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Firefox Going the Big and Bloated IE Way?
abhinav_pc writes "Wired is carrying an article pondering whether Firefox has become big and bloated, much like IE. As the browser's popularity has risen, the interest in cramming more features into the product has as well. Slowdowns and feature creep have some users asking for a return to the days of the 'slim and sexy' Firefox. 'Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer. Firefox addresses this issue somewhat, setting the default cache lower on computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Though the jury is still out on where the perfect balance between too many and too few features lies, one truth is apparent: The new web is pushing our browsers to the limit.'"
Disingenuous FUD aside, I can't for the life of me imagine how IE could be "bloated". It never had much functionality to begin with.
Kudos to Bashdot. Even the current Digg submission doesn't mention IE at all.
That's why I never get the first post!
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.
Geeks strike again 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
More than anything it's reminding me of Mozilla, now known as SeaMonkey. The reason I switched from Mozilla to Firefox was because I wanted a smaller, more nimble browser. I didn't want a RSS reader, e-mail, IRC, etc. packaged together. Firefox hasn't integrated all of those yet but it's moving towards it and I don't like it.
I guess it is the time now for people to look into Opera, which seems to be able to keep the balance. I think software should not be discriminated on the basis of not being FOSS.
Firefox has an awesome ability to add-on things very effectively. I don't understand why they don't keep fx slim with with all the proposed additional features as external (and hence optional) add-ons. Perhaps the not-so-computer-literate can use the bloated-up version of fx so they don't have to figure out how to use add-ons (I'm still amazed at how computer illiterate people can be), but leave a streamlined version for us techies to add-on options as we choose.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Aside from that, the ongoing issue with Web 2.0 apps and javascript with multiple tabs using the same shared namespace and overwriting variable names still hasn't been highlighted by the security community and as AJAX and web based applications become more prominent, the end user will find more and more applications breaking other applications.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
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.
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?
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One think IE does right is a true file-for-file cache of what you have browsed.
Sometimes I like to troll thru my "Temporary Internet Files" folder and pick out a few bits for posterity. Especially large .swf or .flv files that I might have watched. The worst is when I watch one of those in FF, then want to grab the file... the easiest thing to do is to watch it AGAIN in IE so that I can go cache-picking later...
maybe it's just me.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I don't think Firefox ever was such a lean or efficient browser. It's also buggy and the developers don't seem to care much about Linux or MacOS (bad profile support, inefficient graphics, etc.). Opera and Konqueror both seem better written and better designed.
I still use Firefox. Why? Because Firefox works well enough, it's up-to-date, compatible, and, most importantly, has tons of useful extensions.
I hope the Firefox developers will be able to clean up their act, but unless it gets a lot worse, I'm sticking with Firefox, because, on balance, it's still the best browser there is.
Firefox was only leaner than Mozilla back when it was called Phoenix and had only the bare minimum UI necessary to be a web browser.
Mozilla never was slow (at least not after it reached the point that it was good enough to consider using as your standard browser) and really wasn't a memory hog. That perception came about from the people who really didn't want an integrated email program, but absolutely refused to choose "Browser only" when the installer asked what they wanted.
Around the time of the name changed from Phoenix to Firebird, the two browsers were about on par. By the time the name changed to Firefox, it was already more bloated than Mozilla. The project goals moved more towards grabbing attention than being lean.
If Mozilla had just made a theme that blended in to the OS (Classic doesn't do a good enough job of it) and put a link on the download page to an installer that only had the browser included, there never would have been a need for Firefox.
At least when you install Firefox, you don't get some version of Windows along with it :-)
I mean, talk about bloat!
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.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's time to bring back VRML!
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.
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.
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.
Many of us would love it if the entire system were rewritten in tight, efficient code. I suggest you get right on that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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++.
As to the parent post, let's see now:
RSS Support:
I could easily see removing RSS support. Firefox's implementation is nothing an extension couldn't do, and do much better. It's a joke for handling more than a handful of feeds, and stifles development of third-party extensions. Gee, and we used to complain about competing against built-in programs...
Security:
Can you honestly say a browser should be shipped without these, or even an option to not install them? Especially for the popup blocker - are you insane, or have you simply forgotten what the popup-infested web was like? Phishing protection is unobtrusive and useful, as is auto-update.
Miscellaneous:
Integrated search was one of the highlights of Mozilla ages ago, and is now a standard feature in every single browser. Firefox/Mozilla did a particularly good job by adopting an existing open format (from Apple's Sherlock) rather than reinventing the wheel. Search suggestions are the latest evolution of that (primarily thanks to Google Suggestions, if I'm not mistaken). Spell check is marginal - many operating systems offer their own - but I don't see how a third-party extension could improve upon it. Accessibility is just critical for those who need it. Session Restore I'm torn on, as many extensions handled it, but not necessarily well. I see that as the Firefox team deciding to take all of the lessons learned from the third parties, and do it right (much like Apple did with iTunes 1.0).
Bloat is only a problem if it hinders program development, maintenance, execution, or usability. The examples given here don't generally meet those criteria. Most of the features here are simple, self-contained, unobtrusive, and likely have low code and memory footprints.
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.
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.
What's odd is that Opera packs all that stuff in and more (even a BitTorrent client!), and it's faster and more lightweight in terms of resource requirements. Even the download size is amazingly small. What is it that makes Firefox worse in that regard? The XUL stuff? Convoluted codebase making improvement difficult?
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
Yeah, they're currently addressing that problem by rewriting Gecko in PHP (the UI will, however, continue being written in their flavor of eXtended ML). It will run on Mozilla's webservers and you will be able to run Firefox via any compatible web browser.
Apple, OTOH, will rewrite Safari, KHTML, Konqueror and most of KDE in Objective Ruby, which will run on their iNternet iServers, accessible via iTCP/iP (compatible with Mac OS 10.9 and up). Right after they switch their kernel to Hurd.
Yes, that's exactly how the future is going to be or my name is not Sir Reginold Frankbarrister O'Fritzebolt-Tooley the Thirteenth!
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.