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Firefox 2 Launch - Interview With Chris Beard

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the moving-on-up dept.

ReadWriteWeb writes "This afternoon Firefox 2 will be 'officially' launched. In anticipation of the unveiling, ReadWriteWeb has a brief interview with Chris Beard — Mozilla Vice President of Products. Subjects discussed include the growing enterprise usage of Firefox, the importance of user experience and security, Mozilla's theory behind Web feeds and why they haven't included an integrated RSS Reader, the growing add-on ecosystem, offline browsing, and finally a little about the future of the browser." From the article: "It felt to us like a 2.0 product, particularly if we looked at it from what 1.0 was, to 2.0. It was like half steps, from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0. It's also a very stable and rock solid release - it's really ready for the masses. So it really does feel like a 2, as opposed to a 1.x product. Firefox 2 has, we estimate, between 3-4 times the number of fixes than FF 1.5 did. And that doesn't just include fixes and bugs, but all of the feature work as well as memory, stability and security issues. But there's certainly a lot in it which makes it really solid." Also on the site is a concise review of the product, and an overview of Marketing Firefox 2.0.

1 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Why is the setup file larger than that of Opera? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    The size of the Win32 binary installer for Firefox 2.0 is 5,763 KB. The Win32 binary installer for Opera 9.02 is 4,758 KB. Why is the Opera installer over 1 MB less than the the equivalent Firefox binary? We have to keep in mind that Opera also includes a complete email client and BitTorrent support by default, overhead that Firefox does not include.

    It's the same case for the i386 Linux binaries. For Firefox 2.0, the size of the tar.gz archive is 9,397 KB. The shared Opera binary tar.gz archive for i386 Linux is 5,453 KB. Even the statically linked tar.gz archive is smaller, at 7,115 KB! Again, Opera includes extra functionality that Firefox does not have.

    For what is supposedly a lightweight browser, why are the Firefox installers or binary packages so much larger than the equivalent Opera packages? And it isn't an isolated problem, as both Windows and Linux are affected. On Linux, the Firefox package is nearly twice as large as the Opera package. Yet Opera includes far greater functionality than Firefox.