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.'"

Comments

Re:Opera!

[Kesshi]

i use opera as my primary browser, and haven't had it crash on any flashes ever, although getting shockwave to work appears to be hard

I will be the first to admit that I am far less geeky than the average /. user, and I have to ask.... What's the difference between flash and shockwave? I've almost always head the two terms used together a la "Shockwave flash!" Sometimes with "Macromedia" attached at the beginning.

Perhaps my old Opera woes were from macromedia and not flash. Though now I'm assuming and I don't like that.
Also, do you know how well does Opera works on YouTube & Google Videos? Those are two of my favourite places on the internet. Chances are I'd stop using Opera if it doesn't work on as little as 10% of those videos.

In another year or so

[Dachannien]

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.

Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time

[dch24]

My firefox is using 103 Mb currently, or 429 Mb virtual memory. It's been running for almost 15 hours.

$ top
...
28626 root 15 429m 103m 21m S 14:46.40 firefox-bin
...
$ cat /proc/28626/status
Name: firefox-bin
State: S (sleeping)
SleepAVG: 98%
Tgid: 28626
Pid: 28626
PPid: 28616
TracerPid: 0
VmPeak: 479476 kB
VmSize: 448324 kB
VmLck: 0 kB
VmHWM: 106188 kB
VmRSS: 105612 kB
VmData: 298724 kB
VmStk: 140 kB
VmExe: 80 kB
VmLib: 32244 kB
VmPTE: 540 kB
Threads: 10
SigQ: 1/15870

Lynx: Not Trying Very Hard(TM)

[BillGatesLoveChild]

The SSL version has gone. The download directories are all empty: http://mitglied.lycos.de/mirabilos/pub/

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)

Have they ever fixed that damn SHOCKWAVE BUG?

[kennylogins]

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.