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

Pesky users

[PinkyDead]

Fortunately we've become kind of accustomed to complaints from the blogosphere and from geeks, which is generally where this line of pressure comes from. We're pretty good at picking out the points that are important to us and really just letting the others go.

Having wombled around the Firefox support site for awhile looking for answers to memory issues, I came to the conclusion that there was a certain level of disinterest in problems that were less than exicting to fix; more so, than other OSS projects. (I fully accept the subjectiveness)

This snippet sort of ties in with this feeling.

Sure, OSS developers can do what they like - I'm not paying them so I don't have much right to complain, fair enough.

But if you want to compete against MS, who are too customer focused then maybe a balance needs to be found which doesn't involve letting so many go.

Re:Pesky users

[bluebox_rob]

Well the paragraph before the one you quoted seems to say the exact opposite, i.e. less emphasis on whizz-bang new features and more tuning under the bonnet:

It looks like the 1.0 release because most of the work that has been going on has been to make it more stable, how do we fix the memory problems that people are complaining about, how do we make everyday tasks easier

I'd say they're heading in the right direction...

Re:Pesky users

[FireFury03]

This isn't a bug, and isn't a memory leak.

Well, it might not be a memory leak, but I'd argue that it is a bug. If I leave my FireFox pointing at a auto-refreshing page for a couple of days it *will* OOM my machine. Whether or not that's a memory leak, I'd argue that causing the OOM killer to come out and start blowing away applications is a bug. Now I understand that this memory is supposidly used to cache content to speed up the browsing experience but I'd counter that argument by pointing out that if FireFox is so deep into swap space that it causes my machine to go on holiday for 5 minutes every time I do something because it's thrashing the swap then this isn't speeding up anything.

I've had firefox running for days at a time without seeing anywhere over 100 MB. I rarely ever see it go over 75 MB. Then again, I haven't kept it open for months at a time. Maybe if I did, then I may see problems.

I never close my FireFox unless I absolutely have to. Currently it's using about 281MB:
    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
  1934 steve 15 0 281m 94m 8624 S 0.0 12.5 191:18.84 firefox-bin
(Yes, I know this includes mmap()ed resources, but I doubt FireFox is mmap()ing much huge stuff).

Then again, its a web browser. You can turn it off once in a while.

That's not really an excuse though is it... Hey, no need to fix memory leaks in Windows, it's only an OS, you can reboot it every so often... :) Shutting stuff down in order to work around a bug is a horrible and very annoying kludge.

Know thy enemy.

[Volanin]

Quoting from the article:

The truth is that [Internet Explorer 7] actually looks pretty good. People don't expect me to say that, they expect me to say that it's terrible [...] I think that it's a solid product, but I think that by the time it comes out, we're going to be another world ahead of them again, so I think it's kind of a step or two behind us.

And quoting The Art of War from Sun Tsu:

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

I, for one, have pleasure being in the Firefox side of this "war".
And it's relieving to know that Blake seems to have a very clear sight while leading this.

at least

[RockModeNick]

I'm personally more than greatful for firefox, because back in the day, netscape sucked so bad I actually really LIKED IE.