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Mozilla Starts To Follow a New Drumbeat
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Key, then, to the Drumbeat project is openness, specifically openness as applied to the Internet. That fits in well with the original impulses behind Mozilla and Firefox. The former was about transforming the Netscape Communicator code into an open source browser, and the latter was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches. Both Mozilla and Firefox have succeeded, but the threats have now changed."
Key, then, to writing summaries is quality sentences, specifically sentences that don't read like this one.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I don't know what this 'Drumbeat' project is and also I am not sure what is Communincator exactly so obviously I must provide an opinion on this 'story'.
Really, whatever is written in the summary, I don't understand what they are talking about, can anyone translate into normal speak for the ununinitiateted?
You can't handle the truth.
Imagine if Firefox was perfect and the web environment was stable: in other words there was no need to change it anymore until the environment changed. Would the Mozilla folks let it be? No because people are now employed by the Mozilla Foundation and jobs are at stake. Firefox is effectively a commercial product now. As happens to nearly every commercial software product that meets its users needs and original design goals, the software will come to experience feature bloat as the developers try to keep the attention of its userbase. (For the record, I think the claims that it is already bloatware are premature.) Feature bloat and change for the sake of change are the future of Firefox and it will all come in the name of "innovation". PS In any case, the Linux version of Firefox could use some attention devs!
FTA:That's all well and good, but it raises the question: what should Mozilla be doing *after* it conquers the browser world – that is, once it has 50% market share?
Easy, people should begin to explore other alternatives like Chrome, Safari and Opera. There should ALWAYS be choices because absolute power corrupts absolutely whether it's IE or Firefox. It's naive to make simple assertions like Microsoft = bad and Mozilla = good. Any organization that gets that kind of control eventually capitalizes on it. I know the article says "The threats have changed". How about "Mozilla's motivations will change?"
I don't know what this drumbeat is, but I keep having a tap,tap,tap,,,tap in my head and it's driving me mad. Can you hear it?
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
No, it doesn't sound like that at all:
"Mozilla Drumbeat is [..] using technology to help internet users [..] take control of their online lives."
Furthermore, directly below what you quoted you can read this:
"Open. Built on technologies that anyone can study, use or improve without asking permission.
Participatory, fueled by the ideas and energy of 100s of millions of people.
Decentralized in both architecture and control, ensuring continued choice and diversity.
Public much like a public square, with space not just for commerce but also for vibrant social and civic life."
Open, participatory, decentralized and public. Does that sound like someone wants to take control of your online life? Doesn't sound like that to me.
I really hope Mozilla can make it happen.
Where is Google in this? Why are they dragging their feet?
After all, without openness where would they be?
The largest challenge to openness stares us in the face every day, and nobody seems to notice: Much of our data is stored in proprietary servers controlled by private companies, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The Internet was consciously and carefully engineered to put the power in the hands of the end user; data was stored at the end point in open formats (think of POP/IMAP mail and USENET forums, for example). Now a new generation of less sophisticated users hands over their personal data to private companies. Not only are there serious privacy risks, but we've lost control of our data. You are dependent on Facebook's good will to migrate *your* data to another application. What happens when your cloud vendor goes out of business?
Open, participatory, decentralized and public. Does that sound like someone wants to take control of your online life? Doesn't sound like that to me.
says Spyware23. And just how far we trust YOUR motives, hmmmm? (j/k, of course. GP clearly didn't go to the trouble of comprehending TFA. )
Tell me about it. The plugins I need for web development push FFox up to 400-500MB of memory usage usually (physical+virtual usage).
I thought Firefox was about Mozilla being bloated and slow, and nothing to do with IE or Microsoft at all?
Actually, what I'd really like to see in FF is *LESS BLOAT* and some attention to memory management... I'll wait...
Did I hear someone say they wanted a browser with less bloat?
You're welcome.
My blog
Firefox has been much better on memory management since FF3. Everyone talks about Chrome being lean and fast, and FF being this bloated piece of crap.
You do realize that using current builds of both, Firefox uses less memory? The UI will likely never be quite as fast due to XUL, but Firefox's memory management is pretty dang good. They could probably take a page from how Chrome handles garbage collection with their V8 Javascript engine, but that's another story.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Firefox "was about defending open standards from Microsoft's attempt to lock people into Internet Explorer 6 and its proprietary approaches"? Maybe in Stallman's world.
In the words of one of Firefox's creators: (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/009698.html) ... These browser efforts were reactions to the rot we had seen in the Mozilla application suite."
"We discussed the rot within Mozilla, which we blamed on Netscape and Mozilla's inability to assert independence. He suggested it'd be perhaps preferable to start again on the user interface, much of the code in the front end was so bloated and bad that it was better off starting from a fresh perspective.
For great justice.
Too long; didn't read. Repeating the same mission statement 3 or 4 times with minor modifications doesn't make for a terribly great article. Generally, mission statements shouldn't even be expressed the first time around.
Want to see your Firefox crashes? Enter about:crashes into the Firefox address window, and press the Enter key.
There is a discussion of Mozilla product crashes at Mozilla Developer Center crash reporting.
yea, i went that route (6GB of RAM on Vista x64), problem is that Firefox shits the bed long before my OS runs out of memory. in my experience, once FF hits about 1.2GB of RAM, it crashes.
Okay, you are using a web browser as a development tool and find it trendy to beat on it because it gets bulky when you decide to make it do stuff that it wasn't inherently designed to do.... and thats the developer's fault?
So you want a web browser that can double as the best web development tool in the planet (i do think that ff+plugins is the best dev platform for the web today), and when doing that is faster and slimmer than even browsers that can only browse (like safari)?
Go code your own, lets see if thats possible.
NO SIG
The UI will likely never be quite as fast due to XUL,
Therein lies the problem. Memory management to me doesn't become a problem unless I run out (and I've made sure that on my desktop machines, I won't run out). What matters to me is the speed at which I can interact with my desktop.
Now, Firefox on Windows isn't that bad. Pretty snappy. Firefox on Mac isn't as good, but still OK. Firefox on Linux drags along at a speed slow enough for you to think someone is intentionally sabotaging it. I don't care how much memory it's using, but if the UI feels draggy I don't want it.
Chrome on the other hand - feels like greased lighting in comparison. It's fast and snappy across all three platforms. What's bad is that for a UI LOOK perspective I don't like Chrome. I have to use an addon to make sure new tabs always open at the end of the list, and I wish to goodness that there was a way to move the tabs below the address bar. Not to mention that downloads open at the bottom of my browser rather than in a seperate window. Still, despite those quirks, I've taken to using Chrome on everything just because of it's speed. It's also proven more stable for me. Firefox will typically slow to a crawl if you leave certain Javascript heavy pages open on it for an extended amount of time. If I leave the same ones open on Chrome it's fine when I come back the next day.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
generally you do have a point, but the mentality of just throwing more mem and cpu at inefficient programs is wasteful.
microsoft went that way with vista - just stuff everything in there, lads! people'll just buy more ram. but this backfired badly, as vista came out just before the big netbook and smaller-is-better hype.
we shouldnt need a fracking beowulf cluster of powerhouse PCs to run a browser or some other everyday app.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
More lies out of you, huh?
gcc's optimizer is pretty good, actually, and the only compiler that seems to beat it is icc, and then not by much. If anything, gcc should have a more profound effect on OS X than on Linux since Apple uses an older version of the compiler (4.2) to avoid the GPLv3, while Linux distributions can use the latest and greatest.
But since when have facts mattered to a troll like you?
No, it's not that hardware that is the problem. My netbook with FF under windows spanks the interative performance of FF under linux on my main laptop most of the time. 1G Atom vs 4G Core2 2.5. I'm not talking about render time necessarily, I'm referring to responsiveness when I click a button, or try to type in a field, etc.
You know, I always suspected Mozilla's crash-reporting software was kinda lame under the hood - but I would've never guessed that its crash reporting mechanism was to post on Slashdot...
Bow-ties are cool.
Thank you.
Also, of course, if the grandparent poster had bothered to investigate, Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes, and has for years. Apparently Firefox developers don't know how to debug that kind of failure. Apparently the more than $200 million has not been enough.
The randomness of failure reports suggests that Firefox writes to a random location memory that is important in some systems and not others. Definitely the way events are handled has degraded in the last few versions. Firefox often takes a long time to process a mouse event, for example, even when Firefox has been the only program in use for a long time.