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

is it time

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:is it time

[thePsychologist]

Actually, perhaps it's time to totally rethink the internet. Browsers today are bloated partly because websites are bloated.

The majority of websites could do with a simple and less cluttered layout like google's website for instance. Compare it to yahoo and you'll see that yahoo has a bunch of "advanced features" like inpage tabs and whatnot. Lots of this extra junk you'll find around the web is javascript that chooses CSS based on browser and that displays advertisements. Lots of it is just poor use of HTML often from WYSISYG programs. More features in language means more junk on website. More junk on website means more junk in browser.

Re:is it time

[soleblaze]

It's time to bring back VRML!

Re:is it time

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who lives out in the sticks, and pays $100/month for a 1.5MBit 802.11 connection, I say no. Keep the web as plain old HTML. Limit flash (And other plugins) to things like embedded video, NOT AS THE ACTUAL WEBPAGE.

There's still a lot of people out there who are limited to dialup, satellite, or some other jerry-rigged internet connection.

Re:is it time

[ajs]

I'm doubtful that there's a substantial revision to the browser that would be useful. Firefox is really not that "large". When rendering small, lightweight Web pages, Firefox is actually not the largest application I run regularly... of course, small, lightweight Web pages are a dying breed.

That's not really Firefox's fault. Eight Web pages worth of cache is nothing... when you're not visiting a site that has 6 CSS stylesheets, 8 JavaScript sources and 20 images eight pages is a breeze. But visit most Web sites today, and you'll find that that's a dying dream.

Fortunately, well-designed Web sites can take advantage of this. For example, MediaWiki has tons of CSS and JavaScript associated with each page, but it's shared in common across almost all of those pages, so keeping 8 pages in cache isn't all that much more expensive than keeping one.

Re:is it time

[harry666t]

I strongly agree.

BTW IMO any intelligent web designer would do CSS preprocessing on the serverside via PHP, Perl or some other CGI.

Java, Javascript, Flash are disabled in my browser. Adblock + filtersetg are getting rid of 99% of ads. All CSS styles are overrided by my default one (monospaced font, black bg, darkgreen fg, m4tr1x like ^_^), and I must say the overall experience of using the web is way better. Why? Because everything runs faster.

Re:is it time

[nawaman]

I think one of the reason (rather than the caching) FF use more memory that Konqurer or Opera (but I don't think it's that much) is that it use XUL. But XUL is one of the most important why FF is so expansible. Then I think that's considered necessary. :p

Re:is it time

[Skreems]

The original files that compose a site are not the problem. You can throw all the raw CSS you can find into memory and not make a dent. The problem is that Firefox is saving the final DOM that's parsed out of those original source files. That's a lot bigger than the raw data, and it's not something that "simple" websites do any better at.

Re:is it time

[Seraphim_72]

Why not just use elinks/links/lynx then? You are looking for a feature set so low that my copy of elinks actually has more features then yours...not to flame, but I am curiou8s as to why. And before you say it, I fire up a for bore browser when needed - but why do you have your set up rather then mine?

Sera

Re:is it time

[harry666t]

Because Konqueror can move the menu bar to the Kicker, like in OS X, and I like that behaviour. Also, afaik links and lynx still suck at displaying pictures?

Re:is it time

[Seraphim_72]

Interesting. Because my elinks is running in X it defaults to using X to display images. When I am on a dumb terminal it uses aview so I dont even have to mess with images, sure, ascii sux for images, but then again - I can display them any way I want to.

Sera

Very nice FUD

[The Bungi]

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. The article is also (as usual) not kind to Firefox as far as the speed and insane memory consumption it suffers from, which thousands of fanboys have spent the past three years desperately denying for some weird reason. To be fair, I use FF and I don't care about the memory problem, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

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.

Re:Very nice FUD

[Jeffrey Baker]

Yes, and it's doubly FUD because it's based on "anecdotal reports" from the kinds of people who thing that -funroll-loops makes your Linux kernel 20% faster. Firefox is and always has been faster (uses less CPU) and more efficient (uses less memory) compared to IE and even compared to Opera. Try the browser buster memory test and you will see that Firefox beats other popular browsers by a factor of 2x to 4x. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=240 026

Re:Very nice FUD

[acidrain]

Seriously. I use FF because it has a lot of handy plugins, which could be counted as a healthy form of bloat, not because it is faster or smaller than IE. I have been doing some heavy DOM scripting lately (using Javascript to procedurally generate and update web pages) and FF is actually a little slower than IE when it comes to the things that are typically expensive.

If you look at the code (painful) or read the Mozilla road map for FF, it becomes clear the current code base is a tangled mess of legacy api's and the the Mozilla team is really looking forward to the chance to rip out a lot of crap and clean things up.

Re:Very nice FUD

[tepples]

I have yet to actually see this memory problem. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I've never seen it and the people I've seen say it exists never bother giving details (OS, active extensions, theme, version, etc.) so it can be recreated.

Windows 2000, Gran Paradiso 3.0 latest alpha, default theme, only extension installed is Flashblock, and the memory size of firefox.exe temporarily grows by 200 MB when printing even the simplest page. (Bug 379844)

Re:Very nice FUD

[The Bungi]

I suspect Firefox has a problem with the amount of time it stays open, which means it has a memory leak (or a number of them) that are slight enough not to be a problem if you have it open for 8 or nine hours and close it every day but become an issue after two or three days.

The instance I'm typing this into (2.0.x) has been up for about three days. I have no idea how many tabs I've opened and pages loaded, but the task manager shows ~300MB mem and ~120MB VM usage. Keep in mind right now I only have two tabs open.

I suppose one could say the solution to the problem is restarting Firefox at least once a day... except that restarting a web browser seems about the stupidest thing ever.

Still, I put up with it because it's far better than IE6. I don't like Opera, so I don't have a lot of choice.

Re:Very nice FUD

[detect]

except that restarting a web browser seems about the stupidest thing ever. Google Sync is your friend.

Re:Very nice FUD

[mysidia]

I have 10 tabs open, and Firefox 2.0.0.3 on XP Pro SP2 is eating 150 MB of RAM and running painfully slow at the very moment, especially when I try to do "File Menu > Save As" on a page, then the entire browser freezes for almost 90 seconds after I click the save button, even if it's just a text page -- I haven't browsed to any graphic intensive pages, just a lot of pages.

In the recent past, i've had 300MB memory usage on just 3 tabs. I wasn't surfing to pages that contained heavy graphics, java, or anything that would justify the browser using so much memory, I just had been to a lot of different pages during that session.

So I say, not only is the 100Mb memory usage on pages confirmable, it's an underestimate of the scope of the problem; the browser's memory usage keeps expanding until you notice it, or the browser crashes.

I t think the memory problem has NO direct connection to the number of hours you have the browser open. Only, how many tabs you have open, and how many pages you have surfed to in each tab. Most people would surf more sites the longer the browser is open, and I think it's that act of surfing more sites that increases the memory usage, and the memory usage stays high, even if I start closing tabs; only a complete shutdown of the browser is needed to fix it.

I consider it highly annoying, and i've never recently had this problem of excessive memory usage with IE or Opera, no matter how many browser windows I opened or how much surfing I did, so I consider it a serious disadvantage of using Firefox rather than say Opera or Internet Explorer.

well no wonder

[kauttapiste]

That's why I never get the first post!

well

[mastershake_phd]

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.

Re:well

[Anonymous Coward]

Other browsers don't have the need to have the user set memory limits and they have very fast forward and back page and tab switching.

The memory problems Firefox has seem to have the usual open source project response: "It's not a problem since it would be a major hassle to fix"

Re:well

[drinkypoo]

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.

Sure, for geeks. But if we want people to stop using IE we must provide a credible alternative.

There should definitely be an option to tell Firefox to use less than n megabytes of memory, and let firefox figure it out, instead of setting the memory limit through the number of undo levels per tab.

Re:well

[mastershake_phd]

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.

Sure, for geeks. But if we want people to stop using IE we must provide a credible alternative.

There should definitely be an option to tell Firefox to use less than n megabytes of memory, and let firefox figure it out, instead of setting the memory limit through the number of undo levels per tab.

Firefox would have to default to something, doesnt mean you shouldnt be able to change the default amount.

Re:well

[drinkypoo]

That's not what I'm saying at all. Right now, if you want to reduce the amount of memory Firefox uses to enable you to click the back button faster, you have to set a per-tab limit. This is dumb. I mean, it's nice to have that option, but for it to be the only means of controlling that limit? Stupid. There should be a nice fat "never use more than x megabytes of memory" option, and you can fill in the value of x. If the browser starts to run out of memory, it can prompt you and ask if you'd like to increase the memory limit. It needs to be as easy as possible for average users, who do not feel the same joy that you or I might when we figure out some computer-related esoterica. They just want to surf myspace and look at pictures of half-naked teenage girls.

Re:well

[Penguinshit]

HALF???

Speak for yourself, dude....

Re:well

[DittoBox]

Yes because my mom, my dad, my uncle, a dozen or so of my computer illiterate co-workers and my grandma can do it.

Making stupid assumptions that "my users are geeky enough to overcome my development laziness, I'll just make them change a bunch of caching settings once its shipped." is about as stupid. This is why a lot of (FL)OSS doesn't get off the ground: arrogant developers that expect way too much from their users.

I love (FL)OSS just as much as the next slashdotter but if you're going to make your software usable only via arcane knowledge don't whine and complain that 99% of the populace hasn't caught on yet. They won't. I don't mind software that's written for the dummy, as long as software is made to be able to change so that non-dummies can use it too.

But please don't expect your user-base to be 99% non-dummies while you market it to a world full of dummies.

Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time

[slayermet420]

I'm running 3/4 of a gig, and I've never had Firefox crash. And I have BOINC running all the time. My CPU is spinning pretty high all the time, and I tend to have a good bit of my RAM being used all the time. So I don't know what you're doing wrong dude.

Firefox=Mozilla?

[Aeron65432]

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.

Re:Firefox=Mozilla?

[eln]

That's really the problem, I think. Firefox was originally supposed to be just a great browser, as opposed to the bloat that was Mozilla, with additional functionality being provided by Add-ons. Now, though, the development direction seems to be to take the best of the extensions and incorporate them into the main product. It might be better to keep the browser as it is, and then release a separate bundle with Firefox + the most popular add-ons. That way, people that want the slim browser they switched to Firefox for in the first place can have it, while the Firefox team can still have a download that will allow them to crow about all of the great features Firefox has.

Re:Firefox=Mozilla?

[The_Quinn]

That's the beauty of open-source! If you want to maintain the current, lighter version of the browser, all you have to do is fork the source, manage an maintain security patch merges, compile from source, avoid legal entanglements by making the source available to requesters, and try to avoid fracturing the user/developer-community!

Simple!

:D

Opera!

[Romwell]

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.

Re:Opera!

[glwtta]

I think software should not be discriminated on the basis of not being FOSS.

And I think it should. Guess that's why different things matter to different people.

Re:Opera!

[Paradigm_Complex]

I do. Other people can use it - fine - but if I can't see the source, I don't know whats in it and I'm not very trusting. For all I know Opera is grabbing and selling information such as my web history. I know what fx does with the passwords it stores - I can see the code. How do I know Opera doesn't use it to log into my gmail account? I can watch whats going in and out of my ethernet and wireless card, but even so opera could be using some undocumented "feature" of a closed-source operating system to make sure I don't see it. I'm not trying to convert others to F/OSS too actively, but I'm pretty dedicated to the idea. Firefox still has a long way to go before it falls enough for me to seriously consider a closed source browser. Hopefully someone will fork fx and fix these issues - or if not I can. Because, you know, its open source.

Re:Opera!

[Racemaniac]

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 (due to a bad installer from adobe... i haven't bothered to get it to work yet, but from what i heard, i'd have to install firefox to get shockwave into opera -_-)
all in all i love it as a primary browser, sometimes i encounter an incompatible site, and then i switch to IE because i know it's a site i can thrust, and otherwise i work with opera, knowing that so few people use it that noone bothers to write exploits for it.

Re:Opera!

[Timesprout]

Yes, some of us are prepared to use the best tool for the job rather than blindly follow FOSS.

Re:Opera!

[OrangeSpyderMan]

I do. Other people can use it - fine - but if I can't see the source, I don't know whats /i>[sic] in it and I'm not very trusting.

I call bullsh1t on this. You've reviewed all the source of all the pgms you use? Stop this argument, please, it's not a real reason to choose one over the other unless you're actually willing to go through the source of every one of them, and I doubt you have the time, and if you do - you should do something better with it :) .

Re:Opera!

[drinkypoo]

I call bullsh1t on this. You've reviewed all the source of all the pgms you use? Stop this argument, please, it's not a real reason to choose one over the other unless you're actually willing to go through the source of every one of them

You can save your specious arguments for an audience that will buy them. We don't have to review the source of all the programs we use to gain the "transparency" benefit of Open Source or Free Software. The idea is "many eyes", not "my eyes".

Re:Opera!

[quanticle]

Proprietary software is not practical, especially in the long term.

That's got to be the dumbest argument I've heard in favor of Free/Open Source Software in a long time. Look at IBM's mainframes. I don't think you could get more closed or proprietary. Yet, many businesses have stuck by them due to the fact that backwards compatibility is never broken on those machines. Heck, you could run OS360 packages from the 70's on the modern zOS machines without a problem.

I think its just a bit extreme to say that no proprietary solution is practical in the long term. It depends on the application, the stability of the provider, and the relationship that you have with the provider. These three criteria apply whether the provider is the open-source community or a private company.

Re:Opera!

[JordanL]

Then the entire paradigm is based on the (flawed) assumption that a general set of eyes is inherently better than the hired set of eyes which the programmers for any given closed source project employ.

The issue you have is that you don't trust the set of eyes, but the process is fundamentally the same if you do not review the source code yourself. You are trusting someone else to assure you nothing is wrong, and confusing motive with action.

The people who try and claim that FOSS is better than closed source because you can't be sure the evil corporate grmlins are stealing your soul are grasping at straws, and don't understand the fundamental benefits of closed source or FOSS, and IMHO, they are doing a disservice for OSS by promoting something that is not a reasonable benefit of OSS nor something which is an inherent difference it has.

Re:Opera!

[OrangeSpyderMan]

We don't have to review the source of all the programs we use to gain the "transparency" benefit of Open Source or Free Software. The idea is "many eyes", not "my eyes".

Oh so Open Source is all about relying on someone else to review the code for you? Please tell me how this is different from a software house paying QA guys to do it, apart from the fact they're paid professionals :)

I've said it once, and I'll say it again, you're trusting someone you don't know to check it's ok, and if that's the case, there is NO difference whether it's Open Source or not - so stop using it as an argument. There are many more arguments a lot better than this for using FOSS, it simply doesn't need BS like this.

Re:Opera!

[shish]

You can save your specious arguments for an audience that will buy them. We don't have to review the source of all the programs we use to gain the "transparency" benefit of Open Source or Free Software. The idea is "many eyes", not "my eyes".

Seeing as most people who look at firefox's source code go blind soon after, I'm not buying this.

Yes, hundreds of thousands of people can in theory look at the source; but then all of them think that someone else will do it, and nobody actually *does*. (Not counting full time mozilla employees, since MS has full time IE employees, and they don't count towards the "many eyes" effect)

Re:Opera!

[StikyPad]

I can watch whats going in and out of my ethernet and wireless card, but even so opera could be using some undocumented "feature" of a closed-source operating system to make sure I don't see it.

That's possibly the most insane statement I've ever read by someone who claims to be savvy enough to fork a development project on his own. If you really think it's possible for an OS to pass information over a network in such a manner as to make it undetectable, then I have a very special invisible firewall to sell you. Don't worry, it's open source.. I only charge for the distribution costs.

Re:Opera!

[Bogtha]

Sometimes the best tool for the job depends on how far into the future you are looking. Free Software advocates are more pragmatic than you think. You just need to stop thinking about what works today and start wondering about what will work tomorrow. Mark Pilgrim wrote a couple of decent articles about the kinds of problems proprietary software can cause.

Now I don't use Opera for anything other than testing, so I don't know what kinds of risks that particular software exposes you to. What I do know is that staying in control of your computer is a decent policy to stick to, and Opera would have to be significantly better than Firefox or Konqueror for me to use it. That's not being "blind", as you put it, it's being sensible in exercising caution.

Re:Opera!

[bfields]

Then what's the difference? Closed source software has "many eyes," too. They just happen to be paid by someone.

Right. The same "someone", usually. And a "someone" whose interests are not those of users.

This is the same reason we usually trust a result published in a peer-reviewed journal more than one reported by a corporation with only internal peer review, even when the resources available for the internal peer review may be excellent.

It's the difference between "here's our results, here's how we got them, feel free to try yourself and see if you come to the same conclusions" and "here's our results, our best people checked them, honest!"

Re:Opera!

[shish]

I just had the freakiest experience with Opera, and I wonder if anyone here can explain: As some of you may know, in addition to regular back and forward buttons, opera also has a "go where I want" button. I had suspected that it worked by simply finding the end digit in the URL and adding one, ie if you're viewing 42.jpg and hit "go where I want" you go to 43.jpg. But I've just had it figure out that the image after "07.jpg" is "chapter2-01.jpg".

HOW DOES IT KNOW?!

Re:Opera!

[TheLink]

Many eyes?

Haha, so 6 billion monkeys will be able to spot a security problem and submit a bug report? Remember it has to be done before the software is exploited (whether secretly or not).

Sure, many users can spot a UI problem, but only a very few people can and will spot security problems, and fewer will bother to actually report them to the right channels. Plenty of evidence for that - gaping holes in open source that were not spotted and fixed till years later.

There's too much crap code out there for everyone to look at it. Hackers will just pick a target, find exploits, exploit them, when they run out, they pick another. And only a few people actually go around fixing the bugs (or writing good code in the first place).

"Less available RAM"

[Jaffa]

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.

Re:"Less available RAM"

[Vexorian]

But seriously man, I am yet to see firefox go above 120MB, I've seen some trolls saying it can get to 500MB! And who cares if you are not able to play those FULL SCREEN games and have your browser open at the same time? And is it so difficult to got to options\Advanced\Set cache size to 0, there should you go if you got infinite bandwidth and a tendency to open a lot of other applications while browsing?

Oh my god, I just hate how frequent this flamebait is, people won't switch to opera, seriously get over it.

And since firefox is such a friging resource hog I guess that's the reason it wasn't ported to OLPC ...

Streamlined Version

[Paradigm_Complex]

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.

Re:Streamlined Version

[bfields]

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.

At least some of the complaints I've heard about "firefox bloat" have turned out, on closer examination, to be due to memory leaks in the Flash plugin.

And that's a disadvantage of plugins: they're complex bits of code that run in the same memory space as firefox and have the ability to screw it up arbitrarily badly, but that aren't part of the main code base, so aren't usually reviewable or fixable by Firefox developers.

Anyway, what piece of functionality would you identify as a candidate for moving into an optional add-on, and what do you expect that would save?

Memory And Performance Rot

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Memory And Performance Rot

[markov_chain]

It seems that there is a magical responsiveness threshold which humans tolerate, and as the processing power and memory sizes grow, the applications follow along, staying just below that threshold. Usually the reasons are increasing amounts of shared libraries and scripting languages, which allow us to build more application per unit programmer time. We get more features and modern applications, at the expense of a sluggish environment.

This performance penalty is perhaps hard to notice. The easiest way to experience it is to run some old applications; they absolutely scream on modern hardware, to the point that the instant response becomes almost worth the loss of extra features. This is probably why things like xfce prosper.

Besides the cache

[truthsearch]

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.

Re:Besides the cache

[Reason58]

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.

A quick glance at the Firefox features page lists these things, which as far as I'm concerned are bloat as they are not fundamental to a web browser:

• Spell Checking
• Search Suggestions
• Session Restore
• Web Feeds (RSS)
• Live Titles
• Integrated Search
• Live Bookmarks
• Pop-up Blocker
• Accessibility
• Phishing Protection
• Automated Update

I don't see any reason why all of those things are integrated and not seperate addons. And that list gets bigger with each new version.

Re:Besides the cache

[mcrbids]

I don't see any reason why all of those things are integrated and not seperate addons. And that list gets bigger with each new version.

For a seminal work that explains this concept to the intellectually unenlightened: Bloatware and the 80/20 myth. It's not that bloated, slow software is preferred, exactly, it's simply that so-called "bloat" features are actually an advantage.

I'd personally prefer that FF has automated updates. I noticed the spell-checker after an update, and think it's kinda nice, although my spelling is generally pretty good. The popup blocker is quite nice. The other features I just don't care about, and I never noticed any particular performance decrease on my dual-core, 2 GB RAM laptop. Thus, for me, this "bloat" is something I either like or don't mind.

Other people may think an RSS reader is DA SHIZNIT! Some people lean hard on the anti-phishing features. And they will find bloat just as tasteful as I do. Go ahead - read the article I linked to, and then think about it. Of the functionality, what 20% do you want? And, is that the same 20% that everybody else wants? There's the reason for your bloat.

Want just a browser and only a browser? It's open source code, dude. You are welcome to create a fork and do whatever you like with it.

Re:Besides the cache

[SEMW]

Why does slimming Firefox down necessarily mean removing features? Opera can do pretty much all of the things you quotes and much, much more besides (email client, bittorrent client, customizable to the extent that would need about 15 different FF extensions to emulate, etc.) -- and it still manages to be slimmer than Firefox -- a smaller download (4.7 vs 5.7MB), faster to start, more responsive, a smaller memory footprint, etc.

They want Camino?

[wal9001]

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.

Shared Javascript Namespaces

[Foofoobar]

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.

Not my experience

[niceone]

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).

To turn off the cache

[cjb-nc]

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.

Phoenix user since day 1

[Goalie_Ca]

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.

Re:I quit FF a long time ago.

[jcgam69]

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? I disagree. Firefox can be removed from linux just like any other program.

Oh! Oh! I know!

[El_Isma]

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?

Re:I quit FF a long time ago.

[Paradigm_Complex]

If people want to bloat up their browser, I don't see how thats your problem. Now, when the browser comes bloated so that you can't slim it down without spending a good bit of time cutting chunks out of the code, it becomes a problem. If they took things like spellcheck out - slimming the base fx - and allow me to chose if I want it in or not, that'd be nice. But what do you care if I want to put a bigjillion plugins on?

FireFox is a huge resource hog

[MichaelCrawford]

My MacBook Pro had 512 megabytes when I bought it. That ought to be enough memory for anyone. But I found that running Parallels (a virtual machine that can host Windows or Linux) at the same time as FireFox was completely intolerable, even if I set Parallel's memory allocation to a minimum level.

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.

Re:FireFox is a huge resource hog

[drinkypoo]

My MacBook Pro had 512 megabytes when I bought it. That ought to be enough memory for anyone.

With 512MB, your system was probably already swapping, albeit not very much. OSX uses more RAM than there is any possible justification for, and I don't mean for buffers.

Windows XP is pretty much useless without at the very least 256MB RAM. Oh yeah, you can use it, but you're not going to do anything quickly. You will be constantly swapping. OSX is useless without at least 512MB RAM. You had 256MB too little ram to even play, let alone to have things be efficient.

Kids these days don't know how to write code.

Many of us would love it if the entire system were rewritten in tight, efficient code. I suggest you get right on that.

Re:FireFox is a huge resource hog

[indiechild]

Expecting Parallels to run smoothly with just 512MB of RAM is absurd in the first place. Even 1GB doesn't really cut it. If you're going to run VMs properly, you need 2GB of RAM or more.

Mac OS X won't run smoothly unless you have at least 1GB of RAM.

Slightly ot... a nit pick about the file cache

[NotQuiteReal]

Why is the FF file cache so obscure? (kept in hex named files that appear to be indirectly referenced by other map files...)

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.

Re:Slightly ot... a nit pick about the file cache

[JackHoffman]

Automatically storing files locally with contents and names that are defined remotely is a security risk. It would not be a security breach in itself, but it could create an opportunity to exploit unrelated bugs which would otherwise not be remotely exploitable.

Re:Slightly ot... a nit pick about the file cache

[tvjunky]

Or you might just enter about:cache in your address bar.

become?

[nanosquid]

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 stopped being lean a long time ago

[edwdig]

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.

Re:Firefox stopped being lean a long time ago

[evilviper]

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.

I did several benchmarks at the time, and even way back then it was only nominally faster or lighter on RAM. The myth of Firefox being lean and fast is complete marketing.

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.

IMHO, Firefox has only ever had two things going for it beyond Mozilla and Seamonkey... More customizable interface, and per-user extensions/Add-ons. And that's traded-off in things like a horrible user-preferences page that's only getting worse with time, lack of an editor, etc., etc.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least when you install Firefox, you don't get some version of Windows along with it :-)

I mean, talk about bloat!

Bloated if using M$.

[twitter]

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.

Firefox, the new EMACS

[OffTheLip]

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.

Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time

[ookabooka]

My attempt to get modded up (any positive mod) by only quoting grandparent, parent, and the summary(and in that order). . . here goes:

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!

I'm running 3/4 of a gig, and I've never had Firefox crash. And I have BOINC running all the time. My CPU is spinning pretty high all the time, and I tend to have a good bit of my RAM being used all the time. So I don't know what you're doing wrong dude.

Firefox addresses this issue somewhat, setting the default cache lower on computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM.

IE is bloated?

[ThinkFr33ly]

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.

The Wrong Question

[Jeremy_Bee]

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.

OS Level Control?

[hattig]

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!!".

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Like IE? More like Linux, I'd say!

[blindd0t]

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.

Reducing Firefox memle tory usage...

[skeftomai]

...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.

Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time

[Movi]

256MB ? Holy crap! I don't understand why people think we need at least 512MB to run anything decently! In 2001 i was running on 64MB and i can remember i could run a web browser (granted it was IE, but nevertheless!) Winamp and some other stuff. And people _expected_ it to run smoothly with only 64MB ! I know it 6 years from that time, Moores law and such, but i still wonder - why this insane amount of hardware requirements? Notice that Opera for Symbian must run with 8MB of RAM and it has to share. And there's no virtual ram, so swapping is not an option. This of course doesn't count Flash. Right now both of my boxes have 1GB of Ram, and i don't plan on upgrading that number anytime soon - I don't play games (consoles are for that, and my Gamecube has about 48MB combined too!), i don't run VMs and i don't even have a swap partition - it never got touched anyway.

If firefox becomes bloated

[Tribbin]

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.

Bad excuse

[mirshafie]

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.

rethink the OS

[goombah99]

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.

Re:rethink the OS

[SnowZero]

The OS could send a "SIG_FREE_UP_SOME_DAMN_MEMORY". The best part would be applications that don't handle it would just crash, freeing up lots of memory :) But yeah, your point is valid; An OS managed shared cache could make cache management easier. An easier to add although not quite as elegant solution would be to have that cache be part of the desktop suite; While not fully shared, at least all the desktop apps for one user would be cooperating.

Re:rethink the OS

[AvitarX]

Actually if I am not mistaken Opera dedicates some RAM (used to deafault to 10MB) to cache already interpereted webpages (it used to at least). This allowed for BLAZING fast back and forward buttons because most of the CPUs work was done. My guess is that this was another feature FireFox was trying to implement after being inspired by Opera's many year earlier implementation.

Re:rethink the OS

[darthflo]

Yep, you're right.
IIRC it's "Automatic" now, with a similar mem footprint as 10MB.

What I was referring to in my other post was Opera's 2nd level cache (stored on your hard drive, defaulting to 20(?) MB or so) combined with any modern OS's RAM buffering (which should afaik be almost as fast as the first level mem cache).

The Gecko source code is a mess.

[Anonymous Coward]

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++.

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[ASBands]

I once attempted to create a page-rendering engine, starting with XHTML. Eventually, I got a decent-working rendering engine. Unfortunately, anytime there was an error (even a minuscule one), my engine would completely fail. I can't even being to imagine the hell Gecko goes through to render a site like MySpace. I've often thought about a better way to implement a rendering engine, but most involve fixing the web developer's crappy code before attempting to render it, which is not possible in most cases. In C++, you can't compile with an error. Perhaps development software that isn't notepad (my software of choice) should add in validation service in the same way Visual Studio 2005 does.

The internet: We have the tools to rebuild it, but we don't want to spend a lot of money.

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your renderer did what most renderers years ago should have done: failed outright upon errors. That would have been essentially the same as a C++ compiler not emitting anything upon encountering a syntax error. Unfortunately, the early browser developers, mainly at Netscape and Microsoft, decided to try to handle such shit input. And so today we have crap like MySpace.

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[hey!]

To be fair, the w3.org validator is emitting spurious errors from the very top after failing to find the DOCTYPE declaration. It's obviously trapped in lexical lala land.

For example, it fails to recognize the head tag here:

<!-- *** VERSION 2.0 CSS *** -->
<!-- *** ELS2MWEBNET0756 *** -->
<html>
<head>

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[RebelWebmaster]

FWIW, I think what you're talking about is a lot of what they're planning on doing for Gecko 2.0.

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[anaesthetica]

One of the principal goals of "Mozilla 2" is to subject the codebase to "deCOMtamination". Every instance of XPCOM than can be replaced with C++ exceptions will be, in order to reduce the ill effects of XPCOM that you outlined. Unfortunately, Mozilla 2 is estimated to be released as Firefox 4.0 in the first quarter of 2009--so at least a year and a half from now. This remedy may end up being too little too late.

Also see this kuro5hin story.

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[aichpvee]

Too little, too late? And who's going to come along and sink their ship in that year and a half? If Opera were going to do it, they'd have done it by now. Maybe if Konqueror could be a contender if it goes multiplatform (anywhere that runs KDE plus Windows and maybe a native Mac port) with KDE4/Qt4.

Other than that there really isn't anyone to take their place. Oon windows I highly doubt that you'll see many converts going back to IE, even if microsoft somehow makes it stop sucking with IE8, which I guarantee won't happen anyway.

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[EvilRyry]

It's not a matter of when Konqueror goes multiplatform, its when. And the when is scheduled for October this year. Although Konqueror is a very lightweight browser with low resource consumption, its not quite as quick as Firefox or IE, and it lacks some fancy features (such as Midas support).

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Your renderer did what most renderers years ago should have done: failed outright upon errors. That would have been essentially the same as a C++ compiler not emitting anything upon encountering a syntax error.

Which would make perfect sense, except that the person running the C++ compiler probably wrote the C++ code they're putting through it, or at least has direct access to it so if something doesn't work they can fix it. For how many of the web pages you visit regularly did you write the HTML and CSS?

Unfortunately, the early browser developers, mainly at Netscape and Microsoft, decided to try to handle such shit input.

Following the established user interface principle that when things go wrong, you don't make it the user's fault.

And so today we have crap like MySpace.

Where "crap" presumably means a hugely popular service used regularly by a bazillion people?

Technical details and web standards and browser workarounds and so on are just means to an end. That end is getting web sites that people want to use onto their computers so they can use them. The means matter exactly up to the point that they help to do this, and no further.

Re:The Gecko source code is a mess.

[zippthorne]

We should just migrate the web entirely to postscript. Anything web can do postscript can do better, since it's pretty much a full programming language...that fits in a printer. Nobody complains about postscript interpreters becoming bloated, memory and CPU hogs. Plus, page-print will finally "just work" well for a whole class of people.

And then you're nothing but IE...

[Anonymous Coward]

Face it, folks - Phoenix was about slim, slim, slim. Firefox is NOT - it's about best-of-breed. For all the talk of bloat, take one look at things like the default toolbar layout (simple and streamlined), preferences (compare it to Mozilla or IE), and menu layout (again, dare to compare). Internal things like memory management and feature support may have increased, but the user interface has remained streamlined and efficient. THAT is what is important to the vast majority of users.

As to the parent post, let's see now:

RSS Support:

• Web Feeds (RSS)
  
• Live Titles
  
• Live Bookmarks

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:

• Pop-up Blocker
  
• Phishing Protection
  
• Automated Update

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:

• Spell Checking
  
• Integrated Search
  
• Search Suggestions
  
• Session Restore
  
• Accessibility

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.

one word. dillo.

[eteepell]

fast as a rocket on freebsd with P133.

Extensions are a nightmare

[Baby Duck]

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.

Re:Very nice FUD (you too)

[Vardyr]

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.

Re:Freezing

[drinkypoo]

There is no fix for that, because all your firefox tabs/windows are part of the same process. They're all created by the same process. The only fix is to run multiple copies of firefox and I don't think firefox likes it when you do that.

Not just Firefox.

[Ant P.]

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...

Fix the Printing Bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

New Web?

[v3xt0r]

*looks around*

Looks like the same old web to me!

• Browser Compatibility and Performance Problems.
• Insecurely-programmed Web Pages.
• Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities.
• Horribly designed interfaces.
• Ads on every page from the same centralized (user-tracking) source (i.e. google, doubleclick, etc.)
• SEO decepticons. (i.e. blogs)

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!

Re:-1 troll

[moderatorrater]

It stores the rendered page, not the html, which is why it takes so much memory. 500k is small for a rendered page.

All software...

[Rix]

Expands until it can read your mail.

Re:Freezing

[Myen]

To be more correct, Firefox (well, Gecko) is largely single-threaded. All of the UI, DOM, and JavaScript [*] happen on the same thread. This particular case sounds like it's trying to lay out the page in the non-visible tabs, in which case there is indeed nothing you can do other than start a new process, due to Gecko limitations.

[*] For internal code, it is possible to use threads in a very small subset of JS (in particular, XPCOM components that don't have any interaction at all with the UI). That won't help in this case.

Firefox's plan...

[MrDrBob]

...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.

And yet, there's Opera

[Overly Critical Guy]

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?

Re:And yet, there's Opera

[SEMW]

The end result of it is that you have a browser that looks 'relatively natural' on a wide variety of platforms and can be easily extended and themed But not only does Opera run on more platforms than Firefox does, but it's also just as themable as Firefox is (not to mention considerably more customizable out of the box without having to mess about editing css files by hand). Your argument doesn't really hold up.

Firefox also has better support of a number of standards (MathML, SVG, Javascript 1.7) that Opera has little/no support for (they support SVG tiny, but that doesn't seem to do too much). If you're trying to argue that Opera has worse support than Firefox than standards, I don't think you're going to succeed. The only major omission is MathML. You have SVG in your list, but in my experience, Opera has considerably better support for SVG than Firefox does -- you claim it only supports SVGT, which may have been true in version 8.0, but is no longer since 9.0 (incidentally, version 9 was also the first to completely pass the Acid2 standards test, which Firefox stil doesn't; not that that's a big problem for Firefox, but if you're criticising standards in Opera I thought I'd mention it). And, of course, the list of standards that Opera supports but Firefox doesn't is quite considerably bigger than vice versa (NavLinks, Web Forms 2.0, VoiceXML, WML, DOM3, etc.).

Yes, it was.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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?)

Alpha Bravo...

[tepples]

Yeah, thats just perfect.

GRANDMA, LISTEN ITS ABOUT:CONFIG

ABOUT WHO NOW?

CONFIG!!!

KENNY FIG??? Alpha Bravo Oscar Uniform Tango colon Charlie Oscar November Foxtrot India Golf

Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time

[skarphace]

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!

Startup firefox like so: `firefox -p`. Add a new profile, use that one instead. Profile corruption is usually the cause of firefox crashing. All you have to do is move things over you still want like your bookmarks and go from there. It's a good chance that this'll fix your problem.

A user of mine had this problem yesterday. 5 minutes on Mozilla's knowledgebase does wonders.

The issue is conflict of interest

[tepples]

Oh so Open Source is all about relying on someone else to review the code for you? Please tell me how this is different from a software house paying QA guys to do it You make the same argument as JordanL did. The answer is the same: we need many eyes reviewing in the interest of the public, not many eyes reviewing in the sole interest of the company.

Real men....

[DanielG42]

Of course this is irrelevant, because real men use lynx.

Re:Firefox is written in J#, IE is written in D

[Jesus_666]

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!

The flip site of strict error handling

[Kelson]

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.

Re:The flip site of strict error handling

[Koikuri]

But can you imagine a web built solely by programmers? [...] 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. [...] 10 years ago the idea of visiting a website was inordinately dorky, and being online meant you were a social outcast. But what is wrong with that? Yes, I know... Amazon and Ebay and such depend on the casual surfer, but would it really be so bad if the internet comprised primarily academics and programmers and serious hobbyists instead of primarily preteens (and older folks with the maturity of preteens) with too much time on their hands? Call me an elitist, but I don't feel like it would be much of a loss.

Re:The flip site of strict error handling

[eugene ts wong]

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.

That's part of the problem, not a benefit of the choice we made. We have PDF and HTML. Both do 2 different jobs poorly. Firms don't hire Aunt Tilley to drag and drop a brochure. Why do they insist on dragging and dropping a web site? It's absurd. Lowering the bar doesn't improve the pool. Do you drag and drop you way to a better Linux kernel?

A raised bar doesn't automatically equal programmers making web sites. A quality web site is made by a technical person who understands text and design.

Re:The flip site of strict error handling

[jgrahn]

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.

Right. Well put.

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?

Nonsense. If you can write a buggy HTML document, you can also write a compliant one. You don't suddenly need a bloody programmer! Especially not if the browsers themselves (or external validators) had given reasonably helpful error messages, which they would have.

Re:The flip site of strict error handling

[Almahtar]

But can you imagine a web built solely by programmers?

Yeah, it probably would have consisted entirely of porn.

Re:The flip site of strict error handling

[GreyPoopon]

That's part of the problem, not a benefit of the choice we made.

I disagree -- both with you and the post you replied to. It should be classified neither as a problem nor as a benefit. It's a consequence, and with it comes both good and bad things. The bad is that we have so many horribly coded web sites. The good is that we have much greater interest in the internet today than raising the bar would have allowed. Interest in the internet was a prerequisite to development of E-Commerce. I don't think the pool of academics and technology enthusiasts would have been sufficient to entice Amazon, Ebay and the like to set up shop.

... Firms don't hire Aunt Tilley to drag and drop a brochure. Why do they insist on dragging and dropping a web site? It's absurd. Lowering the bar doesn't improve the pool. Do you drag and drop you way to a better Linux kernel?

You have cited capabilities required for business and technology. Aunt Tilley isn't interested in making brochures for a firm, nor is she interested in developing OS kernels. She wants to put together a small web site with pictures of friends and family and maybe a blog area where she and her friends can talk about her adventures with her 14 cats. In order to get that, she has to pay for an internet connection, and her friends have to pay for one too. This greatly increases the number of subscribers, which ultimately increases competition (in the ISP market) and lowers costs. Do you remember how dialin used to cost $30 - $40? Aunt Tilley and her friends are the one who created a market big enough for competition to drive the costs down. Furthermore, once online, Aunt Tilley's friends stumbled across some of the experimental online shopping sites and started the uptake of E-Commerce. If you had told Aunt Tilley that she had to use a text editor to develop her website and had to make sure each and every tag was valid and closed properly, do you think she would have been persistent enough to do it anyway? Not likely.

Now, having said all of that -- it's perfectly reasonable to expect any web authoring tool to generate compliant code (ahem, Microsoft???), and it's also reasonable to expect commercial and large social sites to at least run their code through a validator.

Re:The flip site of strict error handling

[GreyPoopon]

Nonsense. If you can write a buggy HTML document, you can also write a compliant one.

Sorry, but you overestimate the ability of much of the population. Many people building web pages do not fully understand what they are doing. The copy and paste other code, and when it looks right to them in Internet Explorer, they feel they are done. They don't know their HTML code is buggy, and they wouldn't be able to fix it if they did. This type of person isn't stupid. They just do not have the interest or inclination for technology that you have. I'm sure they have other skills that would amaze you.

Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time

[bunratty]

Exactly. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:Very nice FUD, indeed

[bunratty]

I'm surprised that no one has called me on my claim yet, but here's a sample demonstration anyway. Open the following the links in your favorite browser, in the order listed, keeping the IDG site at the top after you're done:
Shockwave site
Java site
Flash site

When I do that, VM Size goes over 150 MB and CPU usage goes over 20% in Firefox, IE, and Opera. It's not up to 250 MB and 50%, but you get the idea with just three tabs and a minute of browser usage. Just add a few more resource-heavy sites, and you can reach those numbers. Add in hours of heavy browsing on a variety of sites, and memory use in any browser can reach hundreds of megabytes.

Now it's time to provide the counter demonstration. Can someone provide a list of links that will cause Firefox to gobble up hideous amounts of memory, but not other browsers? If so, then finally we'll have some details about this problem once and for all!

Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time

[Overly Critical Guy]

A lot of people reminisce without thinking through the differences between then and now. A lot of us remember the days of 8MB, 16MB, and 64MB of RAM being enough for our needs, but don't take for granted the following:

1.) New rendering paradigms in the operating system that require more resources, like resolution independence, vector graphics, and hardware acceleration of window textures in Quartz and Avalon.
2.) In the same vein, screen resolutions and color depths have increased.
3.) Sound cards are operating at higher frequency and bit rates, and multiple speaker systems are not uncommon.
4.) Today's audio and video codecs are higher quality but more resource-intensive.
5.) Convenience services like metadata file indexing, spellchecking, garbage collection, automatic network configuration, automatically updating RSS feeds, background system snapshots (e.g., System Restore), automatic file defragmentation ala Mac OS X, and more.
6.) Today, I bet you commonly have 20 or 30 browser tabs open at times, maybe more. Five years ago, you might have had only five or ten open. Before that, you only browsed with one or two windows open at a time. And websites back then used lower quality JPEGs and GIFs, while today we have high-resolution, high-quality PNGs and JPEGs and high-quality video clips running through Flash and Quicktime.

We have a lot more things running at once that all add up, and to have all these things running smoothly enough for a responsive user interface, it takes a lot of resources allocating precious cycles at every opportunity. Your 48MB GameCube doesn't have to run a general purpose operating system, and its specs are set in stone so that developers can specifically optimize for it to extreme degrees that desktop applications relying on high-level APIs and cross-platform compatibility can't afford.

Re:And yet, few use Opera

[jsebrech]

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.

FF memory leak

[olman]

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.

Thoughts on rebuilding codebases

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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:

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.

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

Re:Very nice FUD (you too)

[arth1]

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

Re:FF2 is a horrible disappointment

[NullProg]

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.

Delete the downloads.rdf from whatever directory your profile is stored in. Instead of complaining you could have just googled for "firefox slow downloads".

Enjoy,