Firefox Is Lagging Behind, Its Co-Founder Says

sopssa writes "Firefox's co-founder Blake Ross is skeptical about the future of Firefox. He says that 'the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive, and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly.' Within the past year Chrome has been steadily increasing its market share, along with the other WebKit-based browsers like Safari. Meanwhile Mozilla's (outgoing) CEO says that while Firefox is more competitive than ever, they're looking forward to their mobile version of Firefox. 'Clearly, both are annoyed at what has happened to their former renegade web browser. But, by many accounts, Firefox is no longer considered to be the light, open alternative it once was.'"

Comments

Things Mature

[WrongSizeGlass]

Companies and products mature over time and Mozilla & Firefox have done just that. Firefox will never be "light" again. Not because of technical reasons, but because users demand a full-featured browser.

Chrome and Safari are taking some of Firefox's market share, but that's because they have nowhere to go but up. IE is still losing the most ground and will continue to do so. More equity in the browser market will only breed more competition, and that's always good for consumers.

Re:Things Mature

[Sycraft-fu]

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

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

Re:Things Mature

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[westlake]

h.264 is a non-issue

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

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

Hardware accelerated in Flash 10. Silverlight.

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

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

Re:Things Mature

[BZ]

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

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

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

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

Re:Things Mature

[wanax]

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

Re:Things Mature

[Xyde]

I'd love to describe one.

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

I could go on if you'd like?

Re: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.

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:It always seemed bloated...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Yes...

[RyanFenton]

Of course development has slowed - it has achieved the goal most users/developers have wanted for it: To be a stable, fairly secure platform that allows a decent plugin model, and works consistently between platforms.

This is like complaining that the GNU C compiler isn't keeping up with the .Net framework, because it isn't taking risks or pushing envelopes... that's not the job it exists to do.

Chrome gets to be sexy, because it is newer experiment in browser ideas mashed together. Firefox leaves that to its plugins - losing some of the "synergy" of a singular design, but gaining much more flexibility in terms of user preferences.

Until Chrome can do everything I want with all my Firefox plugins, I'll keep ignoring it. I just don't want to be losing features in Firefox in the pursuit of the new sexy, when I already love it for what it is.

Ryan Fenton

Re:Yes...

[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...

[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

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

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

[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.

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.

Chrome is seriously lagging behind

[caubert]

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

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.

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.

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

[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

[eosp]

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

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.

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.

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?

[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:It always seemed bloated...

[BrokenHalo]

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

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

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

Re: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:It always seemed bloated...

[FatdogHaiku]

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

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?