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Wednesday, 18 May 2011

Firefox Goes from WIN to FAIL

Posted on 07:35 by thor

I recently signed up for a listserv because I needed to give feedback on a bug I found with Firefox. First I'll fill you in on my bug and how their excuse is lame, then I'll fill you in on the SPAM atrocity that I am still not freed from and the new failures of the Mozilla company that I have discovered because of it.


to skip the rest of the entry and get the latest update on the matter, click here


A few months ago I got a Mac. I discovered that bookmarks within directories in the Firefox bookmark toolbar cannot be right-clicked. The Mozilla feedback listserv admin directed me to a broken link and never got back to me when I said it was broken. It didn't even look like an html file.

I did my own hunting and found other Mozilla admins and moderators telling people that it was actually a Mac problem because nothing else in Mac lets you right click for options (which is crap because you can right click or command click for so many things). Command click, by the way, does nothing, either.

Here is why this excuse is bull. If you want to design an cross OS browser and right click/command click won't seem to work in an OS, you NEED to make some other way to get to that functionality. How do I edit the name or delete a bookmark in a directory within the toolbar? Apparently that function wasn't figured out.

Signing up for the feedback-mozilla list was the start of a nightmare. I receive at least 100 emails a day from the list, 99% of them complaining about firefox and the new upgrade. "Firefox 4 Sucks" and "I hate FF4" are common subject lines.

And I can't get off the list.

According to the CAN SPAM act, you have to let users opt out of mailing lists at any time and make the information accessible or they can report you for spam. There is no opt out link on the list and no way that I have found through countless Google searches over the last 36 hours to get off the list.

It seems like Mozilla set people up for this. A google search for firefox feedback got me this list before any mail in forms. So I signed up, thinking it would be an easy out because that's the law.

One user on the list says:

"On top of that, when I tried to submit this through the "SubmitFeedback" feature on the Help menu, the webpage wouldn't work. The "submit" button of the page was only active as long as nothing was typed in the "remarks" box. The minute anything was typed in, the button was "grayed out" and became inactive."

Are we being set up to sign up for this list? Probably not. If we are, this would be a stupid move as it's mostly hate for Firefox. What I can say is that their web marketers know nothing about search engine marketing and PR if this is how they manage their sites and meta tags.

I've contacted their support and tried various unsubscribe suggestions since coming back from a 6 hour shift to find 75 complaints in my inbox from the list. I got so mad after this went on for more than 24 hours that I downloaded Chrome last night.

The douchebaggery continues. Chrome has a button to import bookmarks from IE and Firefox without having to export as html and then import manually. It doesn't work since the Firefox 4 upgrade. Now, it may be a coincidence as half of the good plugins from Firefox 3.0 don't work in 4.0 and thus make the upgrade even more useless, but it does seem kind of sneaky that abandoning ship to Chrome was made harder by the latest update.

Firefox lured people in saying that FF4 is faster, but most complaints are that it is slow and freezes. This can be attributed to bugs in any new software, but one PC savvy user checked his system usage.

"I've been running FF4 for about 4 weeks now and not long after installing there was a dramatic reduction in performance of my PC (6GB RAM, iCore5 etc etc - good spec) so tested what the cause was today. The primary culprit, I'm sad to say, was FF4. It used considerable more memory than Chrome, IE9 and even VMWare making work very frustrating."

Any complaints about the design or the loss of intuitiveness or user friendly layout is met with direction to go download a customization. I wish I could do sloppy design work and tell users to fix it themselves. Judging by how much time Mozilla gave developers to fix their plugins, I wouldn't rely on yet another plugin to make my browser usable.

Some key browser functions are completely gone!

"I've just finally "up"graded to FF 4, after being nagged by your message every day. I'm still getting to grips with any benefits but I've noticed a very retrograde feature: There is no drop-down page navigation arrow any more. i.e. You can't select to, say, go back to a particular page from the list but must keep clicking on the back page arrow till you reach it.I find this omission baffling - a very useful feature for years now - and if I'd known it would be missing I'd not have upgraded. Why have you done this?"

This influx of hatred is because Firefox used to be loved; they were the only real alternative to IE (because Netscape explorer wasn't really an option) that was cross OS. Firefox started a revolution of independent browsers, but they haven't kept up. Their latest update was rushed to lock out competition and because of that is buggy and has left users who came to rely on plugins stuck without that functionality. When you strip away all of the little tricks that made your browser awesome and then replace it with slow or freezing browsing and awkward design, you give your users no excuse not to bail.

As of this morning I posted a threat to report them for CAN SPAM violations if the moderator of the list does not remove me. I'm so filled with venom for Mozilla now that I may start a hashtag #whyfirefox sucks.

If you know a way to unsubscribe, please throw me a line here. I'm going mad.


UPDATE: Someone finally got back to me with instructions on how to unsubscribe. Funny part is, they managed to do it while all-but telling me that I was an idiot.

You are the one who has to unsubscribe to the list. Sending email to list subscribers is what list servers do. This particular list is populated through "Hendrix" where people provide feedback without the expectation of getting a reply. To unsubscribe reply to any message such as this one and change the subject to only show one word: unsubscribe nothing else in the subject, and remove the content of the reply

If you looked in your message headers you would have seen the following information.

List-Unsubscribe: https://lists.mozilla.org/options/feedback-firefox,
mailto:feedback-firefox-request@lists.mozilla.org?subject=unsubscribe
List-Post: mailto:feedback-firefox@lists.mozilla.org
List-Help: mailto:feedback-firefox-request@lists.mozilla.org?subject=help
List-Subscribe: https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/feedback-firefox,
mailto:feedback-firefox-request@lists.mozilla.org?subject=subscribe
Newsgroups: mozilla.feedback.firefox
Message-ID: mailman.48.1305729071.9060.feedback-firefox@lists.mozilla.org

Like that? Well here's the kicker... that info is not in a single of the 200 something emails I've received and one attempt to just send a blank "Unsubscribe" subject just got bounced after being held because it might contain "administrativia".

Here's a sample email:





Name:
Email: [REMOVED BY AMY TO PROTECT PRIVACY]
Product: Firefox
Summary: Miss old Back Button
Comments:
I really miss the old Back Button with the drop down box that let me
pick which recently viewed page I could go back to or am I overlooking
this feature? It's a bother having to click Back one page at a time.
Browser Details: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
From URL: http://hendrix.mozilla.org/Note to readers: Hendrix gives no expectation of a response to this feedback
but if you wish to provide one you must BCC (not CC) the sender for them to
see it.
_______________________________________________
feedback-firefox mailing list
feedback-firefox@lists.mozilla.orghttps://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/feedback-firefox

Do you see info on how to get out there? Nope.
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