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

[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

[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

[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

[wanax]

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

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: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

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.

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.

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: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?