Q&A with Firefox's Blake Ross

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.

Comments

Memory leaks?

[Stachybotris]

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.

Re:Memory leaks?

[bunratty]

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.

Re:Seamonkey vs. Firefox/Thunderbird

[Anc]

(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.

Re:Control these issues?

[bunratty]

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.

Re:Matching feature parity?

[blakeross]

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.