Firefox Is Lagging Behind, Its Co-Founder Says

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

Comments

Things Mature

[WrongSizeGlass]

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

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

Re:Things Mature

[HBoar]

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

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

Re:Things Mature

[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

[Unoti]

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

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

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

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

Re:Things Mature

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

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

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

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

Re:Things Mature

[BZ]

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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: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