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Firefox Losing Its Way?
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.'"
Here, allow me to post a short summary of the article to save you some time:
I think the new theme and start page is ugly, and there are a few weird bugs that haven't been fixed yet, and they haven't implemented a feature I want in a way that I want it. Therefore, it sucks.- Don't like the default theme that comes with Firefox? Go get another that you like better. Don't like the first run page? Who cares? You only see it one time!
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. That's not meant as a smart-ass excuse for not fixing a bug, but the article's author says:
No, the best way to help is to go through the source and fix the bug! Don't talk about it, do it, and solve everyone's problem with having it!
- The feature the author wants implemented better is an RSS feed reader. I have some news for you: it's supposed to be a basic implementation that gives you the bare essentials. If you want one with bells and whistles, go get an extension that suits your needs better. This isn't a sign that Firefox has lost its way, its a sign that it's principles haven't changed much at all.
- Last, but not least, I'm not sure what the author of this article is proposing we all do. Switch to IE7 or Opera? Yeah, that will help the open source community.
Point is, while Firefox 2.0 was never pitched as the last version of Firefox that we'll ever need as a result of its attaining perfection. Personally, I wish that they would fix the bug that causes only the first page of web pages with absolutely positioned elements to be printed. I wish I had the skill to fix it myself; I would if I could. But I'm sure they're working on it, it doesn't change the fact that Firefox 2.0 is, in my humble opinion, the best damn browser out there right now, and the last thing I'm going to do is undercut the extraordinary efforts of its developers and contributors by posting a whiny blog entry about how because there are still a few things I don't like about it, it's somehow "lost its way somewhere."
Sheez. Talk about ungrateful.
The complaints raised here are trivial features. Not the performance or stability problems I had with 1.5 but instead things like RSS & aesthetics which to me aren't too important when it comes to a browser. I'm sure for some other people RSS or theme might make a world of difference but I'm not that person and I don't wager there are many people like that.
The concern that it makes itself the default browser is valid but using the word 'hijacking' is a bit strong. Honestly, I didn't even notice this but I was going from 1.5 to 2.0 on most of my computers so that might explain why this was a non-issue for me. Perhaps they assumed if you were going to 2.0, you were coming from 1.5? Either, I agree with this qualm though I find it to be the most serious offense listed in the article.
So you may ask if Firefox has lost its way but I counter that there have merely been a few miss-steps along the way. I'm keeping an eye on IE 7 & so far it hasn't lured me away from Firefox 2.0 so I guess that's a good sign as I consider my standards to be pretty high.
My work here is dung.
Some flamebait article from a blog no one's ever heard of, probably submitted by the blogger, passes for news? The major complaint is that the blogger doesn't like the default theme and start page! Pick others!
How about a 'web design recap' for NeoSmart Technologies, as having to fend off a popup which pointlessly informs me that "Mozilla 1.3 Beta is not supported! I'll try, though, but it might not work." has somewhat dampened my interest. Perhaps my 'Mozilla' is 1.3, but that's probably because it's a 'WebKit'.
The only things that should be added to Firefox are bug/security fixes. Leave all the bells and whistles stuff to the extension authors.
Their bugzilla is so filled with ancient bugs that no one has eve nlooked at, and gecko is falling behind their competitors. They really need to get their priorities straight.
that should be "my 'Mozilla' is < 1.3."
I must say, I'm having a feeling akin to the one I had when Netscape went over the 3.0 version number: things feel somewhat slower and buggier, with more bling that I don't really need. One of the most irritating "features" I keep hitting is whenever I open something with an extension, be it a pdf with Acrobat reader, a flash animation, a video with mplayer or a java applet: about 1 out of 10 times, the cpu goes to 100% and FF is dead in the water. I know the usual answer, which is that it's not FF's fault but the extensions', but it happens with all the extensions the same and it didn't happen so much, if at all, with earlier versions.
I don't know, perhaps there's a pattern with very large, popular open-source projects: the more popular they grow, the more developers tend to focus on adding features instead of correcting bugs...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The only thing that bugs me is the new TAB OVERFLOW managing. Before it scaled the tabs down. YES, there was a limit to how many it could hold but it could hold more on the screen at once. A combination of both means of managing the overflow would have been the better way.
Slashdotted biatch!
Someone who can't even survive a slashdotting over thanksgiving weekend critising Mozilla?
Hahahahaha.
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.
I've upgraded to 2.0 on all 3 of my PCs, one running Windows, another with Mandriva Linux, and my Powerbook. I usually use Safari on my Powerbook but I'll start Firefox 2.0 just to use its "Report Web Forgery" menu pick to report the web sites that come in the phishing emails I get every day. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/phishing-prot ection/
Hopelessly misleading blurb. Here's the edited-for-truth version. The italics indicate the original text:
An anonymous reader A NeoSmart staffer writes:
"NeoSmart Technologies has a recap an attack article on Firefox 2.0 and it's shortcomings we say some things that we thought would get some traffic.
Aside from the technical aspects the things we don't understand but will criticize anyway, the article raises some good questions ridiculous mischaracterizations about the Firefox "community," [Editor's Note: Why the "sarcasm quotes"? Are you saying it isn't a community?] it's future, and what it's goals are at the end of the day we inserted a meaningless sports metaphor here.
Their conclusion sophomoric trolling you can safely ignore? Who cares!
There. Now what was so hard about that, Slashdot eds? Oh, and while you're at it, "its" was incorrectly spelled three times out of three.
Firefox is a good browser. I personally refuse to use it, but I'm not afraid to admit that. I simply wish that Epiphany was compatible with Firefox extensions.
Yo.
The time between a critical flaw and a patch to fix it is too great. IE7 has been patched more than FF2.0, and this is not a good thing.
There hasn't been a *single* patch to fix flaws in FF2. Not. A. Single. One.
This isn't a troll, so please don't mode me down. When MS leads the way for browser security, things are very, very wrong for FF.
I'm an XP user partly by choice, but when I seriously consider running FF2 under XP via a VM in Linux just to get some security, something is wrong.
Personally, I wish that they'd fix the bug that makes Firefox2 think that when you shut down Windows, and restart it 2 years later, it'll offer to `restart session`. Shutting down your pc should terminate Firefox, and end the session. I shouldn't have to shut down apps individually to avoid security problems (ie some guy 2 years down the line restarting firefox and being offered to `continue` my `session`...
There hasn't been a *single* patch to fix flaws in FF2. Not. A. Single. One.
There haven't exactly been a lot vulnerabilities found either. The only one I know of found in Firefox 2 since its release is marked as less critical by Secunia. I'm sure that if you can find critical errors in Firefox, they will be fixed quickly.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
The article is slashdotted, but I think the main problem here is that Firefox has pretty much reached perfection. Firefox was intended to be a stripped down version of the Mozilla suite with just the browser. Now there seems to be a bigger push for built-in gee-whiz features.
I guess the community has just gotten board and went home. Specifically I have noticed:
* Mozillazine almost never seems to have any news anymore.
* The SpreadFirefox image galleries have been screwed up for ages now and people keep posting crap that never never gets cleaned up.
* The Mozilla store seems to have been having problems lately (it would hang and timeout when placing an order) and there Firefox CDs are still at old 1.5.0.4 version. (A physical factory pressed CD you can hold in your hand can go a long way convincing a PHB that this is real software!)
* And where is Thunderbird 2.0 anyway?
Come on folks! We still have an evil browser from Microsoft to crush!
Hmm, so here's a question: what about IE7 is so great?
I myself use both GNU/Linux and FF2, but I will try to be as unbiased as possible. What don't you like about FF2 and what do you like about IE?
I agree that Internet Explorer 7 is definitely competition for Firefox. However, I think the IE team shot themselves in the foot when they moved the menu bar. I went back to Firefox because I liked the user interface better.
In Soviet Russia, sigs read YOU!
And how, pray ask, is Konqueror better? Not only does it require KDE, which I don't want to use, it does not have an extension system, is not compatible with other operating systems and in some cases, websites.
I have installed IE7 on a few customers machines and then had to uninstall shortly after. I have had problems loading many pages with IE7. The pages it had problems loading comcast.net, cnn.com, slashdot.org. Not quite sure why, it would just hang indefinitely. There have been quite a few customers at my work who had IE7 installed in the latest round of updates, then when they uninstalled it IE6 was broke. Gotta love it.
Let's look at the facts.
1. Stops popups automatically
2. constant updates and improvements every x months (because it is open source)
3. better security than IE
4. the option to easily clear cookies, history, temp files, etc on close (finding all the crap IE buries in your HDD is next to impossible for the average user)
IMHO The firefox browser is a damn good browser.
To tell you the truth I use FF for #1 ALONE. After listening to all the chatter on slashdot about holes in IE7...
If your honda has a bad muffler, do you trade it in for a yugo?
How about this one?
Microsoft's Upcoming Operating System Woes.
As Microsoft is planning to role out its latest installment in the Windows saga, tech experts warn
that Vista is far from enterprise ready. "Up to now we have received no word whatsoever from
Microsoft whether Vista will indeed integrate seamlessly with existing Windows 2000 servers" says Vox
Technologica's Expert Frank Gibson. "As far as we know the numerous gotchas we have uncovered
in the lastest beta release of the operating system have not been fixed". Since many of Microsoft's
customers are still using Microsoft Windows 2000 servers, tech experts are not expecting a massive wave of
upgrades to Microsoft Windows 2003. Tech experts agree, only very few corporate users will readily
adopt Windows Vista in 2007 pointing out that Windows XP was shown the same kind of cold shoulder.
Is that by default the search box kept pinging Google's server for suggestions when you typed something in the search box. (I haven't seen where it pings for suggestions when the default search engine is not Google's). I can't understand why Firefox developers would leave it turned on by default.
Any way browser.search.suggest.enabled is where this can be turned off. Just search for Filter: "suggest" in about:config tab.
Now my (conspiracy) theory is that the suggestion redirect to Google is paid for by Google. Like it is (publicly known) for the searches in the Search box.
NeoSmart Technologies has a recap on Firefox 2.0 and it's [sic] shortcomings. Aside from the technical aspects, the article raises some good questions about the Firefox "community," it's [sic] future, and what it's [sic] goals are at the end of the day.
Attention Slashdot editors: Edit is a verb. Possessive pronouns in English (save one's) do not have apostrophes.
Firefox's popularity finally shamed Microsoft into updating IE. They did what they needed to do -- encourage (or force) IE to catch up and maybe even try to innovate. The fact is, no matter how popular FF will ever or could ever get, it will probably never be more popular than IE, as long as IE remains the default browser. But by forcing MS to update IE, they've probably helped more people than those who actually use FF.
It's still worth working on, sure, but it's not nearly as crucial as before. IE7 is not nearly as much an embarrassment as IE6 is.
I love firefox for it's plugins, but in gnome, epiphany might be a good choice. I found it more stable, easier on the mem and for the rest not all that different from firefox.
Don't forget to enable the ad-blocker and page-info under Tools->Extensions.
One thing I am missing though is the CTRL+K for google-search.
While you are at it; try abiword whenever you don't really need OOo.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
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.
n 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
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&conte
Before you instantly flamebait me for critizing a high profile OSS project please let me briefly explain my background.
I am an almost 100% Linux user simply because its the OS which works best for me. I keep a spare windows partition only for playing
games. Also I try to suggest OSS solutions in my dayjob and have so far succeeded in getting my company dependent on Apache/MySQL, Imagemagick, Ghostscript, PHP etc (unfortunately all on windows servers, which I loathe).
Anyway allow me to get to the point:
Can anyone tell me why Firefox both starts and run so much slower on linux than windows. It almost feels like its made for windows and the linux version is running on some emulation layer. Now I know thats not the case, I know about their XUL platform and all of that.
The very slow loading could have something to do with the dynamical linker being somewhat slower on linux?, or is the instantiation of lots and lots of objects? slow memory allocation. But I seem to recall linux being much faster at that although I can't point you at any graphs or papers.
Why is it slower than the windows version when you have lots of open tabs?. I've seem to recall hearing that this is due to the flashplugin for linux being slow and since almost every page have flash everywhere yadda yadda.. Haven't tried to compare the two using pages with no flash objects so that sounds quite reasonable.
Why is it slower doing DHTML? again I don't really know if that is the case but try opening http://dojotoolkit.org/ "See it in action"->General widgets->Fisheye (sorry but I can't be bothered to try and dig out a direct link into that steaming pile of javascript (no offense dojo devs)) and compare the rendering speed in firefox/win32 vs. firefox/i386?
This isn't meant as a whining post. Im genuinely interested in why there is such a huge different between the windows and linux firefox experience, I've been wondering about that simple fact for several years now.
and no I can't provide sources and all that crap but being developer myself and having used the software for a long time, I sure can tell when an application is noticeable faster on the same machine.
if any firefox dev is reading this: don't get me wrong im grateful for what I got, firefox is a great browser. I just think its sad that the greatest OSS browser runs worst on the greatest OSS OS (GNU/Linux).
MB of RAM that is. Plus with Konqueror, a larger proportion is shared libraries.The article is slashdotted, but I think the main problem here is that Firefox has pretty much reached perfection. Firefox was intended to be a stripped down version of the Mozilla suite with just the browser. Hmmm. Yes...
Deleted
The regular user when he installs firefox, versions 1.5 or 2, don't really see why Firefox is better then Explorer.
He doesn't see the extensions, add-ons, etc
:]
And to be honest vanilla Explorer > vanilla Firefox, though "hacked" firefox (jesus, I'm using too many linux terms) is much better then Explorer.
So the other 85% need guide to show them how and why firefox > explorer.
About firefox source, I think that it's too much a mess like someone already commented on from a few minutes of looking on it.
What we shall do now, is continuing helping people to see why Open Source is good! I've traveled through schools and showed them linux, Firefox, etc. I'm talk backing on ynet.co.il the local news site, and offering help to move to linux (till now helped 56 people to move to linux!). I hope you're doing as much as you can to help the open source community.!
GOODLUCK
I'd like to add: this is my experience after running firefox on 4 different distributions and having compiled it myself once, since it wasn't called firefox and the version numbers started with 0.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! You really ought to consider a career as a stand up comic. I haven't heard anything that funny in years. I can't even begin to express how far from perfection Firefox is. Perhaps it'd be closer to perfection if it handled cookies properly, handled unknown content types in a sane manner, and most importantly, had a rendering engine that didn't suck (or at least, a development team that was interested in fixing rendering bugs, rather than adding on yet more new and pointless features and eye candy instead).
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Dealing with MS and the mindset that goes with it is what is the big fat mess, and it always has been. The linux devs need to make a *serious* fork and just go their own way,completely, even to the point of renaming the new open source browser something else and work ONLY for open source operating systems. Let the Microsoft volunteer partners (like novell and suse now and the bulk of the mozilla people) deal with making crap work with WINDOWS. FF is 99% a WINDOWS product. We need a LINUX browser.
Messing with behaviors from older versions is a lame thing to do. For example: Replacing the menu hot keys (this totally broke my sage extension hotkey. GRRRRR), and changing the behavior of backspace on the linux platform. Had to dig through about:config to find and fix the latter. No easy way to do the former without messing with your personal css files. Not cool.
http://www.networkmirror.com/ioK7jCMSddcKibor/neos mart.net/blog/archives/294/2/
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Comment removed based on user account deletion
are they still developing the Mozilla Composer?
i like to use it every now and then
They just made it hidden by default. Like Safari does with the status bar.
(I had a friend who used Safari for like a year and a half, and one day he complained to me that he wished it had a status bar. It never occurred to him, apparently, to check the View menu for an option to turn on the status bar, the same way you would with any other toolbar. So maybe you do have a point about IE7... either way, get used to it, because Windows Live Messenger and some other Vista apps are the same way.)
Comment of the year
Comment removed based on user account deletion
According to the site Bill's Big List of Firefox 2.0 Extensions, in only 40 days, the number of Firefox 2.0 compatible extensions has jumped from 677 extensions to 1449 extensions.
If this is in any way a reflection of the Firefox development community, it looks like the community is thriving pretty well.
*KHTML is > Gecko. It is lighter, faster, and more standards compliant.
*Konqueror does NOT require all of KDE; just mainly KDElibs and QT
*It DOES have an extension system.
Any questions?
hahaha... you believe in a supernatural being
"i stand on the edge of destruction" -shai hulud
'i' is taught in schools. Frack is not (because it's not a real word, nope, no more than gajillion).
Schools teach plenty of things that aren't true and fail to teach many things that are. What does that prove?
So you're the over caffeinated troll?
I'm neither afraid to post while logged in, nor to use actual profanity.
Just look at my recent posting history.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The article is slashdotted, but I think the main problem here is that Firefox has pretty much reached perfection.
I doubt very many find Firefox perfect. But I do think that most people have got what they wanted - an alternative browser which is usable on mainstream pages and that runs on Linux and Mac. By mainstream sites I mean market share, Opera was standards compilant for years and never got the market share to make sites standard compliant. For many people that's probably "good enough" that they'd rather spend time using Firefox (or doing something else) than develop it. With the inertia it has, hopefully that'll be enough that the "IE-web" never comes back. The Mac market getting an upswing also promises well for that, and Linux... on the desktop any day now, right? And should Firefox flaunder and fail, I'm sure by then KDE4 and Konqueror would be there to carry the banner. Personally I'll be happy on Opera as long as IE's market share stays low.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I am a big fan of open source, and have turned quite a few to Firefox from IE. But with IE7 coming, they have made a big progress, even if they are still trying to catch up with what Firefox has to offer. On the other hand, we can see new problems arising with Firefox 2, and some inhereted from Firefox 1.5 like the excessive memory usage. I would say IE have won this round and Firefox need to act strong to bring things back.
I think the real problem is that Firefox doesn't make enough use of the extension mechanism. It's clearly sufficiently powerful to do all sorts of interesting things with, but the default install of Firefox doesn't have any extensions at all. You can change a lot of the appearance of Firefox with themes, but it doesn't come with any themes, either (the "default theme" thing is actually not handled as a theme, but is just the built-in defaults for things, which is why you can't install 1.5's default theme on 2.0).
What they should do is split most of the functionality into extensions and all of the appearance into themes, and ship those extensions and themes with the browser. Then you'd be able to choose exactly which features you want from each version. And, since extensions can be updated independantly of the rest of the browser, it would be no problem if there was a bug in deciding that a word had been typed completely for the inline spellchecker; they'd release a new version of the spellchecker whenever they fixed it.
That's true for any moderately useful language. If the language locks you in with limitations, the end result is that the code grows up too much, and either the files become too large or there are so many source code files that you cannot find your way in the project.
With the languages people have been creating in the last 20 years or so, the limitations appear outside of their specialization. For instance, Perl is an excellent language for what it does best, which is processing text through regular expressions, and a mess for many other uses. PHP is wonderful for doing its own specialty, accessing databases from websites. Also, I particularly like the way PHP handles arrays, making them functionally equal to dictionaries. And Python is excellent for small scientific/engineering apps. I think the only "modern" language I absolutely hate is Ruby, because of its ugly syntax. It seems like the Ruby designers did their best effort to create syntax rules that are even more irregular than FORTRAN's...
But when a project grows big, one needs more than syntax, one needs to look at an upper level of organization. The project needs to be well structured in the API, it needs a well-layered set of libraries, it needs a clearly mapped directory structure, etc.
When I manage a large project, I usually start by designing an overall structure for the API that will handle the most computation intensive tasks. These are coded in a library, normally written in C/C++. I make an effort to consolidate and freeze the core API as early as possible, new functions may be added later, but I make an effort to have the most basic functions unchanged. Around this core library one can use different languages, I often do prototypes in either Python or Perl and rewrite them in C/C++ if necessary. The language itself is relatively unimportant for me, I think good coding practices are more important. Use short functions (<150 lines), mnemonic names, well indented code, plenty of comments (but avoid unnecessary ones, like int counter
With these practices, one can write code that stays readable as the system grows, regardless of the language. The big problem is with projects that started small and grew up over the years. With these, it's often easier to start over than to try to keep adding functions to the old code, but of course, with a project the size of Firefox, it would take a manager with adamantium balls to decide to rewrite it from scratch.
To me, neither browser is "Great". FF is nice because of all of the extensions. I use one for the game I play (See my sig), and I used a very handy one the other day for reporting a *lot* of form post fields. It didn't work quite right, but it was still helpful.
IE is nice because for me, I don't ever see the terrible memory leaks that FF has. If I leave FF open for more than an hour or so, it starts to get really big and nasty. Also, FF seems to browse much slower than IE, and hangs a lot of regular pages. In fact, the other day, I caught myself automatically hitting "reload" on a page when browsing with FF because it happens so often, and I thought, "why do I have to reload pages so often when browsing with FF"?
Sigh, I guess that is why a business driving opensource is usually a more likely candidate for success then a group of amarture programmers.
Their modivation for continuing to perfect the product is money, not peer-recongition or geek-worship.
I'm not saying FF2.0 is bad, it's just that they need better managers who can prioritize properly managing their great programmers.
Otherwise, their programmers will get lost adding new features instead of fixing bugs.
That'll probably result in a better product overall, as well.
Cheers
Ben
Brendan Eich addresses most of these issues http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/20 06/10/mozilla_2.html
You should know that they do intend to compete in the mobile web space. That means they have no choice but to clean everything up without the excuse "oh memory is so cheap anyway.."
Firefox Power http://firefoxpower.blogspot.com/
"Any questions?"
Yes: Is sombody working on a firefox that uses khtml for rendering, or alternatively: A khtml-based browser that supports firefox extensions?
Wow, good reply, and thank you. I stand corrected. I won't switch to Konqueror because it does not work nicely with GNOME, but I really respect what you said. I will try to be more considerate next time.
There are **plenty** of sites that can get around FF's popup blocker. And IE 7's popup blocker is getting good. I'd say they are about equal now.
Interesting points. I too enjoyed the older RH releases and used AfterStep. But running a modern distro does not mean you have to run Gnome or KDE. I currently use fluxbox, which is about as minimal and fast as you can reasonably get.
I don't see how free software can manage transition as well as commercial software. Thinking through the transition issues is a boring process. In a commercial software shop, the developers are interested in the new version. Others, like support and marketing, may be aware of the needs of existing customers. In free software, the developers run the show.
The "juvenile" names of programs also reflect the fact that developers run the show with no intervening marketing department. Inside commercial software shops, products and subsystems are given names much like free software. But these names are usually kept hidden, or only leak out to fans.
Actually, I'd say just the opposite: there's a push against the bloat that the community can seem to do nothing about. Lean-mean browser? Not so much anymore. More whiz-bang features keep getting added, while bugs and performance fall by the wayside.
I think there was a lot of excitement over the 1.0 push and the race to take 10% of the market. After those big milestones it's not easy to get people excited once again until another big milestone comes along. You can't just schedule when we're going to take 20% of the market. And no version number is as important for an open-source project as the 1.0 mark--that kind of fire won't come back.
I think the formula for future success I'm arriving at is:
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Right before Microsoft Released IE7 I was finishing up a new webpage. I checked it in FF and IE6 and it rendered fine on both. Then I start getting complaints. You guessed it IE7 didn't render it correctly.
Good freaking grief.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I use it and I love the zoom function.
Opera is better out of the box but I think Firefox is better once you get it set up with the right extensions.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've seen the same thing you have, and I'm also interested if there's a reason for it.
I run Firefox on Linux at home. I've tried both self-compiled and Mozilla precompiled binaries, with various versions from 1.0.x to 2.0. In all cases, complex sites like GMail are significantly slower on my home machine than on comparable or slightly slower Windows machines I use (e.g. at work or my parents' house). I haven't done a direct comparison by running Windows on the same computer as Linux, but I have more RAM and CPU speed than those computers, with less RAM being taken up by other running apps.
Even sites without such fancy interfaces, such as phpBB-type forums, take a little bit longer to render the pages. It's annoying because they stick at 100% CPU while doing it, so I can't interact with the Firefox interface for that instant. Sounds trivial, but when I'm trying to open 5 forum threads at once and then switch to the tabs afterwards to read them, it slowly me down significantly compared to doing the same thing with Windows Firefox.
Anyone have any insight on why the parent and I might be having these problems?
IMO, part of the problem is that the project now has legions of supporters just dumping money and publicity on the project, regardless of quality. Back when this project was just getting started, I bet they put much more effort into their code.
"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."
The fact is, 99.9% of users simply aren't capable of finding and fixing these bug. When Firefox has to compete with Opera and IE which generally don't have such basic bugs (copy & paste bug is still occuring for me in an updated version) and when people moan about problems, they tend to (eventually) get fixed. A sluggish response is always better than "fix it yourself" responses that result in long term bugs that plague firefox.
So they are your slave? It is not their job. Most open source developers are volunteers. Maybe if you were paying the develper to write code for the project, you'd have an arguement, but it sounds to me like you are not. You just want them to be your slave because they publish a useful program for free.
I suppose if you were homeless and went to a soup kitchen, you would demand they hand feed you and wipe your ass after you use their bathroom too.
Those options were removed because they never worked reliably in the first place. So the developers though it best to remove them instead of instilling a false sense of security.
And since I'm replying about the article already...
The article's author probably forgot that Firefox and Thunderbird are now in Mozilla Corporation's hands. Mozilla Foundation is the home of all the other projects.
Welcome to the days of SuSE 10.1 and WindowMaker, then.
Or not - up to you.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I was a relatively early adopter of Firefox, I liked it because of the multiform support, tabbed browsing, etc. I have a triple boot system, with Vista RC2, XP, and Mandriva - and Firefox 2.0 has been crashing/hanging within minutes of any browsing session, with no discrimination for the platform I am on. Needless to say, previous versions didn't have the issue. I have a psychical aversion to downgrading (I'm American, we aren't trained for that kind of thing), but I guess I will have to go back to 1.5 soon. I have also found myself using IE or opera when I am doing something that I really don't want to lose.
/., a major push to get everyone possible using FOSS.
So here's my point - The community can't have it both ways with FOSS:
I'm a EE, and I know enough coding to break stuff, and piss off the CS dept., but I have no desire whatsoever to debug a browser. With that in mind, I've seen, as have the rest of you here at
1: Either this type of software should only be used by those who have the ability and/or desire to fix what is or could become broken
or
2: the community, having pushed the use of FOSS into the less-technical world, should take responsibility for what they have created and promoted.
The reality right now is that the 'community' seems to want both - they want the market share - and they are very quick to run away when a product doesn't work as advertised - and don't try to say that Firefox in particular isn't advertised. Try searching for 'Firefox 2.0' crashes...Basically every response will lead you here.
Since Firefox really is the poster child of the FOSS movement, they need to be very careful not to make Microsoft's case for them.
I mean, damn. How in hell do you figure that?
I had the best possible user experience with firefox since the 2.0 release than ever before with a mozilla product.
I farking love the browser.
Keep your greasy paws off my fox.
NO SIG
Well, that's different. If I wasn't so lazy I'd try and make a joke about Firefox memory leaks at this point.
Are you running Firefox on a new version of one of the more popular distros? I have noticed some newer distros are running services which you may not need (dare I say bloat). Also KDE 3.5 is more graphic intensive than previous. Whilst I've noticed Firefox takes longer to load up under Linux, I have not observed Firefox *run* slower on my Linux boxes than my Windows box, and my Linux systems are older (and slower) hardware.
Firefox may be one of the most popular open source projects, but that does not mean it can implement features as fast as other browsers. Its developers are still comprised mainly of volunteers. When Firefox 3 comes out (Q2/3 2007) it will be a huge step forward from firefox 2, but how many steps forward will Opera have taken by then? If the nightlys are any indication, then Firefox 3 will be on par with Opera 9 in terms of speed and memory usage.
Lets just assume IE doesn't exist, but another browser I didn't mention is Konquerer. From what I've heard it will be avaible on OS X and Windows when KDE 4 is released.
Competition is good
OK, guys, to tell the truth: in former times, for me it was FF, Konquerer and Opera, when I fired-up my boxes under the Linux. It was FF and Opera, when I fired-up any of my boxes under Windo$e. Now the situation has changed, and FF is completely REMOVED from my boxes! under the Wondow$, IE7 definitely beats the sh_t out of FF, which (FF) is relatively slow, clumpsy, and I had problems with memory usage already at FF 1.5. My recommendation for Window$: definitely IE7.0 (by the way, there is very nice free tool available to import all of your FF bookmarks into the IE7.0), for Linux - Opera and Konq. No FF!
Sometime around 2016, modern English usage was revised so that "its" was used in both cases, and the reader deduced the meaning from context. By that time, most scholars were in agreement that this was accepted usage. At least, that's what John Titor told me.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
When you have only have a small market share, it is generally not a good idea to avoid changes that will attract new users in order to try to not inconvenience existing users. The change to tab UI is a response to the experience of having a lot of tabs open.
Fluxbox is enormous compared to the sheer genius and simplicity of UWM/UDE.
If people want eye candy inside of a wm which is still sane and doesn't attempt to take over your system why aren't more people looking at Enlightenment?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
I couldn't have cared less about the default theme or first-use page...seriously, people, grab a clue regarding priorities.
However, after a couple days' usage, I found two issues in FF2.0 that led me to uninstall it and go back to FF1.5:
1 - Broken "back" browser function:
Basically, when I hit the "back" button, I expect to be taken not only to the page I was previously viewing, but to the same location of that page. With FF2, every time I use the "back" button, I get taken to the top of the previous page. Extremely annoying.
2 - Reduced image filtering function:
This one was (and still is) my favorite feature of Mozilla/Firefox 1.x. I like the ability to select the content checkbox that displays images ONLY from the originating website, with the exception of my personal whitelist. That checkbox vanished in 2.0, and this alone was enough to make me uninstall it.
While these may sound like trivial issues to some, they're a major component of my everyday end-user experience with a browser...and FF 2.0 offered nothing in the way of improvements that would even come close to offsetting this setback to my experience.
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.
Hold on a minute! They did do that. They rewrote the whole damn thing starting on October 1998, a mere seven months after the initial release of the source code. One year later, mozilla shipped nothing, and JWZ resigned citing lack of progress. In 2000 -- two years after the rewrite started -- mozilla released the new layout engine, Gecko. Jaws all around had to be picked up off the floor. It was a horribly buggy. (The most obvious bug to me was the fact that scrolling to the bottom of a page, then back up, then back down a second time, caused TWO copies of the page to appear in the window. Repeat N times, and you got N copies. I discovered that bug within the first five minutes of use.) FOUR years after the rewrite, Mozilla released version 1.0. Now four years after 1.0, 8 years after the rewrite that is widely considered the biggest blunder of mozilla's history. A blunder that is made all the worse since it's outcome was immediately forseeable.
Now you're not seriously proposing the repeat their old mistakes are you?
How does Kernel handle this situation when it got big like Firefox? Is the Kernel's sources messy, hard to maintain, etc.? Is it going losing its way too?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Funny, but "it's" = "it is", not "it has".
Funny, but "it's" = "it is", not "it has".Consult your dictionary again. Both expansions are correct.
OK, Firefox has some security design flaws. Installing extensions at the request of the remote site and asking the user if you want to install it, that's a mistake. There's been one vulnerability in this already.
However, this is a TINY hole compared to what Microsoft exposes in IE with ActiveX. And you can simply not install extensions, or remove all the whitelisted sites, and you've closed it. You can't turn off ActiveX because the HTML conrol is itself an ActiveX component!
It's like the difference between not washing your hands after using a public lavatory, and running barefoot over broken glass through a "Hot" ward in a Michael Crichton disaster epic snogging the Ebola patients.
It's typical that this thread devolves into a fight about which language gives you cleaner and more understandable syntax, or whether it's just down to "elegant code" as if that's the main problem here. Want to make your code maintainable and understandable? Here's the big secret you've been overlooking:
Comments.
The sad fact is, the vast majority of open source code may as well not be open, given the impenetrability of it all - mostly written by losers who have convinced themselves that they write "self-documenting code" (*cough* bullshit). There is no such thing as self-documenting code; even if you use Literal Programming techniques (which not nearly enough people do, and which help a great deal) you still need to put actual line comments in.
The last time I dove into Mozilla code was to try and fix a long-standing complaint I had with (what was then) Mail & News. I was dealing with a JS file, not even their horrific C++ (which has been described as "not so much C++ as a whole new language that a C++ compiler happens to be able to deal with". After grappling for an hour with a huge and totally uncommented file, I gave up and never went back. It's a shame, as I'd love to be able to contribute.
Firefox's popularity finally shamed Microsoft into updating IE.
I keep reading that, but there's not proof for that whatsoever. On the contrary: It can be easily proven that Microsoft released a major upgrade of IE with each major upgrade of Windows.
Windows Vista + IE7.
I briefly glanced at the V1.0x series of Open Office, tried to convince myself for an hour "I should be using this, it's Open Source!", ... and turned away.
Life trudged along, and I happened to spy the late Betas and now public release of V2.0x and I like it. A couple quirks take getting used to, one of which may inspire me to submit a bug report if I can find the time to prove it's (spelled correctly!) not a duplicate.
I've never been an early adopter. I like to scout the workings, then bury myself working on my projects. By the time I emerge three months later, someone has often fixed the worst of the heart-attack inducing bugs.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hey, it seems to work just fine on Mac OSX :)
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I agree. We should ditch 'i' and start teaching "frack" as acceptable vocabulary.
Schools don't teach "fuck" as acceptable vocabulary, but I don't see you decrying it's use on the grounds that it's not a real word.
But since in both cases, you can do both simultaneously (not absolutely simultaneously, but you get the idea), this proves nothing.
Why lie? I'm not running for office.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I'm using Firefox 2.0 (well, Swiftfox 2.0) since right after release and I've had:
1) Not a single crash
2) Not a single OOM condition
3) Great performance
4) Not obvious compatibility problems or renderfux
In short, the transition was seamless, the browser is faster than it used to be, all of my plugins and themes came across great... I wonder if maybe some in the tech community aren't making out the "horribleness of Firefox 2.0" to be a much bigger issue than it is. Frankly, I like it a lot, and it hasn't pushed me back to Konqueror yet (which all Firefox releases before 1.5 eventually did).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
People are wasting alot of time on this. Your going to loose the battle anyway, so why bother? Their's just no point.
Weird.... I'm sitting at home here at my gentoo system. I have compiled FF 2.0 from source, and the dojo fisheye is EXTREMELY slow. On a VM windows xp running under this same gentoo box, the fisheye demo is almost as smooth as my kiba-dock (fast).
"fabulating"? "fabulations"? You're certainly enjoying your day-to-day calendar, aren't you?
I spend almost all of my time fixing things, and I think life is richer for it. It's an incredible learning experience and those that fix and repair are far better suited to create as well.
As for all of your accusations about this or that being "juvenile" - OS has been trying to penetrate to a larger audience for some time now - what seems juvenile to you is considered "user friendly" to others, and there's nothing wrong with that especially when you have the power to modify or disable these features. Additionally, a lot of people go into OS because they are enthusiastic, creative individuals striving to produce more than just a paycheck. Don't confuse creativity for immaturity.
ôó
On a what?
In Korea, only old dying people use floppy disks.
You forgot to mention there is a lack of browser synchronization too currently.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2490/
Well, 3, really, since I agree with the author that the look is worse - but that doesn't particularly bother me, as I'm not interested in "eye candy". If I can read the screen text and figure out the buttons, I'm satisfied.
My two main complaints are:
1) Firefox's "Save Link As" is utterly broken (on Linux under KDE anyway - I think it works on the Windows version). Try to download anything from many different Web sites and you get spurious errors back from the Web site - including the notion, from Rapidshare, that you're "already downloading a file" or you've just submitted the wrong CAPCHA- or it just downloads a few bytes or no bytes. Utterly broken. I've had to install DownThemAll and use it to be able to download anything. ("Save Image As", however, still works fine, so I can still get my babe pictures from Superiorpics.com.)
2) Now that I'm still able to "Save Image As", as noted above, I run into: memory leaks - save dozens of images and wait for Firefox to slow to a crawl or start manipulating the save dialog weirdly (fixed under KDE by forcing the windows to a specific size and shape). C'mon, guys, MEMORY LEAKS? This is the 21st Century! We still have people not checking for properly allocated memory? The guys at Mozilla just graduate from Programming 101 - Introduction to Programming with BASIC?
And this has been true since Firefox 1.0. The author of the article under discussion mentions a cut and paste bug which I'm not sure I've seen myself, but he notes this bug is FOUR YEARS OLD. Add the memory leaks to that.
The screwups in 2.0 forced me to install Opera 9 as an alternative browser (and occasionally use Kongueror as well). I haven't used Opera since I think 5.7. Now that's free with no ads, I figured I might as well try it. It's STILL the fastest browser in the business, noticeably faster than Firefox or IE7. And while it has bugs (ALL software has bugs), they aren't show stoppers for me like Firefox 2.0's are.
What really bugs me is that problem number one above CLEARLY shows that Firefox 2.0 simply was NOT TESTED adequately. Since I've just had major problems a few weeks ago with Mandriva 2007 and SUSE 10.1, forcing me to switch to Kubuntu 6.06 (and IT had a problem with its installer), it is now VERY clear to me that Linux and OSS in general is in danger of being held back by incompetent design and very inadequate testing.
The distros and OSS projects are expending their limited manpower and resources into doing things like putting more eye candy into Linux (with Compiz and the like - the problems with the official Nvidia drivers in MANY distros are becoming legendary, since everybody wants "3D shaky windows", for some bizarre reason - I had to uninstall them on my machine after I lost my desktop and other instabilities) rather than putting them into ensuring a rock-solid experience for the end user - which is supposed to be Linux's strong point against Windows.
This is especially true in the installers. End users switching from Windows to Linux need to be shown UP FRONT in the installation process that Linux is better. Screwups like Kubuntu's inability to leave the mount point modification screen are simply unacceptable.
Screwups like SUSE 10.1's update "patch" that screws the entire software update process are also unacceptable. Software update is a considerable weakness in Linux right now (with the possible exception of Synaptic) and the entire process of setting repositories and downloading updates needs to be totally automated and rock solid if we expect Windows users to be able to use Linux.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
It's still not a license to write things the wrong way, nor an excuse for poor language skills. French is my first language and I know the difference between the two and employ the words correctly. If you forced yourself to get it right a long time ago, by now it would come naturally and you wouldn't have to think about it. As I say to all the anglophone apologists: if you're not good in your only tongue, then you're not good in ANY language.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
First, that bug didn't make Firefox "almost" unusable by any stretch. The old code (which was a lot older than two years, by the way) spun a busy loop when you held the mouse button down. The worst-case scenario was that you'd rob some other process of a small amount of processor time during the infrequent periods when you'd hold the mouse button down for no other reason than to complain that this bug hadn't yet been fixed. Big deal.
Second, the bug is in fact fixed in Firefox 2. I should know: I fixed it. You're welcome.
The small set of examples do not represent what firefox 2.0 has to offer. Morever these examples are more about visual aspects, where it is not always possible to please everyone. I like the new default theme very much, and users always have the option of installing themes. What about dictionary feature and all, which comes very handy in the Web 2.0 era where users generate lots of content. What I don't understand is, what disliking some visual aspect or features have to do with the *policy changes in Firefox 2.0*.
file a bug. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
I don't really know what 3.0 is going to be all about. I really don't know why everybody is SO up in arms about the lack of quality in FF .3-2.0. I've been using it the entire time (yes, I know it was called Phoenix back then), and frankly it is and has been since that day: The best Browser available for the Windows Operating System.
Having said all that, though, I do feel the gripes that some users are having, and I agree with them to a certain extent, so I'm going to give Mozilla a piece of free advice, call it even for all the free code you've given me over the years!
Just clean the hell out of it. Go through the code line by line, clean it up, fix every bug, and don't add a single thing but speed.
FF 2.0 is awesome. It's got spell check, and all the things that made FF great up to today, to boot. Now just fix the god damned memory leaks, fix the other security problems, make the code better documented and easier to read, and maybe make a couple of extensions like Adblock and Filterset.G automatic, since we're all using it anyway. Or don't bother, I'll install them myself later.
But seriously: I don't want ANY new features. Hardly ANYBODY DOES. Be the best browser there is on speed and security, and worry about new features after some other browser.
Thanks for all your hard work, and keep it up. Here's to the future clean/fast FF browser!
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Where would I get this from?
www.mozilla.com y'say?
*experiences feeling of deja-vu*
I don't know much in the way of specific details, but what little I've seen from Firefox's Bugzilla have suggested to me a deeply insular, elitist, foul tempered group of people with a tendency to be rather abusive of newcomers.
Mind you, I didn't (and don't) support the Iceweasel fork, and I don't at all think that the Debian Project are in any way a better alternative. I've spent the last few days evaluating Ubuntu Dapper Drake. I have, however, never liked Debian as a distribution, its' "philosophy", or what I've seen of its' development group, so I'm not going to be keeping Ubuntu...when I get my other machine back up I'm going back to Linux From Scratch.
I will be honest when I say that I'm close to the limits of my tolerance with regards to the Linux userbase more or less in general...the LFS people are the only group I've been able to stand being around for any great length of time. They are genuinely humble, tolerant, and altruistic...they help people who arrive on their IRC server with no questions asked...and they run a very solid project.
I have a feeling that the LFS project's behaviour and atmosphere are what FOSS people in general have been *aiming* for...but that somehow it got lost when said people started developing an extremely over-inflated view of their own importance...the continually stoked, unreasoning terror of DRM also is not helping matters. As Linus Torvalds has said, nobody does good work from a basis of fear or hatred.
As I've written previously, I primarily blame the FSF and the Debian people for the current predominant foul attitude among Linux's userbase...I am going to go back to WoW for a while, and simply wait. I cannot help but suspect (or at least hope) that eventually the fear, insularity, and vitriol that the FSF generates will eventually starve it of new converts.
I am going to observe both the advice of the Tao Te Ching and a proverb that I have seen from Vampire: The Masquerade.
"The best way to overcome an enemy is to outlast them."
You are an old man, Richard Stallman, and I suspect that of the two of us, I have more years of life left. Despite the number of people ready to replace you when you go, rare is the cult that survives its' founder...the organisation in question is inevitably radically altered, if it does not fall completely.
I will wait. When you and yours have gone, I will come back.
now that is just sad..
Hm. Since my laptop was stolen and I'm homeless I don't have a system on which to play around with this. I empathize with the author's respect for the Amiga--I was an Amiga advocate for many years until I was forced to the IBM-PC/compatible market out of financial considerations. I could no longer afford to keep up with the Amiga hardware market. I had an A500 with a Kickback module (to switch between 2.04 and 1.3 ROMs), Supra28 accelerator and a sidecar IDE HD controller. When the Kickback module and the Supra28 accelerator burned out it would have cost me nearly $2k to reinvest in an A1200 or $3k+ for an A4000. At the time CBM was also in the handbasket going south and I couldn't justify the expense, even if I had the funding available, on a technology which, while superior, was being provided by a company run by executives who were milking it dry until it hit the dirt.
The screenshots make it look comparable. I know that UDE/UWM is full-featured and customizable in terms of window borders, border decorations, default colors, and many different parameters and behaviors. When I finally come across a reasonable opportunity which allows me to elevate myself out of this position I'll have a look at it.
What's the compiled binary size?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac