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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.