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Firefox Going the Big and Bloated IE Way?
abhinav_pc writes "Wired is carrying an article pondering whether Firefox has become big and bloated, much like IE. As the browser's popularity has risen, the interest in cramming more features into the product has as well. Slowdowns and feature creep have some users asking for a return to the days of the 'slim and sexy' Firefox. 'Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer. Firefox addresses this issue somewhat, setting the default cache lower on computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Though the jury is still out on where the perfect balance between too many and too few features lies, one truth is apparent: The new web is pushing our browsers to the limit.'"
to totally rethink the browser? with broadband becoming more available could websites be built in a way that current browsers don't even let us imagine?
Most annoying thing are the crashes of Firefox 2.x! I don't care if it eats a lot of memory (I've got 2GB - who wouldn't these days?) or is bloated, but I can't stand the crashes!
Disingenuous FUD aside, I can't for the life of me imagine how IE could be "bloated". It never had much functionality to begin with.
Kudos to Bashdot. Even the current Digg submission doesn't mention IE at all.
That's why I never get the first post!
Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use.
The amount of RAM used for caching pages could be set by the user in the options. I think most Firefox users could handle that.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
More than anything it's reminding me of Mozilla, now known as SeaMonkey. The reason I switched from Mozilla to Firefox was because I wanted a smaller, more nimble browser. I didn't want a RSS reader, e-mail, IRC, etc. packaged together. Firefox hasn't integrated all of those yet but it's moving towards it and I don't like it.
I guess it is the time now for people to look into Opera, which seems to be able to keep the balance. I think software should not be discriminated on the basis of not being FOSS.
Ignoring the poor grammar for a moment: "Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer" is a bit simplistic. Unused memory is wasted memory, this is similar to the arguments about top(1) on Linux reporting all your memory being used in buffers etc.
Firefox has an awesome ability to add-on things very effectively. I don't understand why they don't keep fx slim with with all the proposed additional features as external (and hence optional) add-ons. Perhaps the not-so-computer-literate can use the bloated-up version of fx so they don't have to figure out how to use add-ons (I'm still amazed at how computer illiterate people can be), but leave a streamlined version for us techies to add-on options as we choose.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Remember the days that a Linux install took up half the space of a Windows install?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Did anyone not see this coming? It's clearly a case of needing to become what you are fighting, and the thing about open expansion options, like the toolbars, is that they will expand out of control. Viz, that old screenshot of an IE window with every installable toolbar in the world consuming the entire screen but a sliver of browser space at the bottom.
I hate to shill, but I went Opera a long time ago when FF first started trying to do too much and I never once turned away. The only time I use it is on a fresh Linux install with FF -integrated-; I think it's Ubuntu or SuSE that integrates it so you can't remove it without disurpting the OS...didn't a certain Borg-led OS company do that once to ill-effect?
FF's best route at this point is to integrate into the program in an efficient manner the best features of the most popular toolbars, and add a limit on the plugins... three perhaps. As long as toolbar adding is unlimited, people will bloat their installations and then complain as if it's FF's fault. A limit will inconvenience, but not drive off, much of the user base, and impose a bit of discipline.
My Firefox uses from 100-150mb of RAM and I am just doing browsing here, not playing a 3D game or doing video editing. When my computer is slow, I always suspect Firefox and it's frequently his fault. It is still a good browser - but I would like a brand new fork, like a Firefox Lite or something.
Blame Canada!
On OS X Firefox feels sluggish compared to Safari which is all native UI elements. The amount of time is very small but very noticeable where it feels like the non-native GUI is taking more time to refresh the entire app.
But the main problem I have with Firefox right now is after a while it uses up so much VM that just changing tabs starts to chug. And even if it hasn't leaked to the point of swapping when switching tabs, having even a few tabs open seems to degrade performance. It feels like there is extra and unecessary work going on in non-visible tabs.
I find I have to quit the who app and restart it more and more. The tab session reload extension helps but there is definitely some sort of memory/threading performance rot going on.
So other than the memory cache, what features could be stripped from FF to make it leaner and faster? I know nothing of its internals, but without any extensions it doesn't seem to have many wasteful features.
Developers: We can use your help.
To me it sounds like requesting that Frefox turn in to Camino for Windows/Linux. As Firefox has become more and more popular, Camino has taken a back role, reserved for use on Macs by people who aren't impressed by massive lists of features that they'll never touch. In all honesty, I think Firefox is a great example of what open source projects should try to avoid as they become more popular. One developer may think that adding the capability to change the text color of individual lines by middle clicking and pressing Left, Left, Right, Up, A, S, Enter, followed by a hex color code would be an excellent idea, but that doesn't mean that it will add anything to the overall capability (or usability) of the software. Addons do have their place, but even they have become overcome by feature bloat these days.
Aside from that, the ongoing issue with Web 2.0 apps and javascript with multiple tabs using the same shared namespace and overwriting variable names still hasn't been highlighted by the security community and as AJAX and web based applications become more prominent, the end user will find more and more applications breaking other applications.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I don't think there's any disagreement that FF eats up unholy amounts of RAM and CPU cycles. But the worst was when trying to use Flash, as it would consume until it crashed the code I was working on. Unfortunately, for a long time that was the first question I would ask people when the software crashed. Somethings wrong if I think (correctly) your browser is the most likely cause of a crash
I love Opera which I see as lean and mean (I use it on a 133 Mhz laptop I keep for sentemental reasons).
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I spend all day^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a few momentes when I would not otherwise be productive, pimping my music round myspace (surely the biggest resource hog on the net) and firefox holds up fine on my 256MB Thinkpad (running ubuntu).
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
" Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use."
1. That's no feature bloat,
2. if a big page is say 500k, we're talking about a 4MB ram cache which is 0.5% of the ram on this PC in front of me. Or about 1% of what Vista takes.
A quick look finds the option to turn off the cache:
browse to about:config
search for the browser.cache.memory.enable setting
set it to false
restart the browser
On my machine, that lowers the memory footprint from 125MB to just under 50MB.
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_summary.p hp
http://www.webdevout.net/browser_support_css.php
I used one of the very first phoenix builds. It impressed me because at the time i was using mozilla. Phoenix was literally just gecko + some ui and it was really really light and fast. There was no installer, no control panel (well it was blank), etc.
I'm very happy with firefox so far. I run half a dozen extensions to give me features like "session saving" etc. Ram usage is not too much of a concern with me. I would like it if the default was to not cache 8 pages back. And on disk cache should be fast enough to retrieve and render. 90% of the time i only go back 1 click anyways.
Firefox 3 is implementing major changes. Under the hood they are switching to garbage collection and cairo (vector rendering) just to name a few. Cairo is a great abstraction that hasn't fully realized its performance capability. I don't suppose glitz will be out anytime soon. The sql-lite bookmarking looks neat. Epiphany has something similar. But i must admit that i've fully switched to del.icio.us and the extension v1.5.29. That's quite fully featured and it syncs across computers.
The rss reading capability i do not like at all. That should be implemented as an extension. I prefer to use liferea. There are plenty of firefox features that should be implemented as extensions. That way you can disable them if you wish.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I still fail to understand why people make such a big deal out of Firefox. Personally, I find Opera to be a much more elegant, usable, and stable browser.
The mouse gestures are so good, I catch myself trying to use them in Windows Explorer/My Computer.
Let's make a new and smaller browser, based on the same rendering engine! We'll call it Phoenix or something like that. You know, like it's brand new! It comes from the ashes, it must be good! And we won't bloat it, no, no. We'll make it speedy!
Where did I hear that before?
Whenever I clicked from one window to the other, I'd get the Spinning Pizza of Death for a minute or so while the other task's memory was paged in. I had to add another gig of RAM before I could switch windows quickly.
That made this old coder wanna cry. My first Mac had only 512 kilobytes (kilo - not mega) but that was enough for me to write GUI applications with.
Kids these days don't know how to write code.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
One think IE does right is a true file-for-file cache of what you have browsed.
Sometimes I like to troll thru my "Temporary Internet Files" folder and pick out a few bits for posterity. Especially large .swf or .flv files that I might have watched. The worst is when I watch one of those in FF, then want to grab the file... the easiest thing to do is to watch it AGAIN in IE so that I can go cache-picking later...
maybe it's just me.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I don't think Firefox ever was such a lean or efficient browser. It's also buggy and the developers don't seem to care much about Linux or MacOS (bad profile support, inefficient graphics, etc.). Opera and Konqueror both seem better written and better designed.
I still use Firefox. Why? Because Firefox works well enough, it's up-to-date, compatible, and, most importantly, has tons of useful extensions.
I hope the Firefox developers will be able to clean up their act, but unless it gets a lot worse, I'm sticking with Firefox, because, on balance, it's still the best browser there is.
Firefox was only leaner than Mozilla back when it was called Phoenix and had only the bare minimum UI necessary to be a web browser.
Mozilla never was slow (at least not after it reached the point that it was good enough to consider using as your standard browser) and really wasn't a memory hog. That perception came about from the people who really didn't want an integrated email program, but absolutely refused to choose "Browser only" when the installer asked what they wanted.
Around the time of the name changed from Phoenix to Firebird, the two browsers were about on par. By the time the name changed to Firefox, it was already more bloated than Mozilla. The project goals moved more towards grabbing attention than being lean.
If Mozilla had just made a theme that blended in to the OS (Classic doesn't do a good enough job of it) and put a link on the download page to an installer that only had the browser included, there never would have been a need for Firefox.
At least when you install Firefox, you don't get some version of Windows along with it :-)
I mean, talk about bloat!
I'll consider Firefox "bloated" when it requires a 10 GB OS and a supercomputer to run the latest version. They still port Firefox to Win 98, don't they? Sans Adobe Flash and Windoze, it's still slim and responsive on my 233 MHz PII. The community is constantly cleaning the code and it shows.
The free world, comes with choice as well as code sharing. I prefer Konqueror which is also slim and there's always Dillo or Opera to play with. There are also "slimmer" versions of Firefox like Galeon.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Firefox has unfortunately become a memory hog. It often becomes unresponsive and almost everyday it's been crashing. Fortunately, it now has that continue from last session option which has saved my sessions many times.
Firefox is still my default browser in all the systems I use. Opera is the 2nd choice.
To paraphrase an often heard comments about EMACS way back when, "EMACS isn't an editor, it's a lifestyle". Hopefully Firefox isn't headed down the same path.
There are many, many things you can criticize IE for... but being bloated doesn't really seem like one of them. If you RTFA, they compare the growing bloat not with IE, but with Mozilla.
True, 3rd party add-ons for IE can bring it to a crawl, but that's not IE's fault. The same problem exists in any browser that supports extensibility via a plugin model.
I use Firefox on XP because it's safer than IE, certainly not because it's less bloated. Firefox consistently uses far more ram (I have several screen shots of Firefox using 1.5GB+ of ram with *no* plugins enabled and just one tab open), dies a painful death due to poor integration with things like Flash (100% CPU Flash advertisements, anyone?), or simply just crashes.
On Vista I use IE 7 w/Protected Mode. Why? Well, again, because it's safer. But it also has the benefit of returning me to the days when a browser didn't use 2x the RAM of Photoshop. Imagine that.
PuppyLinux (on a DVD-R) takes 0MB space (though for effective use it needs lots of RAM or a swap partition). Can't get much smaller than that.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
How can it be that storing visited pages takes so much memory that it only makes sense with more than 1GB of RAM? That sounds like the real bloat to me. A transferred page is usually 1MB (much less in most cases). An efficient way of storing the rendered version should not be 3 orders of magnitude bigger, which seems to be the real problem here.
All over the web today there are stories about FireFox's (supposed) bloat, but no actual facts on whether it is or is not actually "bloated." Since "bloat," to most people, apparently means the state of a program having more features than is necessary, it's hard to see how the average user would ever be able to definitively answer this question. The question is probably better phrased as "Are you having major performance problems with FireFox 2.0?"
I don't know how the file size (the other definition of "bloat"), of a FireFox installation compares with other browsers but it doesn't seem like an overly large file to download. It also seems to me that when I check my FireFox preferences it actually has a very basic, simple feature set similar to what's available in almost every other browser. If the feature set is roughly the same as other browsers, how can it be rightly called "bloated?"
I think the problem with FireFox is one of performance, not "bloat" per se. I run FireFox on a Mac with only a single extension and a single theme. My computer is relatively new, the OS is up to date, it has a Gig and a half of RAM and a fast video card. On this machine FireFox is as slow as molasses. It takes ages to start and ages to load a page. It also crashes (a lot!).
I use FireFox because of AdBlocker and because as bad as it is, it's still the best there is on the Mac right now. This will likely change in October when the new Safari comes out so this summer's FireFox 3.0 release will have to be extremely, extremely good just to keep the same market share IMO.
Why can't the OS, when it sees that it is running out of memory, send a signal/message/henchman to applications and tell them that if they have the ability to give up some memory (i.e., caches, etc), then do so, to keep the system happy. There could be several levels of urgency in the request as well, like "yeah, dude, just thinking here, yeah, could you ease up a little on the memory, cheers!" through to "Sieg Heil! Deine Memory, SCHNELL!!".
gobbling up every remaining scrap of a computer's memory
Sure, firefox sometimes uses more RAM than expected... but "gobbling up" all available RAM? FUD
Statistics are hard to come by, but our own experiences with the browser include crashes, memory hogging, molasses-slow page loads and the spinning beach ball of death.
Ok... so they're guessing now. If statistics are hard to come by then what on Earth is the rant about? Unsubstantiated nonsense. Molasses-slow page loads? I'd like to add my own subjective assertion here... The pages load just as quick as in IE. There, I said it... My own assertion sounds hollow, why should I regard Wired's comment with any more authority?
Oh, and the dreaded extensions. Once you install 524 extensions, firefox crawls to a standstill. How insightful. And, as a bonus the 12-million extensions use up heaps of RAM--who coulda guessed.
What is good enough for OpenOffice sure is good for FireFox.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well I suggest you check out a base Windows Vista install. A fresh installation of Vista in a VMWare machine yields approximately 7.16GB. ^_^ A complete Linux install (GNOME/KDE, apps, QT + GTK, etc...) still requires less than half that disk space.
My current MacBook Pro has a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo CPU. If that's not a supercomputer, I don't know what is.
I paid good money for these gigahertz dammit (or actually, my Mom did...) and I want them doing useful work for me, and not covering up for sloppy, inefficient coding.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I would take out a lot of the features and allow for features to be added depending on what you want to do. Just turn it in to something like that and you could easily reduce the size and memory requirements of the browser. Thats just my idea though...
...see this: http://www.liewcf.com/blog/archives/2006/04/reduci ng-firefox-memory-usage/. Seems to work for me. I've not had to restart Firefox nearly as much.
But in all seriousness, Lynx rocks, and I've never heard of a single security issue with it. It can even read and post to Slashdot.
technical writing / development
Can anyone recommend a fix for the way Firefox freezes up all tabs and windows on certain occasions. You can see a great example of this here at Slashdot. Scroll down the main page right clicking interesting stories to open in new tabs for later perusal. By the time you get to the 3rd or 4th story the entire browser slows down, adn a few clicks later it'll totally freeze. Sometimes a box will pop up asking if you want to "Continue" or "Stop Script". When this happens not only is the current tab affected, but all tabs in all windows become totally frozen and only become usable once the script in question has finished. Firefox 2.0.0.3 on Windows XP.
Firefox is not written in Java.
It's not just bloated in ram, there's a lot of feature bloat, but for the most part, I like what bloat there is. My biggest complaint is "leaks", and the worst ones aren't ram but rather x windows. Run "xwininfo -root -children" on a machine after firefox has been running for a while. In addition to all the named firefox entries, there will be many saying "has no name" that are also firefox. Run it long enough (I suspend my laptop and keep it running for months), and you'll eventually get the famous:
Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Maximum number of clients reached
your_app_here: unable to open display ":0.0"
So basically you can't open another window until you kill firefox. There's no warning, no slow down, no cpu spikes, so you can be in the middle of something important with 10 tabs open and have to close the whole thing down to get any other app up. Despite all this, it remains my favorite browser because it supports standards and lots of developer and user friendly plug-ins.
Firefox is not being ported to Windows 98 anymore. I don't remember the reason why though but it had nothing to do with it being a memory hog.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Opera is closed source. So long as there is a viable open-source option, I'll use it over anything closed source. Firefox has a number of mouse gesture plug-ins, which I have become sufficiently used to I've tried them in nautilus accidentally. I know a lot of people don't care if a company hides things in the code which could cause them harm - but I'm a bit overly-cautious. Don't underestimate the zealously for open-source a lot of /.'ers have.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
If firefox becomes bloated I will eat the internet with a fork.
Get it? 'Fork'? *wink*
I wouldn't worry to much.
Oh and give epiphany a try.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
If you count Firefox with extensions IE7 doesn't stand a chance, so I'll keep it to the basics.
IE7 have a nice and clean user interface, but it is not as polished as the UI of Firefox. For casual browsing, such as I'm doing right now, IE7 is IMO ahead.
IE7's favorite menu is neat, Firefox could do worse than copy that, the history function is however a step down from IE6. You win some, you lose some, I guess.
Slashdot do not render correctly in IE7 (comments occasionally render on top of each other). Firefox have a wee bit of trouble with complicated pages on Wikipedia (table borders flicker in and out).
As for bloat, Firefox seem to be the slightly more bloated browser, but the additional functions are useful and I miss them in IE7.
Web apps are the wave of the future, right? Well, eventually, Google's going to come out with GFox, the web app web browser, thus ending the browser wars once and for all.
Or something.
Every time the subject of Firefox's sluggishness and memory slaughtering habits come up, someone tries to excuse it the fact that a few MINOR features has been added over the years. Which were the last big news for Firefox? Phising filter, better search management, incorporated RSS. The truth is that Firefox has had memory and speed problems since 1.x versions. At the very least, nobody can deny it for 1.5.+ versions. At the same time, other projects seem to be able to add features without their browsers eating such inexcusable amounts of RAM and virtual memory. Konqueror and Opera both do LOADS better, and both have all the functionality that you should expect from a browser (that is to say, much more than Firefox has out of the box). Actually it's hard for me to believe that Firefox is so popular among tech people. Whenever I'm at a Windows computer, I naturally use IE7 since it beats Firefox with it's little piggy eye closed.
Is there not some way that operating systems can manage caches for applications in a way that certain datasets can be marked as opportunisitic caching. That is, make it as keep a copy of this in any free space, but you can discard it if real memory is needed.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Is this some attempt at a joke or troll that went over my head? Firefox is not written in Java. Much of the UI is done in JavaScript, but JavaScript is not Java.
Firefox was never slim and sexy. It's been heavy since it first went full-release. Ask any galeon user what "slim" means.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I think you mean Javascript. Firefox is written in Javascript, XUL, and C++.
Javascript is definitely slow, but since FF is meant to be cross-platform, it's needed.
Fast, native Gecko browsers exist: K-Meleon for Windows, Camino for OS X, Epiphany for *nix.
dumb, dumb, dumb.
Go look at the source code to Gecko, the rendering engine behind Firefox, Seamonkey, Thunderbird and other projects. In short, it's a mess.
Part of the problem is the foolish complexity of it. Their whole XPCOM idea sounds nice in theory. But then you actually go to implement it in C++, and it becomes a pile of crap. Soon enough, difficult tasks start to become hard, the damn near impossible tasks can't be done, and nobody really has a good idea of what large portions of the codebase actually does. That's not the way to create an efficient rendering engine. You'll end up with memory leaks galore, and excessive CPU consumption, just as we've witnessed with Firefox.
Although it's unlikely to happen now, the best thing for them to have done would have been to throw out most of the code released by Netscape, rather than rewriting a lot of it (at the same low-quality level) in the following years. Then they could have re-implemented it using a natively-compiled implementation of Standard ML. One benefit of this would have been an elimination of the memory leaks that we hear to much about today, due to the garbage collection of SML. Additionally, functional languages are well-suited to parsing (ie. of HTML, XHTML, etc.) and language implementation (ie. JavaScript), more so than C++.
if I can't see the source, I don't know whats in it and I'm not very trusting.
Most F/OSS users just don't want to pay for software and that's OK. BTW Opera is 100% free and has been for years now).
But please don't try to sell me the old canard that you scrutinize every line source for all the F/OSS that you use - I'm not buying. My guess is that there is a FAR greater likelihood of some clever programmer slipping something by you in one of your beloved plug-ins than Opera ever doing anything untoward (a for-profit company has a lot more to lose from bad PR on its primary product than some reprobate teenager in Bakersfield or Bratislava). A little degree of paranoia is healthy only if directed correctly.
For me, Opera (although not perfect) stands head and shoulders above IE and several inches above FF in terms of performance, security, utility and functionality.
I think maybe they used the wrong reference page.
If Firefox is really about being a slim browser, why doesn't the team behind it build and "Official Add-On Pack" that has code-reviewed extensions or themes or whatever?
Then, instead of everyone complaining about bloat (even though I don't really see it, as the browser is still the slimmest of the pack, afaict), they could optionally download extra features that the Mozilla team would like to see in the browser but doesn't feel have a good enough cost/benefit ration.
Or, optionally, they could just go ahead and not download said pack.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
Sorry, the UI is actually written in JAVASCRIPT. And half the standard modules are written in Java, so that's why the JVM loads every time firefox starts up.
As to the parent post, let's see now:
RSS Support:
I could easily see removing RSS support. Firefox's implementation is nothing an extension couldn't do, and do much better. It's a joke for handling more than a handful of feeds, and stifles development of third-party extensions. Gee, and we used to complain about competing against built-in programs...
Security:
Can you honestly say a browser should be shipped without these, or even an option to not install them? Especially for the popup blocker - are you insane, or have you simply forgotten what the popup-infested web was like? Phishing protection is unobtrusive and useful, as is auto-update.
Miscellaneous:
Integrated search was one of the highlights of Mozilla ages ago, and is now a standard feature in every single browser. Firefox/Mozilla did a particularly good job by adopting an existing open format (from Apple's Sherlock) rather than reinventing the wheel. Search suggestions are the latest evolution of that (primarily thanks to Google Suggestions, if I'm not mistaken). Spell check is marginal - many operating systems offer their own - but I don't see how a third-party extension could improve upon it. Accessibility is just critical for those who need it. Session Restore I'm torn on, as many extensions handled it, but not necessarily well. I see that as the Firefox team deciding to take all of the lessons learned from the third parties, and do it right (much like Apple did with iTunes 1.0).
Bloat is only a problem if it hinders program development, maintenance, execution, or usability. The examples given here don't generally meet those criteria. Most of the features here are simple, self-contained, unobtrusive, and likely have low code and memory footprints.
For the non-SSL version, you actually have to e-mail the guy to download it: "NOTE! Due to new ISP bandwidth rules, the above 2 files have been disabled from downloading. If you want a copy, send me an email to jamesYYMM [at] spoonfork.org, where the y's and m's are numbers representing year and month." How big are these downloads anyway?
No wonder Firefox won the browser battle with Lynx. Lynx: Not Trying Very Hard(TM)
is for Firefox to stop deleting my bookmarks every time it auto-updates
Didn't firefox take over IE in bloat ages ago? Google for "firefox myths" - firefox started failing it a long time ago.
Sure IE(6) is a lot more prone to malicious web code, spyware, toolbars, etc (even though a lot of this can be blamed on the stupidity of users). But, out of the box, a bloated browser it is not.
I meant to say Javascript, not java. But now that I think about it, the post probably is flamebait despite any actual point I was trying to make. /sorry.
Several things going on there, but the biggest issue is images. When a page is loaded, the images are decompressed (from PNG/JPEG/GIF/whatever) and stored in memory as 24-bit-color bitmaps (with 8 bits of alpha channel if it's a GIF or a PNG that actually uses alpha). So a 800px by 100px banner ends up being 800 * 100 * 24 == 1,920,000 bytes. The fast-back cache stores the DOM as it's rendered, with all images uncompressed, etc. This can add up quickly. There are proposals to drop the image and re-recode it as needed, or to have graphics system support for compressed images (e.g. allow storing a JPEG server-side on X and using the graphics hardware when it comes time to paint it), but they're not far along yet.
Zealotry indeed.
fast as a rocket on freebsd with P133.
Firefox needs to stop cramming information about all your extensions into a couple of Registry-Hell-ridden configuration files. And then they cross-link by hard-to-remember GUIDs rammed into hard-to-read RDF? wtf?
Look at how extensions are done for Eclipse or JBuilder. It's much cleaner. Don't want an extension anymore? Just delete the JAR or folder. That's it. And it's clean.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Maybe but I suspect that "bloated" is relative and with broadband penetration being what it is, irrelevent. The difference between slim and bloated especially with caching isn't that big a difference. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a teletype to get back to.
I refuse to use FF2 anymore. It takes FOREVER to save images, and even worse, while it's taking forever, it essentially locks up FF, leaving it unusable for up to 2 minutes at a time. This is completely unacceptable, IE3 with a 56k connection saved images faster.
Even worse is somehow between FF1.5 and FF2 the built in downloader got even more broken. The FF team tends to sidestep this by saying "Get an extension" but I say I SHOULDN'T NEED TO, downloading is the most basic of internet features; how the hell did you manage to screw it up?
Until the FF line goes to 3.0, I'm sticking with 1.5 because 2 is a steaming pile of poo compared to it.
The Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix project was started with the intention of being a lean browser based on the Gecko engine because the Mozilla Suite (now Seamonkey) was so massively bloated that it was easier to essentially start over than it would've been to attempt to slim down the main codebase. Firefox absolutely did not start out being more bloated than Seamonkey, otherwise it would've betrayed the entire purpose of its existence.
Most of my apps are using obscene amounts of RAM these days. Gaim/Pidgin for example, going by the RSS value, is using 32MB even when minimised to systray with no active conversations. The XFCE settings daemon is another 20, and that doesn't even have a GUI. Doesn't help much when I dumped KDE for it in the first place to try and fix exactly this...
There are a *lot* of printing bugs that cause the browser to get stuck in an infinite loop. Fix those! Please! Please!
I work on a web application where people print a lot and they cause the browser to crash all the time. You have to go to the task manager to kill the firefox process.
Don't add another feature until that is fixed, please.
*looks around*
Looks like the same old web to me!
User Interfaces have changed slightly, but they're still broken.
What was once considered 'immature' designs or 'designs for the mentally challenged' (i.e. huge text, bevels and gradients, huge icons, etc.) are now considered to be the defacto 'standard' for most of these 'bleeding-edge' web 2.0 sites.
I can understand the dumbing-down to meet the mass appeal (as the mass is rather intellectually challenged, and hence, web-challenged), but dumbing-down the development community with 'web 2.0' marketing hype, is another story.
Kool-aid.2.0 - no thanks!
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
I've had firefox 2 running for literally weeks at a time with multiple windows and multiple tabs in each window, it is incredibly rare that it crashes. I can't recall the last time it did crash actually, it's been that long. You probably have a broken plugin.
Expands until it can read your mail.
Seeing how it's basically NS7.2 with FF extensions. But it's Seamonkey so there are a few compatibility problems even with IE Tab.
Say does anyone have a way to see how much RAM/VM each xpi consumes?
Someone almost assuredly has gone through the source, so you don't need to. If Mozilla.org decided to pull shenanigans, people would notice almost immediately. Not so for Opera.
It's not that the general set of eyes is necessarily better (but it almost certainly is), it's that the hired set of eyes is acting in the interest of it's employer, not the public.
...was not to be the leanest and lightest browser out there; it was always to be a browser which had core functionality which was useful to most people, and could be extended. The features such as the microformat manager for v3 are not things one can easily and sensibly put in as an extension, as to stand any chance of being useful, they've got to be right in the core of the browser. The Firefox team does keep the overhead for new features down, and such features aren't going to get in people's way if they don't want them. Bloat would be an e-mail client, or web developer tools, as those are things that most people don't need, and wouldn't at all be useful for most people. On the subject of memory usage, it's been said before, but it's all a matter of setting the cache sizes correctly. Every large application has memory leaks, and they can be fixed (if people stop whining and start providing proof and valgrind output); the only major problem with Firefox at the moment as regards memory is that the cache sizes aren't quite right. Let me reiterate that: the couple of hundred MB of memory it's using is a cache, not a leak.
- Movement I: There is no such problem, it's all FUD - Allegro assai
- Movement II: Look over there, it's "M$ Windoze" - Grave larghetto
- Movement IV: The community is "fixing" it - Lentissimo non tropo
- Movement V: Free software is undeniably superior to everything - Andantino grazioso
- Movement VI: This doesn't work, but try this other broken thing instead - Moderatto con brio
Bravo maestro!if memory needs to be spent for restoring ALL tabs that are lost in a crash, its worth that.
Read radical news here
Here's how I use Firefox: I go on reddit first thing in the morning, scroll through the first four pages of stories, and open all the links that interest me in new tabs. I'll do the same with slashdot, a few others. Then throughout the day I'll take little breaks and scan a couple stories.
A lot of times I get into the coding and don't get to my stories that day, so I'll do the same the next. I could easily have a hundred, maybe even two hundred tabs open at once.
So what happens is, Firefox gets crushed under the load. The programming stories in particular are valuable to me, so in desperation I'll bookmark them all in a folder before Firefox crashes.
In IE, I tend to have nice folder names, like Scheme, Haskell, and Erlang. In Firefox my folders are named things like Group181.
Now, you could say I shouldn't expect it to hold up under this, but come on, that's what tabs are for! And if Firefox would just cache the non-visible pages on disk instead of keeping everything in RAM, it wouldn't be a problem. I'd put up with the slight delay in opening tabs, it's still quicker than pulling from the net.
I was on 1.5, just downloaded 2.whatever, and it's even worse. And I don't run a lot of extensions either. On 1.5 I had no extensions, now I've got Firebug, that's it.
The last decent Firefox was 1.0, imho. The other thing that slowed down on 1.5 was file saving...it used to be instant, then suddenly it was slow enough to be annoying.
And saving files is annoying too, because unlike IE, and unlike the bookmarking, it doesn't save with the title, but with the filename. Every time I bring this up, some pedantic fanboy says "Of course, that's what the file's called!" But that's not even true half the time, such as when the link is "/article.php?id=29349", in which case everything I save on that site is gonna save as "article"...maybe even as "article.php" which makes it doubly useless, I forget since I gave up on saving articles from firefox long ago. Takes too long when I've got 100 tabs to blow through.
While I'm on my soapbox...how come I can't create a new bookmarks folder while I'm saving the bookmark? I keep trying to save, oops I don't have a folder I want, so I have to go out of that, go to organize bookmarks, remember not to hit the wrong thing cause if I do it hoses up, save, close, finally save my bookmark. That's the other reason I have "Group181" bookmarks. It's too freakin annoying to organize them.
And don't bother telling me it's it's obsolete to save or bookmark now that we've got google...google doesn't always find the stuff I was looking at, and besides, half my reason for saving is that otherwise I'll forget about it.
Not to mention, it sure would be nice if, when I opened a tab, its history connected to the page it opened from, so that the history is one big tree, with each tab being the start of a new branch. Frequently I open a bunch of tabs from Slashdot summaries, close the Slashdot tab, read a story, want to go back and see the comments...oops, no history, gotta manually go to slashdot again and hunt down that story. Fixing this would be one extra pointer per tab, a miniscule amount of memory if they did it sensibly.
I love opensource, even though I program on Windows at work, but with IE7 having tabs now I'm seriously considering switching back. I totally hate the thought of that, but Firefox is gettin me down, man. It's a bummer.
That used memory is not wasted memory. Firefox would be far better to store its cache on disk and let the operating system manage memory.
What's odd is that Opera packs all that stuff in and more (even a BitTorrent client!), and it's faster and more lightweight in terms of resource requirements. Even the download size is amazingly small. What is it that makes Firefox worse in that regard? The XUL stuff? Convoluted codebase making improvement difficult?
"Sufferin' succotash."
For those who want a minimalist browser kind of like Camino for Windows, K-Meleon might be the answer:
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
One down side is that the pace of development is a bit slower, as is the case with Camino. But I think it succeeds in its goal of being a lightweight, native-feeling, Gecko-based browser.
But isn't that where caching eight web pages will give you the best performance? My laptop has two Gig of ram and I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 instead of a more memory intensive OS so eight pages doesn't seem to slow me down any.
I was there.
In the early, early days of Firefox, Internet Explorer was pretty slow and bloated. Most of its snappiness came from being "part of the OS". (Or I was a deluded fanboy then, maybe...)
So, on Windows, you had the choice between Netscape (which was big and bloated), or Mozilla if you were smart (which was also big and bloated), or IE (which was bloated, for a browser). Mozilla was not so terribly bloated, except for the fact that it was a browser/mail/news/irc/dev platform/kitchen sink, and not just a browser. So, if you needed web and email, Mozilla was fine, but if you just needed web, IE was faster.
At the time, I believe Opera was somewhat buggy, and still cost money. I am not sure whether Konqueror existed or not; I only fairly recently became aware of KDE as being better than GNOME in just about every way (at least, as a desktop environment).
So, the Phoenix project was started. I used that from maybe 0.6, and it was good. A bit unstable, yes, but it would come back up in 2 seconds. And on the machines of the time, that was pretty damned impressive. It only seemed to be getting smaller and lighter. If anything was slow/buggy about it, it was that Phoenix required the full Mozilla sources, but the existance of Phoenix was actually cleaning up quite a bit of Mozilla.
And yeah -- Phoenix vs Mozilla was amazingly dramatic. Consider that Windows at the time sucked so much (at least for me) that I'd have used Linux even if it meant using Netscape 4.0, Mozilla was kind of ok. But Phoenix just kicked ass.
Now it's Firefox, though, which has sort of just become a word, and lost its meaning. I know why they changed the name, but still, Phoenix was cool -- the beast that was Mozilla (stomping on IE) had died, but from its ashes, Phoenix rose and became Firebird, something that could fly on its own, with no concern for IE at all...
So, where'd all that go?
Well, some of it's memory leaks. Some of it's almost by design -- note that Firefox uses Gecko for EVERYTHING. Firefox doesn't just embed Gecko, it IS a Gecko app. The menus, config options, the entire UI is coded in XUL, which is basically XML + JavaScript, with some C++ libraries. (Correct me if I'm wrong here.) Firefox itself was an AJAX app before AJAX even had a name. (And so was Mozilla.)
That's another part of it, but it's not really the whole picture.
Extensions, I think, are what kills it. The more extensions you add, the more likely you are to break something. At the same time, extensions are what sold it. There's still two that I miss dearly, now that I mostly use Konqueror -- adblock (the real adblock is so much better than Konqueror's adblock) and unplug (lets you download anything normally viewed via browser plugins, including YouTube videos as FLV files). For awhile, you could even get Thunderbird as an extension -- it was called something else at the time, I think -- and you still can get Sunbird as a Firefox or Thunderbird extension.
Extensions are the killer feature of Firefox, and they are also what kills Firefox performance.
I think it could have been a bit better. I know part of it is bad/buggy extensions, but I imagine part of it is also that extensions are written in XUL/JavaScript. I mean, yes, that enables them -- it's easy to transition from web developer to Firefox extension hacker -- but I do wonder, occasionally, if we could do better, starting from scratch. Konqueror is right out (though we might borrow KHTML or Gecko for awhile), but maybe something written in, say, Python, or LISP, or some good language with a really solid design? Maybe a killer app for its platform, so that people start making Python faster to make their browser faster? (If you think Python is fast enough, you're deluded -- why does the GIL still exist in these days of multicore processors?)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
> Yes, some of us are prepared to use the best tool for the job rather than blindly follow FOSS.
For some of us, the tool being FOSS is part of what makes it the best tool for the job.
For example, even if Microsoft's OOXML was superior to ODF, I wouldn't keep my documents in it, because I know that'll leave me stranded on the upgrade treadmill over time. Like the Red Queen problem; we have to keep upgrading just to keep from falling behind because we allow our software vendors to put us at their mercy.
If programs use files as cache, the OS can keep that data in memory when it's available and use it otherwise when not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ironic that I'm reading this just as I come home to upgrade my chip/motherboard/RAM. My p4 2.4GHz with 640MB RAM doesn't cut it anymore. When my gmail or google reader (heavy on the AJAX) renders, my Winamp skips. Time for an upgrade--solely to support Firefox. Every other App, including CS2, runs fine on this machine. But I don't mind -- time for a Core2Duo w/ 2GB. Overdue, actually.
Many of those things should be provided by the operating system. For instance, Mac OS X provides spellchecking services automatically, and the private RSS framework currently in Tiger will be made publicly available in Leopard. Safari 3.0 will just link to what it needs. The issue here is that Firefox is cross-platform, so it needs those features built-in to take advantage of them universally on all installations.
However, some of the features such as popup blocking are features I do consider essential to a web browser. There's no bloat in stopping rogue JavaScript code.
"Sufferin' succotash."
GRANDMA, LISTEN ITS ABOUT:CONFIG
ABOUT WHO NOW?
CONFIG!!!
KENNY FIG??? Alpha Bravo Oscar Uniform Tango colon Charlie Oscar November Foxtrot India Golf
Well the Day's of less than 1 GB Ram are over I have 4Gigs
The new web???
I run IE on XP and that's nowhere near your mythic 10GB. Hell, even if it were I can get a 320GB hard drive for under $90. It's up to me to decide if I think that's excessive or not. Certainly not to you.
And BTW, I call BS on your claims of FF being "nimble" on a 233MHz Pentium II. I don't doubt it runs, but I'm going to guess it's not a pleasant experience. Just a wild guess.
You're just posturing to get your "M$ Winbloze" quippy into a discussion that doesn't even involve Microsoft other than the submitter's FUD headline.
That said, lately I do find that recent versions of Firefox on Linux and OSX (haven't checked Windows) really are much more usable with multiple cores. The reason is that when Firefox grabs all of one core, you still get decent performance from the rest of your system. I wonder if they're planning on making Firefox multithreaded to remove this safety barrier :). Usually when something is grabbing all the CPU, the culprit is Flash. Flash support on Linux is still poor. Usually I don't mind, because almost all Flash is a waste of time. I'm sure that others have pointed out that Flashblock and Adblock are almost necessities. Without them, FFox is... much like IE, actually.
I've also noticed another problem that I haven't had time to pin down yet. FFox on Ubuntu, even without Flash, seems to eventually slow to a crawl. The workaround is to close it out and restart-- thank goodness it can restore your tabs.
I think much of the recent degradation has to do with habitual defectors (advertisers and worse) working around Firefox's protections to do stuff with Javascript and Flash-- either by sneaking it by or making the site worthless without them. I really hate that, but fortunately there are alternatives to any such site.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?
The newer versions of FireFox run with much less memory then the earlier versions. I'm a tab-piggy, and I've noticed a big difference in memory usage. I used to have to kill and restart firefox all the time. Now just the occasional flash or video file will crash it hard, which is better then the hangs I used to have -- when fireFox had eaten all the memory and my 1Gb systems were paging faster then a 286 running windows 3.0
No, wait Windows 3.0 didn't page, it just crashed. Nevermind.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
The only reason I stay with Firefox is the extremely useful extensions. I've also noticed Google Reader and GMail seem a bit quirky in Opera. However, I use Opera sometimes, and I think it's a great browser.
How's that tinfoil hat working out for you? My god, I've seen some lame excuses to use open source in my time, but that one really takes the biscuit.
Of course this is irrelevant, because real men use lynx.
Daniel
And some of us are willing to work or bear a little inconvenience to support what we believe in.
:)
Quack, quack.
I just can't get over it ... I'll have Photoshop open and suddenly the hard disk is thrashing so badly that it takes several minutes just to open a file. The culprit: always Firefox.
I don't get why Firefox needs hundreds of megabytes of RAM to do its thing. Part of it is, though, that Javascript in Firefox still has some hellacious leaks.
"That made this old coder wanna cry. My first Mac had only 512 kilobytes (kilo - not mega) but that was enough for me to write GUI applications with.
Kids these days don't know how to write code."
Uh, huh. And "back in the day" could you run a VM, host two operating systems, and run a web browser? All in 512K? Didn't think so. Old folks, always living in the past.
The BeOS was snappy and responsive on my 150 MHz PowerPC 604 (not 604e, even) PowerMac 8500.
While OS X didn't support that model, there is an Open Source installer called XPostFacto that does allow OS X installs on the 8500. I was quite dismayed to find it so slow as to be unusable.
My 1.83 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro is the first hardware I've owned that runs OS X at what I consider acceptable speeds - that is, once I added another Gig of RAM, I find the UI responsive enough that it doesn't drag behind my input.
Now, there are some nice architectural features to be found in Objective-C, Cocoa, Core Graphics and the other stuff in Mac OS X. Maybe four or five years from now, when the hardware can handle it, it will turn out to be of real benefit to the users. But from time to time I boot Mac OS 9 on my 400 MHz Blue and White G3 that normally runs OS X, and when I do, I'm always impressed with how fast it is.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Shouldn't this be tagged with "haha" already?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Riiiiiight, because it's "absolutely" impossible to have a goal and fail to reach it.
What really odd is that when Opera's so wonderful, not having all the horrible and obvious problems that Firefox has, why don't more people simply use Opera instead?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I know someone probably posted this but I'm too lazy to read so I'm gonna run the risk of repeating what's already been said 100 times before - YOU CAN NOT HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO!
G'day Bruce!
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
you fags still sucking them dicks? still drinking all that kool aide too i see. fucking dumb motherfucking faggots.
Offtopic my ass! The PP suggested Lynx as an alternative to FF, and I pointed out the links were broken. Try having your first cup of coffee before you start modding, dammit! ;-)
Yeah, they're currently addressing that problem by rewriting Gecko in PHP (the UI will, however, continue being written in their flavor of eXtended ML). It will run on Mozilla's webservers and you will be able to run Firefox via any compatible web browser.
Apple, OTOH, will rewrite Safari, KHTML, Konqueror and most of KDE in Objective Ruby, which will run on their iNternet iServers, accessible via iTCP/iP (compatible with Mac OS 10.9 and up). Right after they switch their kernel to Hurd.
Yes, that's exactly how the future is going to be or my name is not Sir Reginold Frankbarrister O'Fritzebolt-Tooley the Thirteenth!
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
People wanted the features involved? I mean, originally people were screaming for RSS feed support, and spell checking. As well as other features, which more or less come in the form of extensions. All in all, I don't necessarily blame the developers for giving what users want, but I think if they wanted to make it a 'cleaner' implementation, I would have gone the route of adding these as extensions only, so they could work on improving page rendering and load times, as well as reduce the "broken page" tolerance that it, IE, and even Opera (as a javascript) have in regards to web pages, which is probably the bigger culprit in the memory situation, but I think memory isn't as much an issue as memory management (Which is suppose to be an OS level job, right? ... So why ask the application to do the management which it's the OS's job?), rather how often I had issues with Firefox on being friendly with the CPU sharing with other applications (like when I open a page in FF from a link I get in SecondLife or any other cross application interaction or just plain multitasking), which often makes me go to the task manager to kill FireFox, then restart it fresh. That too could be something outside of FireFox, such as some of the terribly designed sites where javascript is implemented in such a manner as to make the browser act in absurd ways.
All in all, I think it is time for the FF team to go back and look at cleaning up the code, more strictly defining extension versus application feature, and possibly removing from the core of the browser certain features (mainly things that other posters pointed out ought to be extensions anyways).
-- Brede
"The reality is that it is better to have something ugly that many can participate in than something beautiful that only a few understand."
Well that explains the success of slashdot.
Amen. Faster still, like Warp 10, on more recent machines.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I agree -- halfway. Had early web browsers been strict about errors, we wouldn't have so much broken code out there, and cross-browser compatibility would be solely a matter of which features are supported -- not which set of error-correcting assumptions you expect.
On the other hand, the fact that those early versions of Mosaic, Netscape, IE, etc. would do something with broken code instead of refusing to display it meant that the barriers to entry were a lot lower. It vastly increased the pool of people who could create web pages, and the talent pool. Sure, some people have both artistic talent and programming ability, or have the resources to team up. But can you imagine a web built solely by programmers?
Eventually the authoring tools would have caught up. But I have to wonder if the web would be as big and diverse as it is now if it hadn't been able to pull in the casual author back in 1995.
Yes, we have crappily-coded sites like MySpace. On the other hand, 10 years ago the idea of visiting a website was inordinately dorky, and being online meant you were a social outcast. Now, it seems like being offline is considered freakish.
The problems you point out may be real, but most of your suggestions aren't particularly practical.
In general, throwing out an existing code base is rarely a good idea. Practically speaking there's rarely a code base so bad that no part of it can be salvaged. Even when things are rewritten, it's almost always the overall structure that's just refactored by a lot of copy pasting.
Also, I'm an SML fan, but there are reasons that no one outside of academia uses SML.
1. Very few people are familiar with it. There is *no one* who has used it for a large project in the real world. I'm not saying it's untested, I'm just saying that the expertise isn't available for a given project like it is with c++ or java.
2. It doesn't support object orientation and the associated runtime polymorphism (i.e. no virtual functions). Runtime polymorphism is pretty darn handy, and it just doesn't exist in SML.
3. There are not the large extant code bases that exist in C++ and java.
Ocaml solves a few of these problems with ML, but not all of them.
As far as garbage collection goes, that would make the existing runtime *more* memory hungry, not *less*. That said, it's handy to have one, and many people *do* use garbage collectors *in c++* http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/
I'd be curious to see someone write a good java browser... but I'm not sure I'd use it unless the UI was at least as snappy as firefox.
You know the one that says blah blah blah "has performed an illegal operation and must close." I know it's been happening for at least a year. Say what you will, but at least IE doesn't CRASH EVERY 3 minutes.
Call it what you like: "Memory Holes". "A Holes". FireFox is slow. Opera is fast. PLEASE FIX!!!
Repeat: Fire Fox No Fast!!! Slow!!! Snelle!!! Retardi!!! Fix Please!!!
The Concerto for Luser in Five Movements, M$235:
Movement I: There is no such problem, it's all FUD - Allegro assai
Movement II: Look over there, it's crappy hardware - Grave larghetto
Movement 2.5: The problem is the user - Crasho the Immueblos
Movement 2.6: The problem is the hackers - Crasho the Immueblos
Movement 2.7: The problem is the drivers - Crasho the Immueblos
Movement 2.6: The problem is the user - Crasho the Immueblos
Movement IV: The next version is "fixing" it and does everything Linux/Mac/OS2/VMS does - Lentissimo non tropo
Movement V: Microsoft is undeniably superior to everything - Andantino grazioso
Movement VI: This doesn't work, but the new version does not cost much - Moderatto con brio
Step 9 Version Inflation??? Collect fees.
GOTO I
Bravo maestro! but Vista still requires 10GB and everything free is slim next to it. Cue failure of Vista, end of above goto and beautiful lacrimosa for the robber barons of Redmond. Got MSFT stock? Sell it or join the chorus of tears.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
People complain a lot about various aspects of software. I suspect that some of the things people want out of Firefox are rather unattainable. For instance, if you want the browser to run quickly, then it needs to use more RAM cache, whereas if you want it to take up less memory, then it will have to re-render pages more often and run more slowly. Plus, a lot of my friends complain to me that Firefox takes up too much memory, and when I go to look at their setups, I discover that they have installed twenty or thirty plugins, each with who knows how many memory leaks. In addition, they also often have upwards of ten tabs open. Obviously, the more sites you have open at the same time, the bigger than memory footprint is going to be. The more plugins you install, the more memory they will take up. The moral of the story is, you can never get something for nothing.
Thank you for demonstrating my point so well. This is exactly the type of response I see whenever I ask for details about a serious problem in Firefox. Oh, sometimes someone will give the URL of a page that supposedly Firefox has a problem with, but when we go to the page we see no problem. Whatever. The FUD isn't boosting Opera usage, so just give it up already.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I call BS on your claims of FF being "nimble" on a 233MHz Pentium II. I don't doubt it runs, but I'm going to guess it's not a pleasant experience. Just a wild guess.
With free software, there's no need to guess or convince yourself without evidence. Install for yourself or just boot Knoppix, Mepis or something easier like a 40MB Austrumi image. Austrumi FF works about as fast as regular Debian Iceweasel installed. It works well, thank you.
I run IE on XP and that's nowhere near your mythic 10GB. Hell, even if it were I can get a 320GB hard drive for under $90. It's up to me to decide if I think that's excessive or not. Certainly not to you.
I don't have a gun to your head, Bungi, and you are free to sell yourself all day long. It brings me some pleasure to think of you sitting around watching your disk thrash, but you might be more pleasant if that did not happen to you so often. You won't convince me to waste my hard drive space and time on Vista or XP. Let me know when you can get XP, Firefox, GIMP and other useful programs into a 40 MB live image.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That works for some types of software, like a web browser. HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. are all well-defined standards, and as long as you can transfer your bookmarks, you're set. Sure, it's nice to be able to transfer your cookies and other settings as well, but the biggest effort involved in switching web browsers is in getting used to the the new application.
Sometimes, though, it's not that easy.
I used to write a lot of documents in WordPerfect. I brought it along from DOS to Windows and then to Linux. Then Corel (or whoever owned WordPerfect at the time) canceled the Linux version of WordPerfect. Over time, the libraries it required stopped getting shipped with Linux distributions, and it was no longer possible to run the old WordPerfect app without spending a lot of effort to track down those old libraries. So I was left with a bunch of documents in WordPerfect format, and no WordPerfect.
I eventually sat down and took a lot of time going through all the documents I wanted to keep. Stories and poetry I'd written. The occasional essay or newsletter article. I pulled them up on a Windows box that had WordPerfect installed, so that I wouldn't have to worry about other word processors' import filters. (IIRC, OpenOffice had problems importing WordPerfect at the time.) I then classified each document based on whether formatting was important. If it was, I saved it as RTF text. If not, I saved it as plain text.
Now I can bring up my archive of old stuff in any word processor, whether open or closed, because the data formats are open.
So now, switching from one word processor to another is trivial. But when all my data was in a format designed for a discontinued application, it was a major event.
"Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer. Firefox addresses this issue somewhat, setting the default cache lower on computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Though the jury is still out on where the perfect balance between too many and too few features lies, one truth is apparent: The new web is pushing our browsers to the limit."
Errr no! When I heard about this I was ecstatic, it's an awesome concept and frankly I'd like my damn browser even faster.
I don't care if it uses 500mb, memory is so damn cheap - sure if it has an option to change the memory use it would be nice but honestly, performance = win.
While I'm at it, we need a damn decent DNS caching tool, I used to use a small package called 'easy dns' (IIRC) which run in the system tray and I set my local machine to point to it as a DNS server, it had a cache of sites and ips and basically sped up browsing quite a bit.
Even on an ADSL2 10mbit link at home browsing is STILL not fast enough on dual core machines with 2gb, I mean it's text and images - it should be damned snappy (it's not terrible but it's not good enough)
If any devs of FF are reading this, please feel free to do whatever you like to make the package even faster!
If you get any spare time, send some snippets of code to MS to fix up the explorer interface snappiness too! (Explorer, not IE)
What really odd is that when Linux's so wonderful, not having all the horrible and obvious problems that Windows has, why don't more people simply use Linux instead?
It's called Cacheviewer. It still needs a bit of tweaking, but as it is right now, it's already quite useful and imho beats reloading stuff with IE.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Firefox went big and bloated a long time ago; I really don't mind. The most pathetic computer I interact with on a regular basis has 768 megs of RAM, my preferred machine has two gigs. I can handle a bloated browser as long as the features are useful. In Firefox I find the the majority, if not all, features come in handy on at least a semi-regular basis. I can't say the same for IE, which has been crammed full of useless crap for a long, long time. When I really want a lean browser I go to Safari; but Safari is lacking and I usually find myself back with Firefox before the day is out.
No, it's not odd at all. Windows doesn't have horrible and obvious problems. I and many others use it without any major problems at all. Besides, so much software is available only for Windows that many people would need to run a Windows emulator in Linux. Why not just cut out the middleman and run Windows itself?
I'm no fan of Microsoft or Windows. It's a mediocre OS from a company well known for its mediocre software. But claiming that Windows has "horrible and obvious problems"? Give me a break!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I personally have only one reason, but it's a biggie: Adblock Plus. Its ad-blocking tools are many, many times easier to use, configure, auto-update, and more powerful than the ad-blocking built into Opera. Opera's ad-blocking improved enormously in version 9.x, but it's still a long way behind Adblock, let alone Adblock Plus. If something as powerful and as easy to use as Adblock Plus were available in Opera, I assure you I'd switch in a heartbeat.
The number and severity of its security problems certainly qualify as "horrible." Obvious? Depends on who you ask. I'm in IT; I think so. Most people in IT would probably agree with that. End users? Maybe not. They have a different idea of "obvious" than most /. readers.
Having to reboot for practically any security update is horrible, at least in my book. Obvious? Hard to say. Most people use either Windows or a Mac (which also suffer this problem; I love my Mac, but WTF do I have to reboot after updates?), and they don't know any better. If they tried Linux or *BSD, they'd realize that you don't have to reboot to update anything but the kernel.
It's pretty clear that Windows has some pretty horrible flaws, and they are also obvious for at least some values of obvious. The most horrible flaw, though, and the least obvious one to people outside of the industry, is that these flaws are so persistent and so hard to fix because they come from the design choices made in Windows. The reason Unix-based systems have so many fewer flaws and they are mostly less severe is, again, because of basic design choices. Is it horrible that an OS designed in the late 1960s, when the industry was still so young and inexperienced with security, is better-designed than NT and its descendents, which were designed twenty years later?
I'll leave that answer as an exercise for the reader.
I'm only half joking, if that much. I'm not completely convinced that making those separate has been a win. And yes, I am aware of the traditional Unix philosophy, but even Firefox without the other functions does not fit that philosophy.
make things more modular and extension based..
less bloat for those who care, but easy means to add in the other stuff if you want.
same thing for the cache problem... instead having the dev's decide on the balance point, make it a configurable option for the user. Not that complicated. Write a doc on it, and let the user decide what kind of tradeoff they want to make.
as for the other comments about problems with things working and not working; we all know the problem. Let's start enforcing a solution. Stop allowing stuff to work on browsers that shouldn't work, and let's force people to start complying. There's gotta be a way somehow. heck what if people inserted some malware into windows that made IE actually throw errors instead of accepting all the broken crap people write they'll start complaining too... ok so its pretty darn difficult but hey i can have pipe dreams can't i?
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Why can't the "Official" Firefox have optimized builds?
e fox-2002
Sounds like a plan to me:
Optimized Firefox 2.0.0.3 Mac G4 | G5 | Intel
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2007/03/29/fir
~hylas
Tutti all' Opera! - Fravia
... the ultimate reference.
:-]
(Die M$explorer, die!)
Or
http://www.searchlores.org/tuttiope.htm
*
~hylas
How many years ago was this summary written? "Firefox Going the Big and Bloated IE Way?" Has there ever been a time when Firefox was faster and had a smaller memory footprint than IE? I hate to say it, but I don't think so. But wait, it gets even better: according to most benchmarks Mozilla outperforms Firefox! Oh, the irony of it all. A smaller, leaner version of Mozilla...
So what to do?
a) You love Firefox: put up with it. The Firefox codebase is a gigantic mess and that's not going to change anytime soon.
b) Go with IE. Just configure it properly. You'll be amazed at the speed and the free memory gained.
c) Better yet: you love free software, don't you? Yes, you do. Switch to Linux and use Konqueror. It's the best browser out there, and it's codebase is nice and clean. This may sound like only a theoretical advantage, but it makes development a lot easier and thus faster. In fact, I think that the effort of all the developers working on Firefox is misguided: their time would be spent much better working on bringing Konqueror to Windows.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Seamonkey is a suite, but you can still bust it up and have just the browser if you want, and it compares or exceeds FF in a number of areas then. That's what I did and consistently find it better at rendering most web pages and faster than any version of FF I have tried yet. It also has the traditional "full" preferences (FFs are just a little too cartoonish and non featured for me), and more complete/more default options than FF, and only uses one large URL bar with a go or search button, instead of redundant bars that are too small to see the full URL, which means it is easier on the eyes and a better security feature (anti pharming or phishing in other words).
Now with *that* said, I would use Konqueror, as it is even less resource hungry and fast, but just from my anecdotal experience, it tends to start to barf at around a dozen tabs open, just becomes so unresponsive that it gets annoying, whereas with seamonkey I can run it up to 3 dozen tabs, way past my ability to remember them all, and nothing slows down at that level on my modest hardware.
If you're running XP and not playing video games you should be running at least 1GB of RAM. If you're using Vista (at all) or playing video games on XP you should be running no less then 2GB of RAM. Additionally virtual memory is a massive waste of time. Once the user runs out of physical memory the user has no way of being told that they need more memory, the computer simply slows down. And no one can ever sound like their not smoking crack by saying a hard drive is faster then memory, virtual memory = cheap Dell computer with 256MB of RAM. Who here would use virtual memory to extend their video card's memory? The point is simple: if programs are getting bigger to adjust to our needs then our computers memory should follow suite.
- John
http://www.jabcreations.com/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My reason is simple: Opera does not allow me to switch tabs by using the scroll wheel on the tabbar.
But it lets you switch tabs using the scroll wheel while holding the right button anywhere, not just on the tabbar. Just as easy, if not better.
Note, that this is considered a mouse gesture in the config - if you turned mouse gestures off, you can't use it.
You can always just hold down the right mouse button and then switch tabs with the scroll wheel, regardless of where the pointer is.
Thanks for the advice. I knew it was possible to bring the list up with Shift+TAB. I've to try it some more, but looks workable.
As a long time opera/ff/moz user since the opera 3.62 days I must say Opera kicks ff/moz butt every single time, in terms of raw speed and response time. There's nothing ff/moz can do to match that, short of a complete rewrite. I mean just look at the mess gecko is.
If you want more proof, run opera and ff on a slower machine with less RAM and cpu muscle, you'll see ff sometimes go slower than IE.
The number and severity of its security problems certainly qualify as "horrible." Obvious? Depends on who you ask. I'm in IT; I think so. Most people in IT would probably agree with that. End users? Maybe not. They have a different idea of "obvious" than most /. readers.
To put this into perspective, I haven't had a security problem on a windows box in over four years. All you need is to follow some good practices and you're perfectly safe. Vista with its limited user powers should help a lot in reducing the effort involved in those "good practices".
I love my Mac, but WTF do I have to reboot after updates?
Because the kernel has been updated. After you update itunes a reboot is not needed.
Is it horrible that an OS designed in the late 1960s, when the industry was still so young and inexperienced with security, is better-designed than NT and its descendants, which were designed twenty years later?
If you're referring to multics, no commercial operating systems have caught up to that yet. If you're referring to unix I have to disappoint you, unix was not designed to be inherently secure. On early versions there were many security issues, because the concept of limited user powers took a while to gain a foothold, and even when they did the system's design was still full of security holes. The first internet worm (the morris worm) specifically targeted unix systems, in case you've forgotten. Just look at the security track record of commercial unices. It's pretty poor.
Linux is not inherently more secure than other commonly available operating systems, it's just too much of a moving target because there is no binary stability, so a worm can't target large swaths of systems at the same time. That binary instability is a strength, but it's also the reason why there are so few binary drivers and commercial applications on linux.
There's ancient bug about mozilla coming up sloooooooooow in Win32 after it's been on for a long time. We're talking about mozilla 0.8 era bug and it affects all the related products that I'm aware of (TB, FF, probably even the calendar app)
The crux of the problem is that the bug affects only win32. So the developers, one and all, refuse(d) to treat it as a codebase problem because it has to be a windows problem.
"slow" in this instance means over 1 minute and easily 2-3 minutes. I even demonstrated at the time that it's not paging issue as such as mozilla/FF sits doing absolutely nothing (from perfmon monitor tool) for long period and when it finally starts swapping pages in it happens pretty quickly (5-10sec)
It was subsequently "fixed" by making FF etc hold on to the memory they've reserved instead of releasing it back to the OS. Hence you get ridiculous 300MB memory footprint that shrinks to 50MB after restarting FF even with the same pages open. Same goes for TB and all the other apps I'm sure.
So if you've got any kind of memory leak, mozilla apps want to keep it all in ram.
I know your comment was meant to be amusing but I think you've actually come up with a very good idea. If the OS could signal somehow to the app that its getting close to its limit and to either reduce its resource usage (of memory , IO whatever) or it'll get suspended/killed etc. I wonder if this has been implemented anywhere?
Only I had to wait for Firefox to start up.
1. Use/make a parser framework ala boost::Spirit. Then you can make a tool which converts the XML schema of HTML specifications to the parser framework.
2. Use Boehm's garbage collector. It is extremely good, on par with Java.
If you're referring to multics, no commercial operating systems have caught up to that yet.
What neat features of Multics haven't been implemented in some similar fashion by Unix or Linux? I've never actually used Multics, but I have read the Organick book that describes it and I can't think of anything genuinely useful that it has but hasn't got a decent equivalent in Unix.
I always rename it to wininet.old,it wont plays flash but,will stop programs from reading index.dat and generally increase speed of any internet program.
If you need more speed use opera.
One difference is that code audits performed by a corporate publisher look only at the quality of the implementation of the requirements. They don't address whether the requirements themselves have specific anti-end-user bullet points in them, such as phoning home or locking out extensions.
The browser is the new OS. For example
In a moment I'll talk about my views on rewriting large code bases, but first I'll say that I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was with the GP poster up until the SML advocacy, and then disagreed. Even given the neat way that functional languages tend to model parsing problems, web browsers do a lot more than parse HTML and CSS files. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this is the easiest problem they solve. Systematically resolving the layout rules in arbitrarily complex cases is a somewhat difficult problem, given the way those rules are expressed in CSS. And of course, web pages are no longer the static things they used to be: today's browsers need to cope with scripts moving the goalposts arbitrarily, maintaining the integrity of the display as much as possible during lengthy downloads of large pages or after AJAXified updates, etc. etc. It's far from clear that a language like SML offers better support for these naturally concurrent operations than the many alternatives.
I do disagree with the parent post on one fundamental point, though:
I'll see your reuse dogma, and raise you my "plan to throw one away" dogma. :-)
Actually, I don't cite this as some sort of dogmatic adherence to ConceptsTryingToSoundMoreCleverThanTheyAre at all. Rather, I happen to agree with the principle based on practical experience. In general, software design is difficult, and few people are good at it. Even those who are rarely have the good fortune to know exactly what their design will be called upon to do a few years later, and will inevitably allow more flexibility (and commensurate overhead) in some places than is really needed, while making some things unnecessarily strict and thus making later changes more difficult than they might have been.
It's been my experience that in long-term projects, far too many managers aren't willing to throw out a whole module, subsystem, or even product, because of popular wisdom that anything they replace it with will just have bugs of its own. I believe this is a mistake because, again speaking only from my own experience, a high proportion of bugs originate in special or boundary cases. According to my reasoning above, a new project built from scratch with no prior experience will rarely get an overall design that automatically avoids these completely. Discipline is rarely good enough on software projects to allow for this and ensure that new requirements are integrated into a clean overall design rather than bolted on; indeed, in a commercial environment, this may not be realistic given short term deadlines and the typical management and marketing pressures. However, over time, such bolted-on special cases will tend to build up. They start to interact, they don't always get properly documented, and new people on the project team either don't know about them or at best don't know all the original reasoning behind them, making safe maintenance difficult.
Sometimes, this problem is manageable, particularly if your project leadership consistently take a long-term view and give maintenance and testing the priority they deserve. But usually, IME, the problem reaches a certain critical mass where the costs of ongoing development of a code base full of dubiously documented special cases outweigh the costs of stopping to clean things up.
As an additional, very practical concern, tools and programming techniques are always developing. Over the sort of timescales we're talking about here, it's entirely possible that more effective tools will have been created, or more effective techniques discovered, that could solve the underlying problem much more effectively in a different way.
Thus, s
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
.... are prepared to put with inconveniences to keep our computing infrastrcuture under our control, and not under that of external entities.
By extension that keeps the freedoms of people "using the best tool for the job", once they are taken for a ride (they always are) they have a full fucntioning infrastructure to fall back to.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Netscape / Mozilla / Firefox always has been a cow. Anybody with more than half a wit uses Opera.
By using open software you have at least a fighting chance to keep some old software running.
With closed software you are completely and utterly at the mercy of the software provider and any problems they may face (software company bankrupt! Ooops!).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
235 patents?
In millons of lines of code?
If that is all what they can come up with, let me say I am not impressed.
If Samba, Mono and WIne have to be dropped, I say good riddance. It is high time that other solutions are found that do not ape MS stuff.
As for graphical interfaces and OpenOffice.org, I really want to see MS making fools of themselves here.
I am itiching to see this go to court. That would expose MS as the unethical company they are (not for the first time mind you) and will let us all wondering how a company with so many resources prefers to litigate instead of innovate.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Firefox started out with the goal to be leaner. This goal was not reached.
Before you people mod me down for stating this, and before you mod the Firefox apologist up, please do a comparison between any two concurrent release versions of Firefox and plain Seamonkey. The Firefox version has always had a bigger footprint than Seamonkey. Yes, really. Try it, dammit!
And also keep in mind that Seamonkey builds on the Gecko engine that Firefox uses, and not, like some people seem to think, the Mozilla codebase with proprietary code going all the way back to Mosaic.
The big difference is that Seamonkey follows the Mozilla suite paradigm of separating out the major pieces and allowing them to be installed or not as per the user's preference, while Firefox became an "Everything but the kitchen sink" project, where "kitchen sink" equals e-mail. This despite the intentions to be lean. Things included with Firefox have been stripped from Seamonkey, because if a user wants to install "Browser only", that's what the user should get -- not fifty different built-in "helper" apps that may or may not assist with certain types of browsing.
Both are great browsers, but they are directed toward different audiences. If you want the leaner version, try Seamonkey "browser only" install before assuming that it's going to be big and bloaty. You may be in for a surprise.
--
*Art
How many version of Vista do we have? I can think of 4 right now. I am sure there are more.
What is the substantial difference between them? Tehcnically nothing if you ask me. THe differentiation is completely artificial since it costs nothing extra to the company in question to give the same version to everybody.
So basically they are looking after their needs, not mine.
How many current versions of Ubuntu are there? I think they are 3, and in reality all derive from the same one. You are not limited, you can move from one to another, the fixes and direction of the distributions are dictated by people with similar interests to mine.
I know which pair of eyes to trust, specially since is easily demonstrable that people involved in FOSS are as capable as anybody else when it comes to programming and design, they just have chosen a path that benefits them *and* us.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And we have nothing to do with software as a bussiness.
We take FOSS tools, adapt them to our needs and if problems are found, they are fed back to our Linux provider, which in turn feeds that back into the Linux everybody uses and loves.
We don't need to look when you feel like we should be looking.
We need to look when, well, we need to. And when somebody does, everybody can benefit. Accumulate all those small effects and it snowballs into a product that is very versitile.
It is like freedom of speech: not everybody uses it, but we need it to advance society.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
First of all, 6 billion monkeys are not looking at the software. People are looking at it, using it, finding problems with it, reproducing problems, reporting them.
For sure there are many gaping holes in FOSS, as there are in any complex piece of software.
But in FOSS the interest is to fix them as soon as possible, there is no bottom line to take care off that could compromise doing that kind of work once a problem is found.
WIth closed source software problems may be important or not, according to the needs and whims of the company making the software.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
...to grab .flv files would just be to get the FF addon that does that, I forget the name, but I used to have it installed. You just click on an icon to grab a flash out of the current window and it cues it for downloading.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
Paraphrasing Mark Pilgrim: on a long enough timeline, the utility of all non-free software approaches zero.
Free software may get orphaned as often or more often than proprietary software, but it can get un-orphaned, and that's the important thing. Businesses who run on OS/360 are an interesting example of what happens when the proprietary vendor goes to great lengths to prevent the software from becoming orphaned in the first place... but who owns the applications that those guys run? I was under the impression that IBM provided the platform, but not the applications--if I'm wrong, please do correct me. If IBM closed up shop tomorrow, how affected would they be?
Also, I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare the stability of a single private company with the stability of the open-source community as a whole--which, if you're a company willing to support a developer, is the stability of the entire programming industry.
I worked at a medical office which ran Medical Manager for many years. It did what it needed to do, sent out bills, all that stuff. However, it was vulnerable to the Y2K problem, in that the program would not accept dates past 12/31/99. The company that had made the software had been purchased by another, larger company, which wanted to sell a new, fifty thousand dollar version which would require a hardware upgrade as well, and would run on a completely different platform. It would have been cheaper to hire a programmer to make the date change, update the tables and whatever... but they didn't have that option. Vendor lock-in is a very real problem; once you give money to that vendor, you're paying for the chains that bind you to them. It's not in their interest to help you be flexible.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Is it time to start thinking of the browser as the OS and make it the bottom layer?
- broadband -> "Just-In-Time Installation" & remote desktops/filesystems
- eeprom based browser -> closer to "instant on"
- browser as OS -> less complexity -> less vulnerability & more performance
I think there's a fair % of the internet/computing world that could get by with this and experience nothing but upside. (sidenote: I'd also like to see a filesystem with XML as it's underlying model, db's and filesystems have been converging for a long time and XML seems the logical conclusion of this conversion).
I have a Dual G5 2.0GHz next to me, running 10.4.whatever, and I don't find the UI responsive enough that it doesn't drag behind my input. As far as I'm concerned, apple failed with OSX.
Heh, OSX on a 400MHz machine? You are a glutton for punishment, eh? I actually put it on a G3-333 once, but I only had 128MB RAM so it was a short experiment. I traded the system for some wifi gear :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you leave Windows out of the comparation. It may even be the less secure sane (not Windows) mainstream OS out there.
Rethinking email
1) In my experience most people might as well be monkeys when it comes to finding nontrivial bugs with a program. No effective difference. Most people can't read source code, or even if they could they don't know good code from bad code. And I don't think they should need to if it's not their job.
:).
2) It's silly to claim with FOSS the interest is to fix them ASAP with "no bottom line" to take care of while with a company it's "needs and whims".
Someone working on a GPL program in his spare time may not fix stuff for a while. He might have other more important things to do - like his day job and what his boss has assigned him. Or have fun with friends and family. After all he's not getting paid for it, and you try sacking him
Someone being paid by a company (Redhat/Suse) to work on a GPL program is under the same pressures as someone paid by a company to work on a proprietary program. So the differences are not OSS or proprietary, it's the management and the person "owning" that code.
It's "needs and whims" for all cases.
Just go look at the tons of reported and unfixed bugs in both closed and open software. Firefox most definitely isn't "high quality". And after Michal Zalewski found some bugs, they didn't fix them all (I'm not surprised - it's not easy to correctly fix bugs fast, especially when you have a not so good design and not so great programmers that allowed so many serious ones to slip in in the first place).
OSS: Very many years ago, while evaluating PHP Nuke, I remember finding and reporting bugs to the author of PHP Nuke. He didn't take things well. So looking at the sort of bugs and the author's response I told my boss that PHP Nuke was NOT the way to go, and sure enough, for many years after it was "new security bug found" in PHP Nuke every few weeks or so. Years later someone else wanted to use PHP Nuke/Postnuke, and I looked at it again, and it was still crap, so I suggested a different CMS be used instead. Good thing too, it was still security bug in PHP/PostNuke every few weeks for years more.
Proprietary: a company I worked for some years ago was reselling Cyberguard Firewalls (as well as doing security stuff). While checking it out, I found a way to bypass the SMTP security proxy on version 2.x of the Cyberguard firewall. I reported it to Cyberguard directly (no public disclosure - hey we're a reseller go figure ). They tried to fix it. But it was eventually only properly fixed much much later AFTER version 4.x! I checked for the bug in 3.x, 4.x and reported it each time. Funnily enough I found and reported a similar bug in a different vendor's firewall later when I was no longer working for that company...
So whether it's FOSS/Proprietary, no difference. What makes the difference is who is actually writing it and fixing it.
An author whose best work to date is full of errors, is likely to still continue writing stuff that's full of errors.
If the same people who wrote and project managed crappy Netscape 4.x and 6.x are doing the same for Mozilla, then no surprise it's still crappy.
There will always be people out there that want Firefox to have x feature so give it to them, but as an extension. For that matter, make everything an extension. Mozilla should concentrate on making a really efficient browser platform with the bare minimum built in; then have all features be extensions. Don't like how bookmarks work? Use a third party one! Want more control over caching? Write it! Etc etc. I am all for having a feature rich browser, but I don't want clutter and wasted resources on features I don't use. I should be able to turn off or replace anything I want.
First post! (just in case I am...)
Am I misunderstanding you or are you stating the case exactly the opposite of how it works on planet Earth? Firefox is browser-only, with no e-mail or other tools. Seamonkey is the suite, with, quoting from the project page:
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
So FF has never been big and bloated????
Don't know how long this will stay up.. but here's a screen shot of the memory usage after some light browsing.
http://i11.tinypic.com/5zd4tia.jpg
FireFox is SLOW. I don't know why. It just is. Fix it please.
You can't fix what you don't acknowledge. How convenient for you.
I have to ask - how often do you have to update your adblockers? I've used proxomitron for 6-7 years now, and I've had to update filters maybe on average once a quarter anymore? I get 97% ads blocked now adays?
I am technical, and do manage a filterset, but it's just not that much time spent on it. As a user, you could do an update install about as often as you might update Opera or Thunderbird.
Use - if I wasn't doing filterset maintenance, AdMuncher or Proxomitron (the two I've used at all extensively) are pretty much setup (takes 3 minutes) and forget. Occasionally I need to bypass the filters for some reason - rightclick, bypass - reload. Or even easier, click on the prox menu in the upper left corner, bypass all filters. Bam new tab automatically.
I suppose the only thing I can see being easier would be if I could highlight a text area (like the annoying ad tables) and have it eat that. I keep hoping Opera ads something like a cut tool that would work like in paint.net, drag a little edit box, and clear it - but then have the browser no longer show that and collapse the space.
My problem is I can't stand firefox long enough to really try out Adblock.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
I've noticed that with the recent merger of monoliths Adobe and Macromedia, it's become even more popular to bash Dreamweaver. (I'm well aware that CS3 has its flaws)
I'm a web developer myself, and proud to say I use Dreamweaver for 90% of what I do. When used properly, it's still a great tool. emacs and UltraEdit only do so much, WYSIWYG bits can be darn handy.
That said, I agree with you, otherwise. FrontPage is a mistake and turns any snippet of code into kitty litter, and using Flash for your entire web presence is messy. Some folks like to turn off the CSS and get to the actual site content. Waiting for a loading bar on a broadband connection really makes me feel like the internet has taken several steps backward.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Wow, that wasn't even close.
"Windows at least, does. Look up WM_COMPACTING." - by FlawedLogic (1062848) on Friday May 18, @10:43AM (#19178793)
Yes, correct on your part, & a very good catch: You can issue that parameter in Windows multiple message queues to each running Window as a message to release any discardable memories they are using...
APK
I hope that 233 MHZ PII has had a few memory upgrades since you bought it. Firefox is currently using 117 MB of memory on my machine. To be fair though, I do have a whopping 4 tabs open though. No flash pages, no PDF pages, no streaming media either. Just 4 plain 'ol web pages.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
I have. That's your problem: I know FF simply does not run well in the hardware you are describing, unless you happen to have at least 1GB of RAM, which I doubt since I never saw a PII with that much memory outside of a data center. So, you're still full of shit.
It brings me some pleasure to think of you sitting around watching your disk thrash
Well, maybe if Firefox wasn't so badly written that wouldn't happen, would it?
And who the fuck cares what you can stuff in 40MB. You have some pretty stupid ideas about what my computer is for. You can go on slumming and FUDing all you want. The rest of us get our jobs done.
For chrissake, for all we know you've got an extension with a memory leak pulling thousands of RSS feeds every five minutes. How can I recreate the problem? What OS are you using? What version of Firefox? What home page? What extensions are installed? What extensions are active?
I've used many versions of Firefox with all kinds of extensions and plugins opening countless tabs and leaving it open for god knows how long on all kinds of hardware running various OSes and I have never ever seen this problem. Nor have I ever met anyone who has seen the problem. Nor has anyone I have ever seen make these claims on the internet ever provided enough information to recreate the problem. Doesn't mean the problem isn't real, but if all you are going to do is complain about it without providing any actual information don't expect to convince anyone -fanboy or otherwise- that the problem is with Firefox and not with something else.
I actually want to see this problem and all the people I see talking about it are a bunch of asshats who think everyone who even discusses the issue is a Firefox fanboy.
While you're at it, another phrase he used should have been "jury-rigged" or "jerry-built" (not "jerry-rigged").
you know your going to use it. besides......
its NOT hard compiled against the "libs" and "API's" of the OS its fuctioning on so it WILL NEVER be as wack like IE will always be.
unless microsoft desides not to build it so intergraded with everything (very bad, we all know that by now).
Try Seamonkey, seriously.
I switched to Firefox when the Mozilla Suite was discontinued, but was never happy with it. I found it slow (despite all the hype about it being faster) and *very* unstable. When Seamonkey 1.0 was released (aka Mozilla 1.8) I gave it a try - brilliant! I'd forgotten how much faster Mozilla was compared to Firefox.
Seamonkey is fast, responsive, stable, and has all the features of Firefox (though for some reason, the icons in the bookmarks and toolbar are turned off by default - I just turned them back on).
If (like me) you want better than IE6/IE7, you don't like Opera, and want a better alternative than Firefox, try Seamonkey.
If there are better options than Firefox, why are you using Firefox? "Because Firefox works well enough" is not a good enough reason.
I agree with you that Firefox was never lean or efficient and that it's very buggy, so I switched to Seamonkey. It has all the flexibility that Firefox has, and it's quicker, more responsive, more stable, and just *feels* nicer to use. It's also being actively maintained and supported.
If the Mozilla Foundation started losing Firefox users, they'll start losing corporate dollars, and they'll start paying attention to what the users need.
Stop being part of the problem! You don't seem to like Firefox any more than I do!
The UI is written in XUL/Javascript. Java has nothing to do with it.