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How Maintainable Is the Firefox Codebase?

Posted by Unknown on from the self-referential-fox dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A report released this morning looks at the maintainability level of the Firefox codebase through five measures of architectural complexity. It finds that 11% of files in Firefox are highly interconnected, a value that went up significantly following version 3.0 and that making a change to a randomly selected file can, on average, directly impact eight files and indirectly impact over 1,400 files. All the data is made available and the report comes with an interactive Web-based exploratory tool." The complexity exploration tool is pretty neat.

9 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Does this guy know what Firefox is? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 4, Funny

    >> A number of modules, namely, accessible, browser and security, frequently appear among the most complex modules. Further investigation may be helpful in identifying why that is the case.

    Does this guy know what Firefox is?

  2. So? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It finds that 11% of files in Firefox are highly interconnected

    Figures like this would be more useful if they were put in context. What is a "normal" level for connectedness? What is the level for the Linux kernel, or for GCC? Compared to other similar sized projects, is 11% good or bad?

    1. Re:So? by hedwards · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Normal probably isn't so useful here, but it would give some context. 11% of files being highly interconnected could be a sign of incompetence on the part of the developers, or it could be a sign that they're engaged in sound design by splitting off commonly used methods into their own files and treating them as libraries.

      I'd suspect that the latter is the case here.

  3. Got a trojan warning by dasapfe · · Score: 5, Informative

    MSE says this bugger is present on the site: http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/threat/encyclopedia/entry.aspx?name=Trojan%3AJS%2FIframeRef.K&threatid=2147679863

  4. Re:Fork by hedwards · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You know that you don't have to load things in tabs if you don't want to, right? And I highly doubt that you're going to have any meaningful performance improvements by loading up different windows. Plugins are there for every browser and the worst offenders tend to be things like Flash which aren't always easily avoided. Extentions themselves aren't usually a problem if you don't install badly behaving ones. And many of them do actually help out with performance, noscript anybody?

  5. I'm interested in seeing analysis of WebKit/Blink by 0x000000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am wondering how this stacks up to a project like WebKit/Blink, as well as seeing that project against the original KHTML. Sure it is a renderer/HTML layout/JavaScript engine only, and won't contain the browser chrome like Firefox, but I think it would be interesting to look at.

    Many people have also suggested that WebKit is easier to embed into various different environments (more so than Gecko) and that it has been able to evolve faster mainly due to the code base being cleaner, and I wonder if this holds true when looking at it from a complexity standpoint, or is it more complex but simply laid out better and in a way that is easier to understand?

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  6. LibXUL on Win32 approaching 4GB memory limit by revealingheart · · Score: 5, Informative

    According to recent comments (continued on the next day's thread), the win32 compiler that Mozilla use is approaching the 4GB limit, after which LibXUL (which Firefox depends upon) will no longer compile.

    It's currently at 3.5GB, and at the current rate, will reach the limit in approximately 6 months: Chart of memory usage of LibXUL during last 90 days

    While I think that Servo will produce a more decentralised design than Gecko and XUL, the memory limit will be reached well before that. With Windows XP support ending next year, Mozilla should consider migrating to x64 as soon as reasonably possible, keeping x32, but focusing on stripping large and extraneous code above new features.

    1. Re:LibXUL on Win32 approaching 4GB memory limit by HoserHead · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm a Firefox developer.

      This is slightly inaccurate. We aren't running out of memory to link Firefox, we're running out of memory to run Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) on Firefox.

      PGO looks at what is actually executed during a given workload and optimizes based on that. It can be a pretty big win — 30% in some workloads —so we work pretty hard to keep it going.

      Unfortunately, PGO needs to have not only all the code, but all the intermediate representations and other metadata about the code in memory at one time. (That's why we're running out of memory.)

      Unfortunately, MSVC doesn't support producing a 32-bit binary using their 64-bit compiler.

      (FWIW, Chrome has *always* been too big to use PGO.)

  7. The code base was not designed for concurrency by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's a real problem. The Firefox dev team gave up on running add-ons in a separate process (the "electrolysis" project) because the code base was too single-thread oriented. Remember, some of the code dates back to Netscape. There's talk of reviving that project now, but it's mostly talk and meetings.)

    Refitting concurrency tends to be very hard and the result tends to be ugly. You get something like Windows 3.x or MacOS 6/7, where easy things are complicated for the wrong reasons.