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Firefox Is Lagging Behind, Its Co-Founder Says
sopssa writes "Firefox's co-founder Blake Ross is skeptical about the future of Firefox. He says that 'the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive, and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly.' Within the past year Chrome has been steadily increasing its market share, along with the other WebKit-based browsers like Safari. Meanwhile Mozilla's (outgoing) CEO says that while Firefox is more competitive than ever, they're looking forward to their mobile version of Firefox. 'Clearly, both are annoyed at what has happened to their former renegade web browser. But, by many accounts, Firefox is no longer considered to be the light, open alternative it once was.'"
Even from before it was Firefox (I've used it back when it was called Pheonix) and it always seemed more bloated compared to (at first) Mozilla Suite and later SeaMonkey.
Companies and products mature over time and Mozilla & Firefox have done just that. Firefox will never be "light" again. Not because of technical reasons, but because users demand a full-featured browser.
Chrome and Safari are taking some of Firefox's market share, but that's because they have nowhere to go but up. IE is still losing the most ground and will continue to do so. More equity in the browser market will only breed more competition, and that's always good for consumers.
In order of resource usage, from a consumer's standpoint I'd rank them: Chrome Opera FireFox Internet Explorer This is not based on any tests but simply my experience using them all. Personally, Chrome is good but Opera has more features I use and is more customizable, so Opera wins out overall - and now Opera is nearly as good as Chrome in benchmarks.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
FF is lagging behind Gee, who would've thunk, each rev is less usable then the last, tht FF is falling behind. I like so many others, have tried, again and again, politely and impolitely, to get FF to focus on so many problems... Like the bookmarks editor...just hopeless Like the loss of control of privacy functions.... Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website ? If open source means anything, doesn't it mean you can get the previous releases, anytime you want ? Failure to give add on developers a stable platform, and failure to give users a way to isolate bad addons One of the constants of the PC era is that MS always wins, cause they can afford to ride out upstarts; however, the upstarts never survive a mistake. From quattro pro to netscape to FF, one bad release, and your toast, and MS is their to pick up the pieces
Not exactly lightweight anymore either, and some parts of it are a bit long in the tooth...
But nothing else has the sort of configurability that it has, so I won't be going anywhere else any time soon.
I love my add-ons to death. Using a browser without them is borderline unusable.
Sent from my PDP-11
He's right.
Firefox 3.5 had Tracemonkey as a JavaScript engine for webpages but the Firefox UI is XUL+JS and it wasn't until FF 3.6 that they dared to enable it for XUL (so FF3.6 is much faster, do try it).
Also I've been looking at those damn UI mockups for Firefox 4 for so long and I think they're better than Chrome but they still haven't released this user interface. It matters a lot to how people perceive Firefox.
The multi-process stuff will take as long as it will take, I can understand that, but the UI refresh should be released now.
Minefield was an alpha version of mozilla's browser line that went amazingly fast. However, true to its name, it did blow up on my system and never recovered. Is it still around because it was roughly as fast as chrome was at the time while still having support for major plugins (adblock).
I downloaded mosaic when the web was new and being a Linux user, Netscape was the only game in town and I suffered through the horrible Motif widgets because the browser and email client were the best of a poor set.
Firefox was wonderful when it came out and delivered a great shock to the system. IE 6 was bullocks and once people got used to downloading a browser, it opened the door wider for Opera and eventually Chrome. I don't know at what point they lost their way, but my Firefox nee IceWeasel got slower and slower and slower. The bickering over the trademark and the increasing performance problems lost me. Once I had to kill the browser every time I went to shut it down, I put Chrome in my sources.list and never looked back. Too bad, really.
My God! It's full of Voids!
Mozilla official cite that the innovation of new features in other browsers suspiciously correlate to the sudden appearance of black duck eggs at restaurants near the Mozilla office.
I am a Firefox lover and what it stands for. However, even though I am not sure it is a few add-ons or what, I no longer get excited about what new (if not often completely transparent to me) is being brought to the table with each update unless it is speed and optimizations. The memory leak thing was horrible and I knew something was wrong long before it was begun to be publicly addressed and I just a user, not a programmer. OK, so the themeing stuff looks good if that is your thing, but lets stay focused here. IE sucks, and Firefox was THE answer since it was open and powerful, yet as simple as you wanted by not using said add-ons. I was never hesitant to recommend it. The only reason why I don't recommend something else is because even if I like Google, privacy is a big concern. With nobody RTFA here, we know John Doe doesn't RTFM or even more importantly the EULA. Other than that (because people are wising up a bit with privacy concerns if not due to Facebook in the news and even then..) Chrome is definitely posing a major threat. But we all know this and has been covered including that Google was something like 80-90% if I recall correctly, the income for Mozilla. Just sad really, nothing good ever lasts.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Of course development has slowed - it has achieved the goal most users/developers have wanted for it: To be a stable, fairly secure platform that allows a decent plugin model, and works consistently between platforms.
This is like complaining that the GNU C compiler isn't keeping up with the .Net framework, because it isn't taking risks or pushing envelopes... that's not the job it exists to do.
Chrome gets to be sexy, because it is newer experiment in browser ideas mashed together. Firefox leaves that to its plugins - losing some of the "synergy" of a singular design, but gaining much more flexibility in terms of user preferences.
Until Chrome can do everything I want with all my Firefox plugins, I'll keep ignoring it. I just don't want to be losing features in Firefox in the pursuit of the new sexy, when I already love it for what it is.
Ryan Fenton
I think that the problem is actually that the higher firefox devs. seem to be focused on looking like chrome/opera... and keep on introducing new features that break the rest of the browser.
People don't move to chrome because of the ui(well okay, some do, most I know didn't), they moved because it was faster and less buggy.
What firefox needs is optimization/cleaning, not new features.
I will personally stay with the fox until chrome or opera allow for both real gui modification(which both opera and chrome lack) and extensions(chrome has that, or at least starting to pick up).v
I understand that over time software gets bloated, but the biggest deal to me is not allowing that bloat to impact the UI. Nothing frustrates me more than having an unresponsive UI while a page is loading. Some stupid flash script is loading, so it takes 5 seconds to switch tabs. That's unacceptable to me. The UI should be instant, no matter what's going on. Switching tabs should be instant, clicking buttons should be instant, typing text in textboxes should be instant, even when the page hasn't fully loaded.
I've long used Firefox now because of its awesome developer tools and great suite of extensions (though I only use a few). However, it has gotten very slow lately, it has always used way too much memory, and quite frankly some of the other alternatives look better by the day. I really want to switch to chrome, but the only thing holding me back is a nice sidebar for things like viewing my RSS feed lists while still navigating the current browser window. There are a few other settings I'd like to have some control over, but it wouldn't take much to get me to switch at this point.
I know everybody blames all of the issues on the extensions, but the issues run deeper than that. I hope they can get it turned around soon, but things haven't improved in the last few years, so I'm not holding my breath.
A community-oriented lyrics site
Firefox jumped the shark with the introduction of the AWFUL BAR !!!!
Any goals that do not focus on security, speed and standards need to be pitched. All feature requests that fall outside of these core goals should be put into add-ins or plug-ins.
Until they fix this -> http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=1dfe0a5962fdc177&hl=en
Like many I was one of the first on the big wagon ride using firefox in the various names it had before its current guise....
but... it just got too slow and clunky, startup times got longer load times of pages lagged... the benefits it had started to lose value.
So I switched to Opera and Safari...... I use firefox on the few websites I use that require it (yes that sounds odd).. I wish it were like it used to be.
I love firefox for its developer related addons but lately it's been getting more and more grating with the performance hit and instability you take with addons.
So I've resorted to running in safe mode and disabling addons. What am I using firefox for anymore? Good question...
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
In at least one way, FF has been bloated all along.
Every time I've used any version of FF for the last four years, once it's been running for an hour or more it starts getting these little halts/pauses where the whole browser and UI freeze for half a second every 10-30 seconds. It gets worse the longer it's been open and the more pages i've opened. I've seen it on macs, windows, and linux. I've seen it on every machine I've ever used FF on. It is independent of all plugins and add-ons because it happens in a bare browser. I don't know what causes it, but intuitively it feels like garbage collection meets a bad memory leak.
It makes video unwatchable, which is pretty much death to a browser in today's world. Incidentally, it's happened three (now four) times while writing this post.
I've seen at least 5 bug reports and at least 10 threads in the Mozilla support forum. In every case, the developers/support people seem to not understand, or not believe that it's real, yet I've (another pause there) seen it on dozens of different computers and platforms, and never met a single computer with FF that *didn't* reproduce the problem. No matter how many bug reports get filed, this problem in FF never gets fixed.
And yet, I depend on my plugins for both browsing and developing. As it is, I use FF for almost everything, but I have to switch browsers to watch video, which is really annoying, and restart FF every (another pause there) three hours, which is even more annoying. /rant off
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
...And what's wrong with Firefox adopting WebKit as its engine? They could retain their current interface or even make version 4.x mock-ups a reality. Again, what's wrong with that?
It's true. I use Firefox as my primary browser on all of my machines, and it is the browser I have chosen to roll out to all of my employees. It is not because of it's speed, reliability, standards compliance, or features. It's for the extensions. Fire-FTP, Adblock Plus, Google Translate, Firebug, Xmarks -all have become very dear to me.
Every other major browser I have tried has had better performance. On some platforms, Firefox does not reliably render all objects, and I find myself having to use IE or Chrome.
The lack of HTML5 h.264 support will be the final nail as far as I am concerned. Unless there is a simple extension available that adds this functionality back I will move on. An alternate build that is not supported by the main branch does not interest me, as I do not want to have to worry about maintaining compatibility with my add-ons.
Firefox has gone downhill, and shows no signs of recovery. It's far from dead, but the future does look grim.
A friend pointed me to a Firefox Windows optimized derivation called Palemoon (http://www.palemoon.org).
Several people bash it saying "Ah is just a guy messing with the compile options and is not for Linux!" - but despite that I tried it. And I saw that Palemoon cut off some unwanted things that Firefox coders think that we should need by force (Personas, parental controls, and other code not needed for me at least). This have a nice side effect: Lots of pages that doesn't work well on Firefox works fine on Palemoon and the program deals better with plugins that I need only. So Palemoon fills the gap that was only exclusive for Linux users and those custom builds.
If Firefox works more on made a good browsing experience rather to work on odd UIs or things that I don't want (personas) maybe it would be the #1 again.
Side notes: Chrome is not for me, I like that google do not spy on me. Opera is nice but lacks of plugins. M$IE? You are kidding, right? Now troll whatever you want. I won't read them anyway. XD
While in the past there were crashes that could kill FireFox related to Flash, I don't see that like I used too. Now I see the browser spiking my CPU and raising its temperature by a few degrees because of bugs in the Java Scripting and AJAX engines. I am not sure if the culprit is memory leaks, or just faults in the software. It just seems like there are bugs in the renderer that are not being fixed and causing the CPU usage to spike in certain complex pages coded in certain ways.
I fix it by using the uninstall option. IE is just as good.
In this case, 'fix it' for many of the posters here is 'delete most of the code'
"His name was James Damore."
If it were not for the plugins I'd drop firefox in an flash. It's s a bloated slow to launch pig. that get's dusted even by safari on page loads.
But flashblock, adblock and zotero are pretty sweet things.
99.995% of users do not have the skills to fix it themselves.
open source != easy DIY
Ever since KHTML was branched into WebKit, I've been mildly excited by the possibilities. There are only so many underlying engines on the market. IE, Opera, Webkit, and Firefox each uses a different engine. IMHO, Wekit is the way forward. IE's engine is closed source, and no one can do anything with it - ditto for Opera's. That leaves Webkit versus Gheko. Gheko has been a good, reliable engine, which has been bent and stretched, folded, and mutilated time and again to perform as various coders and/or coding teams have seen fit. But, I think it is nearing the end of it's life.
From the wikipedia:
WebKit-based browsers
* Arora
* Web Browser for Android (mobile device platform)
* BOLT browser
* Google Chrome
* Epiphany (web browser)
* iCab (version 4 uses WebKit; earlier versions used its own rendering engine)
* Iris Browser
* Konqueror (version 4 can use WebKit as an alternative to its native KHTML[18])
* Midori
* OmniWeb
* OWB
* Safari
* Shiira
* Sputnik for MorphOS (based on S60 WebCore)
* SRWare Iron
* Stainless
* TeaShark
* Uzbl
* Web Browser for S60, used in all Nokia Symbian smartphones.
* WebOS, used in the Palm Pre mobile
* WebPositive, browser in Haiku
Grab a couple of them, and test drive them. That should satisfy the Google bashers who might want to experiment with Webkit.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I think part of the problem is that when a new product arrives, there's no existing user base to piss off with any features you do or don't have. Typically a product starts out with a basic set of features, and gradually stuff gets added. In Firefox's case, features have _mostly_ been added via extension. So that's all fine.
But I think the "too timid, passive and consensus-driven" comment must've related to the whole Firefox UI which has had a bunch of mockups floating around for ages.
I think, if they just released a new browser, lets call it DonkeyBalls. It can have a new, even more slimmed down UI like Chrome does. It can be based on Gecko, so pretty much all the same bits behind the scenes. And it could ditch the old extensions mechanism and use Jetpack instead.
This would allow Mozilla to not annoy existing Firefox users, whilst pushing forward with a new Gecko based product. But.... maybe they wouldn't want to dilute their user-base, because then the Firefox market share goes down?
[I'm rambling now]... but this is pretty much what they already did when they first released Pheonix^H^H^H^H^H^H Firebird^H^H^H^H^H^H Firefox.
What everyone thinks is wrong with Firefox? I'm using it since it was called 'Phoenix' and it keeps getting better with every release. Perhaps, Mr. Ross has some personal issues with his career, than I suggest him looking for a new job.
Opera is also proprietary; users give up their software freedom, something all computer users deserve. As a practical matter you apparently can't get the better addon system or the rich addon library Firefox enjoys without also having software freedom. I'll take the free software and the verifiable level of trust I enjoy with Firefox knowing lots of skilled hackers work on that program in a way where hackers can vet each other's work (including me, should I so decide to engage in that way).
Digital Citizen
I think your numbers are optimistic. 0.005% of users couldn't write Hello World in any language to save their life.
This is why the one of the cornerstones of the open source advocacy debate holds absolutely no water with the Joe Sixpacks of the world. The FOSS community still doesn't get why the public doesn't turn on to their product. They're too busy trying to sell a feature that the public doesn't understand and most of those that do have no real interest.
If I had to seriously consider editing source code to get features out of software that exist in parallel closed source offerings I would scoff at the OSS package and pull out my cash. My time is worth more than an ideology that has failed to deliver commercial quality software in the vast majority of cases. Hell, it's hardly worth my time digging through the bargain bins of software on SourceForge to find a free application that fits all my needs when I know that most closed source software does it plus adds in gizmos and gadgets that I'll never use.
Firefox isn't just some browser with "cool" extensions anymore, it is something which Netscape originally intended to do and messed up. It is something we can call as a "web operating system". Once Firefox is up and running (or compilable) on an Operating System, it becomes equal to other operating systems on behalf of sites and more importantly, intranets which supports it.
Especially the comparison to "Chrome" kills me... Chrome can't even provide a non X86 version of browser. Webkit was never designed to be "plugged in" by extensions, Safari still can't be "extended" without the risky Input Managers, Opera has to maintain a very tight and professional code to keep compatibility with all the crazy platforms it has to run/sell...
I am typing this on Opera and I have never been a huge fan of Mozilla but I am not really ignorant enough not to see what firefox/mozilla has become... Remember Netscape CEO's comment which was the turning point for MS, which drove them into panic: "An operating system will be just bunch of drivers soon, it will not matter".. Something like that. That was the time MS really decided to kill Netscape. It was never about that stupid netscape.com homepage.
If one can buy a netbook running linux without any questions today, it is half because of firefox, half (sorry to say) because of adobe flash. That equals "facebook" and "youtube" or several "cloud based" office applications. Dumb it down and see that advantage gone.
One thing I've really wondered. . . Firefox is a great browser, but it seems like almost anyone creating a mobile phone, tablet pc, etc. has chosen Webkit instead of Gecko. Why did Apple decide it needed to take Konqueror and create Webkit in the first place, instead of just using Gecko? There must've been some reason - I'm sure they must have at least *looked* at Gecko before making a decision? Why did Google choose Webkit for Android and Chrome? Why is Webkit being used in all sort of places, but Gecko is only being used by Firefox and a couple other desktop web browsers?
Is there some technical deficiency with Gecko (too bloated, too memory intensive, too slow, too complicated/hard to develop for? Maybe it's a licensing issue, where other companies don't like the Mozilla license?
Anyone have insight into this?
Both pieces of information in the parent are irrelevant to the problems highlighted by grand parent poster.
Compression is great for high-latency networks but that isn't even close to the problem expressed above.
Further, Opera's "cleaned up" default UI is in a version which is yet to be released. It's 2010 and Opera is just getting around to sorting out the default UI. I relent that the previous versions have all been greatly customisable, but then what excuse does Opera have for not starting simple and allowing the users to expose features to meet their needs?
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Using Opera for my needs, such as 720P HDTV TV (try other browsers!), Nokia E71 Symbian S60 which Google didn't even bother etc.
When you use it in such conditions, you figure the sad fact. Even if Opera switched to open source, it would be some developer PR nightmare since most of the commits would be rejected. Even a single line in HTML renderer must be coded with a Symbian OS, some plane video terminal, some car dashbard, some SD gaming console "web channel" in mind. What amazes me is, they still manage to keep up with the trends and actually implement on impossible to count platforms equally. For example, their Android beta has JIT compiler for Javascript while Google couldn't manage/care enough to ship Chrome to PPC/OS X.
If Firefox really wants a truly mobile version, they should be ready to shave a lot of the code and reject a lot of commits. For example, if someone's super cool JIT patch doesn't work on ARM, the should reject it.
They should have started experimenting with Symbian right after "S60 V3" handsets started to ship. Calling Nokia evil or joking with others RAM (their so called supporters) didn't help of course.
Seriously, even in 2004 what sort of dumbass would make a single threaded UI in a presentation that supported multiple tabs?
Firefox's epic fail of 2010 can be traced to the idiots at firefox 2004.
Of course someone who only browses the web with 4GB of ram isn't going to notice 350MB being used. But not everyone has 4GB of ram and not everyone only browses the web! The fact that you're on Slashdot means you very likely have an atypical computer that can handle a multitude of tasks easily.
But take a run of the mill Dell P4 with 1gb of RAM on WinXP, a typical business and home machine from a few years back, and very likely representative of a large portion of computers in the US. Heck, take most netbooks for that matter. For Joe User, that 350MB is a significant portion of his total RAM, which wouldn't be a bad thing, IF WINDOWS DIDN'T SWAP LIKE CRAZY once you get above some magical percentage. OK, so it's more of a rant on Windows than Firefox, but you gotta build for the way the computer world is, not how it should be.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Firefox has its principal selling point of extensions/addons. The key here is that the browser should be light and fast... want more features add extensions.. It's simple that way people can have the features they want and hopefully there should be competition between extension creators etc to provide alternatives to what features people want. The key negative points that I would like to raise with Firefox.
- Instability.. In the early 1.x days I rarely ever had a crash with Firefox. Now on 3.x I am regularly having crashes.. Fix the stability. Often the browser doesn't crash it just hangs spinning CPU which means there is no crash dump to send in when I kill it.
- Instability.. Ohh I may have mentioned that.
- Performance.. More needs to be done in this area. Startup times need to be cut in half and rendering/javascript performance needs to be heavily improved.
- Move features out of the core product and into extensions, with an easy option to install them.
None of Mozilla Foundation programs are light or fast. They never were. The XPCOM architecture and Chrome JS UI make sure of that. The only things FF has going for it is some degree of portability and the fact that lots of websites support it as the "other browser" than IE, and no built in spying like Chrome Browser.
And don't get me started on Firefox mobile. The WinMo alpha releases were a joke - on 600+MHz Samsung Epix the UI was unresponsive and the only way to exit it was to reset the phone. I am afraid to install it on my Nexus One now.
...but just having it sit idle on a static HTML page with no flash or video makes my CPU fan come on. I hate that. Why the hell is FF using enough CPU cycles to require CPU cooling when it's just SITTING THERE AT IDLE.
Get your crap together Mozilla or you're going to lose everything you worked so hard to accomplish. Extensions are the only thing saving your bacon and Chrome is making some real progress in that area - plus it doesn't tax my CPU.
OMG! Firefox takes 6ms to load a page that only takes 2ms on Chrome. I CAN'T WAIT THAT ETERNITY!!!
Are you people serious? Firefox is really too bloated and slow to be usable anymore? I don't use that many extensions and only have it open like 3 tabs at start up but the damn thing still loads and is ready to read /. and email close enough to instantly for my taste. No, I'm not using it on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM of like some of you seem to think should still be good enough for a web browser. I've got a Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM which is four year old technology at this point. I often run many tabs and look at flash videos and what not. I only run a few extensions like noscript and adblock. I have never once thought, "Oh God, if only my browser could be faster."
Maybe I'm not pushing Firefox as hard as some of you but it never crashes, I like the feature set and interface, and I certainly never find myself waiting for anything except for the occasional dns/network issue.
How fast does a browser need to be?
The Nokia n900 comes with a mobile browser based on mozilla. It is very responsive and works well on the 600Mhz ARM device. Firefox is still my preferred browser. I found that chrome does not perform so well under heavy load (many tabs open) although this may have changed. And firefox is vastly more configurable and has many more plugins. Go mozilla, go firefox! Yay for the best browser out there! :)
Firefox has a real problem in the plug-in space. They're deprecating the old API, and the new "JetPack" API isn't fully implemented yet, let alone deployed. That's a killer mistake. When there's a hiatus like that, developers leave and go do something else. This can kill a technology.
"Web3D" was a good example of that class of disaster. "Web3D" was supposed to be VRML in XML syntax. There was a long hiatus between the official deprecation of VRML and the first X3D tools, during which almost everybody went away. X3D now works, but nobody cares.
He's right, it's not free software. It's freeware.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Only Old People Use Firefox
Yup, it's true, all the school age children around here think Firefox is for old people, and they tell their computer illiterate parents the same thing.
Oops, too late, the Firefox team was "asleep" and lost the edge with that generation and their parents already.
Time for a new lightweight browser to take the lead in innovation.
One thing I find is that in todays "web 2.0" world, sites are increasingly javascript, flash, and other heavy things, prone. One of the main reasons I stick with FF is because primarily of the addons like noscript, adblocker, better privacy, etc, which all greatly improve my browsing speeds. Probably doesnt have much to do with things like render tests etc, but just a side note.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
I'd been using Chrome for a few months, and while I enjoyed it at first I soon realized that it was a memory hog when using dozens of multiple tabs and *consistently* choked to death on Flash content. I've been very happy I switched back, just from using it again today. As long as Chrome suffers these critical flaws and Firefox outperforms it, I will be sticking with Team Mozilla.
It's funny to see Slashdot's audience entranced by the shiny new thing and forgetting their usual priorities. I'm pretty sure that Firefox exceeds Chrome in security, privacy, and end-user control. Suddenly these things don't matter?
The obsession with speed is because people like easily defined, measurable statistics; it's harder to measure productivity, which is what really matters. I use Firefox heavily every day. I can't imagine that any increase in speed would be very noticeable or make my work (or play) go any faster. It responds immediately to whatever I'm doing. The functionality is fantastic -- I can do whatever I need without thinking and very quickly; it's some of the best software I use.
Those who call it bloated are, I suspect, parroting criticism they've heard of other software. I can't think of an application that has a more carefully pruned, uncluttered, and efficient interface. Remember when they added the smart URL field -- it was a huge increase in productivity, immediately benefiting all users without requiring training and with zero interface clutter. It's simple (for users), sophisticated, brilliant software that just worked like magic.
Firefox is stable and, if you care, resource usage is better than other browsers (I think there's a Tom's Hardware or Ars Technica review that covers this issue, among others).
Finally, Firefox promotes open web standards -- it's the reason that browsers like Chrome and Safari are compatible with modern websites, and that we're all not using IE.
Let's not get too carried away with that shiny new thing (though some competition never hurts).
Some people want Firefox to be lean, others want the expandability. I just want the damn thing to use my system's dictionary and spell check services instead of its own. Not taking advantage of a system's native features surely isn't helping Firefox.
I have enough of "OMG! Google pushes Chrome everywhere and it gains on early adopters base, we are doomed!" crowd. I use browsers for 15 years, and Firefox is still number one for me and lot of other geeks. No, I don't care how fast Chrome is, because it so unstable and full with webkit rendering bugs. They have great foundations to work on, but they are not fully there yet. They are growing nicely, I admit, and Google knows how to code. But they still have a long road to be leader.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
True FF is a bloat provided you add all sorts of extensions. I am willing to wait on FF developers to make its Javascript engine faster.
In a literal sense, you are correct. When you add features, you add stuff for the computer to do.
But that doesn't represent the reality of the past 30 years. For 30 years, we've gotten significantly more for the *same* amount of consumption. My computer today burns about 120 watts total, about the same as the first 286/20 I ever had. So we have a millionfold improvement in performance at *no* meaningful additional cost.
Software may cost more to run to add more features, but this is countermanded by the fact that all of today's software is grossly inefficient and there is incredible room for improvement in overall performance if we only take the time to do so! I've seen software performance improve 100x simply by limiting the amount of data involved in a string pattern match, for example!
Yes, in most cases, you can have your cake, sell a piece, and still eat it, if you focus on software inefficiency and make your software work quickly. I improved the performance of one of our products by about 70% in two days by running lots of testing to find out what the cause was.
The result is an application that seems WAY FASTER without doing any less than before. w00t!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
When you delete (or move) your firefox settings directory, then firefox is fast as hell again, so FF is not inherently slow. It becomes slower over time, so I looked for things that changed over time and I found that the performance stays good (except for flash!) even if you navigate dozens of sites on 4 year old hardware, if you do the following things:
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
"Try YouTube in a new web browser Download Google Chrome" also has something to do with "chrome"'s increased popularity?
Who would have thought it. sopssa submits a story intended to undermine one of Microsofts key rivals.
sopssa, remember that user name.
Yawn.
Source
The Mozilla development team released Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, on 21 January 2010 after some anticipation; Firefox 3.5 was a step forward in features but two steps backward in performance. As a minor update, Namoroka was a chance to optimize the last release.
So, now that it's out, did it alleviate some of these problems? Well, let's find out by looking at what 3.6 offers over 3.5.
First and most visible is support for skins, called personas. Firefox developers have been tinkering with the XUL format and they cite its power. They also claim that it has been under-utilized, so personas were a "natural addition."
TraceMonkey received a performance boost, caching more bytecode in RAM using the new "Stored History Integration Table" system which dynamically stores each JavaScript routine as an object in memory in order to more quickly access it during execution.
Firefox's plugin system also received an overhaul, and now lets the user know when a plugin is incompatible. Mozilla also included support for full-screen Theora and WOFF, the Web Open Font File format, as well as additional but otherwise unspecified performance and security enhancements.
Overall, it's a nice list of bullet points for the bump from 3.5 to Nakamora, but the fact that performance wasn't a priority already points away from optimization and to new features. And the features are actually not new at all, but fixes for issues that should have been taken care of during the initial design stages or other numerous upgrades.
For instance, Firefox has been skinnable for years using XUL, and personas are just a hack to this system that allows the user to use bitmapped images as toolbar backgrounds. You are not mistaken if you just had a flashback to Internet Explorer 3.
These personas also slow the browser down, negating any advantage from the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. One writer on the web even suggests that the TraceMonkey enhancements were done in anticipation of new-feature bloat. Talk about the tail wagging the fox!
Plugin incompatibility usually occurs when a plugin was written for an older version of the plugin system, which demands a question about the wisdom of upgrading the plugin system for Nakamoru the first place. But that's just how Firefox developers roll.
Now, if you're running an incompatible plugin, Firefox alerts you at startup and launches the plugin manager, a JavaScript-based app that contacts Firefox's plugin server and swaps all kinds of metadata in a frantic attempt to update your third party add-ons.
Several of the changes are plainly just developmental masturbation. For example, Theora is the least-used web video codec, with the penetration that the newer QuickTime X has. And WOFF is an open standard that Mozilla wants to support for political reasons that isn't actually in use anywhere.
So what exactly are Mozilla development managers doing?
If a private company with an opaque development model like Apple can apply the breaks and optimize an entire operating system, à la Leopard to Snow Leopard, why can't a public, transparent development team be bothered to do the same for something much less complex like a web browser?
Kazehakase. :-)
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Yet the performance issues are just one side of the coin.
FF's inability to react to a user demand for easily obfuscating the Useragent or even the HTTP_ACCEPT have led to the panopticlick.eff.org problem.
Leading to the urge to use 3rd party plugins like noscript/adblock or even privoxy.
Firefox is mostly doing innovation, where it's unnecessary, like the mouse-hover changing skins under Win7. But where is the opera-like visited-closed-sites-recycle-button ?
From my point of view what FF lacks is also a configuration menu within the browser status bar, not the one presented to you atm through extras->options/settings why not scraping extras ->
and just putting up a settings-menu ?
What's missing:
- behaviour restrictions on java script (don't give me the 5 somethings toogles you can uncheck) .net -> can only get rid of me through regedt32 crap, or JQS - Java Quick Start(*)) ..\plugins path you can only disable them,
- including the ability to prevent certain javascript from executing (Flying javascript windows block)
- bevhaviour restrictions for redirections
- behaviour restrictions on user agent (native)
- behaviour restrictions on plugins (much better) (not that overruled by microsoft
- behaviour restrictions of plugins on a site-per-site base including java script/plugins/cookies
this even goes so far to "easily" restrict the plugin search path, for example mediaplayer/drm are loaded from the c:\programs\media play
but removing those entries directly from the plugin-list with two clicks is not possible
- access-restrictions onto domains/ips blocked for navigation (preventing the Koobfacegang) - manually and automaticly(phishing url check/privacy concern)
- better cookie management, accept cookies on default (save them temporarly for only lasting one session) - but reading restricted - user has to activate the needed onces
- export these sitespecific access restrictions+bookmarks into a container file and making it easily distributable for network admins (or just easy to backup)
But these things can all be added through plugins, but why not implement them direct into the browser ?
(*) From my point of view disabling JQS on a machine with a frequent use of java programs isn't impacting the performance so much (I tried it both and I can't really feel the difference) it's one thing less which eats memory and does nothing most of the time it's started as a windows service.
Successive Firefox updates have been more and more careless in their side-effects - the one that made Firefox use the Internet Explorer security settings being a prime example. For an extra dose of irony, the 'don't update automatically' option is also broken. If an effective uninstaller for Google Update was released, I'd be off to Chrome; if Flashblock and Torbutton were available for Opera, I'd be off to Opera.
So Firefox is not open anymore?
Talk about FUD, mr Google Closed Chrome.
Chrome/Iron works because they combine great ideas from all
the other browsers and filled in the gaps with own innovations.
Firefox just need to replace a few GUI details to get growing
market-share again.
While under the hood things are indeed becoming bloated. I guess
Firefox simply isnt for Low-End anymore. Something else will fill that gap.
Or try a fork?
The same good old days when everyone respected their elders, crime was low, the economy was always good, politicians were honest and so on? In other words, the past that never was.
You are looking at the past through rose coloured glasses and remembering what you want to about computers, not the real situation. You are also ignoring plenty of advances in terms of maintainability of code, advanced in UI and so on, all of which take more space and so on.
Get off it, you sound like an elitist that only writes code in a text editor, and probably writes horrible unmaintainable spaghetti code in the name of "optimization".
I mean, I liked Opera from the very beginning, but I never even got close to liking Firefox (which I'm forced to use at work); which is interesting, because I liked the Netscape Navigator (not much, but I did).
Yet, my best friend just loves FF, while he finds Opera too restrictive (don't ask).
One of my co-workers OTOH prefers IE, although she permanently manages to infect her laptop (yeah, I know: O.o).
So, as far as preference goes, there's all kinds of flavors to choose from, so why all this bickering?
Non-supporter of Online Activation and any other draconian DRM
I'm really sorry to offend, but for goodness sake. . !
If you don't use some form of adblock and flashblock then you deserve to have a slow browser.
"Gee! Advertisers are abusing my trust but I'm too daft to recognize it. Why is my browser crawling? Mozilla sucks!"
Jeez! What are you? An Apple user? That's like complaining about your "slow" hardware while at the same time hosting a stack of botnet/malware software you were too stupid to avoid installing. Yes. It's the SAME thing. -A bunch of crap code on your system trying to separate fools from their money and you let it put itself there.
When it comes to technology, I'm all for new innovation, so upon hearing how great Chrome was, I gave it a shot.
I didn't notice any speed increase at all. Hardly surprising.
What I DID notice was that Chrome was prone to freezing and that it lacked the ability for me to configure the damned GUI according to my tastes. If you don't like where buttons are placed, tough-luck buck, because there's no way to change them.
All told, it made me feel claustrophobic.
I tried Chrome TWICE. After a week, I thought I must have been hallucinating. Code produced by the greatest public collection of computer geniuses on the planet couldn't possibly be that lame; it must be me. So I gave it my all. There was one feature I liked; one of their add-ons was noticeably more refined than the Firefox version, but that's third party stuff and has no reflection on Mozilla. But again, the browser froze and died on the third page I tried accessing, (I was trying to read a review over on Gamespot a friend insisted I read. This was a good test for both browsers because I never visit that site so neither FF or Chrome had any of Gamespot's code heavy bullshit in either of their caches). Chrome choked and froze, and FF cut through it with no problem. That by itself is enough to end this debate, but it was the lack of control over the Chrome GUI which I found most annoying; it made me feel like an Apple user. And just to reiterate; when you use Flash and Ad blocking, there's zero speed difference between the two browsers. None that I could notice, anyway.
The one bit of kudos I'll offer Chrome is that the options menu wasn't Appled down to nothing, but the fact that I even need to mention this is retarded. It's like saying, "Oh, you have both arms! Good for you!" I could still do most of what FF offers, but the buggy execution and the total lack of GUI control said to me, "Beta. Come back when you're done".
And now that I think of it. . .
Evil or not, Google is a profit-motivated organization, and its primary business is not giving you a great browser. It's primary business is delivering advertising to you. The two things might run a parallel course past many points, but don't ever forget that Google is not your friend; when all is said and done, you are the john and money is changing hands. An open source browser is the only truly trustworthy browser out there. FF doesn't ever feel like it's trying to bullshit me. (It's real love!)
I'd rather have buggy open-source software than have perfect software which I can't see through. And the fact that FF gives me basically perfect performance is a very big deal. It took a long time and a lot of work to get Mozilla's browser this good. Why the hell would I want to jump to some ad-company's free calculator? The thing doesn't even work properly.
-FL
Four things:
1) How much memory does it take? This is a rhetorical question, I've seen the demo. I can't give an accurate number currently because I don't have an XP system at home, but it is a double digit number of megabytes. The program is optimized for extremely small disk space, and requires a good deal of system RAM when run.
2) How compatible is it? Again, rhetorical question. As noted in the previous issue, I can't run it. Reason is I have Windows 7 and this isn't compatible with Windows 7. Because it is so small, it takes many shortcuts and compatibility is poor. It also plays incorrectly on ATi cards since it was designed for nVidia cards.
3) How CPU/GPU efficient is it? the answer is not very. In particular it hits the shaders on the card very, very hard. All the tessellation of the fractals is done using that hardware. Fine, and it serves the purpose of a 4k demo well, but it isn't efficient when it comes to computation resources that could be used for other things.
4) I like it, but I want some interactivity, I want to be able to move about the scenes arbitrarily, and move through the timeline. I'd also like to be able to edit the shapes, make something more complex, also I want to add vocals to thee song. What's that? can't do that in 1k? there you go then.
Seriously man, demos are cool and I've been a fan for a long time, but stop trying to pretend that this is a realistic example. This program is buggy, incompatible, has a large memory footprint, hits the graphics card hard and is very simple. It is amazing because of its size, nothing more. Now that's great, that's the point of the small demo categories, but it doesn't have anything to do with general programming.
Such a thing is possible because highly self similar information is used (notice it is fractals) in combination with a simple timeline means that you can describe the data in a very small amount of code. However it takes a good deal of RAM to run (not the least of which because it needs to load up many DirectX libraries) and hits the GPU much harder than it needs to, if more assets were stored on disk.
Oh and why this demo? It was #2 in the competition. There is a more impressive demo, though it is 4k.
We install it on all systems at work, which includes netbooks, and I've never been dissatisfied using it on one. Seems to browse the web plenty fast, and I am not a patient person (Internet connections below about 10mbit annoy me with their load times). That isn't so say it can't be made better, everything has room for improvement. However it isn't as though it is slow on modern systems, even the low end.
I look at some of these browser speed comparisons in the same way as the ACID 3 test: Geeks comparing ePenis length. You are measuring something that doesn't matter in the real world and acting like it is a big deal. With regards to browser speed the only thing that matters is if it is fast enough people don't feel they are waiting on it. We are now to that point. You start to deal with the limits of human perception and that once you start to get to the low milliseconds, well you are under the threshold.
For that matter I'd bet the largest lag is often network latency. If your ping to a site is 100ms, means you'll see a page at best 100ms after you ask for it. Thus doesn't matter so much if the browser renders it in 10ms or 30ms, the overall time is the same.
Speaking of the bookmarks editor, try this in Firefox 3.X: Compare your browser history to your bookmarks, to see which site you've visited have been bookmarked.
Whoops, it's basically impossible (or at least takes too much effort to be worth it), because History and Bookmarks are separate tabs off the same window. You can't see both at the same time, just one or the other. And you can't open two instances of that window to dedicate one to Bookmarks and one to History. Even better, when you switch between those two tabs, it resets the window scroll position to the very top so you have to scroll down, see what pages you visited, change tabs, scroll down to see if those are bookmarked, repeat...
Maybe these guys should think a little about how their UI is designed?
I already commented on the last stories about Firefox, that they start to fall for a very bad thing:
They start to transform from innovators to imitators.
Ok, they always were a bit on the imitator side, considering how most cool features came from Opera at the beginning.
But at least they were not thinking in the imitator way. Or in other words: They were independent.
Now with things like this, the mindset turns. And what that results in, is a disease that we best know from Microsoft:
The disease, where they always run behind others, but can never catch up. Since they start orienting themselves relative to those others, and set their goal to the position of those others. While those others themselves set their goal to something completely new (=innovating), and have long moved on, when the followers reach that old position. It’s a game that can’t be won. By definition.
Obligatory car analogy:
It’s like in a car race: When you orient yourself on the car in front of you, you won’t catch it. Only when you stop caring how your position is relative to it, and focus on the actual driving, that you will suddenly notice how you pass it. (This caught me countless times in racing games.)
So I hope they will get back to independent action as soon as possible. Or we will soon be presented by a “Chrome/Opera/IE, but not quite as good”.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Slashdot needs a dedicated forum where the same old debates can be rehashed at length. Especially ones that fall into the category of false dichotomies. I propose a forum with threads for each common point of contention. They would be deleted once every two days to allow the same old arguments to be rehashed by the same people until the end of time.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Gee, what's the fastest growing platform, today?
:-P
Mobile. Whether you're talking iPhone or Android, most of the browsers are based on WebKit.
I can't imagine why we'd be seeing a surge in WebKit-based browsers
I can't wait for a decent implementation of FireFox on my Android phone, especially if it supports plug-ins and add-ons. I'm dying to be able to use AdBlock Plus and Aardvark on my cell. I have a definite cap on my wireless bandwidth, and it can get VERY expensive if I'm roaming. I once paid over $12 for the privilege of reading a Linux Magazine article, because I was across the border in Canada. Being able to kill the bandwidth-hogging banners and other crap would've been so nice . . . .
... by the Dew of Mountains the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning
Yeah, the Firefox devs are in a real bind. If only there were some way that they could fork off a new "Mozilla browser" project from the existing base, with the goal of being a fast and light alternative to its bloatware progenitor.
I agree entirely that browser diversity is a good thing. The wider the variety of browsers available, the more necessary it is for them to comply with Open Standards. No browser with a minority market share can expect web developers to code to their non-standard behaviour.
I only use it for Vimperator.
I'm a long time user of Mozilla, later on Firefox. Sort of. Because I've been using it mostly as Galeon - lightweight browser which uses Mozilla's renderer.
That being said it does not matter to me that much how many features Firefox has or does not have. Galeon feature set (and Feirefox renderer abilities) matters most to me. And while Galeon is something like "dead" for few years (no new features, only minor maintenance tweaks to get it running with newer Firefox releases), I have to say that my browsing needs seems to be stable for now and I'm satisfied.
But there is one big concern growing: library bundling by Firefox. It's against Fedora packaging policies, it's against what I consider good software engineering. Coupled with slower "inivation", why would I want to destabilize my whole desktop just to get slowly evolving Firefox?
So, either Firefox goes to its roots or I have to look for another browser.
Chrome is bundling forked libraries too, so out of question for me. That leave WebKit based browsers.
So, we'll see.
hany
I've been using Firefox for the last eight years now and I intend to stick with this browser for the forseeable future. It is vastly superior in all ways to every other browser out there, and with addon's such as Adblock Plus, Noscript, and Cookie Monster, it makes browsing websites far more enjoyable, and far less dangerous as well.
If someone thinks Firefox is bloated, they are welcome to try alternatives such as K-Melon.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I do not appreciate that Firefox changed the tab order for the new tabs. Now I have to change the tab order on every my computer via about:config.
Firefox, please, do not follow example of Microsoft and Chrome, do not fix what is not broken. Please, do not introduce a ribbon as in IE and Chrome. I do not like this ribbon. I cannot even get accustomed to it.
IE and MS Office ceased to exist for me after the ribbon appearance. It is so damn fluid, it takes a lot of time to find anything on it. The same about MS Player and Windows 7. Nothing is fixed and solid anymore. Everything moves to somewhere on the screen where it is convenient to some usability PhD.
IE's memory footprint includes some OS components, you'll have to count those too.
Yeah? Go ahead, see how well you do.
I am not devoid of humor.