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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.'"
Chrome's noscript is really bad though. You can only allow scripts for the current domain, so if the page uses scripts from a different domain then you have to visit that separately and allow it. And there are no temporary allows, only permanent. And wildcards don't work, so you have to unblock news.slashdot.org separately from yro.slashdot.org.
Still, Firefox is frequently infuriating and I only use it because Midori isn't mature yet.
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.
What? Where did you get that from?
From Wikipedia:
The Firefox project began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser. To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite.
Intended to combat feature creep. It was designed to be a lightweight standalone browser. See any mention in there about a decent extension model (plugins aren't the same as extensions BTW; Flash is a plugin, Adblock is an extension)?
From Computer World in Sept. 2002, the week Phoenix 0.1 was released:
The Mozilla development project, Mozilla.org, this week released Phoenix 0.1, a speedier version of its open-source Web browser.
The Phoenix browser is designed to improve upon Mozilla 1.1, released in August, with additional features such as a new design, customizable tool bar and improved bookmark manager...
The Phoenix browser, which uses a large amount of the Mozilla code, is "a lean and fast browser" that loads in about half the time of Mozilla 1.1, Mozilla.org said.
Again, emphasis is on performance. The line in that article talking about the plugin management for version 0.2 is referring to classical plugins, not Firefox extensions. Extensions were not added to Firefox until version 2.0. Extensions were never an original design goal. I don't have a source for this, but I actually remember downloading Phoenix 0.1. It was distributed as a single zip file without an installer, you just unzipped it and ran the executable. What people were impressed with for that release were the disk size of the files, the startup speed, and the memory footprint. All performance metrics.
It's fine if you want to defend Firefox, but there's no reason to try to rewrite history by saying the design goals for Firefox were different than what they actually were. It's a fact that the current version of Firefox does not live up to many of the ideals that the designers of Phoenix started with. It's also a fact that the current version includes several useful things that were not part of the original goals. Again, there's no reason to rewrite history. People like to defend Firefox because of its extensions, but the fact is that extensions were never part of the plan, speed and performance were the goals. The extension model was added because the core browser lacked many features that could not be included and still meet the performance goals. So, now we have an extension model and worse performance. That's the way it goes.
And yes, I remember this happening. I remember downloading and using Phoenix, I remember the name change to Firebird and then to Firefox, and the initial release in 2004, 2 years after Phoenix started. The release of Firefox 1.0 was a major event in the tech world, they even ran full-page ads for it in the New York Times funded by donations (you got your name listed in the ad, I was there). I remember using the 1.x line, I remember when the extension system was announced for 2.0 and how much it excited everyone, 2 years after the release of 1.0. I remember continually seeing the performance of the browser decline. That hasn't really stopped, even the IE9 preview is now faster at Javascript than Firefox 3.7. So the conclusion holds, the original design goals of Firefox have been neglected or ignored in part, and some of them have
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
There are several things at play here:
1) Webkit provides an HTML/XML/DOM/CSS renderer, period. Gecko provides that plus a
networking library, SSL implementation, and so forth, on most platforms. To create a
usable browser on top of webkit you have to provide all those components. But if you
have to custom-write them anyway for your crazy hardware or OS, then the existing Gecko
implementations don't do you much good. Also, if you want to do something very
different from what the existing infrastructure in Gecko is set up to do in terms of
document navigation, etc, then the existing functionality might get in your way
instead of helping.
2) Webkit is perceived as being simpler and easier to hack than Gecko. It's not clear to
me how much truth there is to this perception nowadays; back when Apple picked khtml I
think it was more true.
3) Webkit has better PR in some ways. It's been actively marketed to developers more
than Gecko has.
4) People seem to have a double standard on embedding the two (e.g. demanding binary
compatibility out of Gecko across releases but not making any such demands on Webkit
for some reason).
5) There are existing Gecko-based browsers on mobile devices (e.g. the n810 and n900
default browser is Gecko-based).
For apple's original decision to use khtml, I believe it was a combination of #2 above and wanting something they would have more of a chance of controlling (hence the forking that happened).