Sunday 11 December 2011

Firefox fucking sucks

I use Linux as my everyday operating system. I love KDE, i love the developer culture of Free Software, i love lots of things about KDE, Linux and its ecosystem. But there are some areas where it not only lacks - it sucks monkey balls. One of these areas are web browsers.

What the fuck?! Web browsing is just about everything most people do with a computer today, and you still can't come up with a decent browser?! Let's see what we have. Internet Explorer? Only old ass versions, only on Wine, and they suck anyway. Safari? No Linux version, and Safari is probably the most inflexible piece of software ever written. Chrome? Hands down fastest rendering and fastest Javascript, no desktop integration whatsoever (looks and feels alien on ANY desktop), extensions suck, and Google is trying to do batshit insane crap with it, like pushing to make it a gaming platform, or allow it to execute native code, or other less than useful stuff. Opera? Bloated proprietary piece of shit (i don't know what do they need extensions for - they already have everything and the kitchen sink in there), sucks at rendering and sucks at Javascript, and hipsters love it. Firefox? Piece of shit with an asshat development team.

Don't get me wrong - there was a time when i was a fan of Firefox. It was a new kid on the block, it had tabs, it was small and fast, it blew IE out of the water, and it was cool to like it because it was all open source and ideologically correct. Yes, Opera had tabs too, but Opera, while being a proprietary piece of shit, sucked then, and it sucks now. Firefox 2 ruled with all its glory.

Things started to go south about the time of release of version 3. Firefox started sucking big time back then. The most unnecessary and idiotic "feature" ever introduced was the "awesome bar". Firefox developers were saying shit like "give it time", "you'll get used to it", blablabla. Well guess what, i didn't. I still despise this fucking "awesome" bar, i still haven't got used to it, and i still miss the old address bar. Sadly, with all the addon flexibility Firefox has, no one is still able to replicate the old address bar.

Firefox also started to be a memory and resource hog. Every time a new version came out, i was pleasantly surprised that it was faster than the previous one, only to discover that it was faster due to some addons being disabled out of compatibility issues. And it got all the bloat back by the time the next release was on the way. The development team was bragging about how they work on memory problems, how they optimize startup time, how they do this, how they do that - but Firefox only seemed to get slower and slower.

Another problem with current Firefox is the development cycle. No, seriously, what were you thinking?! You want to have a rolling release? Fine, but why inflate version numbers? Why not do 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 etc.? Current alpha (Firefox 10? 11? 28?) looks exactly like Firefox 4. So what was the point of all these version numbers? Firefox management didn't just shoot itself in the foot here - it blew out both its legs with a fucking bazooka. Sorry guys, rocket jumps only work in Quake. Not to mention the whole "user is an idiot" mentality that plagues Chrome developers. Admit it, Mozilla, Firefox 4 looks like Chrome.

The main problem with Firefox though is its complete inability to integrate with KDE desktop, which is largely fault of using this piece of shit toolkit GTK+. I still can't understand why those Chrome and Firefox idiots picked GTK+ instead of Qt. Maybe back in the day Qt wasn't a viable alternative, and Firefox being so old ass and having lots of legacy code would find the transition to Qt too expensive, but Google, why?! Why?! Why did you choose a toolkit that looks like ass on my desktop?!

Complete lack of visual integration is not the best part of it, though. The best part is, since i want to have my passwords stored in my KWallet, whenever the new shitty Firefox version comes out, it breaks the KWallet addon. I just can't live without KWallet integration, and this is the only thing that breaks on every fucking update!

It's been a while since i started looking around for better browsers, but they all suck. Chrome lacks DownThemAll, which i can't live without, and is not well integrated into KDE and looks and feels like ass. Konqueror just plain sucks. Doesn't render websites correctly, no extensions, Flash crashes, and due to its swiss army knife nature, whenever you press the wrong button, some lame-ass panel or viewer shows up which i don't know how to turn off.

Rekonq? I have high hopes for Rekonq. It already has KGet integration, which is sorta like having DownThemAll, but it's not nearly there yet. It doesn't store passwords in KWallet, which is really strange, given it's a native KDE project. It also lacks extensions. Some time ago, Chrome extensions were promised, but they didn't materialize. It also promises some interesting ideas like ownCloud sync, but again, it's not ready at the time of this writing. With KGet and KWallet integration though, i can live without most of the Firefox addons (and some of them are available as Chrome extensions as well), but unfortunately some extensions i would strongly prefer having, Ghostery being the prime example (as far too small amount support the Do-Not-Track option). Greasemonkey would be good to have too.

Update: Nope, it does indeed store passwords in KWallet, it just does it differently from Firefox, which is why i couldn't locate them in KWallet Manager - they're stored under Form Data. This makes rekonq barely viable an alternative to Firefox. I wish i could import passwords though. I might look into writing a password import script either from CSV, or from KWallet itself. Probably, CSV/XML would be a lot more useful for the community. I still miss extensions though, and while rekonq has its own flavour of AdBlock, i would really love to see something like Ghostery or Scrapbook.

So, what does it leave us with? Some lame-ass half-assed slow-ass unbranded-ass browsers like Arora, IceWeasel, Namoroka or whatever their names were? Or a semi-usable extension-less rekonq?

It's really simple guys. I just want a browser that integrates with my desktop, and that is reasonably fast and allows at least some degree of flexibility. This is what i'm not getting.

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