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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.'"
You realize that 10MB of RAM is less than 1% of the total memory in most desktops these days, right?
I know, I know, I'll get off your lawn now.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Opera is also proprietary; users give up their software freedom...
Hear hear! I installed Opera and now I can't develop for Open Source anymore!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Memory Leaks is such an ugly, pejorative term... Let's think of them as little digital pressure relief valves...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Bloated is not the right word. It's more that it looks like an overweight person running. It's not a pleasant sight.
Firefox is now like a mall cop trying to compete with an athlete. You can point out that it provides security, or that it has lots of handy stuff attached to his belt, but it doesn't change anything.
To address your questions:
- startup time is definitely the worst, compared to any other browser. Years ago people were dismissing any comparison to IE by saying that it's unfair since IE uses libraries already loaded. Well, Opera, Safari and Chrome also beat the crap out of it. To me, 5 to 15 seconds loading time is unacceptable.
- UI responsiveness - it has nothing to do with smooth scrolling, it has with the interface freezing up when I'm typing an URL. XUL may look good on paper but not in the real world.
- page load/rendering time is OK.
- Look and feel is OK too, it never gave me the feeling of bloat.
- memory usage - things seem to have improved lately and Flash doesn't crash anymore (by the way, I only experienced Flash crashing in Firefox, never in other browsers).
- Javascript performance - more than enough.
The feeling of bloat is mostly related to the application responsiveness. Programmers may dismiss that, but UI is everything to user satisfaction. It's the lesson Apple learned long ago and that's why then can afford to do their stunts.