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what I hate is websites that force PDF files to be downloads instead of letting my browser handle them.

The problem is that the web site incorrectly specifies the file mime type as e.g. "Content-Type=text/html" instead of "Content-Type=application/pdf". While in theory the ".pdf" extension or content inspection could be used to guess it, Firefox (for example) does not use mime type guessing since it is a security issue: What should Firefox do with this file?.

At Mozilla, all I see is mismanagement. They can't control their code. They can't control their staff. And they are continually lagging behind all competition, which is especially sad given their rock star performance not too long ago, with social buzz propelling a large install base.

You say that like it's something new, but it has been ever thus. Firefox, for instance, wasn't created because of any genius master plan. It was created because a couple of programmers got sick of riding on the failboat that was the Mozilla Suite and built Firefox on their own initiative as a fast, lean alternative. (One of them, Ben Goodger, tells the story here.)

That skunk-works project proved wildly successful, of course, and Mozilla, newly spun out from Netscape, was smart enough to jump on it and adopt it as their own. But they've never really been able to drive Firefox to the next level, ceding technical leadership to Google and Chrome. Moreover, all of the developers who originally created Firefox have left for greener pastures. (One of them, Dave Hyatt, went to Apple to create Safari, which quite conspicuously rejected Mozilla's Gecko engine in favor of the then-practically-unused KHTML engine, which Hyatt and Apple would evolve into the now-wildly-popular WebKit.) Not to mention that they don't really have any other hits besides Firefox -- Thunderbird has been stagnant for ages, and Firefox Mobile is way behind WebKit in the mobile space.

In other words, the one hit they have is a hit they lucked into, and their stewardship of even that has been a bit rudderless. So it shouldn't be a surprise to see them steering erratically now.

Some Mozilla people know more about what the web needs than anybody else. Their role is to eliminate anything they consider to be inferior to whatever they like at Mozilla, including technology that has gone through the whole W3C standards process and been implemented by other browsers.

Meanwhile, times change.

FF 5 beta buildID 20110608151458

Overview
                        Memory mapped:153,092,096
                        Memory in use:147,875,008

The largest I can see that I think I could control are:

storage/sqlite/pagecache 47,601,304
storage/places.sqlite/Cache_Used 45,047,832

FF 2 and 3 had an easy way to change the retention period but I guess they removed it for 4 and 5? http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries doesn't say if the history preferences are applicable to 4 and 5 anymore. I'm also using the portable version of beta 5 so the cache in Advanced > Network : Offline Storage, Limit cache to X MB of space is 0.

Anyone know what to change that affect those two storage properties? I prefer maybe 30 days' worth of history.

Please mention something on this thread:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=2219927

Thanks.

You guys are so dumb. I got this thing all figured out.
Oh, yeah, Malvin? How would you do it?
The first game in the list. Go right through Falken's Maze.

For web browsing, the first game in the list is ... Firefox.

Setup Firefox so that cookies for all top-level-domains (.net, .com, .org, .aero, etc.) are blocked. Then allow cookies selectively from the websites where you really need them (slashdot.org, linuxquestions.org, etc.). Make cookies for sites like "google.com" session cookies. Each time you start your web browser, you will get a new id from google.

All of this can easily be setup in Firefox.

Some people complained that other websites will show their facebook picture / profile info. Well - log out from facebook first before you go to any other websites. I always log out from gmail first, before I do any searches on google.

NoScript does not help with cookies afaik.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Cookies
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Hostperm.1#Domain_2

You guys are so dumb. I got this thing all figured out.
Oh, yeah, Malvin? How would you do it?
The first game in the list. Go right through Falken's Maze.

For web browsing, the first game in the list is ... Firefox.

Setup Firefox so that cookies for all top-level-domains (.net, .com, .org, .aero, etc.) are blocked. Then allow cookies selectively from the websites where you really need them (slashdot.org, linuxquestions.org, etc.). Make cookies for sites like "google.com" session cookies. Each time you start your web browser, you will get a new id from google.

All of this can easily be setup in Firefox.

Some people complained that other websites will show their facebook picture / profile info. Well - log out from facebook first before you go to any other websites. I always log out from gmail first, before I do any searches on google.

NoScript does not help with cookies afaik.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Cookies
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Hostperm.1#Domain_2

So please, I love firefox, I love it's open-ness, the add-ons, the customize-ability, and even many of the new(er) features (the awesomebar is, in fact, awesome), but I hate the memory waste! Even adding a hidden config option to enable 'reclaim memory on tab-close' would be much appreciated!

There is such an option: browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers :) Set it to 0, and pages are not cached anymore. See here for more details.

Many people run linux on older, low-end hardware especially because of it's reputation as a low-resource, light-weight operating system. Firefox seems to be building on expectations that are vague or simply not true.

We ship with a default behavior that we think and hope is good for most users. We do user surveys and so forth, to check if we are right, and I think we usually do pretty well (but nobody is perfect, obviously!). I definitely agree that users on low-end hardware have different needs for caching and so forth, and that's why Firefox lets you customize the caching behavior, as I mentioned earlier with that pref. You can also change how much memory is used for the disk and memory caches (search for browser.cache.disk and browser.cache.memory in about:config, to see the relevant options).

It sounds like you're asking for an option like "Firefox, please pretend my computer only has 512MB of RAM" that affects all types of caches in Firefox. Or a slider that's like "Make Firefox as fast as possible [------|--] Leave as much RAM for other apps as possible". I don't think such a thing exists.

You can install RAMBack for a "clear all in-memory caches" button. In combination with about:memory, it can help you tell the difference between healthy caching behavior and memory leak bugs. Unfortunately, it skips sqlite-based caches, which are some of the largest.

You can disable Firefox's "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries" to save maybe 15MB of RAM. On the other hand, it's nice to have that extra defense against zero-day attacks.

You can disable Firefox's URL history to save maybe 35MB of RAM, but then you'll lose purple links and the awesomebar (unless you use bookmarks extensively). There used to be a way to tell Firefox to only keep a few weeks of URL history, but I can't find it now.

You can lower browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers from "8 if there's enough RAM" to 1 or 2. This controls how many navigated-away pages Firefox will keep in memory with their complete state (rather than just scroll position and form data). I'd advise against lowering it all the way to 0, because if you accidentally click a link or close a tab, restoring the page from bfcache is not only faster but also significantly less likely to lose page state (especially on AJAXy pages).

If you use session restore, you can instruct Firefox to only load restored tabs once you switch to them, by setting browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0.

Thanks for the valuable feedback to the OP. Comments like this keep me coming back to Slashdot.

Out of curiosity, is there an option to turn on aggressive releasing of pages? It seems to me to be a good idea, but without being familiar (even remotely) with the source code and design perhaps there are reasons against this (if there is indeed no option to turn it on/off).

Cheers

You can simply tell Firefox to not cache anything by setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0 in about:config. Then once you browse away from a page, it's memory will all be released. More details here

The problem with this is that pressing 'back' will mean a complete reload of the page you just left. At least in my experience, caching pages is almost always worth it (unless you have machine with very limited RAM).

There's no way of knowing how much memory each extension is using. Extension code is thrown into a big JavaScript/XUL soup with shared data structures. With the new Jetpack API it may be possible to determine how much memory and CPU each extension is using. Even if some users do need to find which extension is causing memory usage problems, there is a list of the extensions that cause the most problems.

Most ram is being abused by flash, images (specially animated images) and javascript... so:

Install noscript in firefox to disable java script in all sites except those you want/really need

Install flashblock to block flash on sites that you want to allow java script, but sill wants to control what flash can be loaded

disable animated images (or play once), like they say here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Animated_images

Install ImgLikeOpera, to control when and what images can be loaded

Of course, dont open too many tabs!!

you can also install dillo, its small and fast, no animated images, no javascript, no plugins, limited CSS... but it works well for most sites and for those that need to READ webpages and not play online, its far more usable and useful than most bigger browsers

The RAM usage in FireFox isn't a bug, and there are things you can do to make it use less RAM:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak

http://gs.statcounter.com/#os-na-monthly-201002-201102

Was that link supposed to have web stats for Linux usage? I didn't see any. Googling though I did find this: OS Platform Statistics. It shows web stats for Linux being above 5%. The stats have Linux breaking 5% in November 2010. Going further and comparing Linux stats with Windows stats, it has all versions of MS Windows having 86.5% of the OS market in December. In February it was 85.9%. In the same tyme period both Linux and Mac OSX gained share.

Again going further, there's OS and browser spoofing. Using Firefox I don't know how many webpages I've landed on that says "Best viewed with X" where X is a version of IE. Spoof IE on those pages and some render fine while others don't.

Falcon

For Javascript performance you can see the SS/V8/Kraken results from this comparison but note that IE9 cheats on Sunspider with faulty dead code removal that is removing code that needs to be executed and ignore Peacekeeper because it's flawed in many ways and also tests more than Javascript...

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/ie9-vs-chrome-10-vs-firefox-4-rc-vs-opera-1101-vs-safari-5-the-big-browser-benchmark/11890

For info about why FF4 RC is slower than IE9 in some hardware acceleration tests which they will be fixing soon (probably after FF4 release) see this:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2011/03/investigating_p.html

So when you say 10x faster its not really is it. Anyway I guess you have seen this post as to why IE9 looks so fast on those tests.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2011/03/investigating_p.html [mozillazine.org]

the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).

So when you say 10x faster its not really is it. Anyway I guess you have seen this post as to why IE9 looks so fast on those tests.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2011/03/investigating_p.html

the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).

So when you say 10x faster its not really is it. Anyway I guess you have seen this post as to why IE9 looks so fast on those tests.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2011/03/investigating_p.html

the summary is that the performance differences are explained by relatively small bugs in Firefox, bugs in IE9, and bugs in the benchmarks, not due to any major architectural issues in Firefox (as Microsoft would have you believe).

If I recall correctly, the MS H.264 extension also caused extreme memory bloat/leakage.

Also, a lot of the rewriting you're talking about as needing to happen has in fact been going on, in the open for anyone who's interested to see. Heck, mobile Firefox already does use process isolation and it's coming to the desktop version next. The project is called electrolysis. Honestly, a lot of what you're saying sounds like the usual uninformed trolling about how old Gecko is and how badly it needs to be overhauled as if that work isn't being done. It's a foolish assumption because all Gecko development happens in the open and anyone with the desire to can see and confirm that in fact large portions of the code have been rewritten during the Gecko 2.0 development window (what do you think they've been spending the last 18 months doing?) and are continuing to be already for post-2.0 Gecko.

In case you're interested, here's a list of the major work done on Gecko during the 2.0 development timeframe.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=1961093

Does changing layout.css.dpi make any difference?

There are H.264 patents in France. They're just method patents, not software patents.

See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020400.html for a direct link to the patent list for H.264 and a summary of some of the countries those patents were granted in.

If you want to kill the javascript crud you can install NoScript or follow directions at Allowing only certain sites to use JavaScript

It has everything to do with Firebug. Firebug is an excellent tool, but does cause high CPU and memory usage. Firebug does quite a bit behind the scenes and of course this takes memory and CPU. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

> you're not supposed to skip bits of them just because you
> don't think they're important.

Which just goes to show that Firefox's behaviour is *better* than certain competitive browser.

You see, the Firefox guys think the feature is not worth the trouble of implementation. So they leave it out completely.

Yet, certain other browsers think the feature is not worth the trouble of implementation, so they implement *just enough* of it to pass the ACID3 test, but not enough to actually make it usable.

Which is worse? If you're going to rail of Firefox for saying "Hey! We're not doing this!", you should be absolutely livid with vendors that do a half-assed job just to pass a freaking benchmark!

As for why Moz thinks SVG fonts aren't worth the effort? This guy has it covered: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=9868007#p9868007

> Yes, distribute it by source or distribute it outside the US.

It's not quite that simple. You have to be not just outside the US, but outside most of Europe, a good bit of East Asia, outside North America period, and outside Australia. See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020400.html

It could probably be done, but it would take some work.

FF4 beta still doesn't do 100% on the Acid3 test, btw. Chrome and Safari nail it.

Nor it will, because Acid3 is an arbitrary goal, and the part that Firefox doesn't implement (SVG fonts) are largely irrelevant if you have WOFF support.

Ten cents a browser sounds really cheap, until you do the math and count the number of downloads each browser has. For example, Firefox 3.6 has had nearly 400 million downloads since January 2010 ( http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/stats/ ). That's nearly $40 million a year to include a third party's software to support a single feature in a product they're giving away for free. I'd rather see that money go into stabilization of the codebase, new features, etc.

I'd actually prefer they went the platform codec route. Setup is a little more complicated, but there's no licensing fee for personal use of MPEG-LA formats ( http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=1977899 ), and if I need a license for non-free media I should just get one for my computer rather than depending on each and every one of my web browser companies to provide one to me.

Yes, on a micro scale it seems silly to "cheap out" by not dropping a dime on each of your users to give them a standard video experience. But when there's a free one available, why not push that? WebM is completely free for anyone to implement and use as they see fit.

PS: Your analogy doesn't quite hold. Try "I'm to cheap to recommend SyFy shows to friends, because for each show a friend decides to watch, I have to pay SyFy a ten cent referral fee."

Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan writes about why Firefox doesn't use (DirectShow) system codecs. It is also worth noting that neither IE nor Safari use a codec system their vendor doesn't control.

For those using Firefox: about:config and set network.prefetch-next to false (the default is true).

Pathetic - Fuck the Mozilla Foundation. I did it for the LULZ!!!!!!!!!

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2056049

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=685895

Information

You have been banned from this board until Tomorrow, 5:38 pm.

Please contact the Board Administrator for more information.

Reason given for ban: Foul mouth on this ip.

A ban has been issued on your IP address.

Ohhhh Ho Ho Ho - Fuck OFF - Mozilla Forum Admins ARE such STUPID cunts.....

Oh haaaaaa Haaaaaaa Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa I have been baned for what? A month now without even knowing it, from a site run by stupid fucks who insist on dumping a totally SHIT product on the market - and then they bullshit their way out of fixing it.

$80 million a year in profit alone - just from Google Advertising and they sell the global community a software package that RUNS like fucking shit....

And then the fucking admins of the Mozilla site get all pissy and ban you on calling them on their SHIT BROWSER and their SHIT FOR BRAINS attitudes...

Ohhhhh hoooooooo ooooooo heeeeeeee haaaa haaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

Fuck that is just TOOOOOOOOOO funny!!!!!!

It's like the mechanic calling you an arsehole for calling him on the fact that he fucked your engine....

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Mozilla - you fucking IDIOTS rock....

LOL

Pathetic - Fuck the Mozilla Foundation.

Pathetic - Fuck the Mozilla Foundation. I did it for the LULZ!!!!!!!!!

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2056049

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=685895

Information

You have been banned from this board until Tomorrow, 5:38 pm.

Please contact the Board Administrator for more information.

Reason given for ban: Foul mouth on this ip.

A ban has been issued on your IP address.

Ohhhh Ho Ho Ho - Fuck OFF - Mozilla Forum Admins ARE such STUPID cunts.....

Oh haaaaaa Haaaaaaa Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa I have been baned for what? A month now without even knowing it, from a site run by stupid fucks who insist on dumping a totally SHIT product on the market - and then they bullshit their way out of fixing it.

$80 million a year in profit alone - just from Google Advertising and they sell the global community a software package that RUNS like fucking shit....

And then the fucking admins of the Mozilla site get all pissy and ban you on calling them on their SHIT BROWSER and their SHIT FOR BRAINS attitudes...

Ohhhhh hoooooooo ooooooo heeeeeeee haaaa haaaaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...

Fuck that is just TOOOOOOOOOO funny!!!!!!

It's like the mechanic calling you an arsehole for calling him on the fact that he fucked your engine....

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Mozilla - you fucking IDIOTS rock....

LOL

Pathetic - Fuck the Mozilla Foundation.

Only if you're an idiot and fail to look at the whole dialog. There's also FIPS Mode if you're extra paranoid.

The URL bar now drops down a list of random URLs that has absolutely no relation to anything I have recently entered manually.

It's quite easy to restore the functionality to what you want...just set browser.urlbar.default.behavior to 49 in about:config. I find that "17" works better for me, as it will also search for non-typed URLs.

To restore the URL bar to its former appearance, add the following lines to "userChrome.css" (in your Firefox profile):

/* Hide the "bookmark star" and the "Go button" on the location bar */
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #star-button,
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #go-button
{
display: none !important;
}

/* Set the location bar to show only URLs, on one line */
.autocomplete-richlistitem spacer,.autocomplete-richlistitemlabel{display:none}
.ac-title description{font-size:11px!important}
.autocomplete-richlistitem{border:none!important}
.ac-title{margin:-4px 4px 0px 0px!important;display:none}
.ac-url{margin:-19px 0px 0px 20px!important}
.ac-url description{color:MenuText!important}
.ac-url description[selected="true"]{color:White!important}

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/are_we_fast_yet.html

That benchmark is a bit old (two months ago), but you get the idea.

Funny, I initially misread the article title as "Firefox 4 Beat 8 Up", which could be true if that trend line continued for the past two months. ("8" meaning Chrome v8.) Browser deathmatch!!

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/are_we_fast_yet.html

That benchmark is a bit old (two months ago), but you get the idea.

The only reason I can figure Microsoft did this was to keep people from dropping Firefox and going to Chrome.

That's the only reason you can think of really? My first impression was different. If I recall correctly, the main problem with Mozilla and H.264 is that, while there are open source decoders, they are illegal to distribute in Usptostan.

Of course its also unnecessary, since (just like printer drivers), video codecs are provided by the underlying operating system and don't need to be - and shouldn't be - distributed as part of the web browser. Except that Firefox, almost uniquely among applications that can perform video playback, refuses to use any OS-provided codecs, no matter how stupid that is.

There is a codec distribution problem. Its also a solved problem. The fact that Firefox is having a hard time solving it again shouldn't be their user's problem (but in the real world, it is).

The only reason I can figure Microsoft did this was to keep people from dropping Firefox and going to Chrome.

That's the only reason you can think of really? My first impression was different. If I recall correctly, the main problem with Mozilla and H.264 is that, while there are open source decoders, they are illegal to distribute in Usptostan.

THAT, not the (also real) hate for flash but that; was the main reason for the push of theora and the <video> tag and HTML5.

So the main advantage I see for MS is not eliminating a reason to switch from Firefox to Chrome (both rivals for IE) but eliminating a reason to switch from Windows to *nix.

From Jesse Ruderman:

The WSJ contains some factual inaccuracies, and the headlines on Slashdot and The Register are based entirely on those inaccuracies.

The article refers to a cookie-related experiment (bug 565475) that we ended in bug 570630. (I'm pretty sure this is what it refers to, since it mentions a May 28 landing, corresponding to bug 565475 comment 12.)

We ended that particular experiment because we decided the idea in bug 565965 would be strictly better than the idea in bug 565475 (see bug 570630 comment 0).

The idea in bug 565965 failed to make it into Firefox 4 because we didn't want to break desirable cooperation across websites, such as single sign-on, and haven't come up with a good UI (see bug 565965 comment 16).

Some of us were also concerned that the effect on advertisers would not be the effect privacy advocates want. Rather than abandoning targeted advertising, advertisers might increase their use of first-party redirects or switch to heuristic fingerprinting. These outcomes would be bad for privacy (users concerned about tracking could no longer simply disable third-party cookies) and bad for web performance.

The WSJ claims that we ended the experiment immediately after a conversation with an ad executive, but based on the history in bug 565475, it's clear that we did so before that conversation. The WSJ may have been confused because of the date of bug 565475 comment 18, which was made two days after the change it describes.

For more background, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thirdparty

Here's Asa's blog post, so that you don't have to click through the "news" article, which is almost entirely a copy-and-paste of Asa's post.

Opera 11 alpha is also a slower than Opera 10.63 at other things, such as my Kraken test.

I'm sure it'll be awesome someday, but isn't even close to there yet.

So, yes, maybe they have managed to eke out a bit more speed out of Sunspider, but Sunspider is increasingly meaningless and most gains will be small.

Asa also ran Opera 11 FWIW and got slightly different figures.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2010/10/some_sunspider_numbe.html

As Asa noted:
"Sunspider was designed before any of the browsers had these truly modern JS engines with just in time compilers and because of that and all the progress each browser vendor has made over the last several years Sunspider is no longer particularly useful as a JS benchmark. This is kind of obvious when you see that all of the top scores are pretty much tied. One one hundredth of a second (across 26 tests) separates the slow from the fast and that's just not particularly meaningful. "

Nobody suggested that CODEC's would ship with Firefox.

It's what is being done now, and it's the best option, hence why we're talking about it.

You hate H.264. Dont try to convince us that this is about some grand Free and Open slant.. when clearly you are just picking and choosing what non-Free and non-Open shit to ostracize.

Sorry, but you're just wrong and can't seem to accept that we have reasons other than 'hate'.

Why should Firefox support FLASH but not a CODEC? Both are DLL's provided by the end user. Period. Thats it.

You'll never understand as long as you don't look at the bigger picture. Using DirectShow/QuickTime/GStreamer is not an option for several reasons that have been repeated time and again, so we're down to shipping the codec.

But the statement that Firefox can to use h.264 is a flat out lie. They can use it and they can use it without a paying a cent. The can just use the already installed codec system for each of the OSs.

When they say they can't use it, they mean they can't ship it with their web browser.

Firefox can implement h.264 they have chose not to to make a political statement!

Here you make the mistake again. There's a difference between "implement" and "support". Implementing H.264 would mean shipping code that decodes it. Supporting it would mean the former or using codecs installed on the system.

They have never said they can't leverage the installed codecs. They've said it's not the way to go for several reasons.

I think it sucks, and getting worse. Here's an advanced configuration option as an example:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Content.interrupt.parsing

Possible values and their effects
true
Parsing can be interrupted to process UI events. (Default)

false
Parsing cannot be interrupted. The application will be unresponsive until parsing is complete

Really? Have they not heard of separating a UI and background thread? Or did they just screw it up badly? Type anything into the Awesome Bar after using FF for a few months, and every keypress results in an sqlite lookup. It responds slower than typical telnet latency, and it's very noticeable. And I can't stop it until it completes its lookup. The only solution is to reduce the amount of data available, which means limiting its functionality. It was nice for a while, but these nice ideas resulted in me not being able to use it. Leave a badly behaved page like facebook open (with constant ajax type updates) and you can't do anything on other pages. Wasn't it supposed to optimize itself so scripts didn't run on tabs or pages that weren't visible, or something like that?

I prefer IE sometimes in the rare circumstances that I don't prefer Chrome. Only the extensions keep me using Firefox, everything else is a reason not to use it.

Actually read this whole page, it's illuminating. Maybe v4 will improve things, but they went a long way down the wrong road here and will take a lot of work just to get 2.x usability back:

http://namchangkorpa.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/double-firefox-speed-2/

Agreed. Chrome's rendering, display and scrolling are significantly slower on messy, complicated HTML than Firefox. There was a big advantage on Javascript-heavy pages, but with Firefox 4 that's gone since the browsers are now roughly on par in Javascript performance. And Firefox 4 has GPU-accelerated rendering now which speeds up certain types of intense rendering quite a bit too.

Given all the advantage of Firefox in terms of extension-availability, there's no particularly strong argument in favor of Chrome. And don't you dare say "Firefox leaks memory" - this is the most tired meme at this point. If you have issues on your PC configuration, just try adjusting the caching settings mentioned here. There haven't been any real issues with Firefox memory usage since FF 2, for your average use case user (people who open 30-40 tabs simultaneously may conceivably have some legitimate gripes, but their usage patterns are definitely not typical).

Especially after the frame rate lock applied to firefox.

Let me start out by reminding everyone that when Netscape came up with Cookies, everyone thought they were fine. Now, thanks to 1 pixel images and other tracking methods, cookies are the key to online companies aggregating bits of "anonymous" data into an identifiable profile of a person. Does Google know only as much about you as you would like? In fact, they know far more about you than you would expect, even if you don't use GMail.

The single biggest shot across the bow to privacy in HTML5 is the ping attribute. It may seem innocuous at first glance, but according to MozillaZine, it sends an HTTP POST request to each url. Why not GET instead?

This will allow Google, Alexa, FaceBook, or any "partner" to track users, if a site implements ping, easier than ever before. Some say trackers will migrate away from redirect URLs, but I say they will do both, if only to sop up every last piece of data they can.

I can see ping being used as a stealth DDOS attack, if enough malicious links can be distributed. Some content provider web API gets hacked, thousands of sites load up links (via AJAX) that ping slashdot.org, and Slashdot goes down. Will ping implementations be smart enough to reduce the list of URLs down to unique values? How many times does ping="slashdot.org slashdot.org/foo slashdot.org/comments.pl slashdot.org/article.pl" actually hit the poor, unsuspecting server? There's no apparent limit to how many URLs can be stuffed into a single ping, either.

I'm sure the black hats will think of other ways to exploit this. I agree that tools are neither evil nor good, but this is ripe for unintended consequences.

Install FF4 nightly and test it yourself... Why even mention a number if you're not going to compare it to anything. This doesn't have the latest Opera but it compares a wider variety of prerelease browsers.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=9891857#p9891857

You tested a single browser on faster hardware and magically you got a much better result... Here's a wider variety of browsers tested.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=9891857#p9891857

Supporting multiple font formats, both standard, is not an unreasonable request, especially not when Forefox's own developers admit that it would be "easy" to add.

What, 97% ACID3 compliance ain't good enough for you?

Not when other browsers go the full distance. Not when Firefox's own developers admit that it would be easy to add.

100% ACID3 compliance doesn't mean it's fully standards compliant. Chrome is 100% compliant but one check at quirksmode.org and you'll see that it doesn't support some CSS 3 features properly, like 'content', while Firefox supports those same features properly.

Of course Acid3 doesn't mean full compliance. It does, however, establish a bare minimum baseline: one Firefox doesn't cross, and which IE now feels justified in not crossing largely because Firefox doesn't cross it.