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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.
Your request for a flame war has been rejected for the following reason(s):
[ ]Incorrect assumptions about what people care about.
[ ]Uncreative formulation.
[x]Too obvious an attempt to start a flame.
Considering how slashdot is designed to cross post, I don't see how this can be avoided.
After all submissions are made based upon what users of websites find, so its inevitable that some of those sites are on your bookmarks list.
As it happens I read 2/3 of the sites you listed, but hadn't read this interview so slash is doing its job.
liqbase
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.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
And quoting The Art of War from Sun Tsu:
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.
If I clone myself, can I call it a thread?
If a girl winks to us, can I call it a race condition?
you must be new here
I.O.U One Sig.
I'm personally more than greatful for firefox, because back in the day, netscape sucked so bad I actually really LIKED IE.
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.
The day Netscape released the source to Navigator I compiled it and gazed in wonder at this 'real' browser I compiled on my Linux box. I followed the development of the Mozilla project from the failed start based on the old Navigator code via the slow-starting gecko-based suite all the way to the Mozilla suite. Then, suddenly, Firefox (under one if its many names) and Thunderbird appeared. They looked more modern than the Mozilla suite and individually had slightly better performance. I started using the threesome (Firefox, Thunderbird and the suite) next to eachother. For day-to-day browsing I used Firefox, for more involving things the Mozilla suite has always been more appropriate. I have also followed the development of Firefox (and to a lesser extent Thunderbird) closely, building local versions, testing nightlies, etc.
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 (errr.. Add Ons... Change the name only because Microsoft copies the feature under a different name...?) 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. Firefox' development strategy being what it is there is not that much opportunity - other than by filing bugs - to influence priorities and design criteria.
So... lately I have switched more and more from using Firefox/Thunderbird to using the Seamonkey suite - the successor to the Mozilla suite. It still feels a bit more dated than Firefox and Thunderbird but it does offer much more in features while having a much smaller memory footprint. Add the Seafox theme and it looks quite a bit like Firefox/Thunderbird.
The way things look now I think Seamonkey will be my browser and mail app of preference. Should Firefox and Thunderbird ever run on top of XULrunner I might switch back but for now I have better things to do with my memory...
--frank[at]unternet.org
Since these issues are apparently fairly well-known about, is there anything that the Mozilla team has done to try to prevent or resolve them? Is there some easy way to kill an extension that may suffer from a memory leak at runtime, without taking down the whole Firefox or Seamonkey session? Likewise, for plugins. What about preventing such issues in the first place? Is there a mechanism in place to limit the amount of memory a particular plugin or extension can consume?
From the sounds of it, a lot of these problems are not much different than those issues that operating systems typically deal with: allocating resources to competing third-party programs (extensions or plugins, in this case). Perhaps it is time for Firefox to off-load such responsibilities to the operating system it is running above, and instead just provide a standard method of communication between an extension or plugin running as its own, separate, killable process.
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.