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Q&A with Firefox's Blake Ross

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the looking-forward-to-looking-forward dept.

dotlin writes to tell us the Seattle PI is running a lengthy and interesting interview with Firefox's Blake Ross. In the interview Ross addresses many of the issues surrounding the future of Firefox including their attempt to streamline Firefox in 2.0, the feature comparison between Firefox and IE, different ways of measuring browser market share, and many more.

8 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Obligatory Question.... by creepynut · · Score: 2, Informative

    In fact, it does: http://www.mozilla.org/ports/os2/

  2. Memory leaks? by Stachybotris · · Score: 3, Informative

    From everything that I've heard mentioned both here and on other sites, the biggest memory hog in Firefox is the Forecastfox extension. Once I uninstalled that, Firefox's footprint dropped down to the 30 megs or so that it's at now from the 70-ish that it was at. Granted, I haven't used said extension in quite a while, so it's possible that this problem has been fixed as well.

    1. Re:Memory leaks? by bunratty · · Score: 4, Informative

      There are lots of extensions with memory leaks and other serious problems. Be sure you're not using an extension on that list if you're having problems.

      Plugins, especially Flash, have also been known to cause problems such as high memory use and 100% CPU use after waking up from hiberation. Be sure to get the latest Macromedia, Java, and Acrobat plugins.

      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  3. Re:Pesky users by n0dalus · · Score: 2, Informative
    Shutting stuff down in order to work around a bug is a horrible and very annoying kludge.
    Get Session Manager so you can close your browser and restart it again while saving all your open tabs (I usually have about 20 tabs open). If Firefox starts using too much memory, restart it and all your pages will be back as you left them.
  4. Re:Seamonkey vs. Firefox/Thunderbird by Anc · · Score: 3, Informative
    (errr.. Add Ons... Change the name only because Microsoft copies the feature under a different name...?)
    Where did you get this one from? They didn't rename extensions to add-ons. Add-ons is just a common name for both extensions and themes and it's nothing new (addons.mozilla.org has existed for quite a while, you know).

    But... my experiences with the latest iterations of Firefox (both the 1.5 series as well as the 2 and 3 development series) have left much to desire. The biggest complaint is the incredible amount of memory the browser consumes - even without any extensions [...] and with a clean profile. If a browser manages to bring a 2 Ghz system with 768 MB to its knees in a mere half hour of browsing there is something wrong. Unfortunately this often-heard complaint does not seem to get the attention it deserves.
    Quite the opposite, fixing existing memory leaks has been one of the priorities of the development process recently - take a look a the following tracking bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32091 5. You can be sure that you report will get plenty of attention if you can provide reliable steps to reproduce you problems. However, to my knowledge nobody has been able to do that.
  5. Re:Control these issues? by bunratty · · Score: 4, Informative

    Of course! They've written the Leak Monitor extension to help extension authors to find leaks in their extensions. As far as I know, there's no way to limit the memory an extension uses without causing additional problems, or to kill an extension that's using too much memory. If you have a detailed suggestion for how extensions or plugins could run in their own processes, perhaps you should explain it.

    --
    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  6. Re:Improved download manager? by Maian · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can try the DownThemAll extension. It's a download manager built into Firefox. Has some minor interface issues (can't get the dtaOneClick feature working), but overall pretty solid and polished.

  7. Re:Matching feature parity? by blakeross · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, most words look silly out of context. I thought this one was clear in the context of a discussion about browser religion. Moments earlier I said "We really are trying to make it less of a religious thing." Moments after I said "They are ripping off Firefox in a sense, but the truth is that when we started Firefox, we ripped off Internet Explorer because we wanted to make sure that people who migrated from IE felt comfortable in the Firefox world...I think in general, the community understands that this is kind of a collaborative process. There are always going to be people on the fringes who are just kind of zealots in either direction."

    Language matters, especially in defusing a religious beliefs. I'm not interested in promoting the idea that Microsoft "ripped off" Firefox.