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Happy 5th Birthday To Firefox
halfEvilTech writes "Five years ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0. Ars celebrates the occasion by taking a trip back in time to revisit our classic coverage of the original release." For fun, we dug up the oldest Slashdot Firefox story, which was a Firebird story proclaiming yet another name change from Feb '04. At least this name change stuck.
Which piece of bloat would you remove first?
Netscape 1.0
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I was going to say something like, "thanks for beginning as a faster and better alternative but ending up just as bloated and crappy as we are" cake.
You may have jumped the gun a bit there. While I'm sure there's bound to be a few posts complaining about bloat, as of right now, there is only one serious one in this disucssion.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Firefox is great. But it's all the amazing addons that make it really shine. So kudos to Mozilla, but even more kudos to all the hard-working code monkeys who gave us addons like NoScript, Adblock, and (appropriate for this forum) Slashdotter.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
While it is fun to say that Firefox is all bloated now in comparison to when it started (and many comments above seem to say that) this misses four points: 1) Software naturally becomes larger with more features over time. 2) Many of the features added are very good and very helpful 3) We live in an era where memory is not a precious commodity. It isn't like you are going to have a problem if you can't fit your web browsing program on your floppy disk or can't run it on 64K of memory. The real issue with Firefox is much more limited: There are memory leaking and stability issues that should have been better handled by now. Instead of adding all the features that have been added (some of which are very nice) many people would likely simply prefer to have just the really commonly used features and have it not crash so frequently.
Secondly, Firefox is still focused on only being a browser, nothing else.
Exactly. Firefox has certainly got bigger over the years (though of course not bigger than its ancestor Mozilla), but it has also grown in the features it provides. If it had stayed at the minimal functional level it had at the earliest levels of its development, everybody would be whining that it doesn't offer enough features.
We can't have it both ways. If we want more features, then we have to accept that they will take more codespace. Simple as that.
Awesomebar.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I can't believe I'm making this point, but here goes...
As a web developer I actually appreciate the bloat. The average user does not have patience to look for extensions that fill in the core features that other browsers offer. Without the "bloat", those users would have likely stayed with IE, Microsoft would have no motivation to improve, and we'd likely be stuck developing for something much closer to IE6... ugh...
So for me, bloat is forgivable -- I'm just happy we're finally at a spot where web standards are taking hold. It's hard for Microsoft to embrace and extend they're losing so much ground.
Happy Birthday, Firefox =)
A "Thanks for trying but we are still #1" cake?
More like "thanks for raising the bar and forcing us to improve". I have long argued that the role of OSS isn't necessarily to take over the world but to make it a better place by doing things better for free than most companies do for profit. (Sort of like the NDP party in Canada, they'll never run the country because every time they have a good idea the Liberals take it, implement it and claim it as their own.)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
More like "thanks for raising the bar and forcing us to improve".
This!
I remember in the days of Windows 3.1, it seemed like a big deal that you could change IP address on Linux without rebooting. Once a few thousand geeks realised there was nothing inherent about the PC platform that prevented things like this, and memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking etc., there was a strong market incentive for Windows to improve.
I don't think Windows would be as good as it is today if it weren't for competition from Linux. I'm sure MSIE would be far, far worse if it weren't for Firefox. (Yes, yes, OK, Opera. But for years Opera cost money.)
The [not] "awesome bar".
Somehow it always makes it harder to find what I want, not easier [eg, for some reason, it appears to have decided that penny-arcade.com is the correct url when I type in "facebook"]
And no; "just turn it off" studiously avoids the OP's complaint - which was that things like this shouldn't have needed to be added in the first place. How soon we forget - the name "phoenix" didn't even appeared in the news post [although it is in TFA].
Which piece of bloat would you remove first?
I am sure that many will say "the awesome bar". I don't. In fact, I use it so much that I think that I could now live without bookmarks.
YMMV, of course.
I can't believe it will have been 5 years in December since supporters chipped in to place an ad in the NY Times. I'd definitely help place another one if only to get my name in the paper again! I hear the NY Times needs the revenue (*cough* adblock *cough*).
help fill in hidden movie endings @ End of the Credits
I've been using Firefox since Phoenix 0.5 (December 2002 iirc, almost seven years now) and I have to say, the community process and the extensions make Firefox what it is.
Yes, these days there's another open source browser on the block (Chrome) and it too is very good. But it's great to have Mozilla and Firefox around because you can be sure that Mozilla will look after users' interests far more than Google or Microsoft will. If nothing else, it keeps the others honest.
So congratulations Firefox, and here's to five more years!
Meh, I can tell you why Internet Explorer has any market share at all - because there's millions and millions of corporate PCs where it is too much trouble to get anything else installed. I end up using it on a regular basis for no particular other reason than it's there. Just like my #1 most used graphics application at work is MS Paint to crop screenshots, doesn't mean it competes with Photoshop or really anything at all, just that it works good enough you don't get anything else installed. Even corporate intranets are starting to figure out it's not 2001 anymore, but there's still not a big return on switching or offering multiple alternatives...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Instead of being a small, simple browser that just did one thing well; Firefox has become way too bloated and indeed the plans for the future seem to impart it with a ribbon-like interface and more nonsensical things. Doesn't sound too good for a nice well-loved product.
The original goal was to make a browser that was just a browser, not a suite of browsing, mail, newsgroups...
Firefox is still that. This is why the Thunderbird project was started, and is still going, for that matter.
It was intented to be a project that did a browser, and did a browser well. It wasn't about making minimalist barebones features everywhere. There are other browsers for even leaner feature sets.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
He didn't want to get fined $150k.
Then there are mandates: Our internal corporate web site FORCES you to use IE for much of its content, for two reasons. Internally developed web apps are only tested on IE, because the beancounters won't give IT the budget to test and certify on anything else, nor will they give tech support even the meager extra money to handle the calls where they say to Firefox users, "What part of 'Only supported on IE' didn't you understand?". External apps (benefits, etc.) may or may not be supported on browsers other than IE, but nothing's *not* supported on IE.
I'm not sure why this got modded "funny." A lot of my Linux interaction is command-line only, and elinks is a life-saver. On occasion, e.g. when the only documentation for a package is in HTML, the console-mode browser is almost indispensable.
Removing an application that you don't use is not something idiots do. It's only logical. Do you install Windows with every application it comes with? No? Why not? Right, because you don't use all of them!
Who the fuck cares if it's only 100MB (which is a lot for a single application, I might add, even Firefox isn't that big)? That's 100MB they could have used for something else that they do use!