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:I quit FF a long time ago.

[aichpvee]

That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. Unless of course you work for Opera and believe you would somehow benefit from me running it, since extensions are the thing that keeps me using Firefox over Opera even though the gtk dialogs annoy the hell out of me.

Stupid, biased and subjective article

[Psychotria]

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.

Re:Very nice FUD

[arth1]

Wow, I actually RTFA and nowhere in there does it say that Firefox is becoming as "bloated" as Internet Explorer. Nope, it says it's becoming as bloated as Seamonkey. Oh the horror.

That's rather ironic, considering that Seamonkey (formerly Mozilla suite) without mail/news/irc is the lean alternative among Gecko-based browsers, and Firefox has always been far more bloated than plain Seamonkey.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:Firefox is written in Java, IE is written in C+

[Jadware]

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.

Re:rethink the OS

[darthflo]

"rethink"? Unnecessary.

As far as I know, most current OSes already implement a disk access caching layer storing information that might be read from disk in RAM, so the mozillanians could just switch to disk caching 'stead of wasting precious main mem. However, there's an even better way of doing it:

1. Close Firefox (sudo killall -9 firefox)
2. Remove Firefox (e.g. "emerge --unmerge firefox" in gentoo, "apt-get remove firefox" in debian, ...)
3. Install Opera (yay for intelligent, low-RAM-consuming, blazingly fast disk-caching) (e.g. "emerge opera", "apt-get install opera")
4. Be happy

(just my $.02)

Re:And yet, few use Opera

[Petrushka]

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.