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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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
Have you ever tried out Opera?
Let's look at the facts for Opera:
CHECK 1. Stops popups automatically
CHECK 2. constant updates and improvements every x months
CHECK 3. better security than IE
CHECK 4. the option to easily clear cookies, history, temp files, etc on close
5. Is faster, more standards compliant, and more stable than FF or IE.
6. Includes nearly everything needed for the average user in the core build so no downloading and installing of extensions is needed.
IMHO The Opera browser is the best browser available and I wish more people knew it existed because the majority of people I know think the only choices available are IE and FF, many of them have never even heard of Opera.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
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).
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
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
"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.
Yes, the zoom function definitely comes in handy at times.
n speed
I honestly cannot say if firefox is better once it is setup with the right extensions, Opera just has everything I need already built in. I also know that the cold startup time for Opera is WAY less. According to:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#wi
Opera 9 takes only 2.74 seconds to startup compared to FF 2.0's time of 11.64 seconds. That alone will keep me from seriously testing out FF, when I start up a browser I want it working NOW and having to wait over 4 times longer is not acceptable.
FF definitely has a lot more extensions to use and they may be better but Opera does have widgets now so it no longer is held back in regard to not having support for any third party extensions. Until I see a significant reason to switch over to FF I am sticking with Opera since I am used to it and prefer how it is setup and I think most diehard FF users are of the same mindset regarding FF. I used to be a Moz user until about 5 years ago when I discovered the tabbed browsing that Opera had and that is what got me to switch over at that point in time. To each their own.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
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?
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
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.