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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 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
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?
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
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.
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++.
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.