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What flamewar? For nearly two years, Mozilla developers have asked users to file good memory leak bug reports and have even supplied tools for doing so. If you're still having problems, simply report them and they can be fixed. You can report any bugs in Firefox 3 beta directly to Bugzilla, or discuss them in the MozillaZine Firefox Builds forum first.

Basically, by law non-profits are restricted in the kind of activities they can perform, particularly in generating revenue. Every time Mozilla wanted to work on some project with a corporation (like the arrangements with their default search engines or the creation of customized partner builds for eBay and others), they had to consult lawyers to find out if it was legal. By performing most of their activities under a corporation, all this legal uncertainty, expense, and restrictions could be avoided. The downside to this was that they had to start paying taxes, but that can be considered a good thing in that it supports society.

IANAL, but I don't think it's much different than how a university might own an endowment, which consists of stock in various for-profit corporations. What makes something a non-profit is not what it owns but what it uses its assets for (generating revenue vs. furthering some public good).

The key part of Mozilla's arrangement is that the Foundation is the sole shareholder of the Corporation; the employees don't get any shares to sell off in some kind of IPO (though they'd make a ton of money doing so). This allows it to generate revenue easily through the Corporation, but requires that this revenue must then be used for non-profit purposes (i.e. supporting the project and the internet). The whole thing is kind of an "organizational hack", but it works.

I haven't personally observed any real changes in their overall mission since this change; it was mostly a change on paper. The increase in revenue, though, has been very fruitful to the project. They started with just 10 employees; now they're past 100. They have a whole QA team and are creating several automated test frameworks and test suites (much of the code had gone without tests since the start of the Mozilla project). The whole build and release process is being automated, resulted in much faster releases of security fixes. And so on.

See this blog post by Mitchell Baker and this official FAQ on the reorganization for more details.

Oh, and they just came out with their 2007 grant figures for those interested.

Seriously, how difficult would it be for you to show me a list of search providers at install time and let me choose the one I prefer?

See the little Google icon in the Firefox search box? Now click it.

Last I checked, the last choice was also sticky and/or you could set the default somewhere...

Don't see the search engines you like? Head here.

I don't use the search box myself because it's, frankly, pretty clumsy. I use keyword searches because it's much more powerful: Just right click on a search box on any web page, select "Add keyword for this search", and now you can search whatever you want by typing the keyword and search terms to the address bar. ("g firefox keywords", bam. "wp Mozilla Firefox", bam.)

Unfortunately, your scenario probably isn't too far off.

I built my fiancee a computer a few weeks ago and installed Ubuntu on it. Works fine for her most of the time, as she only does "the basics" (web, email, photos, etc).

But Linux still struggles a bit with the basics. She went to pay her credit card bill online, at CitiCards.com. The site doesn't work with Firefox. Google "firefox citicards" or see this link.

Now, in this case, you could argue that it's Citi's fault. But the point is, to someone like my fiancee, who's not a slack-jawed yokel by any means, who just wants a computer that works without tweaking or troubleshooting, it's broke. She has no interest in googling "firefox citicards" and figuring out how to work around the problem. She can just use her Windows PC at work and visit the site with IE and be done with it.

I suppose the ideal outcome would be that if enough Citi Card-holding "Joe Sixpacks" bought the $200 Wal-Mart Linux PC and wanted to pay their bills online, maybe Citi would actually correct their website. But as you can see from the thread I linked, Citi has already said, "sorry, we don't support Linux or Firefox."

Not true. I got the impression it was more of pragmatic decision: FF is the application that is making the big impact on the web. With its ~15% and growing market share, it is causing web designers to write standards-compliant sites. This in turn makes life easier for Opera, Safari/KHTML, and any other standards-compliant browser without the market share to get designers to care if their sites are compatible with it. The success of Firefox allows Mozilla to effectively push for new web standards and so enable the next generation of web applications (like the new <video> tag). Remember that MS only restarted work on IE because it started losing market share, largely to FF. It only makes sense for an organization to focus its resources on where they make the most difference.

FF has generated lots of excitement from users and developers, resulting in lots of extensions and web apps being written for it; the same hasn't happened with Thunderbird (TB). It could be that TB, as it exists now, isn't the right solution for managing email. The new TB org is talking about creating a unified framework for all communication, managing IM with email with social networking sites together. That might be a better approach.

Also, the work on TB was largely orthogonal to work on FF, upon which the Mozilla Corp. had come to focus on, so it made sense spin it off into a separate organization; this gives TB more independence and control over itself. I don't know why this wasn't mentioned more, but Mozilla gave the new TB organization $3 million in seed money--more than the Mozilla Foundation itself started out with--and says it may give more later if the organization can't find alternative revenue sources.

See this FAQ for more info on the split. For more information on what is actually going on in the new mail organization, read this blog post. Basically, they are now trying to hire developers and figure out the best plan to move ahead.

A while ago, people also got angry at Mozilla for no longer supporting the App Suite. Well, Suite supporters continued work on it through their own community project called SeaMonkey (with the Mozilla Corp. still hosting the project). They've since completed significant code rewrites that many thought would be impossible, and are getting ready for an ambitious v2.0 release. The Suite is being better taken care of than before, and that's without any funding.

Google had no say in the matter. See this blog post for a debunking of a CNET article similar to the one mentioned by the poster. If Google were to stop supporting FF, I imagine Mozilla could just as easily make a similar deal with another search engine. Even if Mozilla lost all revenue sources, its reserves of $70 million (at the end of 2006) means it could operate as is for a while; that gives it independence. With the millions likely to keep coming in for some time to come, I wonder if they might set up some kind of endowment.

Revenues: $66,840,850
Expenses: $19,776,193

"Profit" (or, change in net assets, since it's a non-profit): $27,893,735

According to Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO), salaries accounted for 70% of their expenses in 2006, so that's around $14 million. Net assets increased "only" by around $22 million (lower than the $28 million you calculated, perhaps because the Mozilla Corporation has to pay taxes).

Damn, it's good to be free. You'd think that the foundation would donate its money to fund other OSS projects, but as software people have discovered, the first priority of a foundation is to ensure the existence (and a lucrative existence at that) of its staff.

According to the numbers above, Mozilla employees could raise their salaries to 250% of what they now receive and still break even, but they chose not to. They could have made way more money by selling shares in the Mozilla Corp., instead of having it be fully owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, but they didn't.

See this summary of Mozilla grants for 2006. Near the end:

It's too early to tell how much we'll spend in total, but I suspect we'll easily double the amount spent in 2006. As we move into 2008 we'll also be funding projects in more areas.

I get the impression they've gone slow at first to "test the waters" and find the best way to spend their money. They're even looking for help in giving away more:

The other constant is the importance of having people who can help us put together a funding program in particular areas, as Aaron Leventhal has done for Mozilla accessibility. To repeat what I wrote last year:

We're looking for more people like Aaron to whom we can successfully delegate responsibility for suggesting and overseeing grants in their area(s) of expertise. If you're one of those people I'm interested in hearing from you.

They've been funding lots of accessibility work, whereas many for-profits ignore disabled users entirely. They've sponsored conferences on using the internet for the public good. They also sponsor projects that are not part of FF and its revenue stream: work on Linux desktop accessibility, Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation, buying commercial javascript code and releasing it as open source, Apache and OpenSSL, and just now Perl 6.

Mozilla is working right alongside Opera, Apple, and others to advance web standards in the WHATWG and W3C. Mozilla funds work on web standards (test cases, conformance checkers, etc.), works hard to implement these standards, and even tries to bring useful features of their own platform (such as XBL and the XUL box model) into web standards so the whole web can benefit--even if it means diminishing any comparative advantage of FF over other browsers. Mozilla is working to keep the web platform viable and open in light of competition from Silverlight, Apollo, and others.

Having followed Mozilla very closely for the past several years, I can tell you that these people are not in it for the money; they are religiously devoted to the idea of advancing the Open Web for the pub

Revenues: $66,840,850
Expenses: $19,776,193

"Profit" (or, change in net assets, since it's a non-profit): $27,893,735

According to Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO), salaries accounted for 70% of their expenses in 2006, so that's around $14 million. Net assets increased "only" by around $22 million (lower than the $28 million you calculated, perhaps because the Mozilla Corporation has to pay taxes).

Damn, it's good to be free. You'd think that the foundation would donate its money to fund other OSS projects, but as software people have discovered, the first priority of a foundation is to ensure the existence (and a lucrative existence at that) of its staff.

According to the numbers above, Mozilla employees could raise their salaries to 250% of what they now receive and still break even, but they chose not to. They could have made way more money by selling shares in the Mozilla Corp., instead of having it be fully owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, but they didn't.

See this summary of Mozilla grants for 2006. Near the end:

It's too early to tell how much we'll spend in total, but I suspect we'll easily double the amount spent in 2006. As we move into 2008 we'll also be funding projects in more areas.

I get the impression they've gone slow at first to "test the waters" and find the best way to spend their money. They're even looking for help in giving away more:

The other constant is the importance of having people who can help us put together a funding program in particular areas, as Aaron Leventhal has done for Mozilla accessibility. To repeat what I wrote last year:

We're looking for more people like Aaron to whom we can successfully delegate responsibility for suggesting and overseeing grants in their area(s) of expertise. If you're one of those people I'm interested in hearing from you.

They've been funding lots of accessibility work, whereas many for-profits ignore disabled users entirely. They've sponsored conferences on using the internet for the public good. They also sponsor projects that are not part of FF and its revenue stream: work on Linux desktop accessibility, Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation, buying commercial javascript code and releasing it as open source, Apache and OpenSSL, and just now Perl 6.

Mozilla is working right alongside Opera, Apple, and others to advance web standards in the WHATWG and W3C. Mozilla funds work on web standards (test cases, conformance checkers, etc.), works hard to implement these standards, and even tries to bring useful features of their own platform (such as XBL and the XUL box model) into web standards so the whole web can benefit--even if it means diminishing any comparative advantage of FF over other browsers. Mozilla is working to keep the web platform viable and open in light of competition from Silverlight, Apollo, and others.

Having followed Mozilla very closely for the past several years, I can tell you that these people are not in it for the money; they are religiously devoted to the idea of advancing the Open Web for the pub

Actually, many Firefox devs now use Macs as their primary desktops.

That's the problem. FF2 is based on Gecko 1.8.1, which is now over 2 years old. FF3 (the first beta should be out in a few weeks) will be based on Gecko 1.9, which will have a mind-bogglingly large number of refactorings and core fixes (literally, several thousand bug fixes/enhancements and several millions of lines of code changed). The Mac graphics code now uses Cocoa widgets on top of Quartz (through Cairo) as opposed to Carbon widgets on top of Quickdraw; there's a new Mac theme, and HTML forms are now rendered as native widgets. The result is that FF3 now looks and feels like a native Mac app. Oh, and Linux support will see many improvements in FF3; see this blog post for details, and this one for information on what needs to happen next.

As for memory use, Gecko 1.9 has seen a lot of memory-related work, including a cycle collector for XPCOM (their COM system). Memory leaks seem to be way down. One dev thinks some memory problems might not be due to leaks but rather memory fragmentation. Planned for the big Mozilla 2 rewrite (to be in FF4 or later) is the whole new Tamarin VM (based on that big contribution from Adobe), which will perform garbage collection on the entire codebase.

For now, though: Often memory leaks are caused not by FF itself but by extensions; try running through a typical browsing session in Safe Mode and see how the memory usage compares.

>But, in the end, the proof is in the pudding. There are about 130 to 140 million Firefox users today, coming up on our third major release.

Oh. Wait, just earlier someone linked to a post of yours from 3 weeks ago...

"Mozilla has used search-related revenue to grow from about 10 full-time employees and a few million users back in 2004 to more than 100 employees supporting over 120 million Firefox users today..."

Posted by asa on October 25, 2007 10:41 AM
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/10/firefox_finance.html

Quite impressive growth indeed, 3 weeks and tens of millions of users. Or how about finally agreeing to stop using bullshit download numbers as your installed user base? Might make your calculations a little easier too. I could see how forgetting wget on a loop might add a good number of new "users" overnight.

Yep, that's pretty much what the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article on Firefox CPU usage says. If anyone can demonstrate a CPU use bug in Firefox, please do. Make sure you give steps we can follow so we can reproduce the problem. If we cannot, there is little hope of troubleshooting and fixing the problem.

I got up to 272 MB after opening up 20 pages in 20 tabs, and after closing all tabs but one memory usage went back down to 131 MB. I opened up 30 different pages in 30 tabs and memory use went up to 205 MB, and after closing all tabs but one memory use went back down to 136 MB. It seems like memory use is going down after closing tabs to me. You may want to discuss the matter further in the Firefox Bugs forum on MozillaZine to see if anyone else can see the problem. Like I said, I have not been able to reproduce any memory problem described to me in over a year. I should note that I'm using the latest nightly build of Firefox 3 on Windows.

Close firefox and re-open (with the same session), and FireFox will drop to between 100-200MB.

I think people should read this article, by Asa Dotzler, a coordinator for several Mozilla projects.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/10/firefox_finance.html

Asa Dotzler, the Director of Community Development at Mozilla also blogged about his thoughts on Mozilla's revenue model:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/10/firefox_finance.html

Worth a read.

The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently.

First, the Firefox CPU bug you've been complaining about (Firefox consumers lots of CPU after the computer wakes up from standby or hibernate) was fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.8. If you're still having any problems with the latest release of Firefox, let developers know by filing a proper bug report, including steps to reproduce the problem.

Second, there is no sign of any "memory gobbling bug" that I can see, just a few little leaks here and there and some memory fragmentation. If you're still having any problems with the latest release of Firefox, let developers know by filing a proper bug report, including steps to reproduce the problem.

Mitchell (Mozilla's "chief lizard wrangler") wrote a fairly large blog post, not only about the numbers as published, but also saying some things on the directions Mozilla is moving.

Far more interesting reading than the fluff news.com article, let alone the random FUD spouting by the submitter.

Search engines.
For placement of their search engines.
Read more here.

Python would be totally doable

I disagree, my pet language would be a much better match! I'm only half serious here because I think lua or ruby would actually be more suited to web scripting than python. Javascript for all its faults can allow some incredible code and it'll run almost everywhere. The main issues I see are that very few people know the language well and that it's woefully inconsistent between browser implementations (I'm including DOM incompatibility here too).

I'm doing a lot of JavaScript right now, and I really miss the days of threads, mutexes, and condition variables. You can still do all that stuff, but it such a horrid mess.

Timers with simple lock and yield vars? It's not particularly elegant but then again neither are threads. Brendan Eich is well aware of the need for concurrency, hopefully we'll end up with a clean solution.

if this isn't a marvelously grand conspiracy to rag on firefox and the Mozilla foundation, and these problems actually exist, is telling someone they are the only ones with the problems or moding the comment down so that no one else can see it really a fix?

if this isn't a marvelously grand conspiracy to rag on firefox and the Mozilla foundation, and these problems actually exist, is telling someone they are the only ones with the problems or moding the comment down so that no one else can see it really a fix?

if this isn't a marvelously grand conspiracy to rag on firefox and the Mozilla foundation, and these problems actually exist, is telling someone they are the only ones with the problems or moding the comment down so that no one else can see it really a fix?

if this isn't a marvelously grand conspiracy to rag on firefox and the Mozilla foundation, and these problems actually exist, is telling someone they are the only ones with the problems or moding the comment down so that no one else can see it really a fix?

I think they just added this in a nightly build or something actually. See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=29

Yeah! Mozilla should stop ignoring Thunderbird. They should create a company whose sole focus is on email and other messaging technology. They should fund the new company with several million dollars so they can get off the ground. Yeah, that's what they should do... then Thunderbird will get the attention it deserves. Oh wait, that's what they're doing already. Nevermind.

Actually, removing IE from Windows is a hell of a challenge and breaks stuff. Hell, even Mozilla says not to do it. Removing Safari, on the other hand, can be done by simply dragging the icon to the trash. I was unsure about this when I posted earlier, but confirmed with a friend who had removed Safari from his first OS X install that there were no ill effects.

Yes, webkit still remains, but it can also be removed if one so desires, as long as one is aware of how many OS X applications use it just because it's there. The same applies to IE on Windows of course, but on Windows many parts of the system actually depend on IE so removing it can break a base install, where on OS X you may break third party applications that depend on Webkit but you won't break the main system.

Actually, there is a preference.

This issue always comes up, and it seems the vast majority of the people in this thread are bashing Firefox/Mozilla, but they are ignoring three very crucial points.

1 - The code already has been tested with garbage collectors, Valgrind and the like. Most memory leaks hopefully have already been caught, but they are recommitting themselves to this task.
2 - Mozilla is not responsible for the poor javascript and such prevalent in various extensions written by third parties.
3 - This is the most important part, the massive memory and CPU usage is a feature, not a bug, and can quickly be disabled. Firefox 2 and 3 cache fully rendered versions of pages, so that it is "quicker" when you hit the back button. It doesn't have to rerender the page. Personally, I don't care for this feature, and so I tell Firefox to use less memory.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak

Google is a powerful tool. Slashdot readers should familiarize themselves with it before crucifying Mozilla.

1. Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build. [The same memory and CPU hogging bug has been reported many, many times over a period of five years.]
2. Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important. [The bug eventually takes 100% of CPU power, and makes Windows XP unusable, even after Firefox is killed. The bug affects the heaviest users of Firefox.]
3. Yes, this bug exists, but it is not a common occurrence. [Numerous users have reported the bug. See the links.]
4. Works for me. [The bug is complicated to reproduce, so the developers did a simplified test, which didn't show the bug.]
5. No one has posted a TalkBack report. [If they had read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too, or a TalkBack report is not generated. TalkBack does not generate a report if Firefox is hogging the CPU. TalkBack cannot generate a report if the bug takes 100% of the CPU time.]
6. If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug. [They didn't bother to reproduce the bug using the detailed information provided.]
7. This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. [The other bugs aren't specified.]
8. You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. [But the same use does not crash any version of Opera.]
9. I don't like the way you worded your bug report. [So, he didn't read it or think about it.]
10. You should run a debugger and find what causes this problem yourself. [Then when you have done most of the work, tell us what causes the problem, and we may fix it.]
11. Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.
12. If you are saying bad things about Mozilla and Firefox, you must be trolling. [They say this even though Firefox and Mozilla instability is beginning to be reported in media such as Information Week. See the links to magazine articles in this Slashdot comment: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.]
13. Your problem is probably caused by using extensions. [These are extensions advertised on the Firefox and Mozilla web site, and recommended.]
14. Your problem is probably caused by a corrupt profile. [The same bug has been reported many times over a period of five years. One of the reports discusses an extensive test in both Linux and Windows that used a completely clean installation of the operating systems, not just a clean profile. The CPU hogging bug and instability was just as severe.]
15. If you are technically knowledgeable, you can spend several hours (or days) trying to discover the problem: Standard diagnostic - Firefox [mozillazine.org]. [Firefox has "Standard Diagnostics". It has become accepted that some users will have severe problems. !!! ]
16. I won't actually read the (many) bug reports, but I will give you some complicated technical speculation. [This pretends to be helpful but, on investigation, is shown to have nothing to do with the bugs.
17. It's understandable that Firefox developers become defensive when users report so many problems.
18. To spend smart developers' time going over reports of bugs generated by analysis tools would be a waste. [There have been 3 analysis tools recently used to find Firefox bugs, and many have been found: 1) A special tool designed by a Firefox developer. 2) Software by Coverity. 3) Klocwork's K7.]
19. Your bug report was not specifi

What is actually happening - the way I see it - is that Mozilla (corporation/foundation) is finally abandoning its mail&news client formally. In practice this has been true for years - the number of mail&news developers is currently 2, compared to about... 150 IIRC people working on the browser (although this includes people working on joint core code, such as XPCOM, NSPR, necko, XUL, etc).

In recent years Mozilla is being bankrolled by Google: The choice of Google as the default search engine in Firefox means added revenue of > $5 Billion a year. Google has been paying back with some drops from that bucket - a few tens of Millions a year, see e.g. here (NY Times).

It seems to me (as an outsider and an occasional Thunderbird/Seamonkey extension developer) that effectively means that Google's interests have become, and will be from now paramount in Mozilla's policy. Now, if you're Google, you would be more interested in developing and expanding the use of a browser rather than a fast, modern, full-featured and easily extensible mail and newsgroups client (which I feel Thunderbird is _not_yet_, unfortunately) - this would mean people will tend not to use your webmail system and your web interface for newsgroups. This is bad for you, since you'll be seeing less ad revenue, you'll be able to collect a lot less useful marketing information about users, and your efforts to centralize users' Internet experience around services-servers-content which you control or are involved in will be impeded. So, obviously, you will want the money you donate to Mozilla - which should have 'rightfully' been divided differently (say, at least 25% for e-mail and news work - and that's being modest and not making 'affirmative action' demands).

Now you just need to spin this somehow, e.g. like this.

is not intended to compete with Thunderbird, but instead to complement it

Translation: I come not to bury Thunderbird, but to praise it. That certainly explains this.

That's useless. The maximum is 8.

> Hate to play the devil's advocate here, but the list for
> AdBlock blocks ALL ads, not just "ads that jitter about by
> a couple of pixels, or flash bright contrasting colors".

In that case...

1) From the Firefox menu
  Tools => Options => Block pop-up windows
This stops pop-ups and pop-unders, except at sites in the "Exceptions" list.

2) Use the Firefox Flashblock extension to block schlockwave-trash, except at sites you whitelist. You can also click the "f" button that Flashblock puts up on the blocked Flash stuff, to manually run Flash at sites which aren't on your Flashblock whitelist

3) Follow the instructions at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Animated_images on how to disable animated images

4) ???

5) Lack of profit ... for websites with annoying ads

Goto about:config and

set network.protocol-handler.expose-all to false,
network.protocol-handler.expose.http to true,
network.protocol-handler.expose.javascript to true,
network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto to true and
remove all other network.protocol-handler.expose.*entries (or set them to false).

Set network.protocol-handler.external-default to false,
network.protocol-handler.external.mailto to true and
remove all other network.protocol-handler.external.* entries (of set them to false).

To be sure set network.protocol-handler.warn-external.file to true and
remove all network.protocol-handler.warn-external.* entries (or set them to true).

For more info start at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.protocol-handler .expose-all
Beware, on windows things are different. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol

Goto about:config and

set network.protocol-handler.expose-all to false,
network.protocol-handler.expose.http to true,
network.protocol-handler.expose.javascript to true,
network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto to true and
remove all other network.protocol-handler.expose.*entries (or set them to false).

Set network.protocol-handler.external-default to false,
network.protocol-handler.external.mailto to true and
remove all other network.protocol-handler.external.* entries (of set them to false).

To be sure set network.protocol-handler.warn-external.file to true and
remove all network.protocol-handler.warn-external.* entries (or set them to true).

For more info start at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.protocol-handler .expose-all
Beware, on windows things are different. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol

Firefox CPU usage
Firefox hangs

Firefox CPU usage
Firefox hangs

Your experiences are far from typical. For most users, Firefox runs very well, consuming about as much memory and CPU as other browsers or even less.

If you want the problems you're experiencing to be fixed, describe them in enough detail that someone can write up a proper bug report. Or you can follow the suggestions in these Knowledge Base articles: Firefox CPU usage, Reducing memory usage.

Your experiences are far from typical. For most users, Firefox runs very well, consuming about as much memory and CPU as other browsers or even less.

If you want the problems you're experiencing to be fixed, describe them in enough detail that someone can write up a proper bug report. Or you can follow the suggestions in these Knowledge Base articles: Firefox CPU usage, Reducing memory usage.

Gervase Markham from the Mozilla Foundation suggests using excess heat to power data center jacuzzis.

The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently.

You mean the one where If you open a lot of windows and tabs in Firefox on a laptop, and put the laptop in and out of standby, you will eventually notice that the laptop fan is running all the time, even when there is no activity. That's the CPU bug, and it can potentially shorten the life of your laptop? It looks like it's fixed. As for a "memory gobbling bug", you'll have to describe in much more detail what you mean. Firefox seems to use less memory than other browsers, and in addition, about 100 memory leak bugs have been fixed in the past year.

If you see a quirk in Firefox, simply write up a bug report specifying in enough detail what the problem is, and it will be fixed. Whining about them on Slashdot is about the least effective thing you can do.

Eudora's home page http://www.eudora.com/ says that the paid mode Eudora is no longer available, and that an open source version of Eudora is being developed by Mozilla. An article at http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=2 0078 says that the new Eudora will be based on the Thunderbird engine. This is apparently the Penelope project http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope , which claims not to be trying to supplant Thunderbird, but may be about to do so. Would an insider please clarify all this?

This is a very late post, but changing this setting will help:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signon.prefillForms

IN firefox, enter
about:config
type prefill to seach on this term, and double click the entry above to go to false.

You will then have to double click on a field before password manager provides any input to the page.

Yet another ignorant Firefox memory post. First off, you've got some basic facts wrong. Firefox never stores "rendered pages as images". That's a conflagration of two different caches. Second, you seem unwilling to recognize that the caches actually do make Firefox measurably faster.

One cache is the memory cache, which stores images uncompressed (decoded) for fast access. It stores just images, not "rendered pages as images." You can change the amount of memory used for this cache by setting browser.cache.memory.capacity. Recently a bug in nightly builds of Firefox 3 was fixed that caused only half of the memory cache to be used to store images, and fixing that bug resulted in a 4-6% performance gain. Turning off the memory cache entirely would cause performance to suffer much more. You would probably notice the slowdown, but probably not notice that Firefox uses about 20 MB less, unless you were on the verge of running out of memory.

The other cache is the back-forward cache, which stores the DOM information of recently visited pages so they don't need to be reparsed when visiting them again. You change the amount of memory used for this cache by changing browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers. Again, turning this cache off will result in noticeable delays when going back and forwards up to a few pages, but probably not a noticeable difference in the memory usage.

Even with both caches at their default settings, Firefox generally uses less memory than other browsers. There's really no need to mess around with the settings unless your computer has very little RAM to begin with. In that case, you should read http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(F irefox)

Yet another ignorant Firefox memory post. First off, you've got some basic facts wrong. Firefox never stores "rendered pages as images". That's a conflagration of two different caches. Second, you seem unwilling to recognize that the caches actually do make Firefox measurably faster.

One cache is the memory cache, which stores images uncompressed (decoded) for fast access. It stores just images, not "rendered pages as images." You can change the amount of memory used for this cache by setting browser.cache.memory.capacity. Recently a bug in nightly builds of Firefox 3 was fixed that caused only half of the memory cache to be used to store images, and fixing that bug resulted in a 4-6% performance gain. Turning off the memory cache entirely would cause performance to suffer much more. You would probably notice the slowdown, but probably not notice that Firefox uses about 20 MB less, unless you were on the verge of running out of memory.

The other cache is the back-forward cache, which stores the DOM information of recently visited pages so they don't need to be reparsed when visiting them again. You change the amount of memory used for this cache by changing browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers. Again, turning this cache off will result in noticeable delays when going back and forwards up to a few pages, but probably not a noticeable difference in the memory usage.

Even with both caches at their default settings, Firefox generally uses less memory than other browsers. There's really no need to mess around with the settings unless your computer has very little RAM to begin with. In that case, you should read http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(F irefox)

Yet another ignorant Firefox memory post. First off, you've got some basic facts wrong. Firefox never stores "rendered pages as images". That's a conflagration of two different caches. Second, you seem unwilling to recognize that the caches actually do make Firefox measurably faster.

One cache is the memory cache, which stores images uncompressed (decoded) for fast access. It stores just images, not "rendered pages as images." You can change the amount of memory used for this cache by setting browser.cache.memory.capacity. Recently a bug in nightly builds of Firefox 3 was fixed that caused only half of the memory cache to be used to store images, and fixing that bug resulted in a 4-6% performance gain. Turning off the memory cache entirely would cause performance to suffer much more. You would probably notice the slowdown, but probably not notice that Firefox uses about 20 MB less, unless you were on the verge of running out of memory.

The other cache is the back-forward cache, which stores the DOM information of recently visited pages so they don't need to be reparsed when visiting them again. You change the amount of memory used for this cache by changing browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers. Again, turning this cache off will result in noticeable delays when going back and forwards up to a few pages, but probably not a noticeable difference in the memory usage.

Even with both caches at their default settings, Firefox generally uses less memory than other browsers. There's really no need to mess around with the settings unless your computer has very little RAM to begin with. In that case, you should read http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(F irefox)

Yeah, there's not a whole lot you can do to reduce the memory usage of a browser, when you asking it to display lots of complex pages at the same time. There are some things you can do, such as not use extensions that have serious memory leaks, and use a minimal set of plugins: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(F irefox)

Parent is exactly right. This is old news, but Firefox still ships with the insecure default setting.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Signon.prefillForms
To change it to "false", type "about:config" in the address bar, hit enter, and put "prefill" or whatever in the filter to search to it:
signon.prefillForms

This isn't where we are now, it's where we're all going; see the MS, Adobe, lazlo and JavaFx frameworks for the proof.

Here's a clue

This is not where we're going. With multi-core processors on the table.

I've read the article in your "clue". For me, this clue just shows the Firefox team is clueless, and that's why I've given up any hope on it.

Lazlo is just a failed open-source version of Flex-like framework. They open-sourced it since they couldn't sell it.

Microsoft .NET and JavaFX are full-blown languages with great idea of what a thread is, and they are multi-core ready from the onset.

Adobe's AIR is just a way to publish your web work as a desktop gadget. They recognize the lack of threads as a serious problem and actually just a month ago Adobe released a new version of Flash Player 9 that has split the engine into multiple threads that takes advantage of multi-core CPU-s. Don't be surprized if the next Flash Player adds multi-thread support in the user space as well (i.e. ablity to spawn threads in ActionScript).

So this is where we are ACTUALLY going. Firefox will see their mistakes one day, but it'll be too late.

This isn't where we are now, it's where we're all going; see the MS, Adobe, lazlo and JavaFx frameworks for the proof.

Here's a clue

Another obstacle for corporate Firefox use is the lack of a good deployment method using MSI and Global Policies.
 
Unfortunately, it might not even make Firefox 3 because of a lack of developers. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=5434 05