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

[Anonymous Coward]

Not because of technical reasons, but because users demand a full-featured browser.

If that were true, then lighter browswers like Chrome should not be gaining in marketshare.

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

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

I'd agree with that, although there is room for multiple browsers. Chrome is nice for when I just want to fire up a browser to check my mail or get directions before I leave. Firefox has a far more mature set of plugins. Until Chrome gets the same retinue I doubt Firefox has much to fear. Without fully featured versions of AdBlock, Noscript, FlashBlock, Web Developer, and Greasemonkey, I won't be switching over anytime soon. And if Chrome ever does become robust enough to have support for the same variety of plugins that Firefox has I have to believe that it will be as "bloated" as Firefox is now perceived to be.

To Mozilla, if you're listening...please please please plug the memory leak that is constantly plaguing your product! There is no reason that Firefox with 5 tabs should be using over 300 MB of RAM without any Flash or PDF files open.

Re:Things Mature

[sopssa]

Opera has been really successful with providing a browser that feels light to use but is still powerful and full of native features. That's probably the reason why Opera feels so constant and fast - all the features are build-in and have the same level of quality. While a better addon system would be good, besides ad blocker (which I use Ad Muncher for), there's not really any features that are missing. And the whole GUI and usage feels a lot more robust than Firefox's XUL-based interface.

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

[Blakey Rat]

IE might be losing marketshare, but even IE has features that Firefox doesn't. For example, process separation between tabs. And IE9 is quickly bringing the JS performance and standards compliance up to par with Firefox.

I mean, feel free to hate Microsoft, but there has to be something wrong at Mozilla if even Microsoft's slow, super-careful, backwards-compatible development methods are caught up so quickly.

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

[Kjella]

There are necessary resources and unnecessary resources. Very often it is a sign of a) poor code reuse leading to huge binaries or b) too much data being pulled to a high layer or too many layers and discarded leading to not only high memory usage but also much slower execution time. Like recently I rewrote a report at work, it used to take 13-14 minutes and the new version runs in 1.2 seconds. Why? Because the old one used some high end views leading to excessive joins, poor indexing and huge resource consumption. Of course by using the base tables we're now prone to application changes but still. I'm sure there are many cases where resources are simply wasted that completely dwarf any needed consumption.

Re:Things Mature

[matthew5]

Until Chrome gets the same retinue I doubt Firefox has much to fear. Without fully featured versions of AdBlock, Noscript, FlashBlock, Web Developer, and Greasemonkey, I won't be switching over anytime soon.

I have several of those already installed in Chrome. You may enjoy a quick trip to https://chrome.google.com/extensions?hl=en-US

Re:Things Mature

[binarylarry]

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.

Re:Things Mature

[matunos]

Out of curiosity, what are the features that Chrome lacks that lead to it being significantly faster than Firefox, while WebKit supports more of HTML5?

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

[abigor]

Opera's memory footprint is comparable to that of Firefox. "Feels light" is purely subjective and has nothing to do with actual resource usage.

Re:Things Mature

[DJRumpy]

Apple already has licenses for h.264 which are included with the OS. It makes sense for them to include that support. MS is also offering that support with their higher end versions of Windows 7.

There is no reason that Mozilla couldn't simply rely on the same. it would not require that they charge anyone in those cases. Simply offering the option to use the OS's built in codec is a simple solution. As to what it will 'do to the web', it won't do anything. H.264 is already in use, on a multitude of high profile sites. Simply claiming Theora is better simply because it's OSS doesn't make it logistically a better fit for everyone. H.264 has obvious advantages including hardware acceleration on a huge number of devices where none exists for Theora. Also taken into account that Apple and Mac have already paid those license costs for the OS. Why not use them?

Re:Things Mature

[sdguero]

Feels like 1998 all over again eh....

Re:Things Mature

[blackraven14250]

Emacs is so mainstream, since it's only used by geeks and computer techs.

Re:Things Mature

[Rockoon]

Only when the memory is available.

Run both Opera and Firefox on memory starved systems and you will change your tune.

Re:Things Mature

[gutnor]

Well if all programs were optimised to the max, optimized Firefox would still seems bloated compared to its optimized competitor ... because of course we would not buy quadri-core with tens of gig of ram. So the point of the GP is still valid - the developer pool is the same for all products.

Of course, that's fantasy, the current development projects could not be optimised to what was the norm before. It is just a question of scale: you can build a watch using milimetric pieces placed at micrometer precision. You cannot build your whole house assembling it from millimetric pieces and micrometer tooling. And the scale is about right, what was the whole purpose of program yesterday is just one of the hundreds functionalities required in a modern software.

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

[MightyMartian]

All process separation in IE8 has done has made a slow browser even slower. In the time it takes for the copies of IE8 on every computer I use to bring up my Google.com home page, I'm already checking GMail on Chrome and Firefox. I don't give a shit at this point whether this or future versions of IE gain standards compliance, the browser just plain sucks. I'd sooner restart Firefox once a day than have to put up with IE and all those "features" that make it so slow. Of all the mainstream browsers, IE is probably by far the worst.

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

[Unoti]

Who gives a shit, seriously? 10 megs, 16 megs... Last time i did this in about 2004 with C# I think it was about 12 megs. But what difference does it make? It'd take a lot more than 10, 20, or 30 megs to make me raise an eyebrow.

Re:Things Mature

[Korin43]

There is no reason that Firefox with 5 tabs should be using over 300 MB of RAM without any Flash or PDF files open.

I don't think that's a memory leak, Firefox just constantly takes up around that much memory. It's related to its cache (and maybe plugins).

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]

Context menus on everything, everything configurable and rearrangable. It's not just robust, it's slick.

You sound like someone who has never used Opera, or hasn't digged very deep.

Re:Things Mature

[Anonymous Coward]

Minesweeper.

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

[zippthorne]

Pfft. there are people who have on-die cache bigger than that these days. Not even a small number, either.

Re:Things Mature

[zerocool^]

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.

I hate chrome.

But I use it on my netbook because Firefox hogs too much of the 1GB of ram and 16GB flash disk.

There's still a market for a lean browser.

Re:Things Mature

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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.

If I had a time machine I'd send you back in time to about 1995 so you could use a 60mhz Mac with 16 meg of RAM vs. a 486-33 with 8 meg of RAM. Then I'd tell you to load up an image in Photoshop and print it. After picking up drying print from the Windows machine while waiting for the Mac to finish loading all it's extensions, fonts, and other crap it thought it needed to have in RAM before even showing you a clickable interface you'd understand the point of views on this topic much more clearly.

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

[geekboy642]

Or, perhaps more significantly in the day of netbooks, try Chrome, Firefox, and Opera with a slow or very small main drive. Opera is the only one I've found that doesn't lock up loading a page with the hdd-led solid red, and that is why Opera has evicted every other browser from my EeePC.

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

[martin-boundary]

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.

Maybe those people are the ones using Unix-like systems as opposed to Windows-like systems that are used by those who doesn't understand how features can be built in a modular way?

Everyone wants a different set of features. One way to address this is by giving everybody all the features that anybody might want. Another way is to make all features independent, and force people to install (only) the features that they want.

Re:Things Mature

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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.

This is not a troll. Just look around! Programming is not only a lot more accessible than it was back in the C64 days, but it's also much much quicker to get things written than it used to be. Shake your head and mod me down if you like, that doesn't change the fact that the percentage of people scripting in various forms out there skyrocketed after the internet became ubiquitous. This shouldn't have to be explained just because somebody is whistful over the good ol' days where you actually had to send data directly to memory addresses.

Re:Things Mature

[TheLink]

Why does it have to take up so much memory? Does doing that make it faster than Chrome?

FWIW Firefox has indeed reduced memory usage when compared to the bad old days a few years ago (when it was using more than entire vmware virtual machines :) ). Now it's less than 200MB on my machine.

Re:Things Mature

[Hal_Porter]

Your faith in your friends is your greatest weakness. Witness the power of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL web browser! Fire at will!

Re:Things Mature

[Hal_Porter]

Good. Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.

Re:Things Mature

[mjwx]

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.

I'll back this one up. Firefox's base memory footprint is relatively tiny, it's when Firefox opens pages with a crapload of bad javascript, Java, Flash (Apple Fanboys take note HTML 5 will be exactly the same, poorly coded is poorly coded no matter what language you use). I turn off flashblock or adblock and Firefox's memory footprint doubles.

The reason I still use firefox is because of it's extensibility, Adblock, Flashblock, NoScript, AU dictionary and so forth. Chrome is fast but doesn't offer me half of what I use (and has some serious drawbacks like being completely incompatible with VMware Server), Safari is worse and nowhere near as fast as Chrome. Opera is nice but I don't like their idea of homepage trying to shove all that content in there when I just want a simple Google search page (havent figured out how to set this on Opera Mobile yet). I don't find Firefox taking over my system, quite the opposite in fact I find Firefox has allowed me to take control of my browsing experience rather then being stuck with someone else's idea of what it should be.

As a side note, Chrome on Android is great but in this case I really do need a spartan browser as opposed to a fully featured one.

Re:Things Mature

[trapnest]

Hasn't dug very deep

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

[Johann Lau]

yeah thanks, something didn't felt quite right about that =/

Re:Things Mature

[trapnest]

And things like this are why it is acceptable for Word 2007 to take the longer to open on my quad core windows 7 box as Word 3 did on my 25MHz windows 3.1 machine.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

Now remember that those engines want to run also on our mobile phones...

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

Mobile phone users give a shit. There's much more of them than PC users.

Re:Things Mature

[srh2o]

He did say fully featured. None of those are fully featured in chrome as of yet and currently most of them can't be made fully featured.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

How are those glorious days we live now, which you described, that much different from what NeXtSTEP (or however it should be spelled...) offered?

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

[sznupi]

NextStep (wrong spelling probably...) basically offered, and at a time when you "started 20 years ago": #1 (sort of(*)), #2 (ok, could've used a better menu structure; just a change of style) and #4.

We still need to do lots of #3 (mobile phones)

(*) just throw in, say, Lua; which is, from I've heard, very light, powerful, easy and fast. But we seem to choose not to use it much...

Re:Things Mature

[lena_10326]

It's 1K alright.. but the source code is also unreadable. Complex software requires complex source code which is the source of code bloat. Bloat comes from designing the code using abstractions and generalized interfaces. Without abstraction, no human would be able to understand or maintain the source code of a modern web browser if it were coded as a highly optimized monolithic blob of code.

Re:Things Mature

[binarylarry]

Riiiiight and I'm sure the feature set between the two is nearly identical.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

Try comparing them with bigger number of tabs (*1), running for a looong time (*2) and on as slow machine as you can find (*3)

(*1) why should the software limit what we want to do?

(*2) why should we restart a browser when there's hibernation available? Particularly on slow / mobile connection.

(*3) I would hope we can see the responsibility in using a PC for as long as it can do its job; and that includes choosing software which enables that.

Re:Things Mature

[mgblst]

MOST PEOPLE DON'T HAVE 8GB OF RAM.

Saying that, I agree with your point, just sorry you are too thick to realise how stupid your post is.

Re:Things Mature

[Scoth]

Also, recent versions of Chrome have built-in support for most Greasemonkey scripts. Every one I regularly use has dropped in and worked fine.

Re:Things Mature

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

How are those glorious days we live now, which you described, that much different from what NeXtSTEP (or however it should be spelled...) offered?

With respect, I don't see why that isn't obvious. But I'll answer:

- There's internet ubiquity which has made finding sample code etc much easier to find and, therefore, learn from.

- CPU, disc access, and Memory resources are proportionately way better than what we had back in the NeXT days.

- Interpreted languages are way better. Want to do threading in Python? import threading; Want to do networking? MD5 checksums? Google search for python MD5 or python networking etc. Heck, you can even do OpenGL now. Cross-platform support? No problem.

- Want your code to run on your cell phone or other mobile devices? No problem. Wanna memory manage them? No?? No problem!

- Wanna do 3D? Google OpenGL or Direct X. Wanna do 3D on a NeXT box? Get a big thick book with descriptions on how to do hidden wire removal.

And so on. It's amazing how much less you need a full on programming language/compiler these days.

Re:Things Mature

[binarylarry]

I submit that, you sir, are quite good at reading comprehension.

Amazingly good in fact.

You should win some type of award. Can you post your phone number? I know people, maybe we can get something rolling.

Re:Things Mature

[scdeimos]

Having worked on legacy codebases I can say that "add more features, expect more bloat" doesn't hold as a rule. Adding a new feature often causes a refactoring of code because of the awful way it was written originally. This often leads to a reduction in code complexity and size. Firefox is about as legacy as it gets, with code going back beyond Phoenix into the hallowed halls of Communicator and Navigator. Firefox gets jacked-up occasionally to have entire subsystems replaced, as was the case in FF3.0 when Mork was (thankfully) wheeled out and replaced with SQLite for storage and the Gecko layout engine was upgraded to 1.9.

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

[jythie]

I do not think it is users that keep asking for the bloat, it is bored programmers who keep wanting to fold in the features they like. Most users I have talked to have not used a single 'feature' added in the last two major revisions, but do complain about how the load/shutdown times have been getting longer.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

What I asked for wasn't to remind us about the status quo of the past (when NextStep was...overlooked; ignored (and not without a reason of course)) and how that differs from now.

You seem to not realise what NextStep was capable of (or of what its modern incarnation, GNUStep, is...while still being plenty light; well, there's that other more direct descendant, OSX...too bogged down with shiny, though). Look it up.
To cut it short: it has basically all the characteristics which, on software level, give us those "glorious times".

Re:Things Mature

[scdeimos]

The ability to play back .mp3 and .wav files, it seems, along with a lack of list attributes. Important? Probably not.

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

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Okay, I think you're right, I'm confused by your question. Are you saying that things were just as good for NeXT programmers back then as it is for programmers today, or are you saying that that NeXT offered more bang for the bit? If it's the latter, I have no issue with that statement. If it's the former, I don't understand where you are coming from.

Re:Things Mature

[Johann Lau]

"Complex software requires complex source code which is the source of code bloat."

Then we're meaning to different things by "bloat". To me, bloat is unneccessary.

(Since this article is about browsers: Opera has blown anything else out of the water for longer than I can think of, in terms of configurability, amount and quality of features, and it's also consistently been a much smaller download and performing much faster than any comparable browser. So other browser seem bloated to me in comparison: they do less and do it more slowly, while taking up more space. And I don't think Opera is coded in assembler, you know.)

Yes, features and complexity make executables bigger and sometimes make apps slower, but so do many other factors, like bad programmers, or corporate/open source bureaucracies, and sometimes the non-bloated version of something is not really that highly optimized, it's simply not bloated.

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

[sznupi]

Opera has adblocker built-in, you just have to provide it with a list (updated of course; plus there's also a GUI way of blocking elements if something comes through...)

Re:Things Mature

[martin-boundary]

It's still growing, but you can't see it in our galaxy. The devs found a portal to the 8th dimension years ago, and have not looked back ever since.

Re:Things Mature

[Randle_Revar]

well, we'll see what happens as time goes on. It could stop growing next month, after all. And even if it grew at something like it's current rate for a year, it wouldn't be as large as FF.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

Both. You seem to take "the former" (by using the order from your above post) too literally - of course it wasn't quite as nice as we would like it to be now...but it was pretty damn close. And managing that on very slow, by modern standards, hardware.
There's no reason why we can't have it now, in similarly efficient way.

Re:Things Mature

[wisnoskij]

"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."

The problem I have with it, is i have seen it get slower and slower, but I do not think I have gotten any useful new features in years.
Actually some of the things I used to use stopped working and some other "features" were implemented that made browsing a lot more annoying and time consuming.

Maybe I a just not remembering right, but I cannot remember a update that ever improved Firefox for me.

Re:Things Mature

[tobiah]

Humans have fewer genes than corn. And who's got the most features? Wonder how we did it...

Re:Things Mature

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

My point was never that we can't have both. It was that the value of that extra optimization was way higher back then. This is true even for NeXT developers. Getting that 10meg app down to 100k meant more when we had 16 megs of RAM than it does with what we have now. Our computing resources are growing faster than we can use them. The flexibility we've gained and the time we're not spending on these apps is worth way more.

I agree, though, bonus points if it's more efficient. That's one of the reasons I use Opera over FF.

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

[sznupi]

We still need optimisation. How many PCs are there in the world, a bit over one billion?
And at the same time there are also...around 5 billion mobiles phone users (there were 3 billion at the end of 2008 IIRC, 4.6 billion at the end of 2009, so now...). There are very good reasons for that. The same reasons why most of the world will be using "slow" computers (and will use each unit very long)
The value of optimisation is so that those machines will be a reality. That's of monumental value to humanity, far overshadowing efforts at optimisation.

And here's the kicker...you wrote in the first post of this subthread "how much more they get done thanks to abstraction, pre built libraries/modules, nicely designed IDEs, and interpreted languages" - that is the proper place for optimisation; that's what NextStep did - offering great things in nicely optimised package to build upon (and making it easy to do it properly). Throw in some nice & efficient scripting language (I hear Lua is like that), nice & light IDE (can be done; Qt Creator being one possible example); and make sure the core, on which the rest will be based, is optimised to hell.

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

[Fjandr]

Leave it running for a while and that memory footprint will grow and grow. Depending on the sites, it would probably end up somewhere between 250MB and 500MB. At least, that's where it ends up whenever I forget to close it for a while.

Re:Things Mature

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The value of optimisation is so that those machines will be a reality. That's of monumental value to humanity, far overshadowing efforts at optimisation.

That's a self-correcting problem. a.) The specs of cell phones are dramatically rising every year. b.) When it makes sense to optimize your app to reach a greater audience, the time and money is put into doing it. Just doing it now willy nilly will do little more than lengthen the time to develop and possibly even create more defects to correct.

What you describe isn't some imminent problem. It's a problem we've already gotten past.

...that is the proper place for optimisation...

Settle down, man. It's not like I'm arguing against optimization.

Re:Things Mature

[pizzach]

Not sure, but you do know that Gecko has never released with a Netscape version called Navigator or Communicator, right? The code definitely is definitely old as Netscape started working on it around Communicator 4 time, but it never was released until Netscape 6. So its first public appearance was 8 years ago? Both KHTML and Gecko started development in 1998.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

That's a self-correcting problem. a.) The specs of cell phones are dramatically rising every year.

I'm not buying that; in the last year almost 1.3 billion mobile phones were shipped. Not even 170 million were smartphones (and out of those which were, a lot had quite modest hardware; because Symbian allows it; because otherwise those people often wouldn't even get a smartphone...). Furthermore, the specs of batteries aren't rising at all...

b.) When it makes sense to optimize your app to reach a greater audience, the time and money is put into doing it. Just doing it now willy nilly will do little more than lengthen the time to develop and possibly even create more defects to correct.

What you describe isn't some imminent problem. It's a problem we've already gotten past.

That's quite limited view IMHO. Applying mostly to "developed world" only.
(look at OLPC XO-1...x86 cpu? GTK+? (ok, this one could do...) Python?! Gecko?!!!)

And the point there where I used bold was simply to separate it from the preceeding line looking like that (and where that emphasis was used in widely different context) ;)
But more generally, the point was that since large part of optimisations can be done on a common, small, and crucial part of code...it isn't that much of a problem.

Re:Things Mature

[msclrhd]

Legacy code is code that is not supported, or if it is then only critical bug fixes are made to it (e.g. IE6 or XP). By definition, that means that you do not refactor that code. Refactoring can and does introduce a degree of risk [1].

Firefox has an old codebase that has gone through many releases. It has functionality that it needs to maintain. That said, it *is* being actively worked on and improved in all areas.

[1] Refactoring should be a series of reversible transforms where both pieces of code are identical in behaviour. Refactoring is *not* rewriting the code with a new algorithm or replacing it from scratch. You *can* completely rewrite and rearchitecture code using refactoring; I have done, but those took 60-80 refactorings (with checkins to the source control system to make it easy to back-track). However, we are all human, and mistakes can and do happen. Ideally, you should have the code under test with good code coverage to help ensure that you haven't broken anything, but not all code can easily be placed under test.

Re:Things Mature

[TedRiot]

Not everyone wants to dig deep. As I get older I get more lazy and don't want to configure everything so I choose products that suit me the best with pretty much default options. I have had times when I have really tried liking Opera, but I just didn't like it. A lot of things worked differently from other browsers and for me they felt wrong. Yes, I would be able to configure it to work the way I want, but I just don't want to go through that. That might be a lot of work and still something would bug me or the configurations could be lost in the next version update (I don't know if this happens with Opera or not).

I almost liked Chrome, but I hated the fact that it is installed (by default) under each user's profile and the address bar didn't work properly and the much hated awesomebar was actually the feature that turned me back to Firefox, which is the closest to what I want by default.

Re:Things Mature

[Johann Lau]

"Not everyone wants to dig deep."

Great, but then they just should pass on comments like "this sounds like an audiophile talking about magic cables". Since they have no clue what they are talking about and stuff...

"Yes, I would be able to configure it to work the way I want, but I just don't want to go through that."

who says you have to, just because you can? the OP asked what's so great about the GUI, I answered: it's the GUI you want it to be.

"That might be a lot of work"

nah. just right click something, select "customize -> appearance", then drag and drop to your hearts content. it just takes a bit of curiosity really, and it's less work than spending THOUSANDS of hours using an app as it comes out of the box. I don't think of configuring apps as work, I consider it saving work, making work easier. but yeah, different strokes for different people.

"and still something would bug me"

so? nothing is perfect. still makes it sense to spend a while minutes making it as good (for you) as it can be, instead of giving up altogether.. IMHO.

"or the configurations could be lost in the next version update (I don't know if this happens with Opera or not)"

Nope, upgrading Opera is as painless as it possibly could be.

Re:Things Mature

[MostAwesomeDude]

Xorg drops code and features every release. We've gone from taking half a minute, to taking less than a second, to detect and setup all of your input devices and video cards. Pretty decent, in my opinion. :3

Re:Things Mature

[msclrhd]

citation required

Re:Things Mature

[darrylo]

One issue is that Mozilla is fairly dependent upon Google's funding. Given that Google would like Chrome to succeed, Google has a lot of incentive to decrease funding.

(Yes, yes -- I'm sure that Google will continue funding for a while. However, it wouldn't surprise me if the funding dropped significantly, or even down to zero, in five years' time.)

Re:Things Mature

[dwarfsoft]

Yes! I am glad he could point that out. Imagine those of us with half that amount of RAM! Were you considering us too? ~

Re:Things Mature

[Onymous Coward]

They also use words like "focus" and even "the". Try not to get too hung up on someone else's abuse of a good thing.

Re:Things Mature

[crossmr]

only 500 MB? you're lucky.
a few times I've left firefox open with just yahoo mail opeon and woken up in the morning to find it using over 1 GB.

Re:Things Mature

[countach]

I think he is saying they could embed the local quicktime view (in the case of Mac) or whatever the equivalent is in Windows. I presume this is possible since tons of dinky little programs seem to have no problem embedding video viewers into their application, presumably by linking against some quicktime OS library.

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

[Unoti]

You cannot, with a straight face, use the word "empowerment", and then make a compelling argument. The very word empowerment screams of power point jockeys and PHB.

I just meant that people can increasingly do things for themselves, rather than having to go to exports. Or that the skill level required for experts to accomplish goals isn't as high as it used to be.

But fair enough. How about different words for you, like "independence", or "self-sufficiency", or "douchebag".

Re:Things Mature

[azgard]

I would also add to your list that in the old times, the programmers often made artificial limitations so they could optimize better, for example you cannot have more than 255 of something, your character set must be ASCII, your fonts have to be fixed-width, the labels in program can have at most 8 characters and so on. Today, we don't want any of these limits any more in the software, and that's too why it is more bloated.

Re:Things Mature

[Jugalator]

Not because of technical reasons, but because users demand a full-featured browser.

I'm not sure who you asked in your survery, because there are statistics showing that Firefox is dropping a bit lately as Chrome is gaining. This could be for other reasons than switching users, but what I've heard at various communities is making this seem more than an anecdotal observation.

Re:Things Mature

[jschrod]

"Not everyone wants to dig deep."

Great, but then they just should pass on comments like "this sounds like an audiophile talking about magic cables". Since they have no clue what they are talking about and stuff...

Why? He hit it on the mark: As an audiophile, I can tell you that proper selection of cables is very important for high-end equipment, but that's surely "digging deep" for most people.

The GGP (don't know if that was you) wrote about "slick GUI vs. XUL". That's surely on a level where anybody who's not interested in Firefox's or Opera's implementation details gets to know the difference between them for a user-level point of view. It's also "digging deep". So the GP asked for end-user oriented information about the differences -- why should he need to "have a clue" to ask such a question? Are only those who know XUL and native GUI programming by heart are allowed to ask about differences on the end-user level?

Dunno, but I found the question interesting and I would have liked to get more informed responses, as I use neither Firefox nor Opera. (I'm a Seamonkey user, FWIW.)

Re:Things Mature

[Jugalator]

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".

devenv.exe ... 204 512 kB.

I'm so sorry. ;)

Re:Things Mature

[thegarbz]

No lets see what users care about.

I fired up Firefox and opened slashdot ... ... any minute now ... ... ... Ok it woke up again after 20 seconds.

I may only have 4GB of RAM but I still find it unacceptable that Firefox and Firefox alone will lock up for 20 seconds when opening a web page. Not take 20seconds to load, but physically become unresponsive. I mean what is it doing? Having an army of Viet sweatshop workers sitting there with calculators figuring out how to use those 90MB?

Memory may not be everything but if as the GP said you're using 10MB to print "Hello World" you're doing something very very wrong.

Re:Things Mature

[jschrod]

Oops. s/gets to know/doesn't get to know/

Re:Things Mature

[Jugalator]

It should also be noted that this RAM usage is comparable to that of Chrome or Opera. People are making Firefox memory management too big of a deal. For some reason, they don't complain as much about Opera, even if that browser has had benchmarks done to it and seem to release less memory over time. (In this picture, Chrome is one of those that uses quite a bit of memory but releases it very efficiently due to being process-based -- I think this solves a ton of headaches)

Re:Things Mature

[beelsebob]

Yes and no... I'll take the more features... But in a very unix like way. I don't want my browser to check my email. I don't want my email client to browse the web, I don't want my text editor to be an operating system, and I don't want my word processor to play games.

This is rather why I like chrome and safari – they do their job, they do it fast, and they do it well, nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

Average user would want a light browser because they certainly don't have a machine with 4GB. There's somewhat more than one billion PCs in the world, total (that includes quite old machines for sure); the same amount of mobile phones is sold annually (with total number of users probably around 5 billion by now). Already most of them can access sensibly "full" web.

And anyway, the desktop browser you use is rather conservative with its resource usage; ability to run comfortably on older machines.

Re:Things Mature

[beelsebob]

Features of a "robust GUI" (not quite the term I'd use, but hey...)

1. GUI elements line up properly, don't have arbitrary 1 pixel offsets, don't have larger gaps between one pair of elements than another – Safari, Chrome and Firefox do a great job in this regard. Opera does not.
2. GUIs scale well as the window size changes, elements don't glitch, start overlapping, scale in odd ways, etc. – All the browsers do a good job of this as far as I can see
3. Uses native controls for as much as possible so as to avoid weird collisions in the behaviour of the elements (e.g. the up arrow key behaves very differently in a text field on Windows, Mac OS and Linux) – Safari does an excellent job of this on Mac OS but a poor one on windows; Chrome does a mediocre job of this on all platforms; Firefox does an excellent job of this on Windows, but a poor one elsewhere; Opera does a poor job of this everywhere

By this measure, I give the "robust GUI" prize to:

• Firefox on Windows
• Safari on Mac OS

Re:Things Mature

[beelsebob]

Yes, and for Hello World, you might have a point.

The thing is, that said GUI libraries *still* take up 10MB of RAM when rendering complex GUIs, and that's a price worth paying, in order to get faster-to-develop, more maintainable code out.

Re:Things Mature

[dkf]

just throw in, say, Lua; which is, from I've heard, very light, powerful, easy and fast. But we seem to choose not to use it much...

Lua is very lightweight. One of the consequences of that is that it does very little for you by default; you need to add in libraries to access a lot of system resources (e.g., so that you can draw on the screen or access a network or use non-Latin1 characters easily). By the time you've added in libraries to do all the extras that Lua doesn't supply out of the box that you need for your application, the whole ensemble isn't lightweight any more. That functionality has to be somewhere.

Re:Things Mature

[beelsebob]

And hey, at the end of all that, I think we're doing a pretty impressive job with web browsers. They do all that fancy stuff, and do it on mobile phones with only 128MB of RAM.

Re:Things Mature

[Terrasque]

While RAM, cpu speed and harddisk space have increased dramatically the last decade, harddisk speed is maybe only 3-4 times faster.

Try an SSD, and your hdd speed will finally start catching up to the rest of the computer. I think you will notice a huge difference.

And one more thing, if you mean that Word 2007 and Word 3 is the same, why don't you just use Word 3? I'm sure that starts fast enough for you on a modern computer.

Re:Things Mature

[Haiyadragon]

It's a non-issue in the sense that Firefox can simply rely on multimedia frameworks (e.g. Gstreamer, Directshow) to decode h.264 streams, possibly with hardware acceleration. No need to include the encumbered codec with Firefox itself.

Re:Things Mature

[westlake]

Fortunately, at least Silverlight is nearly nowhere.. :)

Neflix uses Silverlight.

Re:Things Mature

[LinuxAndLube]

Once Google pulls the financial plug on Mozilla, Firefox is dead.

Re:Things Mature

[heffrey]

I guess you've never used the Sysinternals suite of tools then.

Re:Things Mature

[funkelectric]

I am on a mission to demote usage of the word 'consumer'. Interestingly, in your quotation Henry Ford uses the much more apt term 'customer'. The word consumer, to my mind, is degrading. A consumer sits at the end of a tube. A customer is someone who might walk through the door of your shop if you go about your business right.

Re:Things Mature

[JohnnyBGod]

I'd like to see an example of a mainstream piece of software that isn't becoming more 'bloated' as time goes by

That's easy! Firefox! 2.x to 3.x really was quite an improvement.

Re:Things Mature

[tehcyder]

"Feels light" is purely subjective and has nothing to do with actual resource usage.

Well, yes, that is why GP said "feels" and not "is".

Re:Things Mature

[LinuxAndLube]

Why would I want my IDE to print "hello fucking world"?

Re:Things Mature

[wye43]

It's called triage.
You choose what to add, what to remove, what to refactor, what to fix, constantly. A lot of features don’t necessarily mean it has to be bloated. Perhaps the performance/stress testing team is not having a big enough voice at Firefox, if they even have such team.

Re:Things Mature

[plastbox]

Our computing resources are growing faster than we can use them.

Oh really? I think Microsoft, Dell, Intel et al. would disagree! If I buy a brand-spanking-new laptop with 4GB of RAM (and allow all the factory installed crapware to stay), FireFox, MS Office, Windows Mediaplayer, etc. all seem to go out of their way to eat all my computing resources.

Dedicated Opera user here, though I have all sorts of browsers installed since I do web development. Back in the day (ok, I'm not that old) I used IE6 and Firefox (I think.. might still have been using Navigator at this point). IE starts quickly and is responsive and simplistic, FF has features IE6 can't even dream about but is sluggish and renders my computer utterly useless for anything else for a while before crashing catastrophically.

Then along comes Opera. Quick, responsive, no-bullshit GUI, and a feature set covering everything I want and need (mouse gestures? INSTANT LOVE), and then some. There was no way back, and there still isn't. It has a developer tool easily rivaling FireBug, it's GUI and general use is slick and smooth yet "simple" and solid (semi-subjective, I know), it has the fastest rendering engine, the fastest JavaScript engine, it is the most standard compliant browser, and I routinely leave it running for 2-3 weeks straight with hours of daily use shutting it down only when my box needs a reboot and have to date never seen Opera use more than 400MB of memory, or crash outside of beta.

In addition, there is Opera Mobile which brings the full Opera experience to your not-antiquated phone, Opera Mini which along with their free Turbo-service brings a decent browsing experience even to horribly outdated phones, and Opera Devices which lets you surf on stuff like your Nintendo DSi.

Also, Opera is Norwegian. You have lost, simple as that. YEAH! B-)

Re:Things Mature

[Sycraft-fu]

What kind of point are you trying to make? That computers used to be slow? That is well understood and guess what? Apps were more spartan back then, and still took a long time. Back in the day, loading Netscape 4 took a significant amount of time. I'd ask it to start and have to wait while it loaded up. Computer wasn't doing anything in the background either, other than running the PPP program. Audio processing was an epic task since I couldn't afford a Protools DSP system. Effects had to be applied per track and took many times the length of the audio. Mixes had to be precomputed before listening. Video was postage stamp sized, at best (no stretching to full screen) and choppy.

However they aren't any more. They are now exceedingly fast. Firefox loads in less than a second, and that is with whatever I want running in the background. Audio processing is now all non-destructive realtime. I can stream multiple tracks off the disk, apply all sorts of effects and mix them in realtime, as well as have hundreds of voices playing with Virtual instruments, and use maybe 25-50% of my system's total power. As for video? Hell, 1080p video is no issue at all, even when compressed with a very computationally intensive codec like H.264.

The thing is, since we have nice fast computers, we might as well use them. Our software might as well support the features we want, it might as well be made to work better and use those resources. There is no point in bitching about how light things used to be. I don't care. I don't lack for RAM, I don't lack for disk space. I want features, not empty GBs.

Re:Things Mature

[rastos1]

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.

Did you forget what was TFA about? We, old farts, don't appreciate all that, because users complain about bloat. We have to find the balance between usage of "abstraction, pre built libraries/modules, nicely designed IDEs and interpreted languages" and "developing applications that users like".

Re:Things Mature

[geminidomino]

Except that Emacs stopped growing only when it had every feature under the sun. Which happened years ago.

Except a decent text editor.

Re:Things Mature

[Rockoon]

The detractors don't care. To them, Opera uses as much memory as Firefox. "See! Look at what Task Manager says!"

Of course, people who adopted Opera /because/ they were in a memory starved situation, know exactly how bloated IE, FF, Safari, and Chrome are. Even Chrome is fat assed pig.

I started using Opera back when Netscape was still what ISP's shipped to customers. I was running a 386/40 with 4MB of ram (and Windows 3.1 when I had to) and Netscape was a disk thrashing piece of garbage. Meanwhile a ready-to-run Opera install FIT ON A FLOPPY and I could comfortably MULTITASK with other apps without any swapping.

While Opera certainly requires more memory than it used to, its still way better than the others, and that hasnt meant skimping on features.

Re:Things Mature

[drinkypoo]

Until Chrome gets the same retinue I doubt Firefox has much to fear. Without fully featured versions of AdBlock, Noscript, FlashBlock, Web Developer, and Greasemonkey, I won't be switching over anytime soon.

I have several of those already installed in Chrome. You may enjoy a quick trip to https://chrome.google.com/extensions?hl=en-US

He did say fully featured. None of those are fully featured in chrome as of yet and currently most of them can't be made fully featured.

The only one missing is Noscript, and all that is needed now (since beta versions of chrome have javascript control) is a menu button that provides the UI functionality. None of the others are missing any major features.

Re:Things Mature

[lena_10326]

You seem ignore that complex problems often require complex solutions. Waving a wand and uttering a few tidy quotes won't magically simplify away complexity.

Complexity becomes manageable by generalizing and abstracting code, which by its very nature generates reusable code, but not every piece of code is reusable because at some point you must deal with the reality that unique functionality must eventually be implemented. As functionality grows so does implementation grow.

Looking at it another way. Writing reusable code means you're writing abstract code. It's easy to know when the code is reusable; simply count the times it is referenced. It's difficult to tell when abstractions are correct, but a very good indicator is when your abstractions are reused.

Abstraction and reuse are complementary concepts so your quotes are enormous oversimplifications. When dealing with complexity, abstraction is inevitable. It's the abstraction that introduces layer and interface bloat. The net result is the forces increasing software size are more plentiful than forces decreasing software size (and for very good reasons).

Re:Things Mature

[inigopete]

For this argument, I'd be opening the word processor to do the same thing in both cases: create a Word document, i.e. type some stuff in, maybe spell check it, change formatting in a couple of pages, possibly split it into columns, adjust the page margins and save and print it. For 98% of my word processor usage, Word 3 would probably still suit me fine.

Re:Things Mature

[drinkypoo]

I'm not sure who you asked in your survery, because there are statistics showing that Firefox is dropping a bit lately as Chrome is gaining. This could be for other reasons than switching users, but what I've heard at various communities is making this seem more than an anecdotal observation.

Anecdotally, I switched. I got tired of waiting for Firefox. Chrome is vastly faster in every way, I can live with its minor shortcomings. I'm actually using Chromium, FWIW.

Re:Things Mature

[Trepidity]

If one of the common ways it's being played is via Flash 10, then Firefox doesn't need support, does it, since Firefox hands that off to the Flash plugin?

The only thing that matters for Firefox is HTML5 video-tag h.264 that does not come with a Flash primary or fallback alternative. And that is still quite rare.

Re:Things Mature

[the_womble]

How much of that 26% is Youtube and other sites that offer both H264 and Flash? What is the equivalent percentage for Flash?

I have yet to see a single video H264 on the web. MOst web video seems to be Youtube hosted ON the other hand, I see Flash video everywhere.

It would be more true to say "Flash is a problem for Ipad and Iphone that can not be wished away". IT does not seem to be hurting their sales much.

Re:Things Mature

[TedRiot]

I'm actually not sure what you meant by digging deep, but I at first assumed that you meant that I can customize it to be whatever I want. For Opera-fans it usually means UI-wise that if I don't like the UI, they respond by telling me that I can customize it to be whatever I want. But that is exactly what I don't want to do. I really want something that is close to my preferences by default. And because FF's UI is close enough, I don't really want to spend my time customizing Opera.

If instead by digging deep you meant the technical implementation, I have to say I really couldn't care less. The browser is something I mostly just use and don't even want to care how it is implemented, if it does the job for me and feels comfortable. Out-of-the box I think Opera feels very awkward compared to FF or Chrome. And out of the three FF feels the most comfortable to me. It has the back-button (though, mostly alt+left for me), the awesomebar (which has made bookmarks obsolete for me) and the keyboard shortcuts I'm familiar with and for some strange reason in my use it just works. I can live with it out of the box and it is pretty much on every computer I use, though on the two I use the most, I have hidden menubar and the bookmark bar.

Re:Things Mature

[Hurricane78]

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.

No, you just don’t know the “outgrowing” principle. Ever wondered why some version numbers have four parts? Well, there is the major and minor version and the patch level. But that biggest numbers, that is usually 1 or 2, is the generation. Similar to the number behind movie sequel titles. And those versions numbers that only have 3 parts, have a 0 for the generation.
The reason is, that naturally, the goal of a software project moves on. It grows. But when you designed an architecture, you designed it to be best suited for whatever you thought of at that moment. And then more and more new things come in, that don’t quite fit that architecture anymore. Up to a point, where you either do a complete rewrite.. or in other words, you re-design the basic architecture, so that it is ready for the new principle... or you end up like Windows ME: In an upside-down pyramid architecture, where you have a tiny basis, and tons of crap glued to the top of it.

Unfortunately most developers just carry on, until it burst. Instead of defining when it makes sense to stop, and think about the fundamental architecture again.

One such point was when Mozilla got replaced by Firefox. This was such a moment.
Now we need another one. “Firefox 2 1.0” so to speak. Then there is absolutely no reason, why Firefox can’t be light and elegant again. :)
(Actually, I think they should do this with Gecko too.)

Re:Things Mature

[Thing 1]

[...] XUL-based interface.

What, like Venkman's girlfriend's fridge?

Re:Things Mature

[Hurricane78]

Well, frankly I’m too young to remember those days too. But I think you’re just a grumpy old man for generalizing the behavior of the typical consultant whose code ends up on thedailywtf.com to everyone in my generation.
See, I love programming elegantly. I code mostly in Haskell. Which is a extremely efficient and elegant language. (As fast as C/C++, but much much safer and modern.) And I can tell you that I can just as well write elegant and efficient functional-programming-style JavaScript (yes, JavaScript!).

The only moments where I don’t care, is when I write throwaway or semi-throwaway shell scripts or tiny tools for me personally, where rumtime efficiently is actually pretty much irrelevant, and being able to quickly and nicely get it written is more important.

But I still love IDEs too. At least those that don’t expect me to use the mouse or stupid “wizards”. Because I am just much faster in getting my idea across. Because if there are tools there, why not use them? You also use things that use the wheel. We all use tools. Because we benefit from them.

So get off your high horse, and stop generalizing, OK?
Or I could laugh at you for taking cruel months to write code that I can write in days, and still be a lost safer, more elegant and have more fun while doing it.

Re:Things Mature

[Hurricane78]

Oh oh oh... I’m sorry for the typos & co. I’m just pretty ill right now. And while I understand what I want to say very well, I can’t quite get it out without looking a bit stupid. I hope you can look trough it...

Re:Things Mature

[AltairDusk]

In regards to point 3, one can still be responsible while staying up with the latest hardware. When I decide it's time to build a new PC my current one either goes to server or media duty, whatever gets replaced goes to my parents as it's still a decent upgrade for them and will last awhile for what they're going to use it for. Whichever PC they replace either goes to some of their friends or they donate it to a local charity that will make use of it.

Re:Things Mature

[Fnkmaster]

The funny thing is that actually *all* the good modern web browsers do those things very well. Opera, Firefox and Chrome are all great at rendering stuff pretty fast.

In fact, I'd say at this point that Firefox often is better at rendering/scrolling/browsing around complex pages than Chrome on Windows. At least on my desktop computer it feels perceptually faster (a Core 2 Duo running Windows 7).

Everybody insists Chrome is blazingly faster than anything else out there because it has the fastest Javascript engine right now by a significant margin (how significant depends on whose benchmark - some would say 20-30%, some seem to say 100%+).

But when doing something like scrolling around on Slashdot or other big, content-filled pages, the actual browsing is faster on Firefox. I have compared on several computers. The re-rendering of scrolled pages and elements, screen tearing, weird things when you move the page around that make the browser feel sluggish - all worse with Chrome than Firefox.

I don't know why everybody seems to think that the fastest benchmarked Javascript engine == the fastest web browser. It clearly doesn't - that's only a fraction of the web browsing experience.

Re:Things Mature

[commodore64_love]

Firefox still seems "light" to me. Right now I have 7 open tabs, and it's using just 130 megabytes of RAM. I've tried to find a smaller browser like Opera or seaMonkey, but there's no significant difference.

As for paying, I'd be happy to pay for "addons" to get h.264. 1-2 dollars won't rupt my bank, so long as the actual Firefox browser remains free.

Re:Things Mature

[commodore64_love]

>>>Youtube and other sites that offer both H264 and Flash?

I use "3GP" for my youtube watching (via firefox addon), but that's only because my laptop is still stuck on dialup. Perhaps that's the way for Firefox to handle h.264 - via addons.

Re:Things Mature

[commodore64_love]

>>>Run both Opera and Firefox on memory starved systems and you will change your tune.

I have (112MB WinXP laptop). Opera ran like a snail due to disk thrashing. Firefox ran much faster, but still wasn't that great either. I ended-up using IE7 instead.

Re:Things Mature

[commodore64_love]

>>>Netscape was a disk thrashing piece of garbage.

Funny. Netscape Navigator 4 works just fine on my 8 megabyte, 386/12 MHz laptop. I agree AOL's version 6 was garbage, but that was not release in the 1990s. And Netscape Navigator didn't have annoying ads like Opera had.

Re:Things Mature

[TerranFury]

It's 1K alright.. but the source code is also unreadable

Was the source released for this?

Re:Things Mature

[QuantumPion]

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".

Back in the day, engineers were cheap and computer resources were extremely expensive.

Now, computer resources are practically free and engineers are even cheaper :)

Re:Things Mature

[Thantik]

When was the last time you tried Chrome? -- Chrome 5 has addons, has a fully featured AdBlock, FlashBlock, (Not sure about noscript, but I bet it's there too), and Greasemonkey scripts get converted and used as addons just fine. From what I've run across they have a perfectly fine set of tools for web-development built into the browser as well.

Re:Things Mature

[notrandomly]

While Opera certainly requires more memory than it used to

That's mostly because of all the web technologies they need to support. And all the compatibility workarounds. The browser engine is the biggest part by far, and I'm sure they could have cut it down quite a bit if they didn't have to introduce thousands of workarounds for websites.

Re:Things Mature

[notrandomly]

The difference between Opera and Firefox is that Opera's memory usage is more dynamic. It uses more if more is available, and less if the system is short on memory. Opera runs on mobile phones, remember (and not just small computers like the N900).

Re:Things Mature

[Just Some Guy]

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".

I worked with a nice fellow. Let's call him Fritz. Fritz is kind of a COBOL-on-mainframe master; if I ever want an accounting system that will work for the next 80 years, I'll give him a call. His problem is that he can't not optimize, even when it's totally inappropriate.

For example, he was tasked to write a Python program to take a flat text file of invoice line items and match them up to the invoices in our system. When he proudly debuted the "working" product, it made the database cry for several hours as it looped across the text file one line at a time, queried the DB for the matching invoice, inserted the line item, then moved on to the next. Once I recovered from shock and looked at his code (which I'm convinced was also valid COBOL), I realized that it didn't cache anything. If two adjacent lines would've matched the same invoice, his code didn't care. It just repeated that query as many times as necessary.

I finally got it through to Fritz that I would not allow that code in production and to please add some memoizing. His response was to spend the next week optimizing for the special case where those two adjacent lines (in an unsorted text file) went to the same invoice. That got runtimes down to just a few hours. I finally gave up on asking him to do it, spent a morning adding a hash that mapped invoice numbers to their database rows, and saw the program run in 8 seconds (I have witnesses).

So I gave it back to Fritz and asked him to make a couple of minor adjustments before rolling it out live. When he was finished, runtimes were back up to several hours. I was horrified and furious to learn that he'd stripped out all my caching code. When I asked why, he laughed and shook his head at my naivety because my program wasted over 250MB of RAM, but his ran in under 1MB.

In production, it was going onto a server with 16GB of RAM.

I tried to explain that I'd much rather "waste" 1/64 of the machine's RAM for 8 seconds than 1/16000th for 5 hours of database pain, but he never really got it.

Notice where I started by saying that I worked with Fritz? Well, I'm still at the same job, but we're no longer coworkers.

My point in all this is that you see every saved byte as a moral victory over today's decadent youth. I see it as an old man tilting at windmills. Memory leaks need to be caught, of course - even a low drip adds up to gallons over time. Embedded programming still has a place for clever coding that saves bits whenever possible. But in general-purpose desktop code, I couldn't possibly care less whether a program I'll be practically living in uses 1/60th of my computer's RAM (100MB) instead of merely 1/120th (50MB). If that "laziness" lets the authors add handy features to it and fix bugs in a more timely manner than if they had to micro-optimize for every nibble, then more power to 'em.

Re:Things Mature

[BenoitRen]

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.

You should try to make such a "hello world" application with exactly the same code with different C compilers that support different Windows versions. The differences are staggering. With each newer compiler and Windows version the executable gets much larger and the memory footprint rises. While still doing exactly the same thing.

Re:Things Mature

[bynary]

The whole reason I started using Firefox (from early beta through 3.5) was because it was light, fast and didn't have all the crap that "full-featured" browsers have. I prefer Google Docs to the bloatware that is Microsoft Office and even OpenOffice. I don't know what the real problem here is. I'm sure some of it is as you say - users demanding more features, but I don't believe that's even close to the entirety of the problem Mozilla is facing.

Re:Things Mature

[Matheus]

Leave that same set of tabs open over night and THEN check your memory usage. I didn't leave FireFox for it's startup foot-print. I left it for the memory leak (to be honest: Flash is mostly at fault) AND its poor sand-boxing (Read: inability to cleanly handle the flash plugin when it gets out of control)

Chrome is where I've gone and to be honest, like anything, it isn't perfect (especially a few current BIG site incompatibilities) but the first time it told me Flash was running rampant and let me dispose of *just the plugin* not anything around it (vs. FireFox which just crashed... boom gone) I fell in love.

Re:Things Mature

[jc42]

Not everyone wants to dig deep.

And some of us can't afford to.

I do a fair amount of web testing, to make sure that pages (and sites) work on all the common browsers. I have several machines, each of which has lots of browsers installed, and I use them all for testing. This is a potential insanity situation, because of course it's utterly impossible to make a page look identical on all of them. Rather, my usual goal is to make them at least readable, and at best not too horrible looking, on all the browsers. On this Macbook, I currently have Camino, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Sunrise open, of the 11 installed browsers. I have two linux boxes, and my wife has two Windows boxes ("for work") with other browsers. I have a G1 phone and she has an iPhone, giving us a few more browsers, though testing against "smartphones" is a growing problem.

A major problem during testing is "OK, how do I do task T on browser B?" It's true that all the browsers are configurable - to some degree. But their method of doing this vary wildly, so I have to have notes on hand, to remind me how to find the config stuff and type things in for all the browsers. And every update potentially breaks some of these notes, as clever new config approaches are discovered by the programmers. But the worst part is that no browser is (to my knowledge) completely configurable. All of them have some UI things that are hard-coded, or have the config stuff hidden so well that I can't find it easily. So there are irreducible differences in what you have to type to get browser B to do task T. And these differences change over time, without notice, any time you let a browser upgrade itself.

For a long time, I had opera at near the end of my test list, because its GUI was so wildly different from the common set of key commands that the browser "community" was developing. This isn't saying that opera was bad. It's approach may well have been better than the others. But since I had to use all of them, and I couldn't easily remember what it took to tell opera to do task T (and I couldn't find much UI config stuff), using opera was too time consuming to use frequently. I'd spend too much time saying "Damn!" as I realized that I'd typed the common command to do T, but opera required typing something different, so I'd have to dig it up from browser notes. Eventually, opera changed to mostly use the conventional keys for the common tasks, and I moved it to my list of first-test browsers.

Anyway, for anyone concerned with making web sites usable everywhere, UI configuration can easily become a full-time job, due to the wild inconsistencies among the browsers. The most reasonable approach is to mainly use the default settings, and keep notes for how to do the less common things that you need to use. A few config things are worth learning, but you don't want to sink too much time into it, if you want to get on with your work.

It would really help if the browser writers would work on a consistent scheme for configuring the UI settings. But I don't see this happening in my lifetime.

(One of the main annoyances during testing is that many of the common browsers, including FF, don't seem to have any way to say "open in a new tab/window" for buttons. Most now accept shift-ctl/cmd-click to open a link in a new tab, but the same thing works with buttons in only a few browsers, and this is rarely configurable. Similarly, the show-source command is bound to different key combos and is rarely configurable. Opera seems to insist on showing the source in a new tab, so you can't see it next to the rendered page, which is a major hassle for debugging. You'd think that browser writers would do enough testing that they'd have made all this easily configurable, but if so, they haven't chosen to tell us developers how to do it.)

(And yes, I do still have a machine with IE6 installed. It's horrible, but there are still a lot of people using it. I don't care whether a page looks good on it, since nothing ever looks

Re:Things Mature

[bynary]

You fail to realize that part of the reason why we have so much memory in our desktops these days is because programmers have gotten lazy. I hear the phrase "memory is cheap" thrown around alot these days. I don't think that's a good enough excuse to not optimize your code. I agree with the AC post (although he does come across as bitter and jaded).

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

[jedidiah]

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

If you can't describe it, then you can't recognize it and you're really just full of it.

That means your opinion is so bogus and subjective as to be entirely meaningless.

You have nothing to argue because you have nothing really to say.

Re:Things Mature

[jedidiah]

> MOST PEOPLE DON'T HAVE 8GB OF RAM.

If you have enough RAM to deal with a modern version of MacOS or Windows, then what Firefox wastes is not a problem.

The gap between that and 8G is not large enough to matter.

Re:Things Mature

[jedidiah]

> Mobile phone users give a shit. There's much more of them than PC users.

Must be an Apple fanboy that thinks that the iphone is going to take over the world.

The real web stats paint a much different picture...

Re:Things Mature

[LaRainette]

Consumers is not one uniform group.
Most consumers want a full featured browsers
Some want it to be lighter and snappier => Chrome. Yet I don't think Chrome is going to stay that light especially when you try to add the missing features through plug-ins.
Stock FF 3.6 vs Stock Chrome 4, I don't think Firefox is much heavier...

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.

Re:Things Mature

[Hal_Porter]

It's traditional to use a brother/sister incest reference when trolling people who make Star Wars based jokes.

Re:Things Mature

[HateBreeder]

Funny you mention the mainstream.

You'd be surprised what a small subset of of features mainstream users use on their day to day.
Software can be designed modularly in a way that not all features are "loaded" and consume resources when they are not in use.

Firefox is ridiculously slow on my quad core/8gb ram system at work. Chrome feels 10x faster - gui is snappy, graphics is rendered quickly, practically starts up instantly. I don't care about memory foot-print, I wouldn't care if firefox were using 1gb of ram as long as it would be as snappy and fast as chrome.
And guess what? I don't notice any missing features from chrome. Sure, adblock isn't perfect - but it's good enough. I don't care about any other plugin. You think i care about the XUL gui rendering framework? why would I?

Firefox is no longer catering to the mainstream. It's an over-engineered piece of bloated software. bloat != features... bloat == mostly useless features that cause slowdowns. A well designed browser will have an extremely fast core and very flxeible extension mechanisms... firefox is slow without any extensions. A complete failure.

Re:Things Mature

[LaRainette]

I strongly (yet respectfully) disagree. If you see word's features as being able to add up words typed on a keyboard to form phrases and display it on a screen then OK.
But Word (or OOo or whatever name Apple gave theirs) is not about that.
Take word 3, and tell someone with little to no training to type you a report to present to your customers (it has to be nicely paginated and all). This will take him AGES. I mean like a week and the result will suck badly.
Take the same rookie and give him Word 2007, I bet you he is done 5 times faster and the result is 10 times better ! That's feature improvement ! Sure it will have taken word 10 seconds to boot but WHO CARES ?
word is note gedit or notepad or nano!

Re:Things Mature

[Korin43]

Chrome uses less memory, and "feels" faster (at least to me). My guess is that XUL and the plugin interface take up more memory than Google's simpler versions. Does it make that much of a difference though? I rarely find myself on a computer with less than a GB of memory, and even if you have less, I think Firefox isn't actually using all 200 MB all the time (so it should be able to swap some of it out).

Re:Things Mature

[MrBippers]

I had similar problems with firefox on my older eeepc running eeebuntu with a 4gb ssd. Creating a loopback file helped a lot of the issues.

Re:Things Mature

[tpstigers]

You have nothing to argue because you have nothing really to say.

Who said anyone was arguing? Can't people just have an opinion on a subject without having an argument about it?

Or did you just come here looking for a fight?

Re:Things Mature

[Johann Lau]

The GGP (don't know if that was you) wrote about "slick GUI vs. XUL". That's surely on a level where anybody who's not interested in Firefox's or Opera's implementation details gets to know the difference between them for a user-level point of view. It's also "digging deep". So the GP asked for end-user oriented information about the differences -- why should he need to "have a clue" to ask such a question?

No, for my understanding the poster questioned the claim that Operas GUI is "robust" as something vague.

And the whole GUI and usage feels a lot more robust than Firefox's XUL-based interface.

This sounds like the way an audiophile would describe a cable. Can you describe the characteristics of a robust GUI to a user?

I guess I kinda read that as the whole audio cable snake oil thing... saying the GUI is "robust" because you have no actual data/facts. Sorry to the poster if I misunderstood that, I guess I did hehe.

But I didn't say you got to have a clue to ask that question.. would make no sense would it, plus I even answered it: just right click stuff and be curious and you should quickly notice what we mean. But not having used it really and then demanding an explanation of robust, because otherwise it's something vague and doesn't mean much.. well, no. It just doesn't mean much to YOU. It's like someone wanting a better description of "sex" than "amazing and intense". Well, no. Go get laid, and then you will know what I mean by those terms in that context.

Perfectionist, efficient, generous, super slick bordering on pretty... HONEST are the words I would use to describe my reasons to use Opera since 2000 or so. That sounds utterly fanboyish, but you can't conclude from that it's not based in reality and true (for me, since those terms are all subjective). Just use the thing and see if you can come up with better terms I guess ^^

Re:Things Mature

[Johann Lau]

Opera can do that :D

Re:Things Mature

[Johann Lau]

I really want something that is close to my preferences by default.

Well good for you, but I don't :) Especially when those preferences are basically "what I already know", not "how I would stuff to be if I knew all the options and have tried what works best for me". Actually, going through most (if not all) configuration dialogs to tweak things I understand and have a quick glance at things I don't understand - just to see what's there - is essential for me. And nope, that doesn't take long after decades of practice, 99% of options are the same anywhere. It's like putting on your seatbelt when sitting in a car, you don't even really notice you're doing it, and someone suggesting to you to "not bother because it's too complicated" would seem insane to you.

That doesn't mean I wouldn't want Operas defaults to be as close to everybodies preferences as possible, it's your right to not bother and just use stuff out of the box... but in a way, I consider those users as minors, not adults. They should be tended to, but they cannot possible decide how software evolves and kick out features because they don't see a need for them. Software can be much more powerful, it can be like a glove that extends you; that trumps you being the glove that fits the software, and always will.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

Heh, heh, heh...

There's somewhat more than one billion PCs, total (that certainly includes quite old ones, where efficient software is important). Probably quite close to the number of mobile phones sold annually (1.3 billion now, something like that); while at the end of 2008 there were 3 billion mobile subsribers IIRC, tear later that number was 4.6 billion (so probably 5 billion by now easily)

Most of those mobile phones can access sensibly "full" web.

Re:Things Mature

[LordVader717]

Still not a problem for Firefox (at least not yet). You don't mention that the vast majority of those videos are designed to be decoded by a Flash client. Since they introduced hardware acceleration performance has been top-notch too.

I think it will be more of an issue for HTML5+h264 uptake that one of the most popular browsers has no clean way of supporting it, so most providers will probably stick with the tried and true Flash option.
As far as Web design goes it's important that there are free options available. But whether a proprietary codec is decoded by a proprietary plugin, a proprietary browser or a proprietary OS, well most people don't really care.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

That functionality can be in very optimised common libraries, right?

Re:Things Mature

[LordVader717]

I tried using a infinite fractal as a browser once. Didn't have all the features I hoped for :-(

Re:Things Mature

[thetoadwarrior]

Using as much or more memory is no problem if it feels snappy and fast. That is Firefox's problem, it does not against browser consuming as much if not more resources.

Re:Things Mature

[LordVader717]

I'm happy that there are programs that actually use the expensive memory in my machine. The whole idea about upgrading RAM is to allow programs to run faster and do more things. Why would I want tons and tons of idle memory doing nothing but draining power?
If more programs would figure out how to use my RAM rather than page our hard drive to shreds we'd be a lot better off. I got pissed with Firefox recently because it was unresponsive, then I realized I had a bajillion tabs open, many of them web apps and Youtube videos, and was doing it on a five-year old machine. I had no right to be pissed.

Re:Things Mature

[shutdown -p now]

"Feels light" is purely subjective/quote.

It's called "user experience". It's subjective for any particular user, but it's objective in a sense that you can measure it across broad groups of users consistently, and it's the only thing that matters in the end. Chrome has it done right, and Opera has it as well, and Firefox... well... not so much.

Re:Things Mature

[bruno.fatia]

So if IE sucks it makes FF sucks less. big deal. still sucky.

Re:Things Mature

[Johann Lau]

So? Another one poster replying to what *they* think I am implying by posting that 1K intro .. instead of to the paragraph of text that follows it... sigh.

Re:Things Mature

[Thing 1]

Heh, thanks, sometimes I surprise myself; but not this time. :)

Re:Things Mature

[quacking duck]

Actually this is a problem.

I recently futzed with trying to get video on our new website. Being forward-thinking, I tried to use the html5 video tag. Being realistic, I tried to get away without converting to and storing ogg files. The idea was that h.264 videos would play natively for browsers that could handle it, and those that couldn't would revert to the Flash wrapper nested inside the video tag, as demonstrated by several html5/video tutorials.

Unfortunately, as soon as Firefox sees the video tag it expects an ogg source inside it. It won't fall back to the Flash wrapper if it's inside the video tag.

I could have written some Javascript to insert code appropriate to the detected browser, but being a pragmatist I realized I'd spent enough time on it (less than 5% of our visitors are even capable of using the video tag), and settled on the Flash-wrapped h.264 option--for now.

Re:Things Mature

[Optikal]

That "fully featured AdBlock" doesn't block ads. It hides them. They still load.

Re:Things Mature

[LordVader717]

Well it's completely irrelevant for a start. And I bet that executable is quite the resource hog too, it just comes in a small package.

There are indeed situations where the amount of memory used is too small to really bother caring about. That's when I would rather have more features and faster response than a smaller footprint.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

And choosing more efficient sofware enables also just what you're describing, to fullest extent.

Re:Things Mature

[BikeHelmet]

If that were true, then lighter browswers like Chrome should not be gaining in marketshare.

Chrome is full featured, for some people. It's got a lot more perks than IE.

It's also great on netbooks, without any effort customizing things.

Re:Things Mature

[BikeHelmet]

Opera runs well on a 600mhz PIII running Win98.

"Feels light" may be purely subjective, but you sure do notice it on weak old hardware.

Kinda like how Gnome feels heavy on my old Athlon XP. :P

Re:Things Mature

[BikeHelmet]

For one, they flipped away from an efficient binary format to an XML based format, which takes longer to parse and write. And then they compress (zip) it.

Re:Things Mature

[mustafeh]

Golly gee, I remember my first windowed hello world running on windows 3.1; mind you, it actually could have affected anything on the system had it been written to do so, but it wasn't, and only compiled to 20k, which I thought was fucking ridiculous at the time.

Re:Things Mature

[DaVince21]

I'm sorry but I don't consider Chrome to be a 'light weight' browser. It's memory footprint is right up there with the others, especially since each tab is isolated.

This is to be expected with such an interesting idea of making a process out of everything. I'm thinking the "lightweight" lies in its responsiveness and speed rather than its memory footprint - heck, RAM is barely an issue anymore in these days of 4GB RAM inside netbooks.

Re:Things Mature

[DaVince21]

Gecko is probably a big one. WebKit as a whole is just faster and more efficient than Gecko... Oh, and Google also puts a lot of effort into optimization tricks everywhere. Another big thing is probably XUL.

Another big thing is probably the extensions, and how far you can go with them. Chrome has extensions but they can't control your browser. Everything goes with web pages and JS instead of XUL.

Re:Things Mature

[DaVince21]

Without fully featured versions of AdBlock, Noscript, FlashBlock, Web Developer, and Greasemonkey, I won't be switching over anytime soon

You're behind the times, I think. Chrome has full native support for userscripts (so you don't need Greasemonkey), and versions of AdBlock and FlashBlock that work just as well as in Firefox (and are just as fully-featured).

Check chrome://extensions/, it's where extensions and userscripts go (and where you can configure them). I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Re:Things Mature

[DJRumpy]

I find it funny that the topic of browsers being light weight was modded 'Redundant'. Only on slashdot...

As to responsiveness, I don't find Chrome to be all that different from Safari or Firefox. Java performance is not and should not be a factor of 'bloat' as the 'content' is not part of the browser itself. Only the engine to process Java is there. I just don't consider Chrome to be a light weight browser. It is a new browser, and by such, it will not have the full feature set that other browsers do. This is no different than a beta product that will mature over time and eventually become similar to other market leaders.

It is almost feature complete for basics, and eventually it will contain the same functionality or some other alternative features comparable to what Firefox and Safari offer. When that time comes, will it still be considered lightweight if it performs the same functions as other browsers, uses the same memory footprint (or more), and is not significantly faster than the market leaders in basic operation?

Re:Things Mature

[Phoghat]

I've tried them all, and will only give up Firefox when they pry it from my cold dead hand

Re:Things Mature

[DaVince21]

Did you mean JavaScript? The Java plugin (used for applets) is pretty much the same in all browsers, since it's the exact same plugin. All major browsers have actually been working on JS performance, hence you will probably not much of a difference there.

I'm actually seeing Chrome performance becoming better with each new release. And I'm not talking just JS, I'm also talking page rendering and the browser's own responsiveness. Google has stated their views on the importance of speed several times in several places already, I won't reiterate all that stuff here, but they're definitely trying their best to make the web experience faster. And them using and improving WebKit automatically also improves browsers like Safari, which also use WebKit.

And hey, Chrome is 4 years old already, I wouldn't exactly call it "new" anymore.

Re:Things Mature

[DJRumpy]

Older on Windows perhaps. On my Mac, it's pretty basic and only recently available in the last few months.

Re:Things Mature

[DaVince21]

Been using it on Linux for almost two years now. If you're running the nightlies it should be around version 6, which has everything current Chrome has.

And yes, it probably all looks very basic. I also have no idea how well it performs on a Mac. :P

Re:Things Mature

[DJRumpy]

Performance is comparable to Safari and Firefox. Perhaps a tiny bit snappier in rendering a page, but not something that is overly noticeable, hence my opinion that it isn't light weight. It also lacks a decent bookmark manager, drag and drop options for the URL's to the desktop, and some drag and drop operations are not permitted in the bookmark bar, but I notice those are slowly but surely showing up.

The latest betas also enabled the 'extensions' on Mac, which is what was holding me back from using it.

Re:Things Mature

[random string of num]

the issues of running firefox on a SSD(i.e. netbook) have bee well addressed: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne/110L#Speed%20up%20Firefox

you just have to get your hands a little dirty

what specific design choices in chrome makes it faster than Firefox, i.e. what caching/ database ect

Re:Things Mature

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

A program didn't eat up a lot of memory on a machine designed to run on a minimum of what... 2 megs? Shock!

Now tell us what it was like to write code to display video, 3d graphics, 2d graphics, sound, multi-threading, and networking.

Re:Things Mature

[AltairDusk]

True but I'm a hardware nut, I can't stand seeing too many advancements go by without updating. My wallet hates me for it.

Re:Things Mature

[Johann Lau]

"more features and faster response than a smaller footprint"

yeah, but you wouldn't want to have the *same* features and response, but a bigger footprint, right? or even less features, slower respons, AND bigger footprint, correct?

it's not like it's either big or unefficient. sometimes things are big AND unefficient, and that's bloatware. the whole "yeah but more features take more resources" is a red herring.

Re:Things Mature

[sznupi]

Plus that's again a bit wasteful. While already probably living in a place which has plenty of that (X axis only)

Certainly not light

[AnonGCB]

In order of resource usage, from a consumer's standpoint I'd rank them: Chrome Opera FireFox Internet Explorer This is not based on any tests but simply my experience using them all. Personally, Chrome is good but Opera has more features I use and is more customizable, so Opera wins out overall - and now Opera is nearly as good as Chrome in benchmarks.

Re:Certainly not light

[InfoJunkie777]

I would agree, except I have not used Opera since version 9. I found the interface "cluttered". Subjective, I know. Maybe I should try it again. I know that it is the most standards compliant, even implementing parts of HTML 5. I am staying at a relatives house and am using an ancient laptop. It slooooooooooow. So I installed Chrome and the pages just POP. IE is nowhere and even FF is impossibly slow. This is discouraging because I love all the extensions.

Re:Certainly not light

[AnonGCB]

You may not like Opera's default interface, but it's cleaned up in 10.52 and no matter what version it's incredibly customizable. As for an old computer, if internet speed is an issue Opera has a function called 'Turbo', it sends all your requests to Opera's servers and has the pages compressed, speeds up load times immensely.

Re:Certainly not light

[HBoar]

I like Opera, and it's the only browser that I use nowdays, but I'm not sure it's any lighter in terms of resource use than FF or IE. Currently, it's using ~350MB with 10 tabs open after being up for a week or so, but that's because I have a CFD simulation running which is sucking up about 3GB. If there is a lot of RAM free, it will suck up quite a lot more. I don't mind this at all, RAM is there to be used, after all.

Re:Certainly not light

[ducomputergeek]

According to the V8 tests, 1st on my machine is Opera 10.53 getting a score of 109. Just behind it is Safari 4.0.5 at 105, then Firefox 3.6.3 is a distant third at 64.9.

This is on a 6 year old 12.1" PowerBook G4 (1.5Ghz, 1.25GB Ram) running OS 10.5. So no Google Chrome.

The only reason I have FF is because there are two websites I have to use that only work in FF or IE. They don't run correctly in Opera or Safari.

Re:Certainly not light

[__aasqbs9791]

On this newer (but not nearly top of the line) system running Ubuntu, FF 3.6.3 gets a 300 and Chrome 5.0.375.38 beta gets a 2152. This is from the page at http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v3/run.html

Re:Certainly not light

[amicusNYCL]

I'm an Opera fan myself, but I would not rank IE last in resource usage, certainly not below Firefox. IE deserves a lot of scorn, but I think that one of Microsoft's goals with IE is to use resources as efficiently as possible (considering their huge customer base), and I think they've accomplished that goal. I would be pretty shocked to see any real-world benchmarks where Firefox beats IE in terms of memory use. Granted, IE is going to execute Javascript an order of magnitude slower than anything else, but it's going to do it while using less memory. Although, if Mozilla doesn't get its act together then it's going to soon find itself lagging behind IE9 in Javascript performance. That would be embarrassing. Of the top 5 browsers, Firefox is currently ranked 4th in Javascript performance. The IE9 preview already beats Firefox 3.7, but the IE9 preview isn't an actual browser yet.

Like I said, IE deserves a lot of scorn for the bugs and differences between everything else, but I think it's safe to say that resource usage might be IE's strongest point (fighting for first place with an easy-to-use UI).

That being said, Opera still rocks everything else.

Re:Certainly not light

[stoanhart]

Firefox actually uses the least memory of all modern browsers once you've got tabs open (ie: you're using it): http://cybernetnews.com/browser-comparison-internet-explorer-firefox-chrome-safari-opera/


Even straight after launch, it's competitive.

Re:Certainly not light

[raving griff]

On my high end rig running 7, FF 3.6.3 gets 502 while Chrome 5.0.365.38 beta gets a whopping 5228.

Re:Certainly not light

[thoughtsatthemoment]

I've tried the latest version but still don't like it's GUI (maybe I am picky, as I am a GUI programmer myself). If Opera implements FireFox's GUI, I'll definitely switch.

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.

Re:Certainly not light

[thoughtsatthemoment]

FireFox's default is not very good. But I can customize it into something I like. With Opera, I can't. Believe me, I tried very hard. FireFox is indeed not fast, but so far it's still not a deal breaker.

Re:Certainly not light

[InfoJunkie777]

I downloaded 10.52 and the UI has changed a lot. I will futz around with it and see what happens. Even so I long for my FF3 and it's 10 gazillion add-ons. It is slow on a a slow connection and an old PC, but I hope to correct both of those soon. I HAVE been impressed with Chromes magic address line. Since it has all Google data to deal with, usually the site one is looking for is showing before the address is finished. IE I will NEVER use again.

Re:Certainly not light

[man_of_mr_e]

Ugh.. I'm sure there's lots of people that love their "highly customizable" UI's, and they would need to be pried from their cold, dead, stinking, rotting hands... but I move from machine to machine a lot, and have new versions of OS's all the time, taking the time to customize the UI would mean i would never get anything done.. so I need a good, solid, usable default UI so that I don't have to worry about customizing it, other than very slight tweaks.

Re:Certainly not light

[Arker]

Compression helps if the problem is network throughput. It actually makes things *worse* if the problem is an old computer - i.e. slower processor.

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

First, that test is quite old.

Secondly...uhm...opening 25 tabs and just letting them sit there for 10 minutes? That constitutes "using them" to you?! O_o

Try few days, with more tabs, actual browsing, and on a memory-constrained machine.

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

And what would happen with FF or IE after a week or so of (presumably) normal browsing? (for various values of "normal" of course...I would say 10 tabs is very little foe Opera :p )

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

Though Chrome is light & snappy as long as there's plenty of physical RAM available (which it does need more, if going into large numbers of tabs). If that's not the case, the experience goes down the drain...

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

10.52 would be weird considering the latest version is 10.53

Anyway, Opera does seem to be the best fit for "ancient" machines. That's probably one of the main reasons why it's comfortably #1 browser in Ukraine and #1 "alternative" browser in Russia; in both of those places machines tend to live much longer...

BTW, what FF add-ons would that be? It's too often the case that people don't know how much functionality can be had from Opera...

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

Not in practice with Opera. Mostly the same compression is available in Opera Mobile for smartphones & Opera Mini for j2me "feature phones" after all...and anyway I have a very old machine around here that I sometimes boot up, a dual PII 266. Opera Turbo works fine.

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

So why do you want them to implement FF UI?...

Re:Certainly not light

[thoughtsatthemoment]

So that I can customize Opera into something I like.

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

"Having greater means of customisation" (of which Opera has still plenty) != "FF UI"

Re:Certainly not light

[thoughtsatthemoment]

I don't care about the means. It's the results of customization that matters.

Re:Certainly not light

[the_womble]

I am not sure what would qualify a benchmark as "real world" but this (some comments here) looks pretty realistic, and might be enough to give you your shock:

Re:Certainly not light

[InfoJunkie777]

Version 10.53. Correct. Add ons would be Firebug, Color Tabs, Xmarks bookmark synchronizer and all-in-one sidebar. I will check out Opera. Will have to as I plan to finish my schooling and develop web pages.

Re:Certainly not light

[notrandomly]

The V8 benchmark is "cheating", mind you. It specifically leaves out things Chrome is slow at.

Re:Certainly not light

[notrandomly]

Unfortunately, the V8 benchmark was designed to perform well in Chrome. It kind of "cheats" and specifically leaves out things Chrome is slow at. It's definitely not a good general benchmark. The only thing it's good for is comparing different versions of Chrome.

Re:Certainly not light

[notrandomly]

As I mentioned to someeone else, the V8 benchmark was designed to perform well in Chrome. It kind of "cheats" and leaves out things Chrome is slow at. It's definitely not a good general benchmark. The only thing it's good for is comparing different versions of Chrome.

Re:Certainly not light

[notrandomly]

If Opera is slow on an old computer, there's a problem somewhere. Opera should work better than other browsers on old computers.

Re:Certainly not light

[notrandomly]

What is it that you can't do with Opera?

Re:Certainly not light

[InfoJunkie777]

It is as fast as Chrome. It works fine on this old laptop with hardly any memory.

Re:Certainly not light

[__aasqbs9791]

Do you know of better benchmarks somewhere?

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

Opera had sidebar since...a long, long time; one if its defining features (might be different than what you're used to of course). Likewise synchronization, working for a bit more than just bookmarks; and across all Opera browsers (also Mobile; or Mini, the one for j2me phones) plus accessible via webpage. It has also integrated dev tools.

Color tabs - no (afaik... ;) ). However, it has few nice ways of dealing with large number of tabs that you should know of. Tab bar can work basically spatially after one change in prefs; there's "Window" menu (off by default in recent builds, but can be enabled in prefs / works just as well as ever) which lists all open tabs without the need for scrolling the menu if there's too many of them (it's a nested menu); a treeview of all open tabs in sidebar...with search; and "hold down right mouse button and move scrollwheel", that's sort of an overlay list presenting tabs in the sequence depending on "last viewed", quite useful.

Re:Certainly not light

[InfoJunkie777]

I have not yet had time to check the add-ons page at the Opera site. The Xmarks app syncs not only between devices, but stores a copy ONLINE. That way they are accessible on any machine. And/or they can restore a new copy of FF bookmarks on a new machine. I will check out the features you mentioned.

Re:Certainly not light

[sznupi]

Those are not from "add-ons page at the Opera site" - this is a functionality which is built in; already available in the install you've made. And of couse Opera Link stores bookmarks (and speed dial, and personal bar, and notes (Opera has built-in, searchable outliner), and typed browser history, and custom searches) online...how could it work otherwise?... (especially since you can access stored data also via webpage on any random machine)

Re:Certainly not light

[InfoJunkie777]

Kewl. I had no idea. I will work with it. Thanks for the tips.

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:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[teh31337one]

Urgh. Your bastardisation of the English language hurts my eyes.

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[teh31337one]

Touché

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

So hard to find. Oh god oh god.

Most open source stuff is on FTP. Get used to it.

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[smash]

All I want is a multi-threaded UI. Chrome has it. I don't care if it has a million different plugins for downloading porn videos from redtube or whatever - if the UI sucks it is not going to be my daily browser.

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[slimjim8094]

Holy hell man, fix your English. If you want previous releases, they're all right here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ . Starting from .08 .

As for the rest of your criticisms, I don't see what you're talking about. Maybe if you explained what's wrong with the bookmarks editor, the privacy settings, and the stability of the platform...

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[Randle_Revar]

>FF is lagging behind Gee, who would've thunk, each rev is less usable then the last, tht FF is falling behind.
I am more of a Mozilla (SeaMonkey) fan, but FF seems to be getting better with each release (even if the combined stop/reload button is a mistake). The next release may be the first in which the UI gets worse, as they have plans to remove the status bar among other things.

>Like the bookmarks editor. Like the loss of control of privacy functions
those work fine for me. Mozilla still offers more direct access, but FF is ok

>Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website
yes, on occasion. I can quickly and easily find any release or nightly.

>Failure to give add on developers a stable platform,
you mean xulrunner? yeah, that's unfortunate.

>failure to give users a way to isolate bad addons
not sure what this means. I can disable any addon, any that are "incompatible" with the current FF version are disabled by default, and you can use safe mode or a new profile if an addon is causing problems on start up.

Sorry, I wouldn't normally respond to an apparent troll post, but since someone saw fit to mod it up to 4...

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[slimjim8094]

Old versions: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
Don't like auto-upgrades? Turn it off. Most users are happy that things like security fixes, etc are handled automatically.
If your extensions are breaking, complain to the developer - they can easily ensure compatibility so that your extensions are ready by the day of release.

But if you're using unmaintained extensions (legitimate concern), you can take matters into your own hands. Instructions are all over the internet, but here you go: make a key in about:config called 'extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6' and set it to false.

No, there's no central extension tool. Should there be?
And you're absolutely, completely wrong about the addons website. I *just* opened Safari and tried to download some random extension. Download now was grayed, but I clicked on it anyway. "To install this addon, get Firefox - or download anyway". Download anyway was a direct link to a .xpi, which addresses another one of your complaints.

I can only conclude you're talking out your ass. Every single one of your concerns is either not a concern, or easily fixed in about 10 seconds. Play again next time.

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[tehcyder]

Most open source stuff is on FTP. Get used to it.

Yeah, that's a really helpful response to someone looking for something on a website.

Most users don't know what FTP is. Get used to it.

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[metamatic]

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...

Yup. I tried to convince them that per-site script and cookie permissions need to be part of the core browser, and not require add-ons which increase bloat and cause compatibility problems... but no, they're too busy building useless address books that nobody wants, and trying to ram Ogg Theora down people's throats.

So when Chrome got per-site script and cookie controls, I switched.

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[anaesthetica]

Like the bookmarks editor...

Being redesigned. Not to worry. Here is the project page for the redesign.

Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website ?

Here you go: old releases all the way back to version 0.10!

Re:From the no sh*t bosco dept

[vlueboy]

Please.

The point isn't whether you can post some obscure link --knowledge by obscurity is not knowledge. Clicking around, turning off 3 "auto-update" features on a per-user basis and branching to a Safari to download extensions is supposed to be more manageable... The company needs to provide the features centrally and without per-user-per about:config changes.

There hasn't been documentation on the XPI download tricks, and the version hack refuses to work for most extensions. Forced workarounds aren't justifiable even if "they take 10 seconds." The barrier to entry requires very specific searches against taboos from FF's point of view.

And yes, central installation, control and deployment of FF is often brought forward as a dragging weight against FF's progress in the enterprise. You can't just post a one-liner and dismiss an entire comment based on apathy to parts of it. In the end, it's not me speaking. Firefox is already sinking and won't be matter at all in three years.

Definitely not renegade

[mirix]

Not exactly lightweight anymore either, and some parts of it are a bit long in the tooth...

But nothing else has the sort of configurability that it has, so I won't be going anywhere else any time soon.
I love my add-ons to death. Using a browser without them is borderline unusable.

Re:Definitely not renegade

[jjbenz]

agreed, I use the other browsers from time to time, but I keep coming back to Firefox.

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.

And in other news

[joeflies]

Mozilla official cite that the innovation of new features in other browsers suspiciously correlate to the sudden appearance of black duck eggs at restaurants near the Mozilla office.

Re:And in other news

[Hal_Porter]

Mozilla official cite that the innovation of new features in other browsers suspiciously correlate to the sudden appearance of black duck eggs at restaurants near the Mozilla office.

Reference

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/61425

Black duck eggs on the menu of a Chinese restaurant drew the suspicions of a security consultant reporting to renowned security expert Ira Winkler.

The colleague, a former Russian security agent named Stan, was at a new Chinese restaurant in "the middle of nowhere" in the United States, but conspicuously near the R&D center of a Fortune 5 U.S. business.

"Don't you know black duck eggs are a delicacy in China?" Winkler said Stan asked. "I can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere." Stan's conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.

Re:And in other news

[fluffy99]

Oh please oh please can we PLEASE stop spreading this nonsense that FF ever innovated anything?
Just what are you claiming Mozilla innovated? Whatever you *think* they innovated,
Compare with this

I'll be completely honest, I don't care. It isn't Free Software. Until that changes, I'd rather use w3m than touch it.

Where the fuck have you been for the past 5 years? Of course Opera is free.
http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2005/09/20/

Re:And in other news

[ThunderThor53]

I'll be completely honest, I don't care. It isn't Free Software. Until that changes, I'd rather use w3m than touch it.

Where the fuck have you been for the past 5 years? Of course Opera is free.
http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2005/09/20/

Generally when someone refers to "Free Software" they mean free as in freedom (libre), not free as in beer (gratis). Wikipedia. In that regards, Opera is free (zero cost) but not Free (users have the right to have and modify the source code as they see fit). In that sense, GP is right that Opera is not Free Software.

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?

Re:And in other news

[Arker]

You must be very new here if you think people dont care about software freedom.

Many projects use firefox code. Iceweasel is probably the least forked, it removes the auto-update crap that isnt appropriate in most modern linux OSs and adds some privacy-protection features. There are many more, mostly using the rendering engine but building native GUIs around it and often adding unique features in the process, off the top of my head I can think of a few... galleon, epiphany, swiftweasel, flock.

Tis so true...

[Aldenissin]

I am a Firefox lover and what it stands for. However, even though I am not sure it is a few add-ons or what, I no longer get excited about what new (if not often completely transparent to me) is being brought to the table with each update unless it is speed and optimizations. The memory leak thing was horrible and I knew something was wrong long before it was begun to be publicly addressed and I just a user, not a programmer. OK, so the themeing stuff looks good if that is your thing, but lets stay focused here. IE sucks, and Firefox was THE answer since it was open and powerful, yet as simple as you wanted by not using said add-ons. I was never hesitant to recommend it. The only reason why I don't recommend something else is because even if I like Google, privacy is a big concern. With nobody RTFA here, we know John Doe doesn't RTFM or even more importantly the EULA. Other than that (because people are wising up a bit with privacy concerns if not due to Facebook in the news and even then..) Chrome is definitely posing a major threat. But we all know this and has been covered including that Google was something like 80-90% if I recall correctly, the income for Mozilla. Just sad really, nothing good ever lasts.

Re:Firefox 4...

[t0y]

Out of process plugins are coming out soon with 3.6.4 for select plugins.
In the dev release (minefield) this is already enabled for all plugins and it's fairly stable, save from some corner cases like java's modal security popups. This is seen working perfectly when the plugins hang/crash, which is fairly often with certain builds.

And I really, really hope they won't go for the process per tab like planned. It takes a lot of extra memory for little benefit (IMO).

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...

[ducomputergeek]

Funny, because originally that goal was to create a stripped down version of Mozilla/Netscape that was lightweight and fast. They seem to have forgotten that it wasn't supposed to be a wholesale replacement for Netscape/Mozilla with all the bells and whistles.

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?!.

Re:Yes...

[melikamp]

This is right on the nose. Chrome is nowhere close to Firefox feature-wise, if you factor in the plugins. Much has been said about separate processes and the UI lift, and I agree that at this very moment Chrome has some some things at the state of the art, while Firefox is playing catchup. But separate processes and the UI lift are coming, after all, they just take time to program into the platform that is Firefox. Notice their obsession with the mobile branch, which is crucial, IMHO. Chrome is also a sneaky turd that reports to the mothership, and that is one "feature" that I don't want my Web browser to have, ever. Thanks, but no thanks.

Re:Yes...

[sznupi]

They have "obsession with the mobile branch" for over half a decade; and it didn't amount to much (other than "we'll just wait until the hardware is able to run our browser; in the meantime we'll just ignore that others can do it on a very limited hardware")

Re:Yes...

[mirix]

When the program is smaller than one jpeg in your browser's cache, does it really matter? xeyes is minuscule. I don't think it's even 50kB.

Re:Yes...

[Kjella]

Congratulations, you are a power user, I'm sure a few percent always will be. But every time I have to run Firefox as it is out of the box I get annoyed, there's zero effort to get the most popular plug-ins into the default build. In a way I can understand that internally, Mozilla doesn't want to play favorites but externally it's not that great. It's okay that a car has accessories but when you start feeling the steering and gearbox are clumsy then knowing I can easily replace them is nice but hardly a turn-key solution. Particularly in any work environment where they don't give you administrator permissions and let you install plug-ins yourself getting Firefox on the desktop is only 1/10th of the way there. Even in general I think many people would rather just get the "package" from Chrome, which doesn't affect you but might lead the masses away from Firefox.

I think Mozilla would do wise to be very wary of Google. Google will probably keep up the search deal with Mozilla for the page hits, but they have no downsides from convincing Firefox users to switch to Chrome. I'm sure that with the 7% market share they have now the money they save on the Firefox deal is paying for the development and then some. When IE9 is released with HTML5 support don't be surprised if Google starts a push against Adobe with YouTube/HTML5 and Chrome users will do fine, Firefox users not so much. And there's Chromnium for the OSS purists too...

Re:Yes...

[amicusNYCL]

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

Re:Yes...

[Draek]

They didn't forget, the users made them change their minds.

If you want a lightweight and fast browser, there's always Arora and Midori.

Re:Yes...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Way back when, before you remember, firefox was supposed to be integrated into the next version of mozilla called "Seamonkey". Seamokey was the true inheritor of the netscape communicator internet suite line. Why would any internet user not want a consistent interface for web browsing, emailing, website creation, and other stupid things no one else does? But, before that could happen firefox caught fire. People loved it, despite the lack of a html editor. So they cancelled the seamonkey plans, and threw those same developers at firefox to help "improve" it. So you had a bunch of programmers used to trying to build a fully featured internet suite, now working on "just a browser". Well, this is what you got firefox, the bloated. All the features you could want in a browser, memory, code bloat be danged.

Sadistically, some developers rebelled against the "light weight" of firefox and actually went a head and built sea monkey as planned. They are truly disturbed individuals, who should be considered dangerous to themselves and other people. Please do not approach them yourself, but contact the local institute for the criminally insane.

Re:Yes...

[Randle_Revar]

>Extensions were not added to Firefox until version 2.0.
That sounds totally wrong to me. FF isn't my main browser now, and back then I hardly even touched it, but it just sounds wrong.
I feel like Mozilla had extensions by the time it was 1.0... maybe I misremember though...

Re:Yes...

[slimjim8094]

Right. I forgot about Firefox's built-in email, IRC/IM, and newsgroup clients. But the HTML editor sure is useful!

Firefox comes built in with a theming mechanism, and a spell-checker. Admittedly those could be a bit unnecessary, though I don't think so. I'm not sure what else could be considered 'bells and whistles'.

Re:Yes...

[melikamp]

I run fennec on my phone. It supports NoScript and ABP. The hardware is almost there, and for me, personally, it was entirely worth the wait.

Re:Yes...

[Randle_Revar]

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/1.0.6.html#extensions

I knew it

Re:Yes...

[Randle_Revar]

and Mozilla had extensions since at least 0.9
http://www-archive.mozilla.org/news.html#p197

Re:Yes...

[drinkypoo]

Chrome is also a sneaky turd that reports to the mothership, and that is one "feature" that I don't want my Web browser to have, ever. Thanks, but no thanks.

So run Chromium, it's Chrome without the spying. By default it uses google search with autocomplete and suggestions, but you can change all that. Even the official google RSS one-click plugin supports three other web RSS readers (besides Google Reader) and allows you to add more, freeform, so long as they use subscription URLs.

Notice their obsession with the mobile branch, which is crucial, IMHO.

This is, I believe, the third mobile branch of Mozilla I've tried. And so far, Fennec fails all over itself on x86. Frankly I was pretty pissed off at the death of Firefox Mobile, I wanted to use it on my WinCE PDA but the initial release was all but unusable... and that's about all there was

Re:Yes...

[Caetel]

Extensions were not added to Firefox until version 2.0. Extensions were never an original design goal.

You might want to go back and check that. I've just downloaded Firefox 1.0 and it does support extensions.

Re:Yes...

[DaVince21]

Maybe they achieved their original goal at some point and then set some new ones - you won't have much to do as a browser developer otherwise. Though their goal should definitely be going back to the "lightweight and fast" thing.

My take as an old time firefox user ...

[Ekuryua]

I think that the problem is actually that the higher firefox devs. seem to be focused on looking like chrome/opera... and keep on introducing new features that break the rest of the browser.
People don't move to chrome because of the ui(well okay, some do, most I know didn't), they moved because it was faster and less buggy.

What firefox needs is optimization/cleaning, not new features.

I will personally stay with the fox until chrome or opera allow for both real gui modification(which both opera and chrome lack) and extensions(chrome has that, or at least starting to pick up).v

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

[Ekuryua]

Also, it is true that jemalloc(the memory allocator) of firefox is quite broken under linux. It is however quite good under windows, and there are very few leaks from firefox itself nowadays. Most leaks come from non-updated extensions/a couple known culprits(see firebug/video download helper/menu editor, and a couple others)

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

[visualight]

The only thing they do at firefox is stir up the UI. They should have spent the past 4 years optimizing instead of one by one removing buttons I use. Some idiot there with some power looks at chrome and thinks the way chrome looks is why it's popular -and announces that firefox 4 will be a major overhaul of the UI. Like, what release hasn't been about the UI?

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

[luckymutt]

Opera has a plugin system called "widgets" that is quite capable, and the UI is very customizable, such as choosing what you want on which tool bar/area, keyboard shortcuts, customize address bar search and others. What do you want for "real gui modification?" (I mean that as a real question, not rhetoric)

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

[Ekuryua]

something as simple as placing the file menu on the same bar as my address bar.(yes I know there are some custom buttons to do something similar, but it's hardly the same since they don't behave like a menu)

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

[Randle_Revar]

>it is true that jemalloc(the memory allocator) of firefox is quite broken under linux
really? I have 0 problems with memory here. I always figured it was the more numerous windows uses where making all the noise about memory problems. When I was a more extensive windows user, I never had any really bad memory problems - but that was in the Mozilla 1.0 - 1.7 era, and I don't know that it used jemalloc back then.

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

[msclrhd]

UI is only a part of the development that goes into Firefox. It also happens to be the most noticeable.

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.

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

[notrandomly]

Widgets aren't supposed to be plugins, though. They are supposed to be separate applications.

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.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[thoughtsatthemoment]

The UI should be instant, no matter what's going on.

For a non-trivial app, it has to do multi-threading right. And multi-threading is not something you can easily add to a large code base without major rewrites. I think only FireFox devs know if it is doomed (meaning if it'd ever be fully multi-threaded). But I am afraid the answer is yes.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[bill_mcgonigle]

The UI should be instant

Yeah, people were saying this about the Netscape Suite in 1996. Then Mozilla. Then finally Firefox came out and everybody said, "wow, this is great, oh, wait, it's still got a single threaded UI?". And it was told how complicated it would be to re-architect things, and that if only you didn't use this extension or visit that poorly designed site or open too many tabs, or... whatever it wasn't Firefox's problem. I think they finally gave JavaScript its own thread in a recent release, which helps. They've had multi-process Firefox working for a year in the lab, but it's still another six months out for a release (until it slips again). Fedora 15 time, probably. As I recall the entire Firefox project was done in half that time.

Google apparently wised up to the intractability of fixing MoFo a few years ago. It's too bad, some of the better Mozilla technologies are likely to get lost for several years as Firefox wanes.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[sznupi]

Try pushing it more - greater number of tabs (and Opera UI can sensibly work with them), much longer running time (why should I restart anything when I'm on mobile connection and there's hibernation?) - and you'll see how much lighter it is from others.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[AmazinglySmooth]

Once they make the UI perfectly smooth, then I vote that the work on making the rendering nearly instant. Rendering should be instant, clicking buttons should be instant, typing text should be instant, even when the page hasn't fully loaded.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[msclrhd]

Bloat and responsiveness are different things. I can write small programs that are very unresponsive, not because of bloat but because of a poor choice of algorithm or any number of other things.

There are many things that impact performance, and in a complex codebase like Firefox and Chrome it can be difficult to track down.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[msclrhd]

Also note that with any UI program, you cannot do UI calls on another thread. The main UI core is inherently single-threaded. This makes it complicated to do any background work on other threads.

For example, if you load a web page (HTML/DOM, CSS, JavaScript, images) on a separate thread, you need to marshal that data to the UI thread to do the rendering, which will kill performance. Chrome is faster for each page because it is running each page in its own process (which has its own UI thread). This does mean that they are loading the rendering/WebKit code, flash plugin, and resources in each web page process (which increases the memory used). That is, if you load two instances of GMail or slashdot, Chrome has to keep two instances of all the HTML/DOM, JavaScript and images loaded, whereas Firefox can share the resources between both pages.

Firefox is slightly different in that the Gecko engine renders the UI itself, so this may be able to be made multi-threaded, but it is still talking to a single-threaded host window. There may also be mileage in rendering to an OpenGL or Direct2D/3D context on a separate thread and then blitting it to the window. I don't know if that works on separate threads.

Multi-threading also introduces a whole host of interesting issues (especially when sharing data across them), which makes bugs difficult to track down.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[msclrhd]

Every application has a single UI thread (per process). This is true on Windows (yes, even WPF), GTK+/Gnome, Qt/KDE and any other Operating System/UI Framework. Chrome has a separate UI thread for each page because it has a separate *process* for each page.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[thoughtsatthemoment]

Are you a firefox developer? If so, they need better ones.

You are not totally off the mark, but further discussion would only interest GUI programmers.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[msclrhd]

I am not a Firefox developer, but am a UI developer and I follow the Firefox development from their wiki meeting notes, as well as filing a few bug reports.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[Malc]

Don't browsers like IE and Chrome render each tab in their own process (and thus own thread), yet there is only one process that displays all the tabs? Presumably that single display thread has a lot less work to do as it's not doing any layout.

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[bill_mcgonigle]

Sure, in the end, there's always one thread that's doing the actual pixel blitting and taking input. But various toolkits have more efficient delegation of the work required to provide the data-back for the blit work and consumers for event dispatch - the UI can be handled by many threads, even if in the end they all turn in their work to a single thread. Mozilla puts a ton of work into the UI thread, resulting in poor user responsiveness.

I don't have a problem with per-process, it's probably the right thing to do with untrusted code to avoid re-inventing an operating system, but they could have at a minimum done threads for each tab's UI render back in '04. It was talked about extensively at the time (and ever since).

Re:The issue for me is responsiveness

[DaVince21]

Chrome does the same thing - process separation definitely helps here.

Itching to Switch...

[duerra]

I've long used Firefox now because of its awesome developer tools and great suite of extensions (though I only use a few). However, it has gotten very slow lately, it has always used way too much memory, and quite frankly some of the other alternatives look better by the day. I really want to switch to chrome, but the only thing holding me back is a nice sidebar for things like viewing my RSS feed lists while still navigating the current browser window. There are a few other settings I'd like to have some control over, but it wouldn't take much to get me to switch at this point.

I know everybody blames all of the issues on the extensions, but the issues run deeper than that. I hope they can get it turned around soon, but things haven't improved in the last few years, so I'm not holding my breath.

Re:Itching to Switch...

[tehcyder]

I've long used Firefox now because of its awesome developer tools and great suite of extensions

Exactly. And these two features mean absolutely nothing to 90% of users.

Re:Firefox 4...

[steelfood]

the UI refresh should be released now.

I'd like to see them release some of those experimental UI as alternate themes, if just as a way to measure popularity and usability. I'm not sure how deep theme changes can get, but if the UI is completely XUL, it can't be that hard to slap a completely new skin on top.

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.

Re:Whatever happened to keep it simple?

[Hurricane78]

Keep it simple is for simple minds who didn’t have the brainpower to comprehend the original goal.
The original goal was: Keep it efficient and elegant.

Because when simplicity goes up, first efficiency also goes up. But then if simplicity goes more up, efficiency goes down again.
Also, the whole KISS thing is biased towards the dumbest of the dumb. (Lower end of the Gaussian distribution curve.)
It kills functionality for simplicity, and hence also kills the upper end of the Gaussian curve. They can’t do their things with it anymore. And all for no reason at all, since it’s just as easy to make it good for everyone, instead of only for the loudest idiots.
And then nature adjusts your user base, by averaging it on your new required intelligence level. Which introduces new, better idiots. Who again scream for simplification. Until you end up with Clippy. Yay. Way to go... Or in Internet-speak: EPIC FAIL.

But I agree, that the core should be minimalistic. Not necessarily simple. But elegant. With just the core concepts, and no exceptions at all. Because that’t what individual extension modules are for.

Chrome is seriously lagging behind

[caubert]

Until they fix this -> http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=1dfe0a5962fdc177&hl=en

Re:Chrome is seriously lagging behind

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Because I just back-navigated to a page on 5.0.375.38, and was taken to the same position.

But Chrome still has session problems, I think. Several times I have tried to "go back" to restore form data, and the data was lost. I don't know if it still affects Chrome, as it forced me to change my browsing habits to be more careful.

Re:Chrome is seriously lagging behind

[mmaniaci]

Its already fixed. Took me 10 seconds of reading your link to figure that out.

Re:Chrome is seriously lagging behind

[caubert]

okay, preview release at version 5.0.375.29 has this feature somewhat implemented.

Re:Chrome is seriously lagging behind

[Valpis]

using 5.0.375.29 beta and i work as it should, no problem at all actually

Re:Chrome is seriously lagging behind

[Hurricane78]

Uuum, who still uses back buttons? There are
1. buttons on your mouse for that (button 3 and 4),
2. “rocker” gestures,
3. normal mouse gestures,
4. keyboard shortcuts.

They all don’t require to move your mouse up to a tiny button (relative to how fast you can center your mouse on it), and back afterwards.

In fact, all buttons are gone from my Firefox UI. They are just a temporary crutch for the lower end of the Gaussian distribution curve of the beginners anyway.

Re:Chrome is seriously lagging behind

[TrekkieTechie]

Maybe you should have read for 15 seconds -- you might have seen all the reports of the bug still occurring in current versions (such as my own).

Re:What ever happened to minefield?

[Mikeplus42]

I'm fairly sure it's just been renamed to 'Namoroka'.

Switched away long ago.

[lemur3]

Like many I was one of the first on the big wagon ride using firefox in the various names it had before its current guise....

but... it just got too slow and clunky, startup times got longer load times of pages lagged... the benefits it had started to lose value.

So I switched to Opera and Safari...... I use firefox on the few websites I use that require it (yes that sounds odd).. I wish it were like it used to be.

Re:Switched away long ago.

[jewelises]

The other day I got sick of launch times of Firefox and so started disabling extensions. Worst offender: adblock plus. I was able to reduce it from roughly five seconds with a warm cache to half a second.

Re:Switched away long ago.

[sznupi]

And all this time some browsers have built-in and light adblock, one which just has to be provided with a list; plus GUI element blocker if something goes through.

Have had to disable addons lately to get speed

[shovas]

I love firefox for its developer related addons but lately it's been getting more and more grating with the performance hit and instability you take with addons.

So I've resorted to running in safe mode and disabling addons. What am I using firefox for anymore? Good question...

Re:Have had to disable addons lately to get speed

[metamatic]

Yeah, good question. I switched to Chrome because I get the equivalent of Firefox + NoScript + CookieSafe + Web Developer + Firebug with no add-ons required, so it's really stable and fast. To me, those are all core required features of any web browser.

Bloated over time?

[IdahoEv]

In at least one way, FF has been bloated all along.

Every time I've used any version of FF for the last four years, once it's been running for an hour or more it starts getting these little halts/pauses where the whole browser and UI freeze for half a second every 10-30 seconds. It gets worse the longer it's been open and the more pages i've opened. I've seen it on macs, windows, and linux. I've seen it on every machine I've ever used FF on. It is independent of all plugins and add-ons because it happens in a bare browser. I don't know what causes it, but intuitively it feels like garbage collection meets a bad memory leak.

It makes video unwatchable, which is pretty much death to a browser in today's world. Incidentally, it's happened three (now four) times while writing this post.

I've seen at least 5 bug reports and at least 10 threads in the Mozilla support forum. In every case, the developers/support people seem to not understand, or not believe that it's real, yet I've (another pause there) seen it on dozens of different computers and platforms, and never met a single computer with FF that *didn't* reproduce the problem. No matter how many bug reports get filed, this problem in FF never gets fixed.

And yet, I depend on my plugins for both browsing and developing. As it is, I use FF for almost everything, but I have to switch browsers to watch video, which is really annoying, and restart FF every (another pause there) three hours, which is even more annoying. /rant off

Re:Bloated over time?

[IRoll11!s]

Sounds like you are hitting the limits of either your ram or disk cache. (in FF) Install the Cache Status addon. Sure it's a bloated interface to what is essentially a few preference settings, but it gives you a visual status in your um, status bar.

Re:Bloated over time?

[Randle_Revar]

>seen it on dozens of different computers and platforms, and never met a single computer with FF that *didn't* reproduce the problem.
Odd, but although I have seen that behavior (or a lesser version), I have seen more computers that don't have it. I have never had it on my main system, and I use a *lot* of tabs. I have had pauses in responsiveness, but they are clearly cases of hitting the swap, another process grabbing a lot of CPU, etc.

Re:Bloated over time?

[IdahoEv]

I'll give that a try, thanks.

Re:Bloated over time?

[jazzmans]

I've been using firefox since the earliest phoenix days,(I know I'm old, but remember when talk of Firefox having 10% share was a pipe dream?) A couple of years ago, the memory leak was really bad. Now that 3.5 /.6 is out, there is very little memory usage for as many tabs as I've got open (usualy 10-15, I keep ff running for weeks on end without shutting down). I use it on my netbook, 1 ghz atom, 2 gig ram, my older then shit laptop, amd turion? 2 gig ram. and my workstation amd phenom 3 core 2 gig ram. There are no hesitations, unless I run out of ram. Chrome is looking nice, and I keep it, ephiphany, konqueror & even mozilla proper as backups etc. Firefox is by far my main browser, that's due to AdBlock and FlashBlock mainly. I don't have a gazillion plug ins, just the aforementioned plus sun's java, & flash,

This hesitation you speak of, I don't have it. Not on any machines I use. They are all linux boxes, varients of debian stable or sid. Something else in your system is causing this, I don't think it's a firefox bug.

jaz

Re:Bloated over time?

[surveyork]

Finally, Mozilla developers have acknowledged there really is a problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490122 Apparently, these micro-pauses are related to garbage collection, cycle collection and other synchronous I/O activity. The folks at Mozilla are working on garbage collection and I/O improvements. This should help with the micro-pauses.

Re:Bloated over time?

[arcanumas]

The UI freeze every 10-30 seconds is probably Firefox saving its state of open tabs to disk so that it can restore them in case of a crash. This is why it gets worse the more tabs you have open. In about:config check the setting 'browser.sessionstore.interval'.

Re:Bloated over time?

[sznupi]

Why others browsers don't have a problem with that?

Re:Bloated over time?

[sznupi]

Firefox is by far my main browser, that's due to AdBlock and FlashBlock mainly. I don't have a gazillion plug ins, just the aforementioned plus sun's java, & flash,

So...mainly due to features which are in no way exlclusive to it?

Re:Bloated over time?

[sznupi]

Why other browsers wouldn't act that way?

Re:Bloated over time?

[mr exploiter]

Sounds more like a hardware/driver problem to me. I've had something similar but never bothered to much to understand whats going on.

Re:Bloated over time?

[tokul]

It is independent of all plugins and add-ons because it happens in a bare browser.
...
It makes video unwatchable

Did I miss the part where you need plugin to watch video in firefox?

Re:Bloated over time?

[design1066]

I am writing this replay in a firefox window which has been open for 3 weeks. No problem here boyo. Fix your computer.

Re:Bloated over time?

[zipherx]

I have used FF since 1 and have never experienced this sort of behavior. Although I have experienced a similar behavior using some pc's but that was everything that had that cycle you are mentioning, not firefox.

Re:Bloated over time?

[IICV]

Where can I get an AdBlock equivalent for another browser? As far as I can tell, the ones for Opera and Chrome are not equivalent - half the frustration of ads comes from the occasional horribly slow ad server that delays the entire page load, so downloading but hiding doesn't really fix that problem. I don't want to waste the bandwidth on that junk at all; what's the equivalent?

Re:Bloated over time?

[sznupi]

Of course Opera blocks elements, doesn't download them...

Adblocker is built-in, you just have to provide it with a list (btw, one buddy of mine who used FF for a long time and then switched to Opera says the above list + whitespace removal work somewhat better than what he was used to). If, somehow, something would be able to come through (I don't remember that happening...) - there's also GUI element blocker (RMB, "Block content")

Re:Bloated over time?

[Risen888]

Really? Tell me where else I can run AdBlock and I'll try it.

Re:Bloated over time?

[Tarqon]

Firefox automatically backs up your tabs every ten seconds, which can cause lag with the interface and video playback. Going to about:config and changing browser.sessionstore.interval to a much higher value (like 100000, = 100 seconds) should help alleviate the problem. Hope that helps.

Re:Bloated over time?

[sznupi]

If you want to run "AdBlock" then you're stuck with FF of course, considering that's a specific software name. As for comparably nice (but light / integrated) adblocking...

Re:Bloated over time?

[Risen888]

+1 Informative. I really will try this, thank you.

If you can't beat them, join them...

[bogaboga]

...And what's wrong with Firefox adopting WebKit as its engine? They could retain their current interface or even make version 4.x mock-ups a reality. Again, what's wrong with that?

Re:If you can't beat them, join them...

[BitZtream]

Other than that would basically result in starting from scratch?

WebKit doesn't do what Gecko does, so you can't just drop webkit into Firefox.

In Chrome and Safari, you have an application that uses a WebKit rendering area for drawing the web page you see.

In Firefox you have an XUL renderer and everything else (the UI and HTML viewing areas) are just 'sub pages' more or less.

Think of Firefox as a web browser built in a web page. Its far more complex than that, but in principal thats what you get.

Then try Palemoon

[Anonymous Coward]

A friend pointed me to a Firefox Windows optimized derivation called Palemoon (http://www.palemoon.org).

Several people bash it saying "Ah is just a guy messing with the compile options and is not for Linux!" - but despite that I tried it. And I saw that Palemoon cut off some unwanted things that Firefox coders think that we should need by force (Personas, parental controls, and other code not needed for me at least). This have a nice side effect: Lots of pages that doesn't work well on Firefox works fine on Palemoon and the program deals better with plugins that I need only. So Palemoon fills the gap that was only exclusive for Linux users and those custom builds.

If Firefox works more on made a good browsing experience rather to work on odd UIs or things that I don't want (personas) maybe it would be the #1 again.

Side notes: Chrome is not for me, I like that google do not spy on me. Opera is nice but lacks of plugins. M$IE? You are kidding, right? Now troll whatever you want. I won't read them anyway. XD

Bugs are not being fixed.

[Zombie Ryushu]

While in the past there were crashes that could kill FireFox related to Flash, I don't see that like I used too. Now I see the browser spiking my CPU and raising its temperature by a few degrees because of bugs in the Java Scripting and AJAX engines. I am not sure if the culprit is memory leaks, or just faults in the software. It just seems like there are bugs in the renderer that are not being fixed and causing the CPU usage to spike in certain complex pages coded in certain ways.

Re:FIX IT YOURSELF

[Rockoon]

In this case, 'fix it' for many of the posters here is 'delete most of the code'

Firefox plugins

[slashnot007]

If it were not for the plugins I'd drop firefox in an flash. It's s a bloated slow to launch pig. that get's dusted even by safari on page loads.
    But flashblock, adblock and zotero are pretty sweet things.

Re:Firefox plugins

[morgan_greywolf]

Chrome now has FlashBlock and AdBlock. Zotzero is...well, it's a Firefox-only thing; it doesn't work with any other browsers. :( I don't use it, however.

Many complain about a lack of NoScript, but Chrome does have a NoScript equivalent built-in. You turn off JavaScript and then re-enable it per-page. It has NoScript-style on-the-fly re-enabling, too.

Re:Firefox plugins

[Peach Rings]

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.

Re:Firefox plugins

[slashnot007]

Chrome is starting to get more attractive but I'm having a hard time with the mono-bar. I just don't like every key I press being sent to google. I don't use gmail for the same reason.

Re:Firefox plugins

[ElKry]

You can just disable that in the preferences, you know.

Re:Firefox plugins

[eosp]

Chrome's AdBlock still downloads the offending components; it just hides them from the user.

Re:Firefox plugins

[icannotthinkofaname]

So download the version that doesn't tell Google your dirty porn habits.

Re:Firefox plugins

[Aczlan]

Does AdBlock in Chrome block ads BEFORE they are downloaded? Or does still it hide them AFTER they are downloaded? Last time I tried it all that it did was hide ads, which doesn't help when ad servers are being slow.

Aaron Z

Re:Firefox plugins

[msclrhd]

Why is it bloated? What makes you say that?

You mention launch time and page load times, but that does not indicate bloat. That indicates that there are performance issues that can (and are) being investigated.

Is it the 8.1 MB installer? If so, that is small compared to others.

Is it the startup time? If so, there are I/O bottlenecks that are being investigated and addressed. And at the end of the day, how often do you actually open the web browser.

Is it the responsiveness? If so, that is due to graphics performance and there has been work to improve things. 3.6.3 is better at scrolling on Linux, and the team are looking at supporting Direct2D/Write on Win7 (they were the first to investigate that, before Microsoft announced IE9).

Is it page load times? If so, there may well be improvements that can be made.

Is it the look of the UI? Chrome has a more minimal UI, so could be perceived as having less bloat. Firefox is converging to a similar (not identical) UI.

Is it memory usage? There have been memory leaks that have been plugged over the 3.x browser lifetime. There may be others, I don't know. Note also that a high memory usage may be flash (out-of-process plugins will help here) or may be image/page caching algorithms/logic (which help with responsiveness).

Is it the heavy use of COM in internal interfaces? If so, the mozilla team are aware of this and have been making changes to slowly remove this (but not from the DOM). The mozilla codebase is large (as is true with any sufficiently large codebase, including WebKit) and making large changes takes time.

Is it JavaScript performance? Firefox is not the fastest in this, but the speeds are sufficiently capable to run even more demanding sites comfortably. And also, work is being done to improve this.

Re:Firefox plugins

[Lemmy Caution]

As a possible alternative to Zotero, check out Mendeley.

Re:Firefox plugins

[thegarbz]

So you've posed the question about 8 possible things that could irritate people about Firefox. Looking down the list quite a few of them hit the mark. But your proposed solutions? Several points you have blamed the user's hardware, several are being addressed, oh and lets wait for the next version too because feature xxx may be implemented at within an unknown number of months.

So compare it to the alternative of just using another program which the GP alludes to fixing all of his issues save for a specific requirement causing him to (possibly temporarily) stay with Firefox.

You're not really helping convince anyone to stick with Firefox with the "stick with it, it may get better" line of preaching. I have to agree Firefox is one hell of a bloated dog. For an 8mb program it sure does a lot for 3 slashdot pages to be taking up 150MB of RAM. Compared to loading the same 3 tabs in Chrome (which loads much faster) and only comes in at 60MB. Colour Management is the only reason I am using Firefox, as soon as it's supported by Chrome Firefox can go into another long list of applications I once used which lost touch.

Re:Firefox plugins

[gaspyy]

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.

Re:Firefox plugins

[icebraining]

Does it have Vimperator, Auto-pager, DownThemAll, DownloadHelper, Greasemonkey, Stylish, TinEye and Mobile Barcode?

And these are the ones I keep enabled. Then there's Firebug, YSlow, Aardvark, Live HTTP Headers, TorButton, User Agent Switcher and Cookie Exporter, which I enable on demand.
My only peeve with Firefox is having to restart it to enable/upgrade the addons.

Re:Firefox plugins

[icebraining]

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.

My guess is that this has nothing to do with XUL and all to do with History/Bookmarks loading it does to present you with options.
I use Vimperator, which doesn't have "suggestions-as-you-type", but shows them when I press Tab. Writing an URL is fine; it's when I press Tab that Firefox locks up.

Re:Firefox plugins

[Adlopa]

Most Chrome ad blocking extensions seem to hide ads after downloading —not much use, in other words. AdBlock+ Element Hiding Helper works much more like AdBlock for Firefox, though — I've been using it for several weeks and am happy with it so far.

Re:Firefox plugins

[wye43]

The first Firefox apologist. This is surely a sign of bad things to come for Firefox.

Re:Firefox plugins

[goldaryn]

If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times; use an HTTP proxy like Privoxy

Problem solved. I can't believe the contortion people get themselves into over ad blocking.

Re:Firefox plugins

[ThePhilips]

.... and in the times when I was trying to pilot Chrome + FlashBlock, the FlashBlock was appearing/disappearing on me sporadically. One week it is there and works - another week Flash is all over the pages.

I'm not sure about it, but I think that I have experienced the other side of the all-new "silent" browser auto-updates....

Chrome is a nice upgrade from IE. The problem to me that I never was an IE user. I got attached to the Netscape^W MozillaW FireFox's bells and whistles more than decade ago.

The Web without reliable AdBlock/FlashBlock/NoScript is a rather spooky place. Nor I have problem with Fx start-up: the five+ seconds wait is well worth it. Every second of it.

Re:Firefox plugins

[inigopete]

Chrome, on Linux, still has the really irritating disabled backspace key. On any other browser you can toggle using the backspace as a back button; Chrome's new release simply disabled it. With no option to change. about:config is still one of the greatest things about Firefox, IMO.

Re:Firefox plugins

[Goaway]

No. If you worry about Google, get Chromium.

Do not get Iron. It offsers no advantages over Chromium, and it was made by a highly questionable developer who admits spreading FUD about Chrome to increase his own profits.

Re:Firefox plugins

[kaizendojo]

I'd have to agree, especially from the point of web development. While I'm not a browser fanatic and use IE, FF and Opera, my tendencies are towards FF. I find it hard to fathom doing web design and development without my FF plugins. YSlow and Web Developer are indispensable to me on a daily basis.

Re:Firefox plugins

[plastbox]

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.

Best. Analogy. Ever.

Re:Firefox plugins

[CarpetShark]

It blocks AFTER downloading. There is a ticket filed with chrome/chromium to allow hooking the network-level stuff from plugins in order to do it properly, but the ticket, and related tickets are still open.

Re:Firefox plugins

[design1066]

Microsoft shill

Re:Firefox plugins

[jedidiah]

It isn't ad blocking. It's all manner of nonsense that no one should put up like cross-site scripting and scripts running from 10 or more external domains.

Most of what major sites do in terms of scripting should make everyone deeply suspicious. Unfortunately most people are unaware or don't care (thus nonsense with closed or highly insecure platforms).

Re:Firefox plugins

[jedidiah]

When I find something better I will use it. In the meantime, I won't hold my breath.

Alternatives from monopolies and monopoly wannabes really aren't alternatives.

Trustworthiness is more important than speed in a browser that is ultimately it's own scripting platform.

Re:Firefox plugins

[metamatic]

And wildcards don't work, so you have to unblock news.slashdot.org separately from yro.slashdot.org.

They fixed that. You can wildcard [*.]slashdot.org

That's when I dropped Firefox and switched to Chrome.

Re:Firefox plugins

[nwf]

My main issue is the constant and momentary freezes. It makes using anything that plays video unwatchable, and is generally annoying all the time. This leads to Firefox seeming to be unresponsive. I click on something, but it takes 5 seconds to register I clicked because it's running some crazy-inefficient housekeeping task in the background. I've tried all the usual suggestions, including cache flushing, turning off extensions, removing the various bloated .sqlite files, increasing the crash persistence times, etc. Removing places.sqlite helped for a 1/2 day or so. It appears that all the caching it does really slows it down and that SQL Lite was a rather poor choice. Do some googling and you will find that many, many people have problems with FF freezing momentarily. CPU usage jumps to near 100% while this happens. No other browsers I use do this.

As a result, I find myself using it less and less since it's just do frustrating.

Re:Firefox plugins

[cthulhu11]

Is it memory usage? There have been memory leaks that have been plugged over the 3.x browser lifetime

Yet the thing still steadily climbs up toward and sometimes past using 2GB of vmem. Two friggen gig. Maybe something's been plugged, but core leaks are still a way of life, and eventually after running for a while it'll become extremely painful to open a new tab, as the whole app wedges and beachballs for at least 5 minutes.

Re:Firefox plugins

[knorthern knight]

> Why is it bloated? What makes you say that?

Because the firefox developers have succumbed to the Microsoft disease. Every optional feature that 10% of users find nice, seems to get incorporated into the base code. At least in the original mozilla 0.9x versions, you could select not to build in certain stuff. Not any more.
* spell-checking is *BUILT-IN*
* an SQL database (SQLite) is built in. This is a performance-killer in linux. To guarantee database integrity, SQLite does a lot of fsync() calls. In an SQL database, that is a necessity. I'm not bitching about the SQLite developers. They wrote a database to do what a database is supposed to do. I'm bitching about the Mozilla developers' decision to use an SQL database when a textfile will do.

Re:Firefox plugins

[jesset77]

If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times; use an HTTP proxy like Privoxy

Privoxy + SSL = Fail, and many people SSL to many different places.

Now I'm not saying that proxy-modifying-SSL would be impossible: what would be choice would be to establish a trust-chain to your proxy, so you negotiate SSL to the proxy which negotiates SSL to the world. Hell, at that point you could always run SSL to the proxy and thwart many malware and eavesdropping angles of attack against non-SSL sites.

Well, at any rate, I don't think Privoxy is that serious about what they do just yet. That's a lot of work. ;3

Misses the point

[Runaway1956]

Ever since KHTML was branched into WebKit, I've been mildly excited by the possibilities. There are only so many underlying engines on the market. IE, Opera, Webkit, and Firefox each uses a different engine. IMHO, Wekit is the way forward. IE's engine is closed source, and no one can do anything with it - ditto for Opera's. That leaves Webkit versus Gheko. Gheko has been a good, reliable engine, which has been bent and stretched, folded, and mutilated time and again to perform as various coders and/or coding teams have seen fit. But, I think it is nearing the end of it's life.

From the wikipedia:

WebKit-based browsers

        * Arora
        * Web Browser for Android (mobile device platform)
        * BOLT browser
        * Google Chrome
        * Epiphany (web browser)
        * iCab (version 4 uses WebKit; earlier versions used its own rendering engine)
        * Iris Browser
        * Konqueror (version 4 can use WebKit as an alternative to its native KHTML[18])
        * Midori
        * OmniWeb
        * OWB
        * Safari
        * Shiira
        * Sputnik for MorphOS (based on S60 WebCore)
        * SRWare Iron
        * Stainless
        * TeaShark
        * Uzbl
        * Web Browser for S60, used in all Nokia Symbian smartphones.
        * WebOS, used in the Palm Pre mobile
        * WebPositive, browser in Haiku

Grab a couple of them, and test drive them. That should satisfy the Google bashers who might want to experiment with Webkit.

Re:Misses the point

[Randle_Revar]

It is Gecko, not Gheko, and there is plenty of room for two, three, maybe even four major engines. Webkit is an excellent engine, and in many ways is better than Gecko, but in other ways Gecko is better. And there is certainly plenty of life left in Gecko. Already Gecko 1.9.x is very different from 1.0. Many more changes are planned even before 2.0, and 2.0 should be very nice indeed.

Re:Misses the point

[Kjella]

It's called Gecko. But yes I think that one has been stretched more because it seems to be almost Mozilla only, the other users mentioned are quite marginal. WebKit is used by Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari), KDE and all the others you mentioned which tends to limit the amount of hackjobs you can do...

Re:Misses the point

[Nursie]

Gecko is also used in epiphany, the gnome browser, which is somewhat like firefox without quite a lot of the cruft.
IIRC, MicroB the maemo browser uses it too.

I admit these are niche players though.

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:Misses the point

[Randle_Revar]

I think Presto is Opera's engine

Re:Misses the point

[JackieBrown]

Gecko is also used in epiphany, the gnome browser

epiphany has a webkit back-end as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphany_(web_browser)

Re:Misses the point

[pdusen]

Actually, I think Epiphany has made the switch to Webkit. Wikipedia agrees.

Re:Misses the point

[makomk]

But yes I think that one has been stretched more because it seems to be almost Mozilla only, the other users mentioned are quite marginal.

And Ubuntu is planning to drop any non-Mozilla users of Gecko soon because it's just too hard to keep it up to date with security patches otherwise.

Re:Misses the point

[design1066]

thank you

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 do not understand

[ElusiveJoe]

What everyone thinks is wrong with Firefox? I'm using it since it was called 'Phoenix' and it keeps getting better with every release. Perhaps, Mr. Ross has some personal issues with his career, than I suggest him looking for a new job.

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]

The better question is: how much time have you spent arguing with firefox developers over completely trivial bugs that they refuse to fix?

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[sirsnork]

Oh the proxy PAC bugs Firefox has..... how I wish they could have been fixed sometime in the last 2 major versions

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[Mystra_x64]

What's proprietarity (is that a word?) has to do with features/weight ratio?

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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!

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[fluffy99]

Does Firefox still crash if proxy.pac returns a null, which is perfectly valid per the netscape spec and even noted as such in the code? I haven't tried it since the bugzilla entry I started with lots of example code was closed and not fixed. The reason it was closed? It wasn't a priority as it didn't trigger a buffer overflow (my original concern), and the customer could simply fix their proxy.pac file.

So saying, 'spend time trying to improve the code' is laughable.

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.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[Fjandr]

Absolutely nothing, but it's apparently not good to use software you can't see the source for. It doesn't matter if the software is faster, lighter, and integrates features years before anyone else does. Not OSS = bad.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[sznupi]

Opera is a major backer of web standards; typically the most compliant browser (Chromium guys don't seem to have a problem with pointing that out); they initiated HTML5 video tag and are backing Theora-only solution from the beginning. Plus there are just so many ways to keep the browser afloat - while all other big ones exist thanks to major corporate backing (yes, also Mozilla...you don't remember AOL?), Opera simply always chosen to go without corporate daddy...but that needed a way to make revenue for a long time already, not only when lately revenue from searches became viable. They not only found their niche, but are giving for free a usable browser to the fastest-growing segment of the market. Millions of people who wouldn't have a browser otherwise.

Give them some credit...

PS. What was that mess with Firefox (free?) and Debian?

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[sznupi]

It apparently also doesn't matter that some software can get quite a bit more life out of old machines, give them a modern & packed with features experience that remains usable. One would think that has some value in our current world...

Not to mention hundreds millions of people for which this might be pretty much the only available software of such type (each year there is way over a billion mobile phones sold; but not even 200 million of them are "smartphones")

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[Fjandr]

It's also the browser that powers the web connection on the Wii.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[micheas]

Opera is a major backer of web standards; typically the most compliant browser (Chromium guys don't seem to have a problem with pointing that out); they initiated HTML5 video tag and are backing Theora-only solution from the beginning. Plus there are just so many ways to keep the browser afloat - while all other big ones exist thanks to major corporate backing (yes, also Mozilla...you don't remember AOL?), Opera simply always chosen to go without corporate daddy...but that needed a way to make revenue for a long time already, not only when lately revenue from searches became viable. They not only found their niche, but are giving for free a usable browser to the fastest-growing segment of the market. Millions of people who wouldn't have a browser otherwise.

Give them some credit...

PS. What was that mess with Firefox (free?) and Debian?

The mess with Debian and Firefox is that Debian was the only people that were still fixing security holes in Firefox 1.x and mozilla got upset because they were distributing an unauthorized version (lacking the security holes) with the Firefox name.

Debian compiles firefox with iceweasel branding instead of firefox branding, most distributions modify firefox more than debian.

Canonical (ubuntu) claimed the whole thing was because the debian developers were being unreasonable, and then when they found themselves in the same situation with their LTS version of ubuntu couldn't use use iceweasel and created "abrowser" and were ready to set abrowser as the ubuntu default when Mozilla came up with a compromise that worked for Canonical and Mozilla.

It was mostly an example of how badly debian does at PR.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[tehcyder]

Opera is also proprietary; users give up their software freedom

Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[Interoperable]

Here's the great thing about open-source software: you can fix the bugs yourself.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[notrandomly]

Opera is a major backer of web standards; typically the most compliant browser (Chromium guys don't seem to have a problem with pointing that out [chromium.org]); they initiated HTML5 video tag and are backing Theora-only solution from the beginning.

As a matter of fact, not only did Opera propose the video tag, but HTML5 as a whole started out at Opera.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[Risen888]

Not the GP, but with regards to plugins, I think they're correct. Without a free (as in "free country") base to build on, you just don't see people rushing in to write extensions for your product. How many great IE extensions do you hear about?

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[Mystra_x64]

Fx need it because it can't do many things out of the box. Unlike Opera which can.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[Risen888]

Nice troll. Let me flip it for you. "Opera needs to do many things out of the box because being non-free software, it cannot attract a decent mass of plugin developers, unlike Firefox which can."

Wasn't that fun? Now you try!

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[Mystra_x64]

If everyone seem like trolls to you maybe it's you.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[sznupi]

So, Mozilla acted to restrict freedom of software included in Debian.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[jbn-o]

None of those issues you raise in any way rebut what I said. It's a long series of non-sequiturs none of which address software freedom.

The Opera software company is a publicly traded company, but being for free software does not mean one is anti-business (quite the contrary, actually).

Compliance with standards is nice but software freedom is more important as free software can be inspected and improved by lots of people whereas proprietary software can only be inspected and improved by the proprietor. Features, size, execution speed are all conveniences none of which measure up to the social importance of software freedom. I can, after all, have the quickest, smallest, least buggy spyware around whose license doesn't let anyone but the proprietor remove the spying features and share the improved program with others. That's simply not a good tradeoff. It's socially wise to foster software freedom even if it means putting work into improving a larger, slower, and more buggy program because software freedom means social solidarity with programs that can become better. If one can't program (like most computer users don't), one could get someone else to do that job, contribute money or time on a less technical but still needed task (translations, art, documentation, support). There's business opportunities in improving free software.

Finally, your last point is simultaneously irrelevant, an appeal to popularity (which itself is yet another misprioritization of goals), and conjecture.

Re:I want software freedom instead.

[sznupi]

None of those issues you raise in any way rebut what I said. It's a long series of non-sequiturs none of which address software freedom.

Heh, glad you settled that outright...

You don't get it, do you? Companies with the track record of Opera (it's not "compliance" BTW, they gave you lots of those standards; but that's of course not socially important right? Creating an enviroment which also allows free software to thrive, cherishes social solidarity ffs...) are on your side. Closed software won't dissapear - the best you can strive for is a reality which Opera Software, among other, signs up to; and in their case willingly & for a very long time, without forcing it upon them - they're your allies

And by first talking about supposed non-sequiturs on my part and then using a spyware as an example you embarass yourself.

Furthermore, while closed in your small world you don't even realise how socially irresponsible using poorly optimised software is. This graph might help you to understand it (X axis), needlessly wastaeful software certainly contributing its part.

Finally, your ending sentence accusing me of supposed appeal to popularity and conjecture is exactly just that. Opera Mini is the number one mobile web browser worldwide, in large part thanks to people in developing countries who don't have other means to access the internet than on their "feature phones" (which in itself are the first real means of communication for them); for which Opera Mini is often the only sensible browser available.
Where's your social solidarity in providing tthose people something they can use at all? Does it only work among the confines of one "premium" society? (or group of such societies)

Re:Firefox 4...

[t0y]

It runs faster because it runs independently of the all the work going on in other tabs: running scripts, rendering layout and loading stuff from the cache/web. But it can be done with threads instead of processes. It's less secure and prone to crashing, though.

From the project page it looks like they're going for a flexible model, so a lot of options are possible: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

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:Firefox became the real Web OS

[Adys]

Especially the comparison to "Chrome" kills me... Chrome can't even provide a non X86 version of browser.

If you're going to flame Chrome, get your facts right. Posted from Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.38 Safari/533.4.

Re:Firefox became the real Web OS

[the_womble]

Chrome can't even provide a non X86 version of browser

So compile Chromium yourself, or use an OS that has Chromium for ARM available

As for extensions, it has more than any browser other than FF. The average user does not use extensions - a good many Firefox users either do not know, or do not care, and never install a single extension. That is what Firefox now includes feature that could be provided by extensions.

Why is Webkit winning the embedded mkt?

[JSBiff]

One thing I've really wondered. . . Firefox is a great browser, but it seems like almost anyone creating a mobile phone, tablet pc, etc. has chosen Webkit instead of Gecko. Why did Apple decide it needed to take Konqueror and create Webkit in the first place, instead of just using Gecko? There must've been some reason - I'm sure they must have at least *looked* at Gecko before making a decision? Why did Google choose Webkit for Android and Chrome? Why is Webkit being used in all sort of places, but Gecko is only being used by Firefox and a couple other desktop web browsers?

Is there some technical deficiency with Gecko (too bloated, too memory intensive, too slow, too complicated/hard to develop for? Maybe it's a licensing issue, where other companies don't like the Mozilla license?

Anyone have insight into this?

Re:Why is Webkit winning the embedded mkt?

[Zixaphir]

I think it's that every release breaks compatibility and every release follows Firefox's development schedule. Epiphany originally used Gecko. See their reasons for switching: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/epiphany-list/2008-April/msg00000.html

Re:Why is Webkit winning the embedded mkt?

[BZ]

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).

Re:Why is Webkit winning the embedded mkt?

[Rocketship Underpant]

It's been covered — do a little googling and you'll find Apple's own reasoning. Basically, they looked at both engines, but Konqueror's code was a lot cleaner and easier to work with than Gecko's, so they went with that.

Bad moderation

[imtheguru]

Both pieces of information in the parent are irrelevant to the problems highlighted by grand parent poster.

Compression is great for high-latency networks but that isn't even close to the problem expressed above.

Further, Opera's "cleaned up" default UI is in a version which is yet to be released. It's 2010 and Opera is just getting around to sorting out the default UI. I relent that the previous versions have all been greatly customisable, but then what excuse does Opera have for not starting simple and allowing the users to expose features to meet their needs?

Re:Bad moderation

[AnonGCB]

The problem was an old laptop, yes, I went off on a tangent and suggested a feature that would help a potentially related problem (old laptop + relative's house potentially means crappy internet connection). Opera's UI is not anywhere near completely redone, but it's better and cleaner than it was, that's for sure.

Re:Bad moderation

[sznupi]

But the recent version had quite a bit of UI overhaul...

Also, this compression does help on older machines (I still have an old dual PII 266 that I check up sometimes); maybe they have less to process that way (images in much lower quality, restructured js), I don't know. Plus on such machine the snappiness of the browser as a whole is very noticeable, and of great value.

Re:Bad moderation

[notrandomly]

Further, Opera's "cleaned up" default UI is in a version which is yet to be released.

I'm not sure what gave you that idea. Opera 10.50 was released in March.

It's 2010 and Opera is just getting around to sorting out the default UI.

I'm sorry, but Opera's UI has been evolving all along. Opera 10 got a new skin and improved layout of various items, for example. Opera 10.50 got an even cleaner UI again.

I relent that the previous versions have all been greatly customisable, but then what excuse does Opera have for not starting simple and allowing the users to expose features to meet their needs?

This is what Opera has been doing the last few years. It started out pretty clean already with Opera 8.x.

Re:Bad moderation

[shutdown -p now]

Opera 10.52 is a released version (it's the most recent stable build).

And Opera's default UI since 10.50 is very much a rip-off of Chrome UI, which is a good thing, IMO.

Mobile needs Opera model (in OSS)

[Ilgaz]

Using Opera for my needs, such as 720P HDTV TV (try other browsers!), Nokia E71 Symbian S60 which Google didn't even bother etc.

When you use it in such conditions, you figure the sad fact. Even if Opera switched to open source, it would be some developer PR nightmare since most of the commits would be rejected. Even a single line in HTML renderer must be coded with a Symbian OS, some plane video terminal, some car dashbard, some SD gaming console "web channel" in mind. What amazes me is, they still manage to keep up with the trends and actually implement on impossible to count platforms equally. For example, their Android beta has JIT compiler for Javascript while Google couldn't manage/care enough to ship Chrome to PPC/OS X.

If Firefox really wants a truly mobile version, they should be ready to shave a lot of the code and reject a lot of commits. For example, if someone's super cool JIT patch doesn't work on ARM, the should reject it.

They should have started experimenting with Symbian right after "S60 V3" handsets started to ship. Calling Nokia evil or joking with others RAM (their so called supporters) didn't help of course.

Re:Mobile needs Opera model (in OSS)

[sznupi]

That model isn't bad on desktops / laptops, either. The browser is becoming / has become(?) the main app many people use on their PCs. And possibly one of only two (the second being video editing) which can still greatly benefit from improvements in processing power or...attention to its performance during development.

I would hope we can prefer the second, less wasteful, solution.

Some places already seem to do so; places where a PC has typically much longer lifetime. Ukraine, where Opera is handily the #1 browser; Russia, where it's the #1 "alternative" one.

who has 4gb of RAM though?

[snooo53]

Of course someone who only browses the web with 4GB of ram isn't going to notice 350MB being used. But not everyone has 4GB of ram and not everyone only browses the web! The fact that you're on Slashdot means you very likely have an atypical computer that can handle a multitude of tasks easily.

But take a run of the mill Dell P4 with 1gb of RAM on WinXP, a typical business and home machine from a few years back, and very likely representative of a large portion of computers in the US. Heck, take most netbooks for that matter. For Joe User, that 350MB is a significant portion of his total RAM, which wouldn't be a bad thing, IF WINDOWS DIDN'T SWAP LIKE CRAZY once you get above some magical percentage. OK, so it's more of a rant on Windows than Firefox, but you gotta build for the way the computer world is, not how it should be.

Re:who has 4gb of RAM though?

[sznupi]

Whoa there, why would you limit yourself to the US? There's quite a lot of places where average age of a PC is much higher...

Plus mobile phones might be already a much more widespread way to access the web, worldwide.

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.

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.

I want to love Firefox...

[wazzzup]

...but just having it sit idle on a static HTML page with no flash or video makes my CPU fan come on. I hate that. Why the hell is FF using enough CPU cycles to require CPU cooling when it's just SITTING THERE AT IDLE.

Get your crap together Mozilla or you're going to lose everything you worked so hard to accomplish. Extensions are the only thing saving your bacon and Chrome is making some real progress in that area - plus it doesn't tax my CPU.

Re:Firefox had a 1980 design even in 2004

[thoughtsatthemoment]

It seems to me this AC is not that smart either.

a single threaded UI is actually not wrong. It means all window handles (win32) are created in only one thread, usually the main thread. Creating UI in more than one threads is just looking for trouble. FireFox's problem is doing too many things in the main thread. To move stuff into other threads require such architectural changes that only a very big head can handle. I wouldn't call them idiots because I understand how difficult things can get.

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:How fast does it need to be?

[gaspyy]

Freshly installed laptop, Windows 7 x64, Core Duo P8600, 2 GB RAM.

Chrome with 6 plugins loads instantly (1sec).
Firefox with 1 plugin (Firebug) loads in 6 seconds.

After months of use, Firefox gets to a point when if freezes for 1-2 seconds when you're typing a URL and other weird things like that.

I only use Firefox for development, because Chrome Developer Tools are no match for Firebug, but for daily browsing I definitely prefer Chrome.

Re:How fast does it need to be?

[DudemanX]

I dunno. I've never had Firefox take more than a second to cold to start unless I try to start after a fresh boot of Windows while services are still loading or if alt-tabbed out of some newer 3D game. Even then it only adds a second or two. Six seconds does sound pretty unreasonable but I've never seen anything like that.

I'm also running Windows 7 x64 but with an E6600 which is the same 2.4Ghz as your chip except I have an extra meg of L2 cache. I do however have an older 150GB WD Raptor 10k RPM hard drive. It's a good bet that helps my Firefox load much faster than yours which is probably on a 5.4k notebook drive. Windows Superfetch might even be preloading Firefox for me because of my extra RAM. Whatever the cause, I've never had Firefox be anything less than totally responsive. Well... by never I suppose I mean since like 3.0. I'm sure I've had issues with older versions of FF in the past but it has indeed been a while.

After months of use, Firefox gets to a point when if freezes for 1-2 seconds when you're typing a URL and other weird things like that.

Do you mean after months of having it installed or do you actually leave the thing running for months without restarting it? The latter seems like a rather unrealistic expectation. I've never seen a problem like that but maybe my history just isn't that big. I also rarely leave it running since it starts so damn fast that I have little reason to.

Maybe on a lower end machine the speed difference actually becomes noticeable but I honestly never see it.

Re:How fast does it need to be?

[yabos]

I do web development at work and mainly use Firefox with Firebug and a plugin(forget the name) that allows outlining of table cells & whatnot. I usually keep the same 5 tabs open all the time and FF will consume close to 1GB after a few days of page refreshes. Also, once it approaches this 1GB usage, it will generally crash very soon.

Re:How fast does it need to be?

[plastbox]

Try Opera for a week and you will only ever go back to check on cross-browser compatibility. Comes with it's own developer tool, Opera Dragonfly, which more than holds it's own against FireBug.

Re:How fast does it need to be?

[metamatic]

I only use Firefox for development, because Chrome Developer Tools are no match for Firebug, but for daily browsing I definitely prefer Chrome.

Really? I never seemed to be able to get Firebug to work properly, either that or I just couldn't get to grips with its UI. I love Chrome's dev tools.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[FatdogHaiku]

Memory Leaks is such an ugly, pejorative term... Let's think of them as little digital pressure relief valves...

n900 maemo browser is based on mozilla, very good

[swatkins]

The Nokia n900 comes with a mobile browser based on mozilla. It is very responsive and works well on the 600Mhz ARM device. Firefox is still my preferred browser. I found that chrome does not perform so well under heavy load (many tabs open) although this may have changed. And firefox is vastly more configurable and has many more plugins. Go mozilla, go firefox! Yay for the best browser out there! :)

Re:Firefox 4...

[Randle_Revar]

>And I really, really hope they won't go for the process per tab like planned. It takes a lot of extra memory for little benefit (IMO).

I agree on that. I love OOPP, but not per-tab processes

Plug-in death march?

[Animats]

Firefox has a real problem in the plug-in space. They're deprecating the old API, and the new "JetPack" API isn't fully implemented yet, let alone deployed. That's a killer mistake. When there's a hiatus like that, developers leave and go do something else. This can kill a technology.

"Web3D" was a good example of that class of disaster. "Web3D" was supposed to be VRML in XML syntax. There was a long hiatus between the official deprecation of VRML and the first X3D tools, during which almost everybody went away. X3D now works, but nobody cares.

Re:Plug-in death march?

[CyberDragon777]

They're deprecating the old API, and the new "JetPack" API isn't fully implemented yet, let alone deployed. That's a killer mistake.

NO THEY ARE NOT!

Please stop spreading this piece of FUD!

http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2010/01/11/add-ons-are-here-to-stay/

Re:What ever happened to minefield?

[Randle_Revar]

Minefield is a permanent name for alpha versions of FF. Just like Debian Sid.
If I knew which time period you where thinking of, I might be able to figure out which code name it got and which release it ended up as (or will end up as). Personally, I only run Minefield, and likewise the trunk version of Mozilla.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[wisnoskij]

I remember back like 4 years ago it was twice as fast as IE.

Wrong

[Arker]

He's right, it's not free software. It's freeware.

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.

Bloat vs Internet

[carp3_noct3m]

One thing I find is that in todays "web 2.0" world, sites are increasingly javascript, flash, and other heavy things, prone. One of the main reasons I stick with FF is because primarily of the addons like noscript, adblocker, better privacy, etc, which all greatly improve my browsing speeds. Probably doesnt have much to do with things like render tests etc, but just a side note.

Re:Bloat vs Internet

[metamatic]

Chrome has the equivalent of NoScript and CookieSafe built in. AdBlock is available.

Re:Bloat vs Internet

[carp3_noct3m]

Chromes equivalent is very far behind noscript as far as I am aware, noscript gives me granular controls, and apparently you either allow all scripts on a page with the chrome version or not at all, but I could be wrong.

Switched BACK to Firefox Today

[Ignatius D'Lusional]

I'd been using Chrome for a few months, and while I enjoyed it at first I soon realized that it was a memory hog when using dozens of multiple tabs and *consistently* choked to death on Flash content. I've been very happy I switched back, just from using it again today. As long as Chrome suffers these critical flaws and Firefox outperforms it, I will be sticking with Team Mozilla.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

"But current versions of Firefox are fine - at least on Linux, Mac and BSD."

I've seen especially startup times on Firefox degrading over the last few months ... which is, I admit, not a problem for any reasonably powered desktop or laptop but is for a netbook like mine. In the latest versions I have to wait up to ten seconds for the firefox window to pop up and frankly that annoys me enough to consider the switch to chrome.

Which I haven't made yet, because google probably knows quite enough about me as it is, but that's another story.

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

[guanxi]

the 900MB of RAM I'd often see it eating up was annoying too.

You have some other problem, maybe with an extension. I support many, many Firefox users and I've never seen anything like that. You can also read many reviews talking about how Firefox' memory management is superior to the other browsers, including Chrome.

I don't see the other problems you describe among our users either, though 900 MB memory consumption would explain them.

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

[longbot]

The 900MB figure was before I'd started using ANY extensions... but to be fair, it was also one of the early 2.x releases.

I open and close a lot of tabs. It helped a bit when I disabled the "preserve tab history" option in the prefs. But RAM use continued to pile up the longer I had it running. 7-8 days after having first run it, it got to consistently be 400MB+ even with only a couple of tabs open.

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

[design1066]

Fix your computer. FF does not lag.

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

[bored]

I have the same problem in FF, everyone does. Its a question of what is running in those other tabs. I found the problem because one app in particular made it really noticeable. What appears to be happening is every time a javascript timer fires in one of those other tabs FF is off servicing it leaving your UI dead. Normally you wouldn't notice a little glitch like that but if you have a web app that spends a significant amount of time doing ajax calls in timers, or you have a shed-load of tabs open the browser will seem to pause. Youtube/flash and friends also get paused by it, causing video glitching.

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

[guanxi]

I have the same problem in FF, everyone does.

Certainly not everyone does.

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

[mrsteele]

A couple friends and I have all noticed the same issue in the last 5 months: streaming video on FF has become an issue. It stutters, it freezes, the audio has problems.

That's the number one reason I now use Chrome as my main browser. Fix the video, FF, and I'll come back.

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

[longbot]

I did fix it. I installed Chrome.

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

[longbot]

I have a Gmail tab permanently open. That could well have been/be the cause.

That seems to me a particularly glaring bug to be fixed.

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

[longbot]

I believe the intent here was to indicate that this was a common problem. Would you care to chime in with something useful, or would you rather pick nits?

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

[longbot]

It drove me crazy too. People say "just turn off flash". Well, some of us actually LIKE to use streaming video. And if Chrome can handle the exact same video on the exact same hardware more elegantly than FF can, then why does FF falter?

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

[bored]

My point is that it exists everywhere (cause its a real problem), but that a fair number of people (including apparently yourself) never notice it because the delay is generally insignificant for a casual user with only one tab or two tabs doing basic surfing. People with a lot of tabs or heavy web apps (lots of java-script) tend to notice it more.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[staalmannen]

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.

[innocent sounding irony] Plan9? I heard about a Firefox port, but I thought that was just a rumor. In fact, 2010 is the year of Plan9 on the desktop. [/innocent sounding irony]

System spell check for OS X?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Some people want Firefox to be lean, others want the expandability. I just want the damn thing to use my system's dictionary and spell check services instead of its own. Not taking advantage of a system's native features surely isn't helping Firefox.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[byrtolet]

Firefox & Mozilla were never light.

*sight*, not again

[Pecisk]

I have enough of "OMG! Google pushes Chrome everywhere and it gains on early adopters base, we are doomed!" crowd. I use browsers for 15 years, and Firefox is still number one for me and lot of other geeks. No, I don't care how fast Chrome is, because it so unstable and full with webkit rendering bugs. They have great foundations to work on, but they are not fully there yet. They are growing nicely, I admit, and Google knows how to code. But they still have a long road to be leader.

Have your cake and eat it, too

[mcrbids]

In a literal sense, you are correct. When you add features, you add stuff for the computer to do.

But that doesn't represent the reality of the past 30 years. For 30 years, we've gotten significantly more for the *same* amount of consumption. My computer today burns about 120 watts total, about the same as the first 286/20 I ever had. So we have a millionfold improvement in performance at *no* meaningful additional cost.

Software may cost more to run to add more features, but this is countermanded by the fact that all of today's software is grossly inefficient and there is incredible room for improvement in overall performance if we only take the time to do so! I've seen software performance improve 100x simply by limiting the amount of data involved in a string pattern match, for example!

Yes, in most cases, you can have your cake, sell a piece, and still eat it, if you focus on software inefficiency and make your software work quickly. I improved the performance of one of our products by about 70% in two days by running lots of testing to find out what the cause was.

The result is an application that seems WAY FASTER without doing any less than before. w00t!

I was sick of FF's performance, so...

[AlgorithMan]

I was sick of FF's performance, so tried to improve it. Here are my conclusions:
When you delete (or move) your firefox settings directory, then firefox is fast as hell again, so FF is not inherently slow. It becomes slower over time, so I looked for things that changed over time and I found that the performance stays good (except for flash!) even if you navigate dozens of sites on 4 year old hardware, if you do the following things:

• restrict yourself to the indispensable add-ons (although comparing browsers with add-ons to browsers without add-ons is quite pointless, imho)
• use f*cking adblock! ads eat up so much performance! adblock is the one add-on that will improve your performance
• clear the history and see how fast firefox suddenly becomes again... I have set firefox to delete the history and search history on closing the prog. This can become a pain sometimes, but the performance is woth the sacrifice

Re:I was sick of FF's performance, so...

[AlgorithMan]

Although I have to say that UI and rendering should run in different threads...

Maybe the following text on youtube:

[Kartu]

"Try YouTube in a new web browser Download Google Chrome" also has something to do with "chrome"'s increased popularity?

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[Alex Belits]

gb2/b/

</sarcasm>

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[hairyfeet]

Have you tried using a Firefox optimized for your CPU? Since you said netbook I'm assuming an Atom CPU, correct? You'll want the P3 build.

Re:Firefox 4...

[Malc]

I so hope they go to a process per tab. The benefits out-weigh the memory demands, and with computers with more than 4GB becoming more and more commonplace, why put constraints on the majority of users that only benefits a few people on old hardware? Legacy software for legacy systems. I hope a multiprocess implementation comes with decent memory and CPU profiling tools so I can make decisions about killing off individual tabs that are stealing too much memory or CPU. Chrome already does this at a basic level. FF is always going to be leaky, even it's through the flexibility it gives to add-ons. On top of that, it's got to be more secure having tab isolation via multiple processes.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[micheas]

I remember back like 4 years ago it was twice as fast as IE.

It's now about five times faster than IE, unfortunately that still isn't very fast.

Firefox is lacking innovation & also control

[burni2]

Yet the performance issues are just one side of the coin.

FF's inability to react to a user demand for easily obfuscating the Useragent or even the HTTP_ACCEPT have led to the panopticlick.eff.org problem.
Leading to the urge to use 3rd party plugins like noscript/adblock or even privoxy.

Firefox is mostly doing innovation, where it's unnecessary, like the mouse-hover changing skins under Win7. But where is the opera-like visited-closed-sites-recycle-button ?

From my point of view what FF lacks is also a configuration menu within the browser status bar, not the one presented to you atm through extras->options/settings why not scraping extras ->
and just putting up a settings-menu ?

What's missing:

- behaviour restrictions on java script (don't give me the 5 somethings toogles you can uncheck)
    - including the ability to prevent certain javascript from executing (Flying javascript windows block)
- bevhaviour restrictions for redirections
- behaviour restrictions on user agent (native)
- behaviour restrictions on plugins (much better) (not that overruled by microsoft .net -> can only get rid of me through regedt32 crap, or JQS - Java Quick Start(*))
- behaviour restrictions of plugins on a site-per-site base including java script/plugins/cookies
    this even goes so far to "easily" restrict the plugin search path, for example mediaplayer/drm are loaded from the c:\programs\media play ..\plugins path you can only disable them,
    but removing those entries directly from the plugin-list with two clicks is not possible

- access-restrictions onto domains/ips blocked for navigation (preventing the Koobfacegang) - manually and automaticly(phishing url check/privacy concern)
- better cookie management, accept cookies on default (save them temporarly for only lasting one session) - but reading restricted - user has to activate the needed onces
- export these sitespecific access restrictions+bookmarks into a container file and making it easily distributable for network admins (or just easy to backup)

But these things can all be added through plugins, but why not implement them direct into the browser ?

(*) From my point of view disabling JQS on a machine with a frequent use of java programs isn't impacting the performance so much (I tried it both and I can't really feel the difference) it's one thing less which eats memory and does nothing most of the time it's started as a windows service.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[icebraining]

I also have a weak laptop (although it's better than an Atom). But I don't get annoyed because I usually only start Firefox once per week, or so. Hibernation (both to RAM and to disk) is great.

And it doesn't feel slow while browsing, even with 12 enabled extensions, unless I'm loading over 9000 tabs at once. Although I noticed NoScript is a big part of its speedup.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[pegdhcp]

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.

It all boils down to plug-ins. I personally use firefox mainly for the plug-ins (Greasemonkey and friends), however one option that is available to each and every browser (well almost) is causing nearly half of my Linux crashes. Some flash applets that is in frequent use amongst Turkish newspapers are leaking like a river.So it depends on which content you are pushing to the browser, not on which platform you are running it. I am gradually switching to the Chrome in these days... On the other hand Thunderbird works almost perfectly, only with some minor code page problems if the sender of mail/meeting invitation used some arcane Outlook options...

Losing my support

[dugeen]

Successive Firefox updates have been more and more careless in their side-effects - the one that made Firefox use the Internet Explorer security settings being a prime example. For an extra dose of irony, the 'don't update automatically' option is also broken. If an effective uninstaller for Google Update was released, I'd be off to Chrome; if Flashblock and Torbutton were available for Opera, I'd be off to Opera.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[icebraining]

IIRC they created tabs for browsing

Actually, no, it was NetCaptor (which used the IE-engine, but had it's own GUI), in '97.

open alternative

[kangsterizer]

So Firefox is not open anymore?

Talk about FUD, mr Google Closed Chrome.

Re:Firefox 4...

[kangsterizer]

>And I really, really hope they won't go for the process per tab like planned. It takes a lot of extra memory for little benefit (IMO).

I agree on that. I love OOPP, but not per-tab processes

yep, the issue is mainly the vast majority of "supporters" who have no idea of the implications, simply "think it sounds cool, google does it and theres a nice cartoon about it" aka drink the kool aid provided by google since it's their technology, and push the developers

oopp is perfect. now if they fix ff startup speed people will feel like its as light and quick as chrome (oh wait, the interface must have a weirdo menu too, feels "lighter"). seriously, when people realize ff uses far less memory than chrome and loads pages just as quick, they complain about the startup speed. somehow understandable, i guess. most of them close the window and reopen ff.

You mean the good old days

[Sycraft-fu]

The same good old days when everyone respected their elders, crime was low, the economy was always good, politicians were honest and so on? In other words, the past that never was.

You are looking at the past through rose coloured glasses and remembering what you want to about computers, not the real situation. You are also ignoring plenty of advances in terms of maintainability of code, advanced in UI and so on, all of which take more space and so on.

Get off it, you sound like an elitist that only writes code in a text editor, and probably writes horrible unmaintainable spaghetti code in the name of "optimization".

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[tehcyder]

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. ;-)

Good joke, but unfortunately it's the other operating system that most people still use, so if Firefox has a problem there, then it has a problem full stop.

It all comes down to preference

[Ranma-sensei]

I mean, I liked Opera from the very beginning, but I never even got close to liking Firefox (which I'm forced to use at work); which is interesting, because I liked the Netscape Navigator (not much, but I did).

Yet, my best friend just loves FF, while he finds Opera too restrictive (don't ask).

One of my co-workers OTOH prefers IE, although she permanently manages to infect her laptop (yeah, I know: O.o).

So, as far as preference goes, there's all kinds of flavors to choose from, so why all this bickering?

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[wye43]

Firefox is bloated. Starts extremely slowly, and the latest versions are crashing like mad. I'm also sick of the single-thread approach they have, one tab is slowing all tabs down.

I permanently switched to Chrome a few weeks ago, I couldn't take it anymore.

It depends on how willing to be abused you are.

[Fantastic Lad]

I'm really sorry to offend, but for goodness sake. . !

If you don't use some form of adblock and flashblock then you deserve to have a slow browser.

"Gee! Advertisers are abusing my trust but I'm too daft to recognize it. Why is my browser crawling? Mozilla sucks!"

Jeez! What are you? An Apple user? That's like complaining about your "slow" hardware while at the same time hosting a stack of botnet/malware software you were too stupid to avoid installing. Yes. It's the SAME thing. -A bunch of crap code on your system trying to separate fools from their money and you let it put itself there.

When it comes to technology, I'm all for new innovation, so upon hearing how great Chrome was, I gave it a shot.

I didn't notice any speed increase at all. Hardly surprising.

What I DID notice was that Chrome was prone to freezing and that it lacked the ability for me to configure the damned GUI according to my tastes. If you don't like where buttons are placed, tough-luck buck, because there's no way to change them.

All told, it made me feel claustrophobic.

I tried Chrome TWICE. After a week, I thought I must have been hallucinating. Code produced by the greatest public collection of computer geniuses on the planet couldn't possibly be that lame; it must be me. So I gave it my all. There was one feature I liked; one of their add-ons was noticeably more refined than the Firefox version, but that's third party stuff and has no reflection on Mozilla. But again, the browser froze and died on the third page I tried accessing, (I was trying to read a review over on Gamespot a friend insisted I read. This was a good test for both browsers because I never visit that site so neither FF or Chrome had any of Gamespot's code heavy bullshit in either of their caches). Chrome choked and froze, and FF cut through it with no problem. That by itself is enough to end this debate, but it was the lack of control over the Chrome GUI which I found most annoying; it made me feel like an Apple user. And just to reiterate; when you use Flash and Ad blocking, there's zero speed difference between the two browsers. None that I could notice, anyway.

The one bit of kudos I'll offer Chrome is that the options menu wasn't Appled down to nothing, but the fact that I even need to mention this is retarded. It's like saying, "Oh, you have both arms! Good for you!" I could still do most of what FF offers, but the buggy execution and the total lack of GUI control said to me, "Beta. Come back when you're done".

And now that I think of it. . .

Evil or not, Google is a profit-motivated organization, and its primary business is not giving you a great browser. It's primary business is delivering advertising to you. The two things might run a parallel course past many points, but don't ever forget that Google is not your friend; when all is said and done, you are the john and money is changing hands. An open source browser is the only truly trustworthy browser out there. FF doesn't ever feel like it's trying to bullshit me. (It's real love!)

I'd rather have buggy open-source software than have perfect software which I can't see through. And the fact that FF gives me basically perfect performance is a very big deal. It took a long time and a lot of work to get Mozilla's browser this good. Why the hell would I want to jump to some ad-company's free calculator? The thing doesn't even work properly.

-FL

Re:It depends on how willing to be abused you are.

[drinkypoo]

I'd rather have buggy open-source software than have perfect software which I can't see through.

Don't be a total toolbag.

And the fact that FF gives me basically perfect performance is a very big deal.

You're insane. Firefox has the slowest Javascript performance of all major browsers, and frankly, even Slashdot loads faster in Chromium than in Firefox. I have plenty of machine, too, to the point where hardware definitely is not the problem.

It took a long time and a lot of work to get Mozilla's browser this good. Why the hell would I want to jump to some ad-company's free calculator? The thing doesn't even work properly.

In my experience, it works at least as well as Firefox. I've had problems with some versions of chromium refusing to load some pages, including some google pages. But I've had Firefox refuse to load at least as many pages, and it seems to have more problems with networking; connections to a flaky site just seem to time out more in Firefox. And the MOST annoying part of this is that Firefox will take away a partially loaded page that I'm currently reading and replace it with an error message. That is the most abusive thing a web browser has ever done to me, unless of course I've ever been rooted remotely, through IE. In fact, it DID happen to me once, but it was because this dipshit in the IT department brought up his own DHCP server which pointed to some compromised DNS, and I had just brought the machine up and gone to windows update. Or tried to.

Re:It depends on how willing to be abused you are.

[Fantastic Lad]

Don't be a total toolbag.

Wow. Chrome is opensource. I'm a total toolbag.

You're insane. Firefox has the slowest Javascript performance of all major browsers, and frankly, even Slashdot loads faster in Chromium than in Firefox. I have plenty of machine, too, to the point where hardware definitely is not the problem.

I've honestly not noticed any Javascript speed issues with FF. What are people expecting exactly? By the time the images have finished loading, a whole page is up and running and I can read it. What should I be unhappy about here?

And the MOST annoying part of this is that Firefox will take away a partially loaded page that I'm currently reading and replace it with an error message. That is the most abusive thing a web browser has ever done to me,

Hm. That IS irritating. I seem to recall that happening to me before. A long time ago. Maybe I just visit inherently more stable sites than you. I have a fairly low tolerance for wait times and buggy software, but FF long ago rose beyond that margin for me. I've long considered it a 'done' technology with only minor bits of polishing necessary as well as updates as new requirements come along, (like HTML video).

Chrome just fails to impress me as much as the fanfare implies that it should, and most of the complaints about FF seem to stem from the fact that it doesn't deliver a satisfying experience when it comes to having lots of adverts flashing on the page. This just seems like a weird complaint which I solved by simply making them go away. But then, I'm a bad consumer. I try to do as little of it as possible.

But as I said; I like innovation. If Chrome is doing some good things with refinement, then that's great. If it spurs FF into better shape, just as long as they don't fix what ain't broke, then that's great too. I just don't have any problems which need fixing. Everything I want to work, works.

-FL

Re:It depends on how willing to be abused you are.

[drinkypoo]

Wow. Chrome is opensource. I'm a total toolbag.

You are if you use Open Source as a reason why Firefox is superior to Chrome, which is what it looked like in your comment above.

I've honestly not noticed any Javascript speed issues with FF. What are people expecting exactly? By the time the images have finished loading, a whole page is up and running and I can read it. What should I be unhappy about here?

I want the page to load quickly, so that I can skim it to decide if I should read it. But beyond that, Firefox just seems to have incompetent Javascript. This is not to say that I'm smarter than the people who are doing that stuff, or that I could do it better; I couldn't get past step one, whatever that is, I'm not a software engineer. But I notice that Firefox magnifies the effects of incompetent Javascript. This is most noticeable (to me) on Facebook, which has lots of it. To be fair, Firefox has become dramatically better in recent releases. But I think the damage has already been done, at least as far as I'm concerned. Unless Chromium takes a sudden turn for the worse, I'm already a convert.

And the MOST annoying part of this is that Firefox will take away a partially loaded page that I'm currently reading and replace it with an error message. That is the most abusive thing a web browser has ever done to me,

Hm. That IS irritating. I seem to recall that happening to me before. A long time ago. Maybe I just visit inherently more stable sites than you.

Well, we both visit Slashdot, and Slashdot is one of the sites I've had it happen to me on most. This sort of thing isn't an everyday occurrence; it happens when there are network problems like dropped packets, mostly during periods of high congestion on my link, which is throttled to 512kbps as I get access from a local WISP which has to bounce their signal off the top of the local volcano. But basically any other browser fails to connect less than Firefox, and most of them let me read whatever I've downloaded when the connection fails.

Chrome just fails to impress me as much as the fanfare implies that it should, and most of the complaints about FF seem to stem from the fact that it doesn't deliver a satisfying experience when it comes to having lots of adverts flashing on the page. This just seems like a weird complaint which I solved by simply making them go away. But then, I'm a bad consumer. I try to do as little of it as possible.

I don't know of any browsers that elegantly render scads of crap flashing in your face at once. I do have AdBlock and Flashblock (and most of the functionality of noscript... but not all!) in Chromium.

Re:It depends on how willing to be abused you are.

[Fantastic Lad]

You are if you use Open Source as a reason why Firefox is superior to Chrome, which is what it looked like in your comment above.

Ehn? No. I didn't research a point before stating it as a fact. That's shortsighted tomfoolery well worth squashing. However, thinking that Open Source has valid advantages over closed software is a non-falsifiable opinion, and it's a damned solid one with a few billion words written in its defense. It's not a black and white issue by any means, and there are provisos to be dropped all over the place, but I doubt you're capable of getting me to retract it unless you're sitting on some kind of data bombshell I've managed to never hear about or consider over the last decade. Best to stay on less shaky ground when you call names.

To be fair, Firefox has become dramatically better in recent releases. But I think the damage has already been done, at least as far as I'm concerned. Unless Chromium takes a sudden turn for the worse, I'm already a convert.

Well, it certainly sounds like you've found a rewarding browser which has solved a lot of problems that irritated you in the past. There's a lot of value in that. I'd use Chrome too if it allowed me to sculpt the GUI according to my taste, didn't crash or freeze up frequently, (literally my experience), offered speed increases in areas where I find things to actually be too slow, (which I don't), and was made by people who don't have an ulterior motive which involves me clicking on a lot of adverts. The whole Chrome experience is laced with both subtle and not-so-subtle attention channeling. It has to be. That's its purpose. I just don't like feeling manipulated.

But each to their own.

-FL

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:Ok

[metamatic]

How compatible is it? Again, rhetorical question.

There are any number of Java demos you can run on a JVM on pretty much any OS. Entire games, even--Java4K.

Re:Ok

[Sycraft-fu]

And your point? First off, these are not complex by any stretch of the imagination. Yes, there's a 4k game. Wonderful, it does not hold much interest to me. I'd rather play Mass Effect 2 which has far more complex gameplay, a better store, superb voice acting, beautiful graphics and so on. Yes, it requires 12.6GB on my HD. However I don't mind, I've got 1.5TB total, I can happily spare many a gig for better gameplay and still have tons left.

Also if you are talking efficiency please note those games rely on the libraries Java provides to do their thing. On my system Java is 86MB for all the files it requires to run. Java itself doesn't run in a vacuum either, it relies on various services provided by my OS to be able to work. That makes the 4k game a bit less impressive.

Again: You can achieve some amazingly small programs, but there are tradeoffs. Those are fine in cases like 4k demos, since the whole point is "What can you do in 4k of disk space?" It's a special competition, not a programming ideal. However that doesn't mean you can do it for any and everything, nor that it is indicative of modern programs being bloated.

As I said, compare ME2 to one of those games. Now you show me how to make something with the same complexity, detail, features, etc in a tiny space, well then I'm real interested. However when what you can show is "Simple stuff takes less space," I am unimpressed. That is well known. Difference is today we HAVE space (and memory, and CPU power, and GPU power), and so we can do more.

Hell look at movies. Why can we now do 1080p (Blu-ray max) whereas previously 480p (DVD) was as good as it got? Magic? Sinister plot? No, two things:

1) Storage. DVDs only hold 8.5GB max per side and can do a max of 9.8mbits/second of data. Blu-ray holds 50GB per side and can do 48mbits/second of data. That means we simply have more information available, which allows for the encoding of a much higher resolution picture.

2) Processing. DVDs are MPEG-2 because that was all that could be done on an ASIC cheaply at the time. Blu-rays are H.264, which gets much better compression but requires much more power. Not a problem, ASICs today can handle it, as can computers. 480p MPEG2 takes maybe a 400MHz P2 class CPU to decode in realtime in software. 1080p H.264 takes a reasonably speedy Core 2 Duo to decode in realtime in software.

We have a better image because we can now store and process it cheaply and easily. It couldn't be done in the past. Wasn't that we couldn't have liked higher rez, our eyes haven't gotten better, it was that technology couldn't handle it. Now it can. That doesn't make blu-rays "bloated" it makes them superior quality.

Re:Ok

[Johann Lau]

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.

I never started pretending that, so how could I possibly stop?! I just posted a link and said it's 1K. New paragraph, actual post/opinion. Anything you read into my linking that video is just that, stuff you read into it which I never claimed.. I just figured this might be interesting for someone who doesn't even BLINK at the idea of a hello world program taking up 10MB haha..

Hell FF runs good on a netbook

[Sycraft-fu]

We install it on all systems at work, which includes netbooks, and I've never been dissatisfied using it on one. Seems to browse the web plenty fast, and I am not a patient person (Internet connections below about 10mbit annoy me with their load times). That isn't so say it can't be made better, everything has room for improvement. However it isn't as though it is slow on modern systems, even the low end.

I look at some of these browser speed comparisons in the same way as the ACID 3 test: Geeks comparing ePenis length. You are measuring something that doesn't matter in the real world and acting like it is a big deal. With regards to browser speed the only thing that matters is if it is fast enough people don't feel they are waiting on it. We are now to that point. You start to deal with the limits of human perception and that once you start to get to the low milliseconds, well you are under the threshold.

For that matter I'd bet the largest lag is often network latency. If your ping to a site is 100ms, means you'll see a page at best 100ms after you ask for it. Thus doesn't matter so much if the browser renders it in 10ms or 30ms, the overall time is the same.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[characterZer0]

No, a garbage collector is a digital pressure relief valve.

UI whoops

[identity0]

Speaking of the bookmarks editor, try this in Firefox 3.X: Compare your browser history to your bookmarks, to see which site you've visited have been bookmarked.

Whoops, it's basically impossible (or at least takes too much effort to be worth it), because History and Bookmarks are separate tabs off the same window. You can't see both at the same time, just one or the other. And you can't open two instances of that window to dedicate one to Bookmarks and one to History. Even better, when you switch between those two tabs, it resets the window scroll position to the very top so you have to scroll down, see what pages you visited, change tabs, scroll down to see if those are bookmarked, repeat...

Maybe these guys should think a little about how their UI is designed?

I told you they're falling for it...

[Hurricane78]

I already commented on the last stories about Firefox, that they start to fall for a very bad thing:
They start to transform from innovators to imitators.

Ok, they always were a bit on the imitator side, considering how most cool features came from Opera at the beginning.
But at least they were not thinking in the imitator way. Or in other words: They were independent.

Now with things like this, the mindset turns. And what that results in, is a disease that we best know from Microsoft:
The disease, where they always run behind others, but can never catch up. Since they start orienting themselves relative to those others, and set their goal to the position of those others. While those others themselves set their goal to something completely new (=innovating), and have long moved on, when the followers reach that old position. It’s a game that can’t be won. By definition.

Obligatory car analogy:
It’s like in a car race: When you orient yourself on the car in front of you, you won’t catch it. Only when you stop caring how your position is relative to it, and focus on the actual driving, that you will suddenly notice how you pass it. (This caught me countless times in racing games.)

So I hope they will get back to independent action as soon as possible. Or we will soon be presented by a “Chrome/Opera/IE, but not quite as good”.

Not this again

[Interoperable]

Slashdot needs a dedicated forum where the same old debates can be rehashed at length. Especially ones that fall into the category of false dichotomies. I propose a forum with threads for each common point of contention. They would be deleted once every two days to allow the same old arguments to be rehashed by the same people until the end of time.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[squiggleslash]

I don't think current or previous versions of Firefox are bloated as such. The complaints have more to do with the UI and the responsiveness/memory usage of the system rather than the feature set or the physical size of the product.

I would, I have to say, be saddened if Firefox drifted away from its current UI to a more Safari or Chrome inspired UI. I've used both for short periods of time, never felt at home, and always come back. What's needed is for the bugs to be fixed. It would be nice to see certain under-the-hood architectural changes done too (we can argue about what that should compromise, but I'd personally like to see it running over a managed code system with future plug-ins required to be delivered in managed-code form, but that's a whole other debate), but right now I'd settle for something that doesn't use 50% CPU simply because I have a lot of tabs open.

Why is WebKit growing?

[DaChesserCat]

Gee, what's the fastest growing platform, today?

Mobile. Whether you're talking iPhone or Android, most of the browsers are based on WebKit.

I can't imagine why we'd be seeing a surge in WebKit-based browsers :-P

I can't wait for a decent implementation of FireFox on my Android phone, especially if it supports plug-ins and add-ons. I'm dying to be able to use AdBlock Plus and Aardvark on my cell. I have a definite cap on my wireless bandwidth, and it can get VERY expensive if I'm roaming. I once paid over $12 for the privilege of reading a Linux Magazine article, because I was across the border in Canada. Being able to kill the bandwidth-hogging banners and other crap would've been so nice . . . .

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[fast turtle]

Of the many reasons I quit using firefox by default was the stability issues. I'm sorry but even with just Noscript installed, it would crash at least once a day on me. Another reason was the memory leaks. I tend to leave the damn thing open for weeks on end and would routinely run out of memory on a 64bit system due to them. So the combination of stability and leaks finally drove me far enough away that the only thing I use Firefox on Linux for is a couple of sites with flash games. Otherwise I Konq 3.5 as it does everything I need (text/images/links) and doesn't run flash or other bleeping plug-ins No Adverts/Banners as I've got them disabled.

A pity, indeed

[Millennium]

Yeah, the Firefox devs are in a real bind. If only there were some way that they could fork off a new "Mozilla browser" project from the existing base, with the goal of being a fast and light alternative to its bloatware progenitor.

More Powere to Standards

[allcar]

I agree entirely that browser diversity is a good thing. The wider the variety of browsers available, the more necessary it is for them to comply with Open Standards. No browser with a minority market share can expect web developers to code to their non-standard behaviour.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[BrokenHalo]

I've got FF 3.6.3 here, and no sign of crashes. Actually, I can't remember the last browser crash, and my Alzheimer's hasn't entirely set in yet. And yes, I do have Flash installed. (Along with Adblock, Flashblock and BetterPrivacy.)

Startup time isn't instantaneous on this ageing 2.16GHz MacBook, but it very nearly is on my Athlon X2 desktop machine. But if Chrome rocks your boat, I won't argue against it. Though the fact that Google uses it for datamining is a bit distasteful to me. As a matter of interest, can anyone enlighten me as to how Chromium compares?

I'm a long time user ... sort of

[hany]

I'm a long time user of Mozilla, later on Firefox. Sort of. Because I've been using it mostly as Galeon - lightweight browser which uses Mozilla's renderer.

That being said it does not matter to me that much how many features Firefox has or does not have. Galeon feature set (and Feirefox renderer abilities) matters most to me. And while Galeon is something like "dead" for few years (no new features, only minor maintenance tweaks to get it running with newer Firefox releases), I have to say that my browsing needs seems to be stable for now and I'm satisfied.

But there is one big concern growing: library bundling by Firefox. It's against Fedora packaging policies, it's against what I consider good software engineering. Coupled with slower "inivation", why would I want to destabilize my whole desktop just to get slowly evolving Firefox?

So, either Firefox goes to its roots or I have to look for another browser.

Chrome is bundling forked libraries too, so out of question for me. That leave WebKit based browsers.

So, we'll see.

Bloated my ass...

[xQuarkDS9x]

I've been using Firefox for the last eight years now and I intend to stick with this browser for the forseeable future. It is vastly superior in all ways to every other browser out there, and with addon's such as Adblock Plus, Noscript, and Cookie Monster, it makes browsing websites far more enjoyable, and far less dangerous as well.

If someone thinks Firefox is bloated, they are welcome to try alternatives such as K-Melon.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[Mashdar]

I have firefox on four seperate machines (atom, core2duo, AMD regor/sargas, and a pentium IV). In linux (specifically ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, 9.10, and 10.04), an up-to-date firefox boots in .5s on all of them. A few of the machines have windows and similar performance. Perhaps something is wrong with your install or something is recking your performance?

Ribbon, wrong tab order

[Max_W]

I do not appreciate that Firefox changed the tab order for the new tabs. Now I have to change the tab order on every my computer via about:config.

Firefox, please, do not follow example of Microsoft and Chrome, do not fix what is not broken. Please, do not introduce a ribbon as in IE and Chrome. I do not like this ribbon. I cannot even get accustomed to it.

IE and MS Office ceased to exist for me after the ribbon appearance. It is so damn fluid, it takes a lot of time to find anything on it. The same about MS Player and Windows 7. Nothing is fixed and solid anymore. Everything moves to somewhere on the screen where it is convenient to some usability PhD.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[knorthern knight]

> Have you tried using a Firefox optimized for your CPU?

Why just Firefox optimized for your CPU? Howsabout EVERY open-source app optimizied for your CPU? It's called Gentoo linux.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[DaVince21]

Memory leaks in Firefox likely have been around ever since 1.0, since back then the browser wouldn't even start up for a fair amount of people.

Mozilla shouldn't have started from the Netscape codebase, but hey, if they didn't, maybe the web wouldn't be progressing as much now.

Re:FIX IT YOURSELF

[DaVince21]

Yeah? Go ahead, see how well you do.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[hairyfeet]

BWA HA HA HA HA HA! Oh, are you serious? BWA HA HA HA HA HA! On a netbook? Call back in 5 years when the compile is done, kay? Me and my customers actually like having an OS where we can run all the popular software and everything is nice and completely jumping through flaming CLI hoops free.

I just delivered a W7 HP netbook to my dad, 12 inch, AMD Neo X2, 2Gb of RAM, plays SD and HD video smooth as butter, runs his messenger with webcam so he can talk to his retired friends in Florida, and I know short of dad getting something new to plug into it that needs a driver (because not having a CD he doesn't have a clue what to do with a disc) I won't have to be called out there again, because Windows updates don't screw up hardware.

Can you say the same with your OS? When was the last time you needed CLI, this month? This week? yesterday? When was the last time an update fucked a driver? Time before last? This time? Because I ran Ubuntu from 6-9.04 on 4 separate machines and it NEVER updated without fucking something up. Not once. I tried PCLOS, Mepis, half a dozen others, and always the same. Linux has the shittiest record when it comes to QA and driver testing I have seen! works fine on a server, where nothing ever changes and companies spend millions making sure their hardware "just works" but on the desktop? BWA HA HA HA HA! I wouldn't wish that CLI mess on my worst enemy!

A wise man once said "Linux is free if your time is worthless" and no truer words have ever been spoken, my friend. No truer words. My time is $35-50 an hour, and I have better things to do than trawl forums for "fixes" or spend hours trying to tweak some mess of CLI just to get my fricking wireless to work AGAIN.

Re:It always seemed bloated...

[wye43]

I used FF 3.6.3 as well. After getting tons of crashes, I went to their website to report the problem and I noticed a lot of people are encountering this and they are not doing shit about it. They also have issues with very slow DNS resolve time on proxies for AGES - tons of people have reported it and they are not doing shit about it either.

Perhaps it does not affect everyone (you are one of the lucky ones) but this certainly affects a lot of users.