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Firefox Losing Its Way?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wrong-side-of-the-bed dept.

An anonymous reader writes "NeoSmart Technologies has a recap on Firefox 2.0 and its shortcomings. Aside from the technical aspects, the article raises some good questions about the Firefox 'community,' it's future, and what it's goals are at the end of the day. Their conclusion? Firefox 1.5 was a much better open-source project/community model than 2.0 ever will be, and that 'It seems Firefox has lost its way somewhere along the passage to fame.'"

7 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. The source is a fucking mess! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Last time I checked, Firefox was still open source software. If they're not fixing bugs fast enough for your liking, by all means, download the source and fix them yourself.

    We hear that reasoning a lot from open source advocates. But when it comes to Firefox and Mozilla in general, it just isn't a case. Their code is a mess, regardless of whether it's C++ code, or whether it's JavaScript code. Look for yourself: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/.

    I don't follow the project closely enough to know why the quality of their code is so low. It may be due to inexperienced or untalented developers. It may be due to rushed development. It may be due to a lack of refactoring. But the end result is that it's very difficult for most programmers to come up to speed with the code even just to fix a small bug, let alone implement entirely new functionality.

    The poor quality of the Firefox and Gecko codebases could be indicative of why we've seen to many quality and security problems with Firefox as of late. Firefox does suffer from pretty horrendous memory leaks, even when not using any non-default extensions. The number of serious 0-day security glitches has increased dramatically, as anyone on any notable security bulletin mailing list can attest to.

    Quality software builds upon a quality codebase. And until the Mozilla project can obtain that quality codebase, we will continue to see them produce poor-performing applications that suffer from frequent security flaws.

    1. Re:The source is a fucking mess! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Nice troll. I'm personally as unqualified to comment on Mozilla source code quality as you are, and I'll definitely not claim everything is perfect (there's been too much abstraction in the past - hence lots of deCOMtamination work now), but every patch that goes into the Mozilla tree gets reviewed critically at least once - most often twice - for code quality, and to point to an example metric that doesn't say much of anything (but neither did you, so that should be familiar ground) - the coverity scan found fewer defects in the Firefox code (0.355) than the average baseline for open source projects (0.434).

    2. Re:The source is a fucking mess! by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Interesting

      "But in any event, I can't pass judgement on this source code, since I can't find it. I looked through the source he linked to and I couldn't find a single C file."

      Exactly the problem with the "if you don't like it, fix it yourself" answer.

      The particular source code you are looking for (rendering pages or putting up menus or toolbars) is located in some directory whose name makes no sense except to the person who originally created it. You probably looked in the directory called "Browser", but, as someone who used to build my own customized versions of Firefox, I can tell you -- it ain't there.

      Unfortunately it's been over a year since I worked with the code so I don't remember where things are anymore and have no desire to go thru the whole process of finding them again.

    3. Re:The source is a fucking mess! by Shawn+is+an+Asshole · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Mozilla codebase is a mess. However, it is getting better. Did you look at it at all when Netscape first released the source? It was absolutely terrible. The Mozilla guys have done a good job at cleaning it over the years, but it's still a mess. They really should have just started from scratch and used the old codebase as a reference.

      However, if you really want to see a codebase that's an absolute mess, download the source to OpenOffice. Same as with Mozilla, the developers are making progress on cleaning it up, but it's still a total mess.

      --
      "It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
    4. Re:The source is a fucking mess! by thealsir · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I'm running firefox 2.0 with a rather minimal set of extensions. Let me tell you, does it leak. I have 1GB of RAM, and, left open long enough (say, three or four days) the system starts slowing down dramatically, and firefox starts not responding that well, UI starts not painting right, etc. I wonder what the heck is going on.

      Then I go into task manager to find firefox consuming 900MB of RAM with tons put in the page file.

      NO OTHER application I have ever used does it to this extreme, and while I'm sure IE has some not so good memory leaks, in my years of using IE that has NEVER happened to me.

      --
      Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
  2. noticed out library is not using it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I noticed our library hasn't upgraded to Firefox 2.0 at Umass Boston. I thought it was interesting and asked the reference librarian why. She said the IT people didn't think it was significant enough to bother upgrading and people also didn't like the way it looked. Interesting, I thought to myself.

    This is one of the reasons I switched back to the Mozilla Seamonkey Suite. It uses less memory when you run Mail and the Browser together than Firefox and Thunderbird. I like the more community orientation of the development also. All you need to do is throw on a good theme like SeaFox http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=tech&conten t=c_linuxseafox.php and add an extension to enhance the UI like MonkeyMenu http://markbokil.org/index.php?section=tech&conten t=c_linuxmonkeymenu.php and you have a better browser than Firefox 2.0

  3. Re:Volunteers are not slaves. by toddbu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What I find so interesting about this post is that it's exactly why companies are nervous about using open source for mission critical projects. You're absolutely right - since people pay nothing for the software then they can make no demands of it. I've even posted bug reports on open source projects that start out saying something like "I know that I haven't paid anything for this so I have no right to complain, but..." So give me one good reason, after reading this post, that any IT manager would want to bet their future or the future of their company on open source? At least with proprietary software you have the right to demand that things get fixed, and if you don't get what you want then you can find an alternative.

    --
    If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.