Goodbye firefox!

I’ve been following the Debian vs Mozilla case (aka Iceweasel/Firefox) pretty closely, especially as this happened during the JDLL (if you don’t read french, debian people put those posters on their booth which was just in front of the mozilla one, which triggered a blogging skirmish involving quite a lot of bird name calling). See this LWN article for a quick summary of the situation.
I had been thinking of leaving firefox entirely for a long time (I had already traded thunderbird for mutt last year), mainly due to its huge memory print (I like to navigate with more than 20 tabs at the same time), its slowliness and a growing dislike of the mozilla attitude, especially since the creation of the Mozilla Corporation.
As far as I know, there are only a few alternatives: epiphany, which I discarded because it’s running gecko, opera, which is very good but unfortunately not free (as in speech) and konqueror. I initially overlooked it because I’m not running KDE, and I was fearing that it would want 90% of the desktop environment to work, but it looked pretty happy with “only” kde-libs (which I already had for k3b, anyway) and some extra stuff.
I have to say it’s really good, and in fact much better than what I had thought, even when run on top of FVWM. Navigation/rendering is good and the UI responds without any noticeable delay, which is really a big relief from firefox. I have imported my bookmarks and spent 5 minutes reconfiguring the fonts, and there we go!
So far, there are only two things that I miss, though I may have simply overlooked them: forms staying filled when you press the back button, and tabs being saved from one session to the next one.

I plan to unmerge firefox in the next few days and have, at last, a mozilla-clean machine, which would be a nice gift for its second birthday!

9 thoughts on “Goodbye firefox!”

  1. Uhm, I changed firefox for opera a couple of months ago. I really love it!

    Maybe I should try konkqueror, since I just like you didn’t want to install because I didn’t use KDE 🙂

    Regards,
    Alex

  2. Tabs can be easily saved by typing Ctrl+Alt+S and Enter (or just go Tools -> Profile stuff). Don’t remember if that shortcut works on default, though. Anyway, you save the session before you quit and continue from there the next time. 🙂

  5. I switched too from firefox2->epiphany (ffx2 broke almost all my extensions minus webdevel)

    now i install konqueror 🙂
    Also opera and links are great for me

    Mozilla Corp did a “good” thing with iceweasel/Firefox icon controversy , now we are looking at alternatives (like sylpheed,evolution for email)
    Open source is good

  6. Firefox is too slow for me. I use Opera. All I miss is the possibility to watch streams.
    -Firefox is often not responding when I open about 20Tabs.:(
    And most important -Opera doesnt reload a page every time I hit back(Does a site change withing seconds?)
    -Opera increases the size of pages perfectly and even better than what I saw with IE7 @ my father’s laptop.

  7. I find really funny that it’s the _debian_ folks who want to use the firefox trademark freely.

    I mean, “debian” is also a registered trademark _AND_ they’ve enforced it against debian-derived distros some times.

    But now mozilla is the only “bad guy” here.

    And of course, every linux users should stop using firefox because the firefox project gives more priority to the win32 platform than linux, but everybody should jump to epiphany…despite of the fact that epiphany doesn’t even cares to support win32.

  8. @Diego: did you follow what really happened? Basically, mozilla is refusing to make any exceptions for debian (it used to) and want to totally control how their trademark is used. While this *can* make sense in the wild world, I don’t see the point in suspecting debian people of hurting the mozilla trademark (their patches are for things that should be fixed upstream, like support for more arches or possibility to disable the automatic upgrade system). And even if for some mysterious reason, that was to happen, they could act afterwards and take whatever measure they see fit, instead of this silly prevention.

    And did I ever say that everyone should stop using firefox? I said that I stopped using it, for reasons that I have explained, but everyone is free to choose a browser they like and I totally respect that choice.

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