Slashdot Mirror
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.
I think Microsoft should send them a cake to celebrate.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Which piece of bloat would you remove first?
GP is confused due to this sort of news. Parent is correct in that there will be no such interface.
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.
Come on, Firefox has such bad feature bloat. I just use Emacs-w3m to surf. It's just as nice, but instead of feature bloat, you get the web via Emacs!
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.
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 =)
Here's the Slashdot story from 5 years ago: Slashdot | Firefox 1.0 Released
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.
Just curious to know if I'm alone. As the web has gotten more bloated (not just firefox), I find I use lynx more for quick, routine checking of websites. And you can script it.
I like firefox a lot, but sometimes Lynx is better.
You can disable it entirely (the functionality not just the look) in FF3.5, so what exactly is your problem with me using it?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Gecko's memory usage now is less than it was in the early 2000s in many cases. So this particular program is actually using less memory than it was in the early 2000s. Since just the shared libraries for it are bigger than 32MB (uncompressed, on some OSes, etc), it's hard to see how it could fit in 32MB of RAM...
If your question is why there are these big shared libraries, the answer is that it's trying to do too much. The SVG1.1 spec is about 800 pages last I checked. And this is not because it goes into excruciating detail or anything. The CSS2.1 spec is about 300 pages (and while it's better on the detail, it's not perfect). You just end up with a huge gob of code to handle all those behaviors the huge specs require.
How much memory do you think a web browser handling modern web standards should take up? How does that number stack up against existing web browsers?
There's also the data set. People think nothing of sending hundreds of kilobytes of JS per page to the browser (last I checked, cnn.com has upwards of 500KB of JS just linked directly from the page; who knows whether they load more?). People think nothing of sending large amounts of graphics, etc.
Which brings us to the last point: programs are bigger because they _can_ be. If you have to fit into 32MB of RAM, then you can't just decode a 3000px by 3000px image into memory (it's be 4 * 3000 * 3000 bytes, or 36MB). You do it piece by piece and forget the pieces after painting them, or something. You don't even cache decoded smaller images, since it's so easy for that to fill up memory. If you feel like you have more ram to work with, you might make the space/performance tradeoff of keeping the decoded image in memory instead of decoding on every paint...