It does! I have it on my Windows box at work, in fact.
There’s also Opera to consider. Dara’s shifting over to Opera on some of her machines.
Yes, but getting my work to install it will be a project. They blocked StackOverflow until a few weeks ago…
Ahh okay. So it’s all driven by your IT people? You can’t just install your own browser? Drag.
No, I can’t just install my own browser. They’re into a certain amount of security theatre.
Ugh. 🙁
Yep. But I enjoy the work. And it pays well.
The tricky thing about Gamergate is “integrity” actually is synonymous to stroking their reactionary ideology in their understanding of the term. So, when they talk about “integrity in gaming journalism”, they technically aren’t lying (at least as they understand the word), but it unfortunately amounts to a euphemism for being terrible human beings in the name of a quest for ideological purity. :/
Those little fsckers. May all their computers execute HaltAndCatchFire.
::whimper:: I despise when doing the right thing, that means ‘following my principles’ means making something in my life suck.
@Pauline: INDEED.
I bailed on FireFox/Mozilla long ago due to the memory leakage issue. I was already running a subpar machine at the time, memory-wise, and the issue made my entire computer unusable every time I used it.
Yeah, I can just bet! My older MacBook has 4G in it, and even there it was a problem. My current MacBook has 8G! But even then it was a problem–at one point I found that Firefox had eaten 5G of the RAM!
Once that happened, I had to install the plugin to monitor memory usage. And if you have to have a third party plugin to compensate for the browser problems, the browser is definitely doing it wrong.
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