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.'"

Comments

Things Mature

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

Re:Things Mature

[Sycraft-fu]

Ya this attitude of "Something should have tons of features but no bloat," has always confused me. There seem to be far too many technical people who think that you should be able to have software with all the features in the world, yet that takes up only a tiny sliver of memory and disk space. No, sorry, not how it works. The more you want something to do, the more resources it needs. You like a robust browser plugin architecture? Cool, but that takes resources, not only for the plugins you load, but just in general to support it. Want colour correction? No problem, but again takes resources to do that. Full HTML5 support? Sure that can happen, but the complexity of the markup means again more resources needed.

You cannot have something with tons of features and a minimal footprint. Just doesn't happen. Personally, I'll take the more features. Computers are not starved for memory or power these days. Let's use that for nice features, not whine and bitch that software should be spartan to same a few MB.

Re:Things Mature

[HBoar]

Agreed. In addition, I'd like to see an example of a mainstream piece of software that isn't becoming more 'bloated' as time goes by. It makes sense to give users more features and capability as hardware specs improve. Why would your average user want a browser that has limited functionality but only uses 10MB of RAM when they have a machine with 4GB that they only use to browse the web?

I'm using Opera at the moment on my office PC -- it's using ~350MB of RAM and I simply don't care. It could twice that and I still wouldn't care. For those that do, there will always be less mainstream options out there that are much more lightweight at the expense of some functionality.

Re:Things Mature

[Anonymous Coward]

You are obviously too young to remember the days when programmers wrote optimised and intelligent code. These days all of the lazy fucks that call themselves programmers just point and click in pretty drag and drop IDEs that require 10MB of RAM just to print "hello fucking world".

Re:Things Mature

[hedwards]

h.264 is a non-issue, they've chosen to go the correct route and not include it in the distribution. The alternative would be to require people to pay for the codec which doesn't really work for a free browser. The other browsers can do it because they've either got excessively deep pockets like MS or don't care about what that'll do the the web.

But Firefox is a notable exception, owning as many eyeballs as it does, it has some clout and the other smaller distributions should be backing it up on this issue. Unless we really want to be stuck forever in the plug in hell that the web has been put through over the last decade or so.

Re:Things Mature

[tpstigers]

Can you describe the characteristics of a robust GUI to a user?

And why should anyone have to describe it? Just let a person have a damn opinion, for Crissake.

Re:Things Mature

[onefriedrice]

Truly. It definitely is possible to write software that is featureful and fast. You just have to write it correctly. And let's face it, Firefox is not written correctly. It's nice that people are sticking up for their favorite browser, but let's not be in denial about what a bloated mess Firefox has become.

Re:Things Mature

[Unoti]

You are obviously too young to remember the days when programmers wrote optimised and intelligent code.

Maybe. On the other hand, this is called empowerment. Development horsepower is moving downhill. Power is moving out of the hands of the top developers into the hands of the merely mortal developers. And out of the hands of the merely mortal developers and into the hands of the power users. Here are some other things that are different today vs. the golden days of yore:

1. Empowerment of users. A lot fewer programmers are needed to get tasks done than used to be required. A huge portion of tasks users can now handle for themselves using spreadsheets, databases such as Access or their VB equivalents. Quite a few of the programming tasks I did professionally when I started 20 years ago are no longer needed, made no longer necessary by things such as label printing programs, easy to use mailmerge functions in word processors, and so on.
2. Software usability, and GUI. Back in the day, every single program needed documentation to come with it to explain how to use it. Today, most software is so easy to use that if you don't intuitively know how to accomplish what you want to do, it's pretty much crap. There are exceptions to this rule, like CAD programs and photo editing software, but mostly, software is way easier to use today than it used to be.
3. Programmers were forced to optimize their code, it wasn't like they had a choice. When you're working with 64k or 640k of main memory and bankswitching the rest of your memory or whatever, you kind of need to optimize your code. The difference in productivity between that kind of thing and what we to today is staggering. Today I write software by assembling modular bits of subprograms together rapidly, string it together with this or that, and wham, it's working. Back in the day, everything had to be written from scratch.
4. Radical productivity differences. Developers are radically more productive than they used to be. Things that used to take days or weeks to do are routinely done in hours now. Things that are considered routine today we didn't even attempt to do back in the day. (Example: Today, computers from different companies exchange data all the time easily and efficiently using webservices. Compare that to the nightmare of integration and taking forever or not getting done at all that EDI used to be.)

Sure, we use more memory now. And yes, it's easier to code than it used to be. I wouldn't say that drag and drop ide's are the be-all end all today, though. Non-gui development environments are just as popular as they used to be, don't you think? I'm thinking of Ruby on Rails, Django...

Re:Things Mature

[binarylarry]

Lets see, I fired up Firefox (chrome user here) and opened slashdot, shacknews and a couple of other sites (you know, porn).

Memory Usage: 90MB

I have 8GB of RAM, probably more than your average user, which comes out to roughly 1% of my system memory. Even someone with half that could run dozens and dozens of Firefox instances with intensive pages open and still use other apps without an issue.

Remember Bob, baby steps to Google, baby steps to the search box. You don't need to obsess over every last bit of memory. Baby steps.

Re:Things Mature

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You are obviously too young to remember the days when programmers wrote optimised and intelligent code.

You are obviously too old to understand why programmers don't spend all those man-hours writing optimized and intelligent code anymore. These days all of the old farts that call themselves programmers don't appreciate how much more they get done thanks to abstraction, pre built libraries/modules, nicely designed IDEs, and interpreted languages.

It's easy to criticize when you conveniently forget that that hello world app has a mouse-supported window wrapped around it complete with an OK and [X] buttons and that it's run without affecting anything else on the machine.

Re:Things Mature

[Anonymous Coward]

IE's UI feels blazing fast on a clean box. However once every mainstream software package installs its own special IE add-on, it becomes slower than fuck. Don't think this won't happen to Firefox and Chrome in due time.

Re:Things Mature

[Johann Lau]

You realize that this comes from a one kilobyte executable, right?

There is never a good reason to waste resources. If computers have loads of RAM, let them do something useful and/or interesting with it... but even using it for disk cache is better than wasting it on bloatware. And no, I'm not saying everything that isn't super crazy optimized is bloatware, but there IS bloatware, and it needn't be accepted. If you care about your body, you don't eat shitty food, if you care about your computer, you don't put bloatware on it ^^

Re:Things Mature

[Anonymous Coward]

Parents post is not overly difficult to understand. The H.264 license was payed for as part of the OS on those that come with H.264 support, meaning it is not necessary to license it again for the browser. The browser could elect to simply rely on the OS support to render H.264 if needed.

Re:Things Mature

[Draek]

Ya this attitude of "Something should have tons of features but no bloat," has always confused me. There seem to be far too many technical people who think that you should be able to have software with all the features in the world, yet that takes up only a tiny sliver of memory and disk space.

Well, that's because you're misunderstanding their argument slightly. What they want, actually, is "a program that has all the features I need and none I don't".

Which is a perfectly reasonable request, of course, as long as you're willing to write it for yourself. People are quick to forget that if you stick four people in a room for half an hour you'll end up with five different opinions, and the same happens when trying to decide which features are "necessary" and which ones are "bloat".

Personally, my needs are fairly spartan so I generally prefer light tools over heavier ones, which is why I've been using Midori and Arora for browsing rather than Firefox or Chrome. My ideal browser, of course, would drop support for HTML3.2 and previous and be a *lot* more anal about invalid HTML but then again I'm too lazy to code it myself so I make do with what I have.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

Seems like Opera might be better fit for you? Helluva light (and I have also Arora installed here), quite a bit of features (so there's higher chance of "a program that has all the features I need and none I don't", while remaining light) and, well, it did supposedly have a "problem" with being too anal about invalid HTML; or at least that was often one of the reasons why it was a no-go to some, apparently.

Re:Things Mature

[westlake]

h.264 is a non-issue

H.264 is 26% of web video now. 160% increase in H.264 video online since January

H.264 video support is everywhere. In cell phones. Camcorders. Webcams. Blu-Ray and HDTV. In OSX. Windows 7. In Canonical's OEM distribution of Ubuntu...

Hardware accelerated in Flash 10. Silverlight.

Netflix Now Streams HD Movies to the Web [May 18]

H.264 is a problem for Firefox that can not be wished away.
 

Re:Things Mature

[BZ]

I can assure you that modern web browsers are not written in drag-and-drop IDEs.

I can also assure you that there's a good bit of very low-level optimization work going on in them (L2 cache profiling, trying to squeeze every single cycle out of hot paths, etc).

The one issue is that most people want their web browser to be a language runtime, media player, image viewer, text editor (with spellchecker), and HTML editor. They also expect realtime graphics rendering of arbitrarily complicated scenes, even ones coded in brainless ways. Plus of course actual document layout (including advanced typography features, but not including good line-breaking .... yet).

All of that comes at memory cost. Inlining on hot paths leads to faster but bigger code. Aggressive caching of various sorts to get the needed performance leads to more heap memory usage. That spellcheck dictionary needs to live somewhere. So do all those DOM and layout data structures. CSS requires computing the value of each CSS property (all several hundred of them) for every element in the DOM (all several thousand of them on many websites). Web browser try to optimize this to some extent, but complexity management sets in at some point and clear slightly less optimal code wins out over write-only "optimal" code that stops being optimal next month when a new CSS property is added.

Re:Things Mature

[torstenvl]

If your concept of code reuse makes the code bigger, you're doing it wrong.

If your concept of code reuse makes the code less legible, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Things Mature

[thoughtsatthemoment]

Today I write software by assembling modular bits of subprograms together rapidly, string it together with this or that, and wham, it's working. Back in the day, everything had to be written from scratch.

Finally someone figured out the difference between the programmer and the developer

You know my cable company also has this amazing concept call programming. They find all the great movies and string them together so that viewers will never take their eyes off the tube. Yes, they have great programmers. And Of course movies have to be made by film makers. Wisely, they are not called programmers.

Re:Things Mature

[wanax]

Processors, memory and HD space have improved at an exponential rate. Word's feature set, not so much.

Re:Things Mature

[Fjandr]

Done that a number of times, and Opera comes out ahead in a vast majority of cases. I have to close Chrome and Firefox far more often as a result of aggressive resource consumption compared to Opera.

Re:Things Mature

[Xyde]

I'd love to describe one.

- No useless dialogs informing you of non events (if I immediately close the dialog with no consequence, it wasn't that important)
- Unambiguously labeled options
- Clear areas of distinction for various functionality
- IF YOU'RE USING ALL CAPS YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG
- No grandiose corporate banners or logos randomly inserted for no reason or mandatory splash screens that are just basically an advertisement wait timer at your own expense
- Tasteful artwork/icons, not something lifted directly from Office 98 clipart
- Use native system frameworks, and most importantly conventions and UI where possible. There's a reason Firefox is lagging behind which is because (suprise!) it uses an intermediate layer.

I could go on if you'd like?

Re:Things Mature

[Malc]

Of course, Chrome is doing process separation too. I would love it if Firefox implemented this. Forget the possible security improvements, a separate process per tab empowers me in reigning in the browser's demands on CPU and memory. Firefox leaks memory like a sieve (be it directly, or be allowing extensions the freedom to do so), but I have no way to find the problematic tabs and kill them off individually - I have to do a complete FF restart, which is just annoying. Why should activity on other tabs kill the performance of the tab I'm using? FF has inherited Netscape's moronic attitudes towards monolithic architecture, so change will be slow.

Re:Things Mature

[marcosdumay]

Also, just start the dam browser when I run it. If there are updates, you can think about a non-itrusive way to alert me later. A window without the focus is ok, even if it opens before the main window. But blocking the main window because of it isn't ok.

Re:Things Mature

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Also taken into account that Apple and Mac have already paid those license costs for the OS. Why not use them?

That's not the only argument for this model. From a simple engineering perspective, I think it makes sense for the OS to handle codecs. The browser is certainly not the only application that needs to access them so if we use a model where apps pay, users will be paying multiple times needlessly. Apple already uses this model. Long ago I installed Ogg codecs, so when Apple introduced the HTML5 "video" tag in Safari, poof magically all those demo videos work for me in Safari. That the same is not true for running Firefox is sad to me and reflects their development philosophy. They seem to focus on cross-platform as their primary attribute. If it doesn't work on Windows, they won't make it work on Linux or OS X either, thus we're all held back by the worst common denominator. The results of this philosophy are the main thing keeping me away from Firefox. I like the plug-ins. I hate that it can't use all the cool native features of my OS and insists on re-implementing other features their own way that makes them incompatible with my other apps.

From the no sh*t bosco dept

[cinnamon colbert]

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

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Firefox from Phoenix 0.1 to Firefox 3.0.8, when I dumped it because of the growing bloat and terrible memory leak problems. The memory leaks started sometime after Firefox 1.5 and got progressively worse with each new version. The bloating really started sometime after Firefox 2.0.

Yes...

[RyanFenton]

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

Re:Yes...

[lemur3]

I dont know if it is just me but whenever people harp on about how theyll ignore other browsers until they can do everything they can do with firefoxes _insert obscure plugins here_ I tend to think of how we always end up with useless crap like XEYES on pretty much every graphic installation...... Maybe sometimes people create a need where one didnt exist?! Maybe we CAN live without Xeyes?!.

The issue for me is responsiveness

[Dragoniz3r]

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.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[HBoar]

This is exactly why I use Opera. It doesn't use any less RAM than the others that I've noticed, but it's UI is always lightning fast, even on older systems.

Whatever happened to keep it simple?

[schwit1]

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.

They need a new browser!

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

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.

I want software freedom instead.

[jbn-o]

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).

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[QuantumG]

Whoever modded me as troll clearly hasn't experienced what it's like trying to contribute to Firefox. It's where patches go to die.

Firefox became the real Web OS

[Ilgaz]

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.

Firefox should be

[Exter-C]

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.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[BrokenHalo]

I picked up Phoenix comparatively late - prior to that, I preferred to build my own browser-only version of Mozilla (i.e. without the mail client, webpage editor and kitchen sink). That consistently out-performed Phoenix and early versions of Firefox.

But current versions of Firefox are fine - at least on Linux, Mac and BSD. I have no information on how it works on that other operating system, but I don't believe anyone really uses that, since it's not ready for the desktop yet. ;-) And I have never (ever) had any problems with the browser's stability.

Since those who whine about bloat are usually also the first to complain about missing features, I'm not sure we should bother listening. If you want more features, you have to put up with more codespace. Simple as that.

Re:Certainly not light

[AnonGCB]

I hate FF's GUI, it's bloated and ugly, in my opinion. Opera is nice and light looking, taking up just as much space as it needs.

Light? When was Firefox light?

[Technomancer]

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.

How fast does it need to be?

[DudemanX]

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?

Re:Misses the point

[msclrhd]

Plus, competition is always a good thing. It will push Gecko, WebKit (WebKit is the engine), Trident (for IE) and the others (I can't recall the name of Opera's engine) to all become better engines. In the end, the users will benefit because they get faster engines that have better support for web standards.

If you have a single engine, it is likely to stagnate.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[lorenlal]

I also remember about 7-8 years ago when it was the only thing that seemed to be out besides IE. I remember being so grateful to the Mozilla folks for taking on that project. To this day, I still am.

Microsoft took us hostage with the single most insecure, buggy, and just plain awful browser ever. And they did nothing with it because nobody else was anywhere near their market share.

I credit Opera for holding in there and pushing the feature envelope. IIRC they created tabs for browsing, which was and still is a great feature. But nobody was going to force MS's hand while charging for a browser.

Firefox isn't shiny and new, it's just better

[guanxi]

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).

Re:Firefox isn't shiny and new, it's just better

[longbot]

I have to disagree. Different folks have different priorities, different setups, and different requirements. For myself, I was constantly having problems with FireFox's UI becoming unresponsive for 1-15 (yes, that large a range) seconds when trying to do simple things like enter text into a box, close a tab, type a URL, or simply watch an embedded video without it coming to a halt every few seconds.

I don't consider it acceptable for FF to just stop responding to all input (seemingly) randomly, after running for a few hours, or a couple of days at the outside. It had actually gotten to the point where I was restarting it every few hours just to keep using it from driving me batty.

FF does have a lot to offer, but I am convinced that more emphasis needs to be paid to it's performance. I used it for about three years as my daily browser, and with each new version the lag-outs got worse. Of course, the 900MB of RAM I'd often see it eating up was annoying too. Even as a non-developer, I could see that there clearly were issues with garbage collection going on under the hood.

When Chrome finally polished a few minor corners, I jumped ship almost entirely without looking back. To me, speed is tantamount to usability. For example, if I was typing this in FF, it would have ground to a halt and pinwheeled a dozen or so times by now. Even if all I was doing was entering text into a field. In my view, FireFox isn't bloated... just piss-poorly optimized. Some multithreading (god, Chrome is so much more responsive on a multi-core machine!) and proper garbage collection would do it a world of good. That's why I ditched FF.

Bonus point: I have a low-end netbook with a rather slow SSD in it. Chrome loads in about 10 seconds, and FF starts to approach usability after 50. Guess why I don't use FF on it?

Re:Firefox isn't shiny and new, it's just better

[longbot]

I did fix it. I installed Chrome.

Re:My take as an old time firefox user ...

[Andtalath]

I have no idea why you think that Opera has no GUI options.
One of the reasons I do use it is because it's the only browser that does allow me to configure pretty much all aspects of the gui.

Ok

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:And in other news

[fluffy99]

Okay, I missed the Richard Stallman 'Free Software' reference. Do you honestly think there are more than a handful of users who care that the source is closed? Can you point to more than a few folks who have attempted to branch or modify Firefox, or even had the devs accept their inputs?