A History of Firefox

chrisd writes "Firefox module owner Ben Goodger has written what I think is a very interesting post about how Firefox came into being. It goes into details unheard of to date about the inner workings at Netscape and he fills in a timeline spanning from the open sourcing of Netscape to the release just recently of Firefox 1.5. Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'. Anyhow, I consider this required reading for any fan of the Firefox browser." Or even just a programmer. Worth reading.

Comments

A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[CyricZ]

I think I'd rather read such a piece about the history of Opera. Indeed, there is far less known about the inner workings of Opera (the company) than there is about Netscape, let alone the Mozilla project.

It would also be excellent if Opera were to release the source code to some of their historic (and now obsolete) releases, say Opera 3 and earlier. While there may very well be licensing issues concerning some of the code, even being able to store a fair portion of it would be a blessing to computer historians around the world.

Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera

Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. Now, if only part of it would be actually true.

Fucking Wikipedia-MMORPG.

Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this not the Opera you speaketh of?

Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[shokk]

A History of Opera, the Cliffnotes edition:

They made it.
A few people bought it for a while.
Mozilla and Firefox borrowed some of their ideas.
Firefox takes off in a way that Opera could not.
Opera makes their browser free and stuff it full of ads.
Still not good enough, Opera takes all ads off their browsers.
Firefox releases version 1.5.
Opera cries "what about me?" as it's broken down on the side of the road while the bullet train that is Firefox advances towards IE.

Sorry, pick up hitchhikers will only slow us down on the way to meeting IE. Thanks for playing.

Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Mozilla and Firefox borrowed some of their ideas." - by shokk (187512) on Monday February 06, @04:25PM

'Borrowed'?

Ahem - You really mean 'STOLE', don't you??

(e.g.-> Tabbed Browsing ring a specific bell here???)

"Opera cries "what about me?" as it's broken down on the side of the road while the bullet train that is Firefox advances towards IE." - by shokk (187512) on Monday February 06, @04:25PM

Oh, really? Well, take a peek @ this URL, & tell me that Opera's folks would even have to 'stoop so low', when they win the browser speed/performance tests like these, overall & across the boards vs. IE &/or Mozilla variants (netscape & firefox):

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win

* :)

(Argue with the numbers & facts on that page - it's the MOST accurate & up-to-date performance test for webbrowsers I know of, & Opera comes out ontop in most of all the tests, across the most platforms).

APK

Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[mdwh2]

I'm pretty sure it was free with ads long before Firefox was around - I was using it in 2000, possibly 1999.

"Hitchhikers"? The few you speak of where able to use a free browser much better than IE, long before it became trendy to switch. I think that Firefox is great both in terms of being open source, and raising awareness - but it's ridiculous to categorise Opera as "broken down on the side of the road" when it made the journey long before Firefox came along.

Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[shokk]

Ah, but browser speed and performance are nothing if no one wants to use the damn thing. I simply don't see the same level of developer interest in extensions in Opera that Firefox has. There is so much community behind it.

I'm also very impressed by the new patching system when they rolled out FF 1.5.0.1, so they've got security covered very well. The extensions and security offer functionality and I say FF wins there.

Sorry, Opera.

Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

" I simply don't see the same level of developer interest in extensions in Opera that Firefox has" - by shokk (187512) on Wednesday February 08, @01:39PM

You SURE about that? Look up "Opera Widgets" (AJAX technology) then. It's new, give it time, extensions ARE possible in Opera... & it hands down beats the heck out of any other browser on more platforms for performance (especially on Win32) overall & the most.

"Ah, but browser speed and performance are nothing if no one wants to use the damn thing." - by shokk (187512) on Wednesday February 08, @01:39PM

Man, come on: Quit kidding yourself on THAT account! You're talking to/with someone who's helped the FireFox team find & kill bugs before & had them directly mail me that day, & fix it the next day on the forums boards we found it on (bug in how it handled the board actually)... they came & spoke to us all there no less (ntcompatible.com, their forums are self-created by the owner Philipp).

I like FireFox well enough, & it does have QUITE the extensions community (except when they are found flawed like the GreaseMonkey one was not too long ago) & when they update, as was the case in 1.51 here (yes, I have it online to test sites I build)?

Many of the extensions that ran on earlier builds do not work anymore... too many extensions expose security risk and DO SLOW YOU DOWN LARGE with some of them.

You know it, I know it.

Plenty of folks use Opera man, & for many reasons - it had the features other browsers took from it like tabbed browsing years beforehand as well as better performance & security.

(Plus, less memory leakage).

Many BIG plusses to using it, & in the latest release (9 beta out today)? It even has BitTorrent technology in it + WORKING voice command control.

* It's light years ahead in speed, technology, and NOW 100% FREE also!

APK

How Firefox came to be?

[ziggamon2.0]

It was done in a zing!

The Firebird name was taken, so they got a new suffix with the Firesomething random animal generator.

ok, I'm off to RTFA...

Re:How Firefox came to be?

[Anonymous Coward]

> the Firesomething random animal generator

I dunno about that FireFox thing, but for me, it seemed like Disco ThunderMonkey Chairman crashed more often than IceCool RoboPenguin Deluxe Ultra. Of course, now I should probably try out this Zen BuddhaDaemon DeRaadt Generator thingy...

the true power of opensource

[scenestar]

I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches.

Free from business buzzwords and company politics mumbojumbo.

all that remains is a top notch stable product.

Re:the true power of opensource

[Timesprout]

If thats the true power of opensource then the Opera team must be divinely omnipotent coding Gods, better product delivered years ahead of Firefox and without all the ego and self congratulation.

Re:the true power of opensource

[foandd]

Also without entire classes of capabilities. Yes, I know, you vehemently disagree, but perhaps you should learn something of what you spout about before you do so. I was getting paid handsomely years ago for deliverables which worked fabulously in IE and Mozilla which Opera would blow sky. A browser's features and capabilities aren't limited to whether or not it renders your favorite porn site.

History of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Copied all the ideas from Opera, called it 3 diffrent names, and then achived fanboy cult status.

Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?

[RobertM1968]

February 06, 2006
Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?

The story of Internet Explorer is long but yet lacking in detail or any real value. There are many perspectives. This is mine. IE was of course written by Spry and acquired by us at Microsoft.

Since then, we've added many new bugs (I mean features), security holes (err... features),
stolen and duplicated ideas (umm... innovations). Even more importantly, we added tons of
new code to work around things in the original Spry browser we didn't understand... tons...
and since bigger is better, that alone makes IE7 the best browser on the market.

IE7 keeps Windows users working twice as productively (doing System Restores and removing viruses)
on their machines - what other browser forces (I mean allows) a user to sit in front of their
computers doing (recovery and restore) work?

Such amazing new security ideas like sandbagging (umm.. sandboxing) IE will force IE to write
files and such to only the temp directories (though since so many viruses and spyware already
write themselves there and then execute this is another item our Marketing Department needs
to spin as an improvement).

All in all, our newest browser is bigger, (bloatier), (borrowed and outdated) feature rich and
far more (or less) secure!

Footnotes

      1. Some people claimed we didn't create all the new innovations in IE7 like tabbed browsing,
            but you need to remember that Time is relative. Besides, even though we were the last ones
            to come out with these innovations, our amazing Marketing Team can still convince the world
            we are first - we call it our "Leading the Pack From the Rear" methodology.
      2. "How to Secure & Stabilize your browser(TM)", or "The Mozilla Advantage" as it is more commonly
            known as.
      3. "Module Owners" - Microsoft, Microsoft and only Microsoft - where we "borrowed" the ideas, code
            and technology is irrelevant.
      4. "Moving Target" or "Barely Crawling Target" as we prefer to call it.

Re:Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironcally, IE7 still does web browsing better than Firefox (without crashing) for me.

see also

[Anonymous Coward]

also interesting:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

Effectiveness often breeds resentment

[smittyoneeach]

There was and remains much resentment towards Firefox and its development model. At its creation, there was much shouting about how the many were not always smarter than the few, the merits of small development teams with strong centralized direction, the need to adhere strictly to Mozilla's module ownership policy[3]. In practice, these statements resulted in effectively locking everyone but the Firefox team out of the Firefox source code. We railed against the inefficiencies of past UIs. We were unnecessarily harsh, and polarized opinions. We had been badly wounded by the Netscape experience and the disorganization that had followed. I don't think a lot of people understood that. It wasn't something we could easily communicate.
To many, it looked like we were breaking ranks. We were claiming their work had no value. It was said that what we were doing went against the principles of community development. That wasn't true -- as most open source projects are centrally managed by a small few. Many have well defined release plans and maintain tight control over what contributions make it in. We had hurt our case though by being so dogmatic up front. We did not do a good job of PR.

Recalls a Margaret Thatcher quote, from her speech at the US Naval Academy sometime around '93 or '94: "Consensus is the absence of leadership".
Impressive, indeed to admit to having been heavy-handed. Then again, there is a stark difference between leadership and running a popularity contest.
OTOH, even Emacs will have another release Real Soon Now. The ones to fear are those who claim to have Teh One True Way.

Re:Effectiveness often breeds resentment

[slavemowgli]

Effectiveness ould breed less resentment if Firefox wouldn't suck so much. (Yes, mod me troll now without reading the rest of this post... go ahead, you know you want to because I dared criticise your toy.) Or, more precisely, it wouldn't if it actually was effective, but in the case of Firefox at least, it isn't, and certainly, a lack of consensus or a "popularity contest" does not automatically make things effective.

Of course, things *can* work that way. The Linux kernel and the notion of Linus Torvalds as a "benevolent dictator" is probably a good example, and it stands to reason that if there wasn't one person who's ultimately in charge of what goes into the vanilla tree and what doesn't, it wouldn't be where it is now. Can you imagine a "Linux steering committee" debating endlessly over the relative merits (or lack thereof) of certain things? I can, and it's not pretty, so I'm glad Linus does the job he does.

But - and this is important - Linus is not on a power trip. He does not approve things because people suck up to him, he does not reject things because he's on a personal vendetta, and so on; in short, he's not the "mwahaha, I've got power over you, tremble before me!" kind of guy. And while there are good (in every sense of the word) Mozilla developers, not all of them are, and it often seems that the relative amount of developers more interested in politics and their little games is higher than it should be - and higher than in other projects, too. (asa, anyone?)

Ultimately, the only thing that should matter when you develop a piece of software is technical merit. With Linux, it does, and that's why Linux is - basically - great (and successful); with Firefox, it's politics more than anything else, and that's why Firefox - ultimately - sucks. Just check out bug #18574 for a prime example of what's wrong with certain Firefox developers.

Mozilla: a good PR move for Netscape...

[thx1138_az]

Mozilla was a good community relations move on the part of Netscape. I can remember early on when Netscape had sued Microsoft and delayed the release of Windows 98 in a fight for browser dominance. The only logical move was to appeal to the community at large just to stay alive.

Firefox:A tripartite golden braid

[Tackhead]

> Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'.

Kenobi:Skywalker:Use The Force, Luke ::
Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian ::
Firefox:Goodger:In Open Source, You Must Think.

Re:Firefox:A tripartite golden braid

[DrSkwid]

Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian ::

this is /., here Russia Thinks of YOU !!

Re:Firefox:A tripartite golden braid

[Kelson]

this is /., here Russia Thinks of YOU !!

Ask not what you think of your country.
Ask what your country thinks of you!

Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I think Netscape's mistake came earlier: when they thought that people would each pay $40-50 to buy a standalone browser. IE cut the floor out beneath them and Netscape went down hard after that.

Someone arriving at Netscape at 1999 would have been someone boarding a sinking ship, it would seem...

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't recall ever meeting a Netscape user who paid for his/her browser. They gave it away in real effect.

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[Anonymous Coward]

That's where Microsoft really screwed up too. Thinking people would actually pay $450 for a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a slideshow generator.

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[tb3]

That's just silly. At the time, Navigator was like any other app, of course you should pay for it. Microsoft pulled their favorite bundling trick and gave IE away, for the express purpose of eliminating the competition.

Funny story; it also had the side-effect of saving MS money. I heard that they bought the Spyglass source code rights for a small amount of cash and a promised share of the profits. Since no copies of IE were ever 'sold', Spyglass never got paid. Microsoft never miss a trick, do they?

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[TallMatthew]

Definitely true, but it goes further.

Netscape took their share because IE was practically unusable. Once Microsoft geared up development internally, which Netscape should have anticipated, Netscape still had the opportunity to maintain their edge and leveraged themselves as a "cool app" company which would have suited the market fine for years after their decline. They could have done any number of things to counter the fact they'd have to give the product away free, using the Opera model for example. I mean they had market share. People didn't migrate to IE en masse simply because it was free and netscape wasn't.

If netscape had targeted user experience as aggressively as the firefox project has, instead of just resting on their laurels and thinking being first was good enough, they'd probably still be in business. Instead they just let it slide and spent their time and energy trying to convince everyone how unfair Microsoft was.

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[Kelson]

Funny thing: Netscape was free for educational and (IIRC) government use. Given that so many of the people on the internet at the time were college students, that's a large market segment that they didn't lose because they weren't worried about it in the first place.

The market they lost was the business market. Companies that bout 10, 30, 100 copies to put on their employees' desks. That, and ISPs looking to provide a browsr for their users. Back then you couldn't take a brand-new computer and download a browser -- you had to have some way to get that browser. Usually ISPs would send their new customers a couple of floppy disks with the basics -- a web browser, an email program, and maybe an FTP client.

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[Nimey]

That's not quite true. Joe Bloggs could download the browser for free. IIRC Netscape's business model was originally to get businesses to buy Navigator and their webserver product (whatever it was called).

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"Joe Bloggs could download the browser for free."

Remember - that was 1997. A 5 meg download was quite annoying back then.

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[jjohnson]

From Netscape 3, and somewhat earlier, end users never paid for it, getting it either as a full-featured 'demo' download with no expiry, provided by their ISP, or used by their company. Netscape's business model at the time was to sell it to corporations and large ISPs as a brandable browser, but that never provided a significant revenue stream; instead, their web server was holding up the company.

Also, Netscape had the majority share of the browser market from version 2 to 4. It was only IE 4 that started the erosion of Netscape as browser king, and it wasn't until IE 5 that the last nail was driven into Netscape's coffin, largely because the Communicator 4.7 was just so unbelievably awful.

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, my name is (anonymous coward). Congratulations! You just met someone who paid for his browser, back in the days of Netscape 2, 3, and 4!

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[opec]

Since no copies of IE were ever 'sold', Spyglass never got paid. Microsoft never miss a trick, do they?

They later sued Microsoft for contractual shenanigans and settled for $8 million.

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[evilviper]

Remember - that was 1997. A 5 meg download was quite annoying back then.

Bah! 56K modems were already comming out in '97, and 33.6 modems weren't bad. I downloaded 600MB Linux ISOs over dial-up (it took 2-3 days of course).

Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free

[markhb]

Nit: they did sell a few copies of IE... Version 1.0 (largely the Spyglass code) was distributed in the Microsoft Plus! pack for Win 95, an software package that included themes, Internet connectivity, and either a pinball game or Freecell (I forget which), and which required a 486 or better to run. That allowed the core Win95 product to meet its box specs of running on a 386 with 4 MB RAM.

History of Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

In a related paper, the histrory of Mozilla has been described through emprirical software engineering here. It shows how the source code changed over time etc.

Something about the mozilla suite on linux?

[matt me]

Wasn't the Mozilla suite very popular on Linux, perhaps accounting for most of its users, shipping with Red Hat and the other non-K distros as the default web and email applications? But then there was a speedy fork which became very popular on windows as an alternative to ie, thus mozilla greatly changed their position, almost abandoning their old userbase for their new intiative of evengalistic saving of windows/ie users. But then I see that ie/7 is going to ship very close to firefox 1.5 as it did to ie/6 (layout, extra features disabled, tabs hidden).

Anyone remember the style-sheet changer?

Re:Something about the mozilla suite on linux?

[greenrd]

I'm not sure what fork you're talking about - Mozilla products have always ran on both Linux and Windows, since the earliest days. There have been forks, but to "slim down" the browser, not to focus on Windows AFAIK.

Re:Something about the mozilla suite on linux?

[evilviper]

But then there was a speedy fork which became very popular on windows as an alternative to ie, thus mozilla greatly changed their position, almost abandoning their old userbase for their new intiative of evengalistic saving of windows/ie users.

That's just nonsense. Mozilla was evangelizing to Windows users long before the switch to Firefox, and Firefox wasn't only better/faster/popular on Windows, but on every platform.

What you're really thinking of, I don't know.

Pardon?

[CyricZ]

Go take a look at the Mozilla codebase. Seriously, go do it right now. It is amongst the worst code I've seen written. It's overly complex, it's bloated, and it's badly architectured. But please, don't take my word for it. Go look for yourself.

If there were any efforts to limit the inclusion of low quality patches, I think such efforts failed. But then again, what would be a low quality patch to the FreeBSD project may very well look like a real gem when compared to the awful codebase that makes up Mozilla.

The true power of open source is letting us see how awfully written many of the most popular software products are, Mozilla included.

Re:Pardon?

[Dr. Evil]

It takes a long time to understand how a large project operates. I couldn't tell much from the source without a few months to think about it.

At your advice, I'm pulling it down to have a look.

Do you have any examples of what I should be looking for, or is it really that obvious?

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst, upsetting, heart-sickening and dumbfucked code I've ever seen written are the GOOG's Firefox-XPIs (just unzip, view and vomit).

Seriously, I can't understand why they, who supposedly hire the world's most intelligent and capable people, fail to see the benefit of at least indenting function-blocks and if-statements.

Granted, the concept of indentation it pretty new ('70), but still...

Re:Pardon?

[RBAE]

Mozilla? You should've taken a look at NS Communicator's code. Now that was scary. I can tell you many people couldn't believe that thing could actually run without crashing after 5 minutes of us. When we launched beta versions, some of us were freaked out to see that people was actually using them.

But we had a lot of fun :-)

Re:Pardon?

[robbo]

The old mozilla code-base was indeed a nightmare that took hours to download and compile. I learned how tangled it was when I barely survived an attempt to fix a file:// url bug on unix platforms. The need for portability had produced this many-headed demon. But a lot of really great things came out of that early mess- bugzilla is probably the most notable.

I've never looked at the firefox code but I've always assumed that the firefox team took the useful parts of mozilla- gecko and the portability libraries and produced something smaller and cleaner. .. but maybe I'm wrong.

One quote in TFA really resonated with me:
As is often the case with ideas and prototypes, the fun quickly deteriorates into tedium as the magnitude of the task becomes clearer.

How many times have I been down that road?! When a complex system nears completion, one always feels like there could have been a better, cleaner way. Sometimes there is. But most of the time you spend a week or so trying your new ideas and the project quickly gets bogged down in new problems that only reflect the complexity of the problem.

All the same, I love firefox, and considering its roots I'd rate it as a real open-source success story.

Re:Pardon?

[bdaehlie]

I work with the Mozilla code every day. It is complicated, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is all badly written. I think you probably don't understand the reason for the complexity, and therefore you incorrectly consider it to be terrible code. I'm not saying we don't have some bad code in there, but to say what you are saying about the entire codebase is very naive.

Re:Pardon?

[ZuperDee]

I can tell you many people couldn't believe that thing could actually run without crashing after 5 minutes of us.

I couldn't believe it either, because for me, NS 4.x actually did crash after 5 minutes of use, most of the time.

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does anyone mod this asshole up? He is isn't just a troll, but he trolls every single Slashdot article! He might even be right about Mozilla's code, but he's only saying it because he knows that he'll be modded up. He doesn't know what the fuck code the looks like.

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

well said

Re:Pardon?

[ThomS]

You have to remember that this is stilla version 1.x product that will continue growing and improving for many years. It's also open source, so if the code offends you that much, I invite you to go and help fix it.

Re:Pardon?

[CyricZ]

I understand that it has to deal with issues such as portability and interoperability with other programming languages. Yes, dealing with such issues can often become very complex, especially for larger applications.

However, I do believe that such matters can be dealt with in far more efficient and effective ways than is done so by Mozilla. A browser like Opera, for instance, offers many of the same capabilities as Firefox without even a quarter of the memory consumption, and often with a far greater responsiveness.

When it comes to dealing with complex issues in software, the best thing to do is not to overly complicate them. It appears that the Mozilla project has overcomplicated them, for whatever reason. And that has lead to a browser that consumes far more memory than it should, while also not being as stable as it ideally could be.

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to polish a turd.

Re:Pardon?

[bdaehlie]

What you are saying about Opera is simply not true. Yes, they offer much of what we do. But they don't come anywhere near offering all that we do. Consider at XULRunner, Firefox extensions, or the fact that we have a more compliant rendering engine. About the rendering engine in particular, the first 90% of compliance is not that hard. It is the last 10% that adds the majority of the complexity. Opera has not gone as far (far as they may be) in terms of compliance and the complexity tradeoff is absolutely not linear.
So, if you want what Opera has to offer and only that, then use Opera. But don't bash Mozilla's codebase because we don't offer the same feature set that Opera does and therefore a bunch of our code is needlessly complex.

"It appears that the Mozilla project has overcomplicated them, for whatever reason."

I think if you put even 5 minutes into thinking about "whatever reason," you'd not be saying that. Again, I'll use XULRunner and Firefox Extensions as examples of things that Opera does not do and will never do in its current form because they lack the (complex!) infrastructure that allows for such capabilities.

It is easy to bash code and get a good response from people - a large part of slashdot is just that. It is much harder to defend code, and that is something I just can't do for the Mozilla project in the time I have allotted for myself to post on slashdot. All I can say is if you want to know how good/bad the Mozilla code is, give it a lot more thought time or ask someone who would actually know. You could start with Mozilla developers. We're not all so biased and blinded as to blatantly lie about the quality of the Mozilla code.

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol. CyricZ produces some of the most arrogant, one-sided posts on Slashdot. They all get modded up. How? Why? Who knows.

Re:Pardon?

[eqisow]

I don't know a thing about the Mozilla codebase, but I do know that the Gecko engine is not anywhere near as close to being standards compliant as Opera is. Opera can almost pass the Acid2 Test, Firefox doesn't even come close. (though it is much closer than IE)

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the OP's real question is, "why are the Mozilla folks screwing around with NSPR and Xulrunner, which add a hell of a lot of complexity?" There are plenty of other non-trivial cross-platform GUI applications that don't require their own runtime environment(s).

Re:Pardon?

[kadathseeker]

It's overly complex, it's bloated, and it's badly architectured

What was that about Microsoft?

Seriously though, code and jokes aside, Firefox is much nicer in every way than any MS product I've ever used.

Re:Pardon?

[bdaehlie]

I don't know where you got that idea, and I'm not going to argue with you here, but that is definitely not a given. An issue with your comment that makes me think you don't know much about standards compliance in rendering engines is that Acid2 is an almost meaningless test. It does not in any way measure overall standards compliance. It is an interesting test that has been turned into a tool for marketing these days, and it worked on you.

Re:Pardon?

[Goaway]

And how many of those support cross-platform extensions?

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite method in mozilla is the kungFuDeathGrip();. I have no idea what it does thou, but it sounds awesome.

Re:Pardon?

[bdaehlie]

If you want to do what Mozilla does, you need something like nspr. Even apache has something similar, apr (so I hear, I have not looked at their code).

As for XULRunner and the infrastructure involved in that, it would surely be a shame if the Firefox extension system was not around. By asking why we're messing with XULRunner, you're basically also asking why we're messing with Firefox extensions in their current form, because the infrastructure for both has a lot of overlap (XUL, XPCOM, nspr...). Sure, you could make developing extensions much more difficult and thus reduce some complexity in the Mozilla codebase (though less complexity is in no way guaranteed if you want similar capabilities), but then we wouldn't have nearly as many of the great extensions we have today. And what we did have would largely be for Windows only. Furthermore, we were able to take that work and extend it a little to offer XULRunner, which has been very useful for quite a number of people. You may not want XULRunner, but that doesn't say much about the need for it. And you're not suffering much for it either if all you want is a simple web browser.

The great part is, we were able to do all of this without really bothering our users that just want a web browser. Firefox is a pretty cool piece of software that many, many people enjoy. The development of XULRunner and Firefox extensions has done more good for them than bad (through bug fixing and developer interest), and a user that loves Firefox probably isn't going to care so much about any theoretical argument that it is coded sloppily. Yeah, we've got some memory leaks once in a while, there are many things we could do better, and we don't run in 64K of RAM, but it really isn't a big deal outside of slashdot postings looking for karma, and it really isn't much worse (if at all) than other apps. The tradeoff is worth it. You just need to understand it.

Re:Pardon?

[Marsell]

or the fact that we have a more compliant rendering engine.

Really? Is this a bit like the claim on getfirefox.com that you can browse faster, when Firefox is actually one of the slowest of the major browsers?

There doesn't seem to be a big difference between gecko and presto (or KHTML): CSS engine comparison. So what do you mean by "more compliant"?

I'd like to know who cares about XUL other than the Firefox devs too. There are better kits out there. I can feel the UI lag even on a modern machine. And SpiderMonkey? That's so slow only small and thin applications can be written in javascript.

Firefox has been a bit of a disappointment to me. It was originally supposed to be a light replacement to the Mozilla suite. And what did we get? An overengineered mess! XUL is just one symptom of the mentality of NIV and lack of KISS. Firefox could have been so much better...

Hey, is it just me, or is it a bit hot here?

Re:Pardon?

[sahala]

Well said. I haven't seen the Mozilla codebase, but I tend to take "that codebase is horrible" statements with a grain of salt. To all professional developers...have you ever noticed the chief architect or senior tech lead or other technical leaders ever dismiss an entire codebase.

Any professional developer should print the paragraph below out.

-- snip -- I work with the code every day. It is complicated, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is all badly written. I think you probably don't understand the reason for the complexity, and therefore you incorrectly consider it to be terrible code. I'm not saying we don't have some bad code in there, but to say what you are saying about the entire codebase is very naive.

Re:Pardon?

[smittyoneeach]

I have no idea what it does

Documentation
You're welcome. ;)

Re:Pardon?

[Myen]

Usually kung fu death grips hold on to a given reference-counted object so that it will never reach zero references.

That is, most things in Mozilla are XPCOM-based; it's similiar to Microsoft's COM if you've used that. Things get reference counted (i.e. they keep track of how many pointers are pointing at them, with the help of the people acquiring and releasing references). Once something reaches zero references, it's considered no longer needed and get released (memory deallocated, etc.). In some cases you want to make sure things stay alive for a certain period - such as making sure event listeners don't kill themselves before you finish processing them - so you give them an extra reference via the kung fu death grips. Once the grip goes out of scope, the reference is released; if at that point it gets a reference count of zero the object kills itself. ... Err, as far as I know anyway :)

Re:Pardon?

[catprog]

Well from my point of view I coudn't use phpmyadmin on IE because it was too slow (probly downloading) but when i used it in firefox it loaded.

Re:Pardon?

[CyricZ]

Yeah, we've got some memory leaks once in a while, there are many things we could do better, and we don't run in 64K of RAM, but it really isn't a big deal outside of slashdot postings looking for karma, and it really isn't much worse (if at all) than other apps.

Is this seriously your attitude? It's no wonder that Firefox and much of the other software from the Mozilla project is so bloated. Even on systems with 2 GB or more of RAM, it is still a relatively scarce resource, and thus should not be wasted. I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.

Remember, 400 MB for a web browser is still a massive consumption of memory on a 1 or 2 GB system. When there are many regular folks with systems that only have 512 MB of RAM, you start running into serious performance issues (which is often reported to be the case).

You say it's not a big deal to waste memory. Sorry to say it, but you're fucking wrong. Firefox will continually be looked upon as an inferior browser by those with any software development background if such a trend of waste continues.

I hope you understand why I keep coming back to Opera. They've put out a product that's just as portable and just as featureful as Firefox (if not more so). And they manage to do it without consuming hundreds of MB of RAM.

Re:Pardon?

[CyricZ]

It's because I'm always right. Why bother with the other side(s) when the one I present is flawless?

Re:Pardon?

[kadathseeker]

better than Internet Explorer somehow makes Firefox a superior browser?

I believe that "foobar is better than foobar" is the dictionary definition of superior.

Other than your wording, your argument about the code quality is valid, but the two are worlds apart in performance and features (in quality, not numbers), which is all that matters to 99% of users, the people that don't edit it. If you don't have the time to edit the code yourself, shoot and email to the dev team with some suggestions. I don't have the coding skills necessary to aid in that way, so I must entrust the safety of OSS with you, the leet haxor code-bearer.

Re:Pardon?

[transient]

This is retarded. Why not just increment the reference count, and then decrement it when you're done? That is, after all, what reference counting is for. And in case that's all this function does, why does it have such a bizarre name?

Re:Pardon?

[CTho9305]

It's definitely worth reminding people that if you *flawlessly* rendered valid CSS, but also were forgiving and did a "best guess" for broken CSS, you'd fail the Acid2 test.

Re:Pardon?

[John Bokma]

Can I say MORK?

Re:Pardon?

[HeroreV]

I bet all the code you produce is boring. Some people like to make things exciting.

bool magicalCircus(char * question);
 
holla( magicalCircus("Isn't this kewl?!") );

output:

Of course it is nigga!

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

NS4 was pretty solid when I was using it. If you want to see buggy, try Netscape 2. 3 was better. 4 was great... and then it stayed the same for a very long time. I never liked Opera. I actually used IE for a while. I tried Phoenix at 0.3 but it was too buggy. I tried it once in a while. Then it hit 0.7 and it was actually stable. After a while, I decided that I could depend on it as my primary browser and it's been my default browser ever since.

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arrogant and flaming, such endearing qualities. You must be an absolute blast to be around. :)

Re:Pardon?

[bdaehlie]

Heh - that would be one of the *bad* parts :)

We are in the process of replacing MORK with SQLite.

Re:Pardon?

[transient]

I bet all the code you produce is boring.

Actually, almost every program I write includes a furious knife-wielding monkey.

Re:Pardon?

[CyricZ]

I'm not arrogant. I'm just always correct.

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless it's frozen.

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a rage dump, mon!

Re:Pardon?

[Myen]

because kung fu death grips are usually nsCOMPtrs, so they automatically release the reference when it goes out of scope (it's similar to _com_ptr_t for MS COM).

A function might have any number of points where it exits(especially there's lots of "if that function call just failed, return with the same code to tell somebody else about it" fake throw type thing hidden as NS_ENSURE_SUCCESS() calls). By using a smart pointer class, it goes out of scope and does the release for you when the function ends.

And they're not functions, they're variables. Not sure about the bizzare name part though, since that confuses me too :p

Re:Pardon?

[diegocgteleline.es]

I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.

Oooh! Mozilla eats 400 MB of RAM after using it for a few weeks! This is obviously a common case, I guess that firefox isn't going beyond of the 10% share because of that

Re:Pardon?

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes a few minutes, if not seconds for Mozilla or Firefox to leak hundreds of megs of memory. Just open and close ~50 tabs ( which goes extremely fast ) and whooop.

Re:Pardon?

[diegocgteleline.es]

Well, I just opened more than 60 tabs (with linky) and closed them and the RSS is 69, so duh..

Re:When are they going to patch

[Cecil]

It already does. I've been running this browser instance in single-window mode (tabs only, never a new window - ever) for 2 months now and it's only using 95MB of memory. Which granted, is a lot, but it's fairly normal for Firefox with 10 tabs open. If it didn't release memory when I closed tabs, it would be way, way, way beyond that.

Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[CyricZ]

I'm not sure why your post was heavily moderated down. It does address a very serious point: Opera did influence Firefox.

Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).

It's not a bad thing at all that Firefox draws from Opera. The goal is to provide the best product possible, and that does at times require the implementation of good ideas that were thought up elsewhere. Browsers like Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb and Safari innovate; Firefox brings those innovations to the masses.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[worb]

It would be really nice to see Opera and OmniWeb (in particular) receive more credit. I think they deserve a lot more attention than they have now.

Firefox broke into the mainstream, but the only innovation is the extensions system. Opera and OmniWeb have tons of innovative features, but most people never get to know about it.

And some of these features are actually possible to do as Firefox extensions.

It's almost as if there's no point in any other browser :) You can use Firefox, and if you need more features, you can just install extensions.

But I actually find extensions to often be very bad substitutes for properly integrated features. Not everyone wants to deal with extensions.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[stummies]

I like this instead: It's not a bad thing at all that Microsoft draws from Apple. The goal is to provide the best product possible, and that does at times require the implementation of good ideas that were thought up elsewhere. Browsers like Opera and Safari innovate; Internet Explorer brings those innovations to the masses.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[CyricZ]

There's nothing wrong with Microsoft drawing good ideas from Apple, or from anyone else. That's the best thing they should do, as it benefits their customers.

Now just because they incorporate such ideas doesn't mean they do it well. The problem with IE isn't so much the feature set it offers, but how it insecurely and poorly offers those features. Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Safari, and even Firefox to a lesser extent, do a better job of implementing such ideas.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[stummies]

I know, it was just a little joke.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bad thing when the open source community tries to pretend they invented those features, though. I remember a talk that Bruce Perens gave where he claimed that Firefox invented tabbed browsing and was using that as proof that the open source community inovates.

I'm not sure how, but I managed not to break out laughing.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[Gefunden]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing According to that article in wikipedia, tabbed browser wasn't invented by opera but by InternetWorks back in 1994.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[CyricZ]

And do you know what? Wikipedia isn't a credible source.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[evilviper]

Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).

Opera didn't invent tabs, and frankly, the tab support in Opera was insane. Mozilla was the first to have sane tabs, going from one side to the other (right to left first, now left to right), rather than back in your history, which makes no sense considering human usage patterns of a web browser.

Mouse gestures, AFAIK, aren't part of Firefox yet, just an extension.

Maybe Mozilla/Firefox haven't do much "NEW", but what they have done is taken simple concepts, and made them stop sucking... First decent tabs. First decent download manager. First blocking images from 3rd party servers (caused quite an uproar). First with a good bookmark manager. etc. etc. etc.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[Sunsetbeach]

> Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera.

Well. Its not true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing#Tabbe d_browsing

And in a way Firefox ist the offspring of Mosaic, which was groundbreaking back in the days.

So i'd say Firefox did heavily influence Opera.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[WhyCause]

But I actually find extensions to often be very bad substitutes for properly integrated features. Not everyone wants to deal with extensions.

And, of course, not everyone wants to wait while all of the "properly integrated features" add an additional 3 minutes to the program's load-time. I imagine that if you "properly integrated" all of the extensions available for firefox, you'd very quickly obtain an unusable beast of a program (e.g., MS Office, where 90% of the users use 10% of the features). Not everyone wants to deal with "properly integrated features" when a very workable extensions system means you don't have to.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[Gefunden]

actually i beleive studies have shown that it's just as good as any other encylopedia. it even stands well against britanica in number of errors. don't be so stuck up, it's not an admirable quality.

Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox.

[CyricZ]

Do these studies have entries at Wikipedia we could refer to?

Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[worb]

Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight. The company has been run by the same people for ten and a half years by now - the founders - and they've had a clear vision. They wanted to bring the web to everyone, to give them choice.

Unlike Mozilla, Opera has always had make money, and that in a situation where they've had less than one per cent of the market. So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts" and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course.

That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.

Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well.

While the payware, the ads, and so on were necessary to keep the company afloat, it has also hurt Opera. Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign. Firefox's timing was incredible. They released 1.0 when everyone was talking about how dangerous it was to use Internet Explorer.

While Firefox was free as in beer, easy to use, and ready for the masses (more or less), Opera still had to rely on ads, and had to charge for the browser. But they cleaned up the UI, and last year Opera was released for free-as-in-beer.

Some may say "too little too late", but Opera has never been huge. There isn't much of a market share to lose! Opera has a small but loyal following, and it's still smaller, faster, and it has more functionality out of the box than Firefox.

Now that Opera has simplified the UI and removed the ads, it can only grow. It will need proper marketing, though, and it will need to differentiate itself from Firefox and establish an identity which gives people a clear vision of what Opera is about, and why they should use it instead of something else.

Opera has always been the "browser innovator". Most features in Firefox were available in Opera ages before Firefox did it, and some were even invented by Opera. But these days Firefox takes all the credit, and that's partly because it can rely on others who have done everything, so it can simply pick and choose from other browsers' innovations. And it can avoid the pitfalls too, because Firefox already made those mistakes back when it was "Netscape". Firefox obviously benefits from being Netscape's "successor". All web designers know about Netscape, after all. So they can't ignore it when designing pages.

Opera has done a lot, but one wouldn't think so just by looking at its market share. It's a pity, really. Opera was the only independent browser, and they put real money into open standards. IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.

Now Firefox has stolen the thunder, partly deserved, partly undeserved. But I think Opera can make it too. They just need to get the marketing right.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[The Salamander]

I was an Opera convert until they let their non-windows versions lapse. When I couldn't run 5.x (Windows-only), Linux was 4.x, and Solaris was 3.x... It just wasn't worth it anymore.

I switched to firefox and haven't looked back. And if they had taken $$ for linux/solaris, I would have paid.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[worb]

Well there you go then. Opera has always had to do everything on its own. No donations. No huge corporations to pay for everything. As I said, it has been both a blessing and a curse. Obviously, a tiny company which has to pay its own bills is going to have problems doing "everything" at the same time.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[Kelson]

Actually the Linux version has finally become a nice browser.

It seems to take Opera a few versions to really get up to speed on a new platform. Opera for Linux debuted at version 5, and was -- well, the only reason I paid for it (I was already a paying customer on Windows) was that I wanted to encourage them to keep going in the Linux market. Fortunately that strategy seems to have worked, as Opera 8 is excellent on both Windows and Linux.

I don't remember when they started the Mac version, but it's taken a while to catch up in stability. I think I tried it around version 6 and it was terrible at the time, but the last time I tried it, it was much better. With luck Opera 9 will be the version whre it finally catches up.

Lately they've been doing simultaneous releases on Windows, Linux and Mac. (I haven't been keeping track of Solaris, FreeBSD, etc, so I'm not sure about those.) The last major delay I recall was 8.0, where they held onto the Mac version for a few weeks, probably for polishing.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[cynyr]

i owuld be much mor inclined to use Opera(tm) if i did not require me to use QT. otherwise i'm sure it looks as bad as most QT apps i've seen. anyways just my little rant. feel free to ignore me.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[CarpetShark]

Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.

Yeah, right. Opera is nice as proprietary browsers go, but most of us consider the good guys to be the volunteers who work to develop open, standardised software that's guaranteed by copyleft to be available to everyone. Opera is in a completely different niche, and it's adware. Definitely not on my list of good guys.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[cyber-vandal]

In what way is it adware?

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[Kelson]

Opera is in a completely different niche, and it's adware.

Not anymore, as of version 8.5 (last September).

And even when it was, at least it was benign adware like Eudora in sponsored mode, not nasty adware that brought up a zillion pop-ups behind your back, inserted extra links into web pages, and surreptitiously installed more pop-up generators.

Granted, the ad bar was #*@!$ annoying, but it was hardly in the same class as, say, Gator/Claria/whatever.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[C_Kode]

The ads are removed, anyone can download and use it, and you may be right about your claim when you say "most of us", but that doesn't include me. Just because something is closed source doesn't make it bad.

As for my view, I find that people who think *everything* should be "Free as in beer" and "Open Source" are naive and selfish. There are benefits abound on both sides of the street. These capitalistic companies that have closed source software/hardware laid the ground-work within which we walk today. Intel, IBM, Bell Labs, Sun, HP, VM Ware, etc...

It took lots of money to make today possible. John and his best friend Jose wouldn't have created todays processors in their basement. They wouldn't have been able to write the databases of today without the inroads made by Oracle, IBM, Ingres, Microsoft, etc.

Compare Opera to IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, EMC, Symantec, Intel, and just about any other corporation out there. Hell, Apple has this huge following and in my opinion they are nothing but a Microsoft wannabe. (Look at the iPod and all the law suits that Apple filed because people wanted to interface with there iPod without being forced to use iTunes) The Aqua debacle, Apple's hardware, etc...

I don't hate any of these companies, but if I had to say one of them was a good guy. Opera.

Disclaimer: I'm using Opera to post this message. ;)

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[hkmwbz]

"Firefox has *never* been about out-of-the-box features."

Which is both good and bad. Good because you get a clean program to start with. Bad because extensions are extremely unreliable and buggy, and clutter up the thing. And besides, Opera is as clean as Firefox by default now anyway. And it's still a smaller download (and that's including the Flash plugin which is almost a meg).

"A few features were present in Opera before Firefox, but certainly not most."

Yes, definitely most. And did you see the new features in 1.5. It's like the Firefox devs went to Opera's site, read through their features, and copied them right over!

"I'll give you tabs, but what about Web Developer, live RSS bookmarks, advanced javascript debugger, etc?"

There is a web dev toolbar for Opera, but what do users care? Opera had RSS before Firefox. A debugger is not "innovative". It doesn't help the web experience either. And it is not a Firefox first either, sorry.

"Firefox, both through the browser and through extensions, has innovated the web browser more than anybody since Netscape. Look at AdBlock, GreaseMonkey and ColorZilla... I know many people who would be lost without those extensions."

GreaseMonkey is a ripoff of Opera's User JS. AdBlock has been done to death in other browsers too. ColorZilla? A color picker? Hehe, well... No, that's not innovative either. I had a panel for that in Opera ages ago :)

"It's simply not fair to compare Firefox without extensions when they are such an important part of the browser. Once you do compare extensions it's plainly obvious that no other browser comes close to matching Firefox's featureset."

Yeah, dare I say untested, buggy feature set? At least Opera is a streamlined package, properly tested by professionals.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[fireboy1919]

IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.

Its not really fair to lump Firefox with the big corporations. Its entirely because they rebelled against their roots that they got where they are today.

And its not really fair to talk about "out of the box" only when Firefox and Mozilla's key innovation is XUL. The fact that you can actually create applications or applets specificially for it is its unique innovation - an innovation not ever used by Opera. And its not at all fair to say that all the rest of the innovation in Firefox came from Opera, or that all of Opera's innovation came from Opera itself. The "innerHTML" property always springs to mind as one heckuva convenient thing that came out of Microsoft's browser.

There are some things I have always really liked about Opera. In the bad old days, it didn't render nearly as well as Mozilla. I couldn't find any ways to do the neat things with javascript that I was pulling off in IE or Firefox in Opera. But Opera was fast - something I attributed to not actually having the ability to support these features.

Those days are gone, though, and Opera has most of the capabilities that the other two browsers have. The only thing missing from the current version that I'd like are:
1) iframes. You can't put one on top of another. z-indexes don't work with iframes.
2) opacity. Both of the other two browsers have a mechanism for blending layers. Opera doesn't, AFAICT.

Those are deal-breakers for me. I can't work around them.

Of course, Opera isn't alone in missing features. Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will. IE has serious problems doing vertical layouts, and all of them have their issues with CSS3. These are all issues I can live with, though.

I 'spose most people see the past with rose-colored glasses, though. Hopefully I haven't shattered them too much.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[imess]

Yes, definitely most. And did you see the new features in 1.5. It's like the Firefox devs went to Opera's site, read through their features, and copied them right over!

Yeah and you can say the same thing the other way around, because anyone can check out Firefox and bugzilla to see what they are working on in advance!

There is a web dev toolbar for Opera, but what do users care? Opera had RSS before Firefox. A debugger is not "innovative". It doesn't help the web experience either. And it is not a Firefox first either, sorry.

Oh yeah since average users don't care, why mention them right? Why mention Opera is 1-2 MB smaller download than Firefox, when average users have DSL and Gigs of space? And why mention web standards, since average users don't care?

And does Opera have *live* RSS feeds before? Oh yeah they are similar, and I can say that IE has tabbed interface from Windows taskbar too! Opera doesn't have tabbed browsing first either, sorry. (It's NetCaptor)

GreaseMonkey is a ripoff of Opera's User JS. AdBlock has been done to death in other browsers too. ColorZilla? A color picker? Hehe, well... No, that's not innovative either. I had a panel for that in Opera ages ago :)

Opera User js borrowed from GreaseMonkey, not the other way around! Adblock is the first usable way to block ads from within the browser, without relying on proxy where you have no easy way to find out if things get accidentally blocked. Done to death? Oh yea since Firefox has it, and other browsers copied it, you can simply ignore it; while at the same time, the Opera fans can reiterate how Firefox borrows Tabs from Opera, even though Tabs has been done to death as well.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[pete6677]

Is it too much to ask for a web-browser discussion (or hell, any kind of discussion) on Slashdot without some asshole modding down anything that is less than praising of his favored technology? Shit like this is enough to almost make me start meta-modding again.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Opera had always been the "good guys"
You say this, but give no backup, why are they good and Mozilla guys not? Mozilla.org has given not one but two decent browsers, a XML cross platform GUI, and various build tools to the community. I feel they should get a good guy label as well.

before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.
You state this as if it was somehow unfair, as if Firefox was some Johnny come lately with style but no substance. Firefox has been around for a long time as well. It was a branch of of Mozilla (and I'm a long time user, for me it became usable enough for daily use around Mozilla Milestone M-18) started because a lot of the Mozilla developers didn't like the Mozilla interface. Too difficult for the average user to use. So they forked it internally, and eventually became so popular it became the mainline product and now seamonkey (what was once the mozilla suite) is an afterthought. I remember some of the debates from this time, the Mozilla (err, seamonkey?) folks wouldn't listen about any UI issues. They were more interested in cool tech and platform creation. A small group realized a good platform means nothing if people don't want to use it, and that's how Firefox (nee Phoenix) started.

So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts"
What shortcuts? If you include Mozilla development Firefox development goes back many years. Even longer if you include the tiem wated on Netscape 5, though that's a little (but not huge) stretch. They created a whole cross platform GUI toolkit, a rendering engine, and various build tools. If anything they've been too ambitious, though the general OpenSource community is better for the tools. ...Opera has always had [to] make money
Yes, this is a huge disadvantage for Opera. As it was for Netscape, who essentially abandoned development because of cash losses, sadly going from being the darling of Wall Street to using accounting tricks to look decent enough to be bought out by companies that were more interested in the value of their name than any tech. This is not Firefox's fault, it is Microsoft's, who set the price that people would pay for a browser to be $0.

and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course.
The searches are only a recent addition, if anything, the relationship with AOL sponsoring Mozilla development as a counter to IE is a bigger impact on Mozilla/Phoenix/FireBird/FireFox development. That was always tenuous though, AOL has never been good at integrating acquisitions (look at NullSoft) and ended badly, but it did keep Mozilla going when it needed a couple bucks to sustain it.
Netscape itself didn't have the vision to make money on the portal thing. Here they had the tremendous advantage of making the client, but they didn't have the vision to monetize searches. If they did, maybe Netscape would have more developer cash and the landscape would be different. It is a mistake a few people have made.

Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well.
True, much like Mozilla was a power user's program. They both had the same difficulties, Mozilla's being worse since it crashed multiple times per hour.

Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign.
Like "steal their limelight" above, you say "steal their thunder" like it was Opera's to own. Mozilla had a long gestation, FireFox had a long gestation where they had to fight for approval in their own community (the suite vs. single browser split) and had two name changes (Phoenix to Firebird to FireFox) to deal with. It wasn't overnight, and it took a few foul starts. Opera never seemed to capitalize.

Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right t

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[CyricZ]

Opera is one of the best sorts of companies around. They're quite honest, and put out high-quality products. Talk all you want about volunteers and some such working on Mozilla. I'd take Opera over Firefox any day. From a technical standpoint, the features and resource consumption of Opera is far superior to that of Firefox. As for the open codebase of Mozilla, it's pretty much useless due to its low quality.

And recall, Opera got rid of the ads a while back. Of course, I know you haven't bothered to use it recently, so that's why you're making blatantly false statements.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[eonlabs]

Does someone have the world's smallest violin? I think you're needed here.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[evilviper]

That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.

Haha... Umm, no. The ads were slightly annoying, and the price was rather high, but that wasn't the problem... not at all. The problem was the terrible interface.

Look at the bookmarks system. Every menu and sub-menu has 4 different items I'd never use which clogged-up the screen space "Open All" "Bookmark this page here" etc. And you couldn't even manage them in any sane way. You open a bookmarks sidebar, which doesn't show you where in the heirarchy you are, so managing bookmarks is like fixing a car while looking through a microscope.

Then there are the tab system, which works in a completely insane way... When you close one, it takes you to the last one you had open, which is pretty much never what anyone would want. If you click on three links, you want to switch to one, then when you close it you want to go to the next one... You had no idea what page you'd be dumped into when you closed the current tab, so you'd spend a second just re-orienting yourself, seeing what tab is highlighted, and what the URL is. Plus, like everything else in Opera, the bookmark tab bar was far too big and clunky.

Then there was the preferences, which looks like preferences chop suey... Hundreds of options are thrown-in, but you really can't guess what section one will be under. You really have to go through ALL sections to find an option you want. Plus, when you get there, the available options probably don't cover what you really want... eg. maybe you can block all images from all sites, and only allow whitelisted sites, but no blacklists. Cookies would probably be just the opposite.

Like the tab bar, all the other bars took up far too much of the screen real estate. You'd have a stop button on one line, the URL box on another, the back/forward buttons on another, tabs on another, the file menu on another, the status bar on another, etc. Pretty soon half your screen is used by bars, even though they're all half-empty, or filled with buttons you'll never want nor use.

Plus things like the download manager which perhaps didn't have any way of automatically deleting the entry for a file after being successfully downloaded, no key tied to delete, and the NEXT item wouldn't get focus after the previous one got deleted, so declutering the download box by de-listing the last 20 items you downloaded could take 3 minutes...

And so on, and so on, and so on. I really wanted to like Opera. It was a tiny, fast, and stable browser back when Netscape and IE were painfully slow (on current hardware), and infuriatingly unstable. Still, even though I tried successive versions over the years, after weeks of use, I couldn't stand any one of them. They've just barely started to de-cruft the interface, and usually they add a bunch more at the same time.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[DeepHurtn!]

Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will.

As a mere user, I just want to say that as far as I'm concerned, that's a feature, not a bug!

IMHO, websites should *never* mess with the browser itself, which for me includes the scrollbar. Coloured scrollbars are tacky at best.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[HeroreV]

And it's still a smaller download

Updating Firefox uses very small downloads. When will Opera get such a system? Unless you never update, Firefox wins when it comes to smaller downloads.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[HeroreV]

Coloured scrollbars are tacky at best.

Even scrollbars within the page, such as on iframes? More and more websites are using fake scrollbars because the system defalut ones clash with their design. I would choose colored scrollbars with behavior controlled by the browser over fake scrollbars created with JavaScript or Flash anyday. Also, I would be insulted if someone tried to claim that I wouldn't be able to tell that a scrollbar is a scrollbar just because it's pink or blue.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[theTerribleRobbo]

> And its not really fair to talk about "out of the box" only
> when Firefox and Mozilla's key innovation is XUL. The fact
> that you can actually create applications or applets
> specificially for it is its unique innovation

I support Firefox, but I'm curious about this statement. What is ActiveX, then? (Please excuse me if XUL predated it, I'd not heard of XUL until well after.)

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[CarpetShark]

And recall, Opera got rid of the ads a while back. Of course, I know you haven't bothered to use it recently, so that's why you're making blatantly false statements.

Actually, no, I did use it recently. And I was quite impressed. That doesn't change what I said though. I *did* forget that the ads had been removed, but that's Opera's fault, for doing something so annoying that it sticks in potential customers' minds.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[CarpetShark]

I find that people who think *everything* should be "Free as in beer" and "Open Source" are naive and selfish.

There's a huge difference between *everything* and "everything I choose to use". One is a personal choice, the other is a dictatorship.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[jonadab]

> Opera had always been the "good guys" before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.

You're kidding, right?

Opera traditionally charged consumers money for their product, when Netscape was free for non-commercial use. Later, IE and Netscape were free to use for commercial *or* non-commercial use, and Opera still charged. Still later, the open-source Mozilla came around, and Opera went to an ad-supported model, where you had to have extra superfluous banner advertisments taking up large portions of the toolbar -- unless you paid. In other words, it became nagware.

The move to make Opera totally free (to use) didn't happen until *very* recently, after Firefox 1.0 was released.

One thing you have to give Opera credit for: they have remained as one of the semi-major browsers -- never in the top two, but never far from the top three -- for more than a decade now. Netscape (as a company, and as a brand) is washed up, and Mosaic is a distant memory indeed, but Opera is still around.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[hkmwbz]

"And does Opera have *live* RSS feeds before?"

No, but live RSS is a sad excuse for newsfeed handling. Even Mozilla knows that, and that's why they are going to fix it.

"Opera doesn't have tabbed browsing first either"

I never claimed that it did.

"Opera User js borrowed from GreaseMonkey, not the other way around!"

Dear oh dear. Opera's User JS is from back in the day when they released the bork version. That was, what, version 7? Ages before Firefox was even being considered.

"Adblock is the first usable way to block ads from within the browser"

Several IE shells did ad blocking from withing the browser long before AdBlock.

"Oh yea since Firefox has it, and other browsers copied it, you can simply ignore it; while at the same time, the Opera fans can reiterate how Firefox borrows Tabs from Opera, even though Tabs has been done to death as well."

The point here is that Firefox keeps taking over features that already exist in Opera and other browsers. Opera is innovative, Firefox is not.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[fireboy1919]

ActiveX lets you run native Windows code in the browser.

XUL lets you access things that are part of the browser itself. XUL is still in the sandbox of the browser; ActiveX isn't.

Further, XUL applets can only be installed via the extension installer interface, and then only by approved sites. So its quite difficult to trick someone into installing an extension that they don't want.

Finally, XUL is for extending the browser. ActiveX is for plugins. An example of a XUL applet I have on my system is a debug panel that lives on the status bar and pops up for each page if I click on its status-bar icon.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[mdwh2]

Oh yeah they are similar, and I can say that IE has tabbed interface from Windows taskbar too!

Actually, this is the reason why I never considered there to be anything special about "tabs" in the sense of "tabs grouped together on the taskbar". To me, tabs was about having a parent window which remembered the child windows - in particular, they were remembered when I restarted the application, for example.

I was quite surprised when I first tried Firefox - here it was, shouting loudly about its "new" tabbed browsing, yet this fundamental feature didn't work. I never understood what was so useful about "tabs" without these sorts of features.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[mdwh2]

But I don't think the concept of "Good guys" is related to charging money or not, since you have the freedom to choose whether or not to pay. Especially since all companies have to make money, and Opera don't have the advantage that Microsoft have of bundling it with an OS. By that logic we should be criticising Apple for daring to charge for their products.

"Good guys" is more to do with how a company acts, and providing products with new features.

Also, don't forget Opera Mini - a very useful browers for phones, which is entirely free, and I'm not aware of any open source equivalents.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[Xyde]

Polishing? a polished turd more like. I've come to expect crap interfaces on linux and sometimes windows software but when it's ported over to the mac and doesn't have sensible keyboard shortcuts every other browser on the face of the earth does, or doesn't have a native UI, only skins which clash with the OS it's running on, doesn't seem to have an option to rearrange toolbars (Opera software seems to think their tabs should be above the address bar and toolbar buttons, not directly above the web content), doesn't use standard OS controls causing strange address bar behavior, doesn't use ATSUI text rendering (ugly fonts)...I could open it up and rattle off about 50 other issues if i hadn't deleted it after fighting with it for a few hours. Maybe it's fine on windows or linux, but it just doesn't feel like a web browser to me. The last version i tried was the first free one they released, maybe it's gotten better since then but the issues are far from skin deep. This sort of thing rarely flies in the mac community, which is probably why I've never heard of anyone using it. It's free, we appreciate the effort guys but try and make it a little more mac like? It feels REALLY cheap and nasty. Also check out the preferences dialog boxes - the UI bitmaps aren't even aligned half the time, and i won't even go into the layout.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[Risen888]

but most of us consider the good guys to be the volunteers

Are we talking about the same people here? Firefox - Mozilla - Netscape - AOL - TimeWarner? Those volunteers?

Don't get me wrong, I use Firefox and love it, because it works. And I am the first to say that since the cold-blooded murder of Netscape, the Mozilla Foundation has overcome some pretty daunting odds to accomplish all that they have. But don't get all fucking sanctimonious over it, man.

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[imess]

How exactly is the borked version a demonstration of USER js? Can USERS load scripts into webpages? Why did they release the binary but not the js file if it's really USER js? If this is comparable to greasemonkey, I can say XUL is user js too!

And may be I'm ignorant, which "several IE shells" had adblocking "long before AdBlock"? Links?

Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. The preferences seemed pretty easy and I'm pretty happy with my somewhat minimal toolbar setup in Opera. You can see a screenshot here.

The AOL Factor

[db32]

I often wonder how widely accepted the whole Mozilla/Firefox stuff would be if AOL had turned it into "The Internet" like what they are doing with IE. So many AOLers think that IE is "The Internet", would it have been different had AOL gone on to use Mozilla? How would the geeks respond to this? I imagine quite a few heads exploding trying to rationlize out who is more evil in the IE vs AOL battles. Geeks like to think they are completely objective...but we are anything but...geeks can be full of just as much zealotry as the latest religious fundamentalist. Take a *nix vs MS argument and replace either one with Creationism and Evoloution...almost the same sort of fight. So...how accepted would AOLFox have been?

Re:The AOL Factor

[imsabbel]

Hm
Maybe i remember stuff wrong...
But...
Didnt AOL use a netscape 3.0 based webbrowser back in the time?

And... the normal AOL (or even EVERY non-geek) user wouldnt be able to tell apart browsers anyway... if you take themes into the picture, just imagine how you could find out which browser somebody uses without resorting to the help/info menue?

Re:The AOL Factor

[Kelson]

IIRC AOL had their own built-in browser, then replaced it with an IE shell. At the time they bought Netscape, it was already on 4.0.

Re:The AOL Factor

[db32]

Honestly I'm not terribly sure on the browser history of AOL. I had always thought that they never completed anything with Netscape. But really being able to tell what browser wouldn't matter for the non-geeks, it is all the same to them. That wouldn't stop the geeks from knowing that AOL uses Mozilla and the resulting outlash against it as being related to AOL. The non-geek user doesn't care about the ideaology behind browsers, they just want "The Internet" to work, its the geek that will raise the call to war on issues like that.

Re:The AOL Factor

[Tezkah]

AOL on the Mac uses Mozilla to render pages. AOL on Windows uses IE to do the same thing.

if you want to see AOLfox, look at Netscape 8. *shudder*

The only good thing that AOL has done is to open source the Mozilla codebase. The hands off approach is the only thing that saved Mozilla.

Re:The AOL Factor

[db32]

I'm not terribly familiar with the exact history of the beast. Did AOL actually release Mozilla? The bit of history I could find said Netscape did it in 1998, which seems to be the same year they got bought by AOL, but I'm having a hard time finding much specifically about it. The article seems to imply that Mozilla was OS before AOL got involved. But hey, I may just be confused :) It is pretty early.

Re:The AOL Factor

[SanityInAnarchy]

Yes, my head certainly exploded there. You seem to be trying to say that there are only zealots on both sides of the Firefox vs IE debate, because it's similar to the Creationism vs Evolution debate, where there are only zealots on both sides.

WHAT?

You're right, I suppose. Creationism is based on faith, which is a nice word for completely unfounded conviction. Evolution is based on overwhelming evidence, yet we have absolutely no convincing evidence for Creationism. I'm sorry, but an inconsistent, violent, outdated, mistranslated, and dogmatic book obviously written by a lot of men with a lot of different opinions is not "evidence".

Internet Explorer has a long track record of horrendous insecurity, is fairly un-customizable -- while there are ways to add functionality, most of them involve completely replacing the IE interface -- is bloaty and slow, and only really works decently on one platform (Windows) -- on a Mac, it makes Netscape 3 look good. Firefox, OTOH, is stable, mature, secure, patches quickly (instead of waiting for "scheduled" bug releases), is reasonably fast, supports all kinds of extensions, and runs well on all kinds of platforms, managing to look like a native app (by default; it's skinnable) while also looking similar enough to pick up easily on a new platform.

Tabbed browsing alone would make me switch to Firefox, because it's just that annoying to have to open new Explorer windows. But that won't happen in Explorer until 7.0, which is nowhere near ready.

Why is IE the most popular browser? Because it is "The Internet", which is the completely unfounded conviction (faith) of a lot of people who simply don't know any better.

So you're right, sort of. Replace "Firefox" with "Evolution" and "IE" with "Creationism", and you'll see that the debates are similar -- each debate has one side using reason and overwhelming evidence, and the other side using piles of propeganda and faith.

Even 0.3 was very usable

[octopus72]

Being a user from Firefox 0.3 (Phoenix), I immediately predicted it's success. It was, unlike clunky Mozilla (and Netscape) a real refresh in a browser world. Tabbed browsing was very novel thing back then (although not completely new). Enough for me to switch fro IE. Soon extensions were there and it was definitely a killer feature that gave firefox a BIG boost.

Re:Even 0.3 was very usable

[Crizp]

Same here, the tabs was the feature that sold me (and all the others I've shown it to and installed it for). although Opera had them, there was something about the Opera UI that I disliked (and still do - it's too cluttered!)

I don't use many extensions (AdBlock, FilterSet.G, BugMeNot, Aardvark and Download Statusbar) but I like the feature. What makes me keep using it still is its exceptional standards compliance. And it's FAST!

It is said that the KHTML rendering engine is better (and it does render the Acid2 test correctly) but Konqueror is just sooooo daaaaamn slooooow...

On a side note, I hope - oh $deity I hope, that IE 7 will be able to read application/xhtml+xml... As a web developer obsessed with standards, and after having read the XHTML 1.1 Strict / CSS2 specs religiously, I've quit bugfixing my CSS and XHTML just to cater to the IE lusers. It's just too much damn work! If they want to view my pages, they should get a decent browser, and they're told so when they come to the site.

But I'm ranting, as always. Pardon.

Opera brought it upon themselves...

[Anonymous Coward]

... or what they expect of a company or product named 'Opera'? No drama?
Now 'Operette' would have been a company or product with a more upbeat future.

Mozilla Foundation should pay their taxes

[Everyman]

The Form 990 for 2004 has been released by Mozilla Foundation. They consider their $4.4 million in income from "search revenues" (apparently this is all from Google) to be part of their exempt function or purpose.

The IRS considers any advertising income realized by a nonprofit to be "unrelated business income" and subject to taxes. Question: What's in the contract with Google that Mozilla signed in 2004? Is it based on AdWords percentages? Opera's 2005 contract with Google works this way, so I assume that Mozilla's contract with Google does also.

Even if unrelated to AdWords, the fact remains that doing any sort of business with Google, which is an ad agency (99 percent of Google's income is from advertising), means that income from Google is unrelated to any nonprofit, exempt function or purpose.

And it's definitely not a donation. A charitable contribution requires that no goods or services are exchanged. The money passed from Google to Mozilla does not qualify as a contribution, because Google has received substantial benefit from the association.

Naughty Mozilla Foundation. They should pay their taxes.

A copy of Mozilla's 2004 Form 990 is available at http://www.scroogle.org/mozilla.html

VC's still enamoured of Netscape's former mgt

[Anonymous Coward]

As an amusing sidenote to the story, I have seen one of the top VC's in Silicon Valley (KP, to be specific) continually trotting out the former top engineering management at Netscape as pillars of superb engineering management skills.

Go figure.

This story only touches upon the managment ineptitude, from what I've heard from other engineers who worked there.

Re:Where is version 5.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no Firefox 5.0 as of now. Perhaps you only caught the middle part of the latest version number 1.5.0.1

Work is ongoing on 2.0

Re:Where is version 5.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean version 1.5? They haven't even hit 2.0 yet!

Re:Where is version 5.0?

[Diordna]

The latest version of Firefox is 1.5something.

Re:When are they going to patch

[CentraSpike]

well, and i'm really not making this up, i came home from work about a week ago and opened the laptop on my coffee table (that had been on for about a week, probably, with an instance of firefox running constantly) and i found that it had stopped responding almost entirely. I checked task manager (took a while to open) and I was running at 1.2GB of memory/page file usage (this is a laptop with 512MB of RAM). Checked Firefox process and that was well over 300MB. I killed the firefox process (this took about 10 mins to finish cleaning up) and memory usage dropped to around 300MB total - meaning i had recovered around 900MB from the firefox process. I'm not sure why there was a discrepancy between the reported memory usage and the memory recovered but there you go. The memory leak didn't seem to happen gradually either, as it was fine the evening before. Unfortunately I have no idea what the cause was so i haven't submitted a bug report (maybe i'll try and reproduce it sometime - probably not though) but i'd say there's still at least one big memory issue floating around.

Innacurate

[Berger2006]

The article makes it sound as if Blake Ross was non-existent during the creation of Firefox, by not mentioning him. In reality, He was one of the founders, not Goodger.

Re:Innacurate

[blakeross]

Hi Berger,

I appreciate the nod. Richter made a similar comment on the post itself. I attempted to respond with the following about an hour ago, but it seems it didn't make it past the moderation filter, so here it is:

"Hi Richster,

I'm not sure either. My post on Firefox Religion from this time last year did mention Ben. But to be fair, Ben's article does begin with a discussion of perspectives :) Sour grapes don't help anything, and like others here, I enjoyed this article as a persuasive essay on why software engineering doesn't have to be as dispassionate as most people think.

I haven't lost interest in Firefox by a long shot, but coding-wise I prefer to work in leaps and bounds in small teams on fledgling products. Firefox no longer fits that profile--which is mostly a good thing! So I've been working with Joe Hewitt (another of the original Firefox guys) on a new project that will complement Firefox.

I think when we release, it will become clear that I never actually strayed too far from the fox. But I also know that the kinds of things we're working on could never be achieved--or achieved quickly enough, at least--if attempted in a project that has grown as large and mature as Firefox. Thus, our new project is in many ways a realization of where I would take Firefox today were it still as pliable (and thus immature) as 2 years ago.

Given that there are only two of us on the project right now, it consumes about all the coding time I can muster...so I allocate my Firefox time on SpreadFirefox and its campaigns, such as our newest, Firefox Flicks.

Thanks,

Blake"

Re:Innacurate

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read Blake's post carefully, you'll see two good reasons why hobbyist open source software, even at its most wildly successful like FF, will never entirely displace commercial software written by staffs of paid developers.

Re:Innacurate

[blakeross]

Firefox is written by staffs of paid developers, so I'm afraid I miss your point.

Re:Innacurate

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, make that three reasons.

Opera doesn't suck

[thepotoo]

I'm not sure why you weren't modded troll. Opera is a very good, solid stable browser. I know of several people which swear by it, and use nothing else. Personally, I use Firefox, (because of addblock), but Opera does the same things as FF, just as solidly, and it doesn't require extentions. Also, Opera has the ability to open a closed tab, something I really miss in Firefox. OTOH, FF has better bookmark toolbar support. Thus, both are great, and both serve different needs.

If you were trying to make a joke, I guess I missed it.

Re:Opera doesn't suck

[PsychicX]

He was trying to make a joke. It's just that he failed miserably.

Re:Opera doesn't suck

[Oldsmobile]

Umm, yes, I kind of like Opera, though I don't use it for a only a few reasons that could easily be fixed.

Slashdotters hate Opera for some reason.

Of course now that I had to explain it to you, it isn't too funny.

Re:Opera doesn't suck

[Breakfast Pants]

Download Tab Mix Plus and you can reopen tabs in Firefox.

Re:Opera doesn't suck

[Schrade]

Firefox also has the ability to re-open closed tabs. There's several extensions that handle it of which the best, in my opinion, is Tab Mix Plus v0.3.0.2. It also includes SessionSaving in it as well. It's the power extension of tab control.

You can pick it up here: Tab Mix Plus - Firefox Extension

Generally, if there's a feature that you can come up with someone can make an extension for it. Sometimes it's a bit too difficult to to implement some ideas though.

The one thing I really wish Firefox had was the ability to scale both text and graphics smoothly and quickly like Opera does. That is truly a useful feature and why I think Opera is the best browser for lower end computers.

Re:Opera doesn't suck

[thepotoo]

thanks. That's the sweetest extention:
Tab Mix Plus completely enhances Firefox's tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

Taken from here

Re:Opera doesn't suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox also has the ability to re-open closed tabs. There's several extensions that handle it
No. The extension has the ability to re-open closed tabs. Firefox itself does not. Installing 3rd party software to run inside the browser does not make the browser itself more functional.
-Proud SeaMonkey user

Re:Opera doesn't suck

[eyepeepackets]

This Slashdotter has been an Opera user on Slackware Linux since Opera first released for Linux in 2001 or so. It's small, fast and has a good feature set.

I do have the fox and sometimes even use it, but I much prefer Opera. It's not the the fox is bad, but that I'm happy with Opera.

Thanks to the Opera folks for supporting Linux with a great product.

Cheers.

Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is for people who care about free as in freedom.

For those of us who care about having a browser that doesn't suck, there's Opera. No memory leakage, no unexplained CPU use, and now that it's properly free as in beer, there's no reason to torture yourself with Firefox. There just isn't.

Re:Early optimal move for Netscape.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up... Offtopic? Isn't this tread on the history of Firefox. If Netscape had been successful from the start then there'd be no Firefox... would there?

Firefox history

[payndz]

1977: Craig Thomas writes Firefox
1982: Clint Eastwood directs and stars in Firefox
1983: Craig Thomas writes Firefox Down
2004: 'You must think in Russian!' jokes [as seen below] swarm the internet.

There may also have been mention of some internet browser, but that hardly seems relevant...

Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common

[Anonymous Coward]

Soo when are the Opera equivalents of Firefox's Adblock Plus, Filterset.G updater, Web Developer toolbar, and Download status bar coming out? Heck, I'd really be satisified with just an Adblock Plus equivalent.

No, don't start talking about custom CSS. That's not even close to the power and ease of use that Adblock offers.

Hum along...

[Julian Morrison]

A lot has been told about the development of the Firefox browser since Firefox 1.0. The reality is that the story is bigger than just Firefox 1.0. It goes back years, spans continents, and includes a cast of thousands. It's a fantastic story, with all of your standard themes -- greed, rage, turmoil, love lost. But mostly it's a story of dedicated people laboring to create something they truly believe in.

Is it just me, or does this page need a musical theme accompaniment? Something orchestral, stirring, and self-impressed, like the music in Titanic.

Sorry Love Netscape more

[rjdohnert]

More in love with Netscape than I am with Firefox, its faster, it has built in Phishing and spyware protection. Its more attractive and has a much cooler name.

Re:Where is version 5.0?

[Glenn R-P]

Maybe you were looking at the user identification string, which says "Mozilla/5.0" for Firefox and the other major browsers. For example, mine identifies itself as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060202 Firefox/1.5.0.1 (mahowi)" when I check Help->about Firefox Community Edition

But why so much Gnome stuff?

[Richard_J_N]

What I still wonder is why Ffox has got so much Gnome in it. Nothing against GTK (mostly), but a few things really really bug me:

1)Some of the options are controlled by prefs within the gnome-control center. There is no way to set/override them from within Firefox itself, nor is there even a hint as to where to find the control. By default, Firefox sends mailto:s to Evolution, not Thunderbird!

2)Why, oh why did they abandon the rather good native file-widget in favour of the horrendous abomination that is the new GTK2 filepicker? This is very limited, and worse, it takes 30 seconds to open, during which time, the application stalls!

Re:But why so much Gnome stuff?

[Anonymous Coward]

it takes 30 seconds to open, during which time, the application stalls!

Update to 1.5.0.1

Firefox: Most unstable program in common use = +5

[Futurepower(R)]

Note that the Firefox is the most unstable program in common use was moderated up to +5 in a former discussion.

An honest history of Firefox would include the fact that it has been unstable for more than 2 1/2 years.

Re:When are they going to patch

[bunratty]

If there's any bug about Firefox not releasing memory when closing a tab, I haven't found it in Bugzilla, and I can't reproduce it. Maybe you can tell us about the problem?

More interesting, the future of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless there are some radical changes this year in Firefox, I think next year we'll be using past tense on it.

From TFA:
Netscape made two mistakes. They did not publish enough product management information to enable the community to help them achieve their goals. They did not even consistently communicate what these goals were.

Publishing crap to the community is 99% of what Firefox does. Publishing quality code and accompanying documentation is (rounded up to) 1%.

Interesting that they considered C#/.NET, if they had they would have had to rewrite all the code instead of search/replace netscape with mozilla.

From TFA:
Many new contributors are finding the project and new ways to help out.
Dear Google,
How many millions will you pay to be our homepage this year?
Love Mozilla

Ignoring the Mozilla propaganda division, ask yourself these questions about the history of Firefox:
- why have so many memory leaks passed QA for 4 years running
- why aren't extensions run in a protected sandbox
- why is spreading Firefox more important than fixing it?

Firefox hype is pointless, and I think with IE7 and Opera9 coming out this year we'll see people start to realise Firefox is nothing more than a tricked up Netscape, with new problems.

Re:Firefox: Most unstable program in common use =

[Anonymous Coward]

If your Firefox is buggy, it's you at blame. Not Firefox. Either you or your extensions, but never the fox!

It's one of the most amazing features of Firefox that the user is to blame for all problems, not the browser.

I'm a bit disappointed to see that the history of Firefox didn't go into how their priorities have dramatically changed over the years. Their priority is being in the news, not being the best.

A cheesy blog post being /.ed just emphasises that.

Re:Firefox: Most unstable program in common use =

[bunratty]

From the above mentioned +5 post:

You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.

I tried what you suggested with Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Windows XP. I opened that large web page into three tabs, and when all three tabs were done loading, I closed them all. When the tabs were closed, memory use was about 30 MB. When they were open memory use was about 200 MB. I repeated these steps three times. Can you explain what the bug is? Perhaps the moderators did not try what you suggested before modding you up?

And, for the record, I'm not seeing the crashes or CPU problems, either.

To understand, read everything.

[Futurepower(R)]

Note that you included this sentence in your quote above: "This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of [the bug occurring] in normal use, since that web page is huge."

It's just one aspect. To understand what people know about this very well-publicized bug, you should read everything. It's interesting to note that no Firefox or Mozilla developer has done this; it's obvious from their replies.

Anyhow, does it seem reasonable that opening 3 tabs showing the same 4 megabyte HTML file should require 200 Megabytes?

Why is it that Opera has no problems of this nature? Don't say extensions or plug-ins, because I'm not using any.

Re:To understand, read everything.

[bunratty]

Anyhow, does it seem reasonable that opening 3 tabs showing the same 4 megabyte HTML file should require 200 Megabytes?

I just tried the same test using Opera 9 Preview 1, and it takes about 165 MB to show all three tabs. So you're saying that Firefox using 200 MB is obviously unreasonable, but Opera using 165 MB is obviously perfectly reasonable, demonstrating "no problems of this nature"? If so, can you explain how you've made this determination? Sure, Opera uses nearly 20% less memory in this case, but how do you jump to the conclusion that Opera has no problems, and Firefox has terrible memory problems? It sounds like you're just ever so slightly biased towards Opera to me... IHBT!

Re:Where is version 5.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go give yourself a pat on the back for being such a neaubcake.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060205 Firefox/1.6a1

Re:Firefox: Most unstable program in common use =

[bunratty]

If your Firefox is buggy, it's you at blame. Not Firefox. Either you or your extensions, but never the fox!

Of course. That's why Firefox developers created the memory leak detection tool and are hard at work fixing memory leaks. They're all in denial I tell you!

Sheesh. What needs work are the Firefox trolls. Maybe do some research next time so your trolls are at least convincing?

You are only being adversarial.

[Futurepower(R)]

Bunratty, you are just playing an angry game here. If you actually had an interest in the CPU hogging and crashing of Firefox, you would read all the ideas presented.

Re:You are only being adversarial.

[bunratty]

I've read them, and none of them hold any water. I went and read your bug reports; they are mere rants rather than having any useful information such as how to reproduce a specific problem. That's why the bug you mentioned got marked INVALID, not because of any conspiracy to hide problems.

If you can demonstrate a memory problem, CPU hogging problem, or crash, give some steps to demonstrate the problem. Look, there's space right below my post for you to report the problem for all to see. Otherwise, I have to conclude you're trolling.

What is Deer Park?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this Deer Park thing? You called it open source, but it is illegal to use the term Firefox!? what crap is that?

Irony...

[ErnieD]

Gotta love a little irony...

I tried to print the page for later reading, but Firefox 1.5 didn't preview or print it correctly...had to open it in IE to print.

Things that make you go "hmmmm"...

Re:Where is version 5.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Maybe you were looking at the user identification string, which says "Mozilla/5.0" for Firefox and the other major browsers."

MSIE has reported itself as Mozilla/4.0 in user-agent headers since 1997.

Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 1.5.0.1 is far less stable than 1.5, which is less stable than earlier versions. This is on Windows XP SP2, all patches supplied.

I don't know dude. Firefox is pretty fucking stable on Linux 2.6. Maybe you might switch platforms, you know one with a decent memory manager that doesn't swap every chance it gets? Also, the 2.6 kernel's process scheduler kicks ass in the CPU department. But what do I know, go ahead and keep torturing yourself with Windows.

Three biggest challenges of programming

[Futurepower(R)]

Bunratty,

For about 3 years many, many people have reported the unique instabilities in Firefox and Mozilla browsers. Under the conditions mentioned in my bug reports, I'm not able to make the bug fail; it is always there. I've never had any evidence that any Firefox or Mozilla developer has reproduced those conditions.

I've tried Linux, Windows XP, and Windows 98 SE. I've tried Intel and Via chipset motherboards. The CPU and memory hogging bug is always there.

Now the problems are beginning to be reported in technical magazines and newsletters, and even the mainstream media.

The answer from Firefox and Mozilla developers has always been a variation of "If you make the problem easier for me, I will consider fixing it." I don't think that those developers understand the following:

Three biggest challenges of programming

Here are programming's three biggest challenges. Coding is relatively easy. It is these challenges which separate a true professional from an average programmer:

1. Skill in social interaction -- Often the social interaction necessary to understanding what is needed and wanted is more difficult than any coding challenge. Social skills can be learned, and are part of being a good programmer.
   
   
2. Being a scientist -- Often the most difficult programming is easier than the most difficult debugging. Often debugging requires creative scientific thinking. First, it is necessary to gather information. Second, make a theory that fits the facts. Third, design an experiment that tests the theory. Fourth, perform that experiment and analyze the results. Fifth, using the information that was learned, design a new theory, and repeat the steps above.
   
   
3. Designing the user interface -- Only someone who has habits of caring for others can have the necessary detailed insight and creativity to discover how to do everything possible for the user.

Instead there are excuses:

Mozilla Top 10 Excuses

Top 10 bad things Firefox and Mozilla developers say about those who report difficult bugs:

1. Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build.
2. Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important.
3. 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.)
4. If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug.
5. This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. (The other bugs aren't specified.)
6. You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. (But the same use does not crash Opera.)
7. I don't like the way you worded your report. (So, I didn't read it or think about it.)
8. 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.)
9. Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.
10. 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.)