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Mozilla: Following In Sun's Faltering Footsteps?
snydeq writes: The trajectory of Mozilla, from the trail-blazing technologies to the travails of being left in the dust, may be seen as paralleling that of the now-defunct Unix systems giant Sun. The article claims, "Mozilla has become the modern-day Sun Microsystems: While known for churning out showstopping innovation, its bread-and-butter technology now struggles." It goes on to mention Firefox's waning market share, questions over tooling for the platform, Firefox's absence on mobile devices, developers' lack of standard tools (e.g., 'Gecko-flavored JavaScript'), and relatively slow development of Firefox OS, in comparison with mobile incumbents.
Just as a n00bie type question (and I am looking for real answers) what did Mozilla innovate? I'm not real sure of the early history and I'm wondering what I don't know.
Instead of this rapid innovation thing, they should focus on maintaining security for the ESR versions, even the older ones. Wouldn't people like a bit of stability?
And that is why we need to help Mozilla by installing and using Firefox, dammit, not by simply taking potshots at it from our armchairs. Google is doing well enough. Stop using Chrome.
But Firefox got embarassed and offered to re-open my tabs.
Just about everything in the summary is wrong. I'm going to assume that the article isn't much better.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Do you have Firefox 36 on windows? Look at your advanced firewall settings.
Mozilla is non profit foundation while Sun was a publicly traded for profit corporation. Apples and Oranges.
except that I have it installed on my Android right now. By "mobile devices" did you mean crApple by any chance, fanboi?
Google (Chrome) is not the better, they have a lot of money for marketing actions.
Firefox is still my favorite Windows browser. IE still sucks, and Chrome chews up so much memory that it is useless after a few hours. On Mac, I prefer Safari, although I keep Firefox around for those rare sites that don't support Safari.
So I think they're still doing a good job on the desktop/laptop browser market. I just hope that their struggles in the mobile market don't impact the desktop.
No sig? Sigh...
Firefox has become the high school loser that tries to be popular by badly copycatting a popular person.
Anyone have any crazy rumors we can start about where Chrome is going? See if we can troll Firefox devs into implementing something completely asinine? Cuz you know if they think that's what Chrome's doing, they'll do it without thinking.
Since when is a corporation like Sun that got acquired by another corporation (Oracle) "defunct", as in "no longer in existence; dead; extinct?" The fact that Java, which was created and popularized by Sun is alive and (arguably) well is ample evidence that Sun is not defunct. It has simply been acquired.
Likewise, whatever the future of Mozilla may be, it's far more likely to trudge on and/or take on some other new life than to ever become "no longer in existence; dead; extinct." Just like the old Netscape browser that was its foundation.
Too bad they were so narrowminded.
LMAO, chrome uses less RAM only if you use less than 2 tabs, otherwise the sandboxing makes it eat up tons of RAM every time a new tab is opened.
And despite the sandboxing chrome is always at pwn2own.
Sun died a slow death following 1970's midwest business principals in a 2000's world. Even its open source efforts, although noble, were crippled by managements tunnel vision. Sun was practically predicated on the phrase "cash money millionaires" and everything, absolutely everything was licensed and contracted in perpetuity. The allure of Linux combined with chipset advances and the culture, in my opinion, are what killed Sun.
the help was no help either. Suns doc portal online was a festering carbunkle with a search feature and their community of greybeards on IRC were nothing less than violent toward anyone who dared to question the OS without having studiously memorized the entire canon of SUN scriptures. Being gobbled up by Oracle/whatever was an inevitability.
now, does Mozilla fit that profile? maybe yes, maybe who cares. theyre already the realmedia player of the browser world with a video chat system and an inline tile targeted advertising program. They validate your searches with google by default, and often times new releases steamroll your configuration options like download path. They arguably havent worked toward their stated mission since 2006 but that isnt the point. Mozillas license alone gives the community so much power over its direction that its path and principle arent relevant. One profoundly stupid move is all it takes before a massive fork, and there have been forks. iceweasel itself is proof the mozilla brand is only as effective as its adherence to principal.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Why should we care that it uses a lot of RAM? I didn't buy the RAM to sit there empty and look cool on a monitor screen showing "ooh, only 10% used!". Apps should use the RAM and so should the system (for caching, etc.).
I've been a Firefox user pretty much since it was released, but last year I switched to Chrome. It's not much better, but at least Chrome has less propensity to grow to gigantic memory proportions and slow down to a crawl and/or crash for no apparent reason.
Mozilla: Focus on making Firefox small, fast, efficient, and reliable, and I will gladly switch back.
Amazingly since about FF35 my memory issues it seemingly leaking memory have gone away. It can still get huge with a lot of windows/tabs open, but it's far better than it was only a few releases back. I still wouldn't call it 'small', but it seems better than it used to be until recently.
This article is just trying to attract pageviews by trying to create some controversy... market share is enough for then to survive (specially as more people as getting sick of chrome), local-browser javascript problems are the same in all browsers. FirefoxOS and mobile, everyone knew it would be difficult to beat android, so they are trying to attack the low cost market niche, just as microsft. Europe and the US will not see firefoxOS devices for a long time whenever it will be ready (not yet)
Firefox is still better than Chrome....
Chrome has sucked ever since they got rid of sidetabs
How clueless is the author? Releasing updates that don't work on a monthly basis, dropping thunderbird support, and cancelling the contract with Google to make Yahoo the default search engine are killing the company. All they make that's noteworthy is Firefox and they're completely screwing it up and turning it into an ad-infested spam pile.
Whoever says FF is "RAM-hungry" must obviously never used Chrome.
Mozilla the company is probably the best tech company anyone could hope to work for because of their morality (if you find yourself in agreement with their morals). Firefox is the only browser I trust. I refuse to allow Chrome to be installed on my computer, although I do allow Chromium (the open source part of it). Firefox is an AWESOME browser. My only complaint is when opening a zillion tabs and keeping it running like that over a period of days, it uses a lot of memory even after you close most of the tabs. It still seems to have a bit of a leak.
Firefox rose to prominence when the market desperately needed an alternative to the execrable Internet Explorer. Well, it worked. Firefox broke IE's stranglehold on the browser market, and now Chrome and Safari have kept it beat down. (And IE is now a pretty decent browser that is no longer a festering nest of standards-breaking crapola.)
Keeping a browser up to date and holding pace with the feature race is difficult and expensive. It's not surprising that Firefox has fallen behind while the commercial efforts keep steaming forward.
(Speaking for myself, I was a die-hard Firefox user for years, but switched to Chrome when Firefox's memory leaks kept getting worse and worse... with Chrome, I can "kill" a resource-hogging tab without killing my whole browser. I know what Google "charges" for Chrome (privacy) and it's a price I'm willing to pay.)
I'm grateful for what Firefox accomplished, but that doesn't mean we need it any more. (And there's no reason to think that should an open browser be needed again, one can't appear.)
If you care about privacy, ability to remove tracking, block ads and customize your web experience - Firefox is unbeatable. No other browser has ability to allow extensions to do so much (quite by design, I am sure - as the other 3 major browser makers are driven specifically by desire to mine information and sell your clicks to advertisers). As such, I don't see a viable replacement to Firefox in foreseeable future.
I suspect that the "big 3" would very much like Firefox to become a failure, if only because it would make their click-tracking ad-inserting behavior-recording job so much easier.
Thank you, FF, Ghostery, AdBlock Edge, Cookie Controller, Ref Control, UA Control and, of course, Greasemonkey, (without whom Google would be still tracking my ever click :) )
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you, but a few weeks ago I saw Chrome hit just a little short of 9GB RAM utilization on a machine that had been rebooted perhaps four hours before, with only a dozen open tabs. Was that a poor interaction between Chrome and my ad blocker and whatever the hell javascript and .GIFVs on Imgur does? Probably. But there's no way a browser's processes should be using more RAM than running virtual machines.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Because juggling RAM isn’t free in CPU time. It’s cool if you can fit it all in, but you still have to read and write data. If you have a lot of it, well your caches get trashed, and you’re still managing memory instead of doing meaningfull stuff.
the execrable Internet Explorer
Are you sure you didn't mean "excretable"?
Not making electrolysis their #1 priority a few years ago and turning on Eich. I just switched to Chrome and can't imagine what the hell people are thinking when they say that Firefox is now "just as fast as Chrome." Uh, no. It's noticeably less responsive in many cases. And with the Eich issue, they alienated a heck of a lot of conservative and libertarian users who switched to various forks or Chrome afterward in protest. Then their online magazine waded into the gamergate waters and took a pro-censorship of comments stance when the message didn't line up.
This is increasingly not a Mozilla that I want to support. If they want my support, they can make electrolysis their #1 priority so it becomes as fast and responsive as Chrome and then drive out the social justice warriors.
What killed Sun wasn't just aimless dicking around, it was the endless cycle of purchasing companies that had stuff they were missing, then laying off all of the top-paid employees — the ones who understood the products they'd just bought. Then they failed at an iteration of their Ultrasparc processor, it took them so long that by the time it came to market it would have been old and slow, so they skipped it. They never recovered in the land of single-thread performance, instead optimizing for the kind of workload which was already at the time increasingly being handled by cheap x86 clusters. This was an obvious road to destruction, and many of us pointed this out at the time, not that anyone expected Sun to listen to the people in the trenches by that time when they had proven conclusively that they were interested in no such thing.
Solaris provided only two innovative features probably ever: containers and ZFS. Both were too little too late to save Sun, and ZFS got open-sourced anyway, eliminating any potential competitive advantage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
slow down to a crawl
Which is usually causes by heavy swapping
What on earth do they mean by that? I've been using mobile FF for a long time, because it's the only mobile browser I found that supported AdBlock, NoScript, and Ghostery. I refuse to use the web at all without those extensions.
There were some early troubles with mobile FF but recent it has been working flawlessly for me. It's fast, responsive, supports pinch zoom, boomarking, and most importantly of all, extensions.
> I didn't buy the RAM to sit there empty and look cool on a monitor screen showing "ooh, only 10% used!".
That's you and not me. I didn't buy the RAM. Period.
I can buy it alright, I got the money. What I don't have is patience to adapt all my machines, most in the range 1 to 2 GB RAM. I maybe dreaming but I've seen so many excellent programs run in 512MB that I simply cannot conceive needing more than 2GB (except for cache, but then there are SSDs).
Actually, I'm annoyed that programs of late are so big or that 64-bit versions require more than 2GB RAM. You don't need to play chess in less than 1kB, but what is with this crescent use of RAM? To do the same things for which 128MB were once enough? What gives?
I'm a Firefox user on my Linux desktops (no Chrome is not enough for surfing, but it's ok for most Google-conceived uses). I'd like to use it more on my smartphones -- but smartphones suck! The screen is ridiculous (and I can't carry anything larger, I'm a businessman, can't use a backpack), connection is flimsy at best (and yeah, I can pay the same I do for a home connection, 4G is laughable here) and Firefox is too heavy for a small machine.
Opera had some good ideas (like the content-simplifying proxy), but software must be lighter on a phone. Now that Opera is Chrome-based, everything is heavy. The good thing is that Flash was flushed and it really was inefficient.
The smartphone is not a Firefox problem, it's a source of annoyance by itself.
.
Those companies that can transition from one to the other survive.
Those companies that cannot transition from one to the other falter.
In what way is it "Bloated"? It uses less ram than the Chrome/IE.
Memory being allocated doesn't thrash your cache. Loading data from memory to cache is CPU expensive. It doesn't matter how much memory an application is using, if CPU usage is slow, then so it cache trashing. I'm sure a contrived situation with low CPU usage and pre-fetching instructions could be created, but that's not real world.
Chrome is bloated too, so #1 is a non-issue. #2 is the main problem.
I like Chrome and use it both at home and work almost exclusively.
Whenever I take a look at Firefox (mostly for compatibility testing) I just think "why bother?",
Why bother using something that is identical to the thing you already use?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Sun's attitude always was "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Which was largely true, until they weren't cool anymore. But at that point the company was so big and entrenched that they'd lost sight of that. It was no longer "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Instead it was "If we keep making the things we've been making all along, people will buy them." The people in charge no longer understood that the engine of their success was constant innovation, and sat back and rested on their success. Assuming they ever understood that in the first place. It's entirely possible that Sun's success was entirely accidental. The gimmicks they started using to try to attract talent exposed their lack of understanding. It was not "Work for us and you'll get to design some of the coolest, bleeding edge technology in the world." It was "Work for us and we'll have a circus at work while we flail around aimlessly (And make you fill in a 12 page form to unlock version control.)"
Google's now in that position of making cool stuff that people will buy and use because it's cool. Their current leadership also seems to understand that they need to keep innovating to remain in the position they are now. Every so often you see some jackass writing about how Google needs to stop spending so much on "Useless R&D." I would suggest that you avoid taking stock advice from those people. Anywhoo, given that Google seems to understand that innovation is the key to success, the question is, can Mozilla keep up with them? Mozilla should have the advantage that they're able to focus on the one thing they do and do that really well. But to make serious advances in market share, they'd have to significantly stand out from the competition. I'm not entirely sure I can see that happening.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Maybe they are where they are partially because they force people out or actually fire them for the employees' political beliefs.
The CEO that stepped down because of a vocal bunch who didn't like his politics is the first to come to mind. He was one of the founders of Mozilla! Likely a big voice in it's innovation.
I also have a personal friend who helped a client in the British government - and he was let go because his boss got angry - the British government has been known to spy on some of it's inhabitants apparently, and helping the client doomed my friend.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Last time I checked, Sun was a corporation selling pro-level branded hardware and insanely expensive services (like they all do), being bought out by Oracle and Mozilla was a FOSS orgranisation watching over branding and provided guidance to a set of web- and mobile-centric FOSS projects.
Those two things couldn't be more wider apart.
As for Mozillas market and mindshare being eaten by Google: That is due to Google releasing the awesome Chrome browser, because the web is too important an income vector to them, so they decided to pull it inhouse and cut out the policy middleman. Mozilla itself is ten git commits away from switching from Gecko to Blink, and the devs could probalby do this in a weekend. Probalby have been doing it privately already just for the kicks. So no big deal, it's all free and replacable anyway.
The one big thing that Mozilla has going for them is their branding, and as far as I can tell that is going pretty well. Right now, anything standing between a totalitarian Googlezied control of the web and freedom loving citizens is Mozilla - at least in most peoples perception and if they continue playing their cards right, relyably drumming the hip and flashy but yet still underdog/freedom theme, they'll continue to do just fine.
IMHO Firefox OS was a bit of a stretch, but if they manage to keep things simple and intuitive in that ecosystem, having a mobile plattform that puts web-technology front and center could be just exactly the right thing a continuingly fragmented mobile space needs.
As for the browser: Google-independant "Hello" voicechat by Telefonica, Search by Yahoo, neat, google-independant environment syncing, etc. All these things aren't too bad. In fact they're all pretty interesting to me. And I am an IT opinion leader, as we all are. That should have Apple and Google raising their eyebrows.
What we need is a replacement for the Google online suite of apps, and if Mozilla can manage to pull yet another underdog of the industry in to help build that, we have a free-free competitor to all the Google stuff. Desperately needed!
Meantime, Mozilla IMHO is doing just fine making neat celebrative movies and playing to the hippster independant "we are different and free" crowd. That's what made apple big. Apple, however, is a PLC, dependant on profit. Google is too. Mozilla, OTOH, is mostly a FOSS organisation. They can all go on vacation 10 years and then come back and everything will still be the same for them. What does that have to do with revenue and eval problems Sun had back when Oracle scooped them up? ... Nothing.
I see Mozilla as a hip web-zentric play of the old and bland EFF & GNU organisations with a solid focus on branding (very smart btw.). They'll do just fine if they don't spread themselves to thin and wait for the big boys get all paniky about profits somewhere down the line.
I've got FF in everyday use and will continue to use it. If they build an independant contacts application for mobile and web alongside a calendar and perhaps some simple docs management, preferably all of it encrypted, I'll be on board from day one.
Google doesn't have to get *that* big or know everything.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Mozilla is a non-profit counterpart to other browsers. It started as a community browser with a call for donations - and many, many people (including everybody in my family) donated. However - with big Google and Yahoo deals and money, Firefox has left its roots. Market share has become more important than being a community browser. They incorporated interfaces for DRM content though there was strong opposition from the users, they changed their synchronization api and made hundreds of open source sync interfaces useless (and the new sync api is a nightmare), they now want all extensions to be signed by them exclusively, ignoring the pleas from the developers. I am still a friend of Mozilla. But no longer a fan. If they don't come back and start listening to the users and developers again, they will become just another browser. And there's still Chromium.
Which is another reason to continue to support Mozilla. Their code is open and there are other browsers based on that code tweaked and compiled for different needs. I switched to WaterFox because I wanted a fast 64 bit based version of FireFox and Mozilla hadn't released a 64 bit version at the time. I still use it. There are other versions targeted squarely at the fast/light crowd.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Well, if you actually used it instead of just looking at it, you'd realize how different they are. But I understand. If you don't really need what Firefox offers that Chrome doesn't, then why bother? Especially if you're hooked on Google's products, at which point it would be silly to switch to someone else's product.
The extensions are good.. the open source is really nice... their problem may be their revenue model.
To pay the Enterprise dolars for security updates, and the licenses for using FireFox in all my computers (and the extra per each core) and the overpriced enterprise support.
I am on the ESR schedule.
It works for me on Windows and Linux.
One major upgrade per year is about right, not having to deal with all the UI disruptions (Now where is that import bookmarks function this time?).
Security and stability fixes are more important.
I think Chrome started this crazy every 6 weeks a new version madness, and it is too fast to get quality.
My SSD has 1GB of memory, my cell phone has 3GB of memory, my Video card has 4GB of memory, my system has 24GB of memory. 1Gb of memory? What is that, a sport watch? Spend the $30 and purchase 4GB of DDR3-1600, stop using an 8086.
You're dreaming. Websites are now far more complex that you realize and you a 2GB machine really doesn't work today like it did 10 years ago.
Get yourself at least 8GB of ram (it's cheap, Mr. "I got the money") or 16 if you want to not worry about ram (for now).
If Mozilla's "paralleling" anything that would be Netscape, not Sun, which of course is ironic given where Mozilla comes from. Just as Netscape lost to Microsoft when IE was included in Windows, Mozilla's losing market share because Google puts the "Download Chrome" on its search landing page.
(And IE is now a pretty decent browser that is no longer a festering nest of standards-breaking crapola.)
Excuse me kind sir? Can I have a little bit of whatever it is that you are smoking? Because I don't know what it is, and it sure sounds like some REALLY good shit.
Seriously, though, IE is a piece of c-r-a-p. Always has been and always will be. The most astounding piece of crap EVER. Even Microsoft has pretty much given up on it.
I won't even comment on your assertion that Chrome is better than Firefox in the memory-hogging department.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Stop talking about revenue. Start talking about marketing.
Google has been promoting Chrome as if it was the coolest shit in the world. Chrome everywhere, Chromebook, Chromecast, Chrome this and Chrome that. Mozilla does not have much of a marketing budget (as far as I can tell).
It's not much of a mystery, if you like free shit, where YOU are the product being sold and bought, stick with Chrome. I'll stay with Firefox, thank you very much.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The destruction of it's ecosystem.
Too many choices have been made to simplify Firefox when maybe they should have done a bit more spelunking to see what the users were actually using.
Taking away the status bar. Yeah, there are multiple extensions to get that back, the trouble being that they aren't the original status bar and some of the extensions that I use expect the old status bar, not the extension status bar. Update that extension? Well, the person writing that extension has thrown in the towel. When other issues cropped up, somebody else did come along and fix the issues, but the original programmer can come around and kill it because it's still technically his copyright. Yeah, he didn't GPL or put any other kind of license on it. So, it might exist today, but tomorrow it won't.
Making Firefox look like Chrome is just stupid in my book. There was zero reason to change it. Talk about getting the desktop to look like the mobile is pure crap. They are different environments. What works on a phone or tablet doesn't necessarily mean that it works on the desktop, even Microsoft has figured that part out with Windows 10 coming out now. Extremely obvious to me, so I must be a genius. Or not.
They have changed things such that old themes no longer work. The old personas, which I guess are now considered to be theme extensions, seem to be the only new themes actually getting developed. And they're ugly.
Their mobile push (for Firefox OS) was interesting, but again, desktop seemed to suffer again because of it. They started actually pushing a 64-bit version of Firefox on their Nightly page. Then decided that tracking those bugs specific to it might be too much, so they decided to stop it, then after an outcry, decided to keep doing the 64-bit builds, but if you had a problem, don't bother filling a bug for it unless it also happened on the 32-bit version. And then they decided to back track on that as well. You just can't find the 64-bit version on the Nightly page anymore. But it can be found, at least.
I run the 64 and 32 bit Nightlies, release and beta versions. And they work for me. At least for now.
I don't like IE. Chrome works. I'm just not sure I want Google tracking me that much.
Bryan
It would be very bad if Firefox was gone.
The stock Android Webkit browser has a very bad security flaw - it does not properly enforce the Single Origin Policy (SOP) in Jelly Bean and below. It will not be fixed.
For Android devices that lack Google Play, Firefox is the best option.
Firefox would be an even better option if it was as fast as the stock Webkit browser. Let's hope that happens.
Potential Firefox wins:
Firefox is also the default browser in RedHat/Oracle/Scientific/CentOS Linux. That has to count for something.
Only a newb would think Mozilla is on the way out. Sure, FIREFOX sucks now, but that's why there's other Mozilla clones like Sea Monkey that uses the old style interface (firefox V. 3 and prior) and feels just like an old school every day useful browser.
If anything I would think IE and Chrome have alot more to worry about. IE never has had great reviews and has always had rendering issues, and Chrome is just another WebKit clone like Safari.
You don't need to play chess in less than 1kB, but what is with this crescent use of RAM?
I agree with your sentiment, but I'm scratching my head over "crescent"--"extravagant" or "profligate" would work, but what did you type that got auto-corrected to "crescent"?
Firefox was once really innovative, and alongside the browser the Thunderbird mail client was a rising star - and it is still the case that Thunderbird is well utilised as probably the most comprehensive mail client that has more extensive functionality than any other existing MUA. What other mail client can deal with html mail, calendar sync, imap and have a pretty clean gui, and run on all the main computer operating systems, even if there are perhaps still too many unfixed bugs? Chrome is the preferred browser for both Windows and Linux users for many users, even though there remains a core of Windows users who for various reasons never moved away from I.E.! If Mozilla continues to wither, and Thunderbird then withers with the decline in the browser, it would be so nice if Google would build a Chrome-related email client that had as much functionality as Thunderbird but based on modern build tools, with efficient libraries! Anyone else have similar thoughts?
mike c
How can you compare a business that has only two real products (Firefox and Thunderbird) to a company that had several iterations of hardware and dozens of software products, as well as service, support, and contracting arms?
Of course Mozilla is on the downslide -- Chrome came along to compete with them, and Internet Explorer was improved, while Safari came into existence. Mozilla still make my browser and email clients of choice, but not all people make the same choice.
And so it should be.
But while Mozilla may be waning in popularity and market share, they are hardly imploding like Sun did. They were never any where near as big nor as important to the industry to begin with!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I've been a Firefox user pretty much since it was released, but last year I switched to Chrome. It's not much better, but at least Chrome has less propensity to grow to gigantic memory proportions and slow down to a crawl and/or crash for no apparent reason.
That's weird, that's exactly the reason I switched back to Firefox, because that's exactly how Chrome behaved. Firefox isn't nearly as much of a memory hog.
See subject: Blocking adservers Opera used then in hosts ... & it worked (like hosts do on tons of other things for more speed, security, reliability, + even anonymity to a lesser extent though, & for FAR LESS resources consumed than other "so-called 'solutions'", by far...).
APK
P.S.=> It was TRULY, that easy... apk
Have you looked at the data Chrome sends around? It might surprise you. Of course that would require you to retire the old canard of "YOU ARE THE PRODUCT! blarf!" and actually come up with real arguments against them, so I doubt you'll actually do it.
My theory is that every release of Firefox that has come out for a few years now has been worse than the one before it. Their switch to rapid release has just made the situation worse. And the mobile version of Firefox is horrendous and borderline unusable.
The machines I regularly use have:
4GB
8GB
16GB
The last two need to run at least 2 and 4 VMs with 3Gb ram each respectively. Running chrome for day-to-day work would make these setups impractical, whereas firefox runs well (firefox needs to be restarted more frequently than the OSs, but not significantly).
Additionally, chrome/chromium have some display issues on one machine (linux, KDE, radeon).
No, I can't (or can't justify just for chrome when firefox is fine) adding more ram, most of the above are work machines, 1 already is fully populated with DDR2, upgrading the ram would be prohibitively expensive
Seriously, though, IE is a piece of c-r-a-p. Always has been and always will be.
I don't know if it always will be, but it's certainly a piece of crap, I agree, and getting crappier with each release. The problem with Firefox is that it's not much better than IE and is following the exact same trajectory of constantly getting crappier. Although, admittedly, each browser has its own unique flavor of crappy.
While some things have improved in Firefox, much of the browser has gotten worse over time. Simple illustration... it leaks huge amounts of memory. After only 3 days of sitting around:
UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND
101 164892 1738 128 230 0 1.45G 1.02G - R2L ?? 3d09:44 firefox -geometry +2820+80
After around 2 weeks the machine starts to swap. I've seen the image grow to over 6GB (with 4GB *active*) before I've had to kill it and start a fresh copy. WTF is firefox using all that memory for? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Other problems include severe instability, particularly with the file requestor (when uploading files), which results in seg-faults. And even with all the threading there seem to be severe interdependencies between tabs running javascript, so if one tab is javascript-heavy, it messes up the performance of other tabs.
The menu system is in a complete shambles, and I was really unhappy when the last upgrade changed my default search preferences to Yahoo without so much as a by-your-leave.
-Matt
What makes you think that was auto-corrected at all? Spelling, grammar and just general knowledge of what the fuck a word means is abysmal nowadays.
The problem with Firefox is that it's not much better than IE and is following the exact same trajectory of constantly getting crappier.
Wait, IE has gotten less crappy with each release, but Microsoft has decided that it's reached its lea of crap, and so they're delivering a new browser with their new Windows. That seems like IE just fell off the opposite trajectory.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(Speaking for myself, I was a die-hard Firefox user for years, but switched to Chrome when Firefox's memory leaks kept getting worse and worse... with Chrome, I can "kill" a resource-hogging tab without killing my whole browser. I know what Google "charges" for Chrome (privacy) and it's a price I'm willing to pay.)
Exactly my experience, but with the addition of the Firefox devs basically telling me my memory leak problems were me "browsing it wrong".
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Think waaaaayyyyy back...
IE6 was a badly-written, compatibility-breaking, resource-hogging, security-bug written pile of fetid garbage that MS had pretty much stopped developing entirely. Firefox became popular to fight against that scourge. While subsequent versions of IE (when they finally came out) were not entirely great, they represented a significant step forward that realized what made Firefox so popular.
If IE 7 had been out at the time Firefox was released, I doubt Firefox ever would have become particularly popular. And the version of IE in the works discards MS's sordid standards-breaking legacy entirely, and will be no more broken, standards-wise than the other major browsers.
All I have to say about the memory leaks is that Chrome has never "locked" my hard drive light on for several minutes upon closing it to clean up the multiple GB of memory it decided to consume. The one-process-per-tab architecture of Chrome has real advantages, the biggest being when a tab leaks like a sieve (and this doesn't happen very often), you don't have to close every browser instance to clean it up.
...that don't exist on Chrome. I like Chrome, but there are some things Firefox does better, and I'm glad Chrome has some competition to keep it honest. IE is still a hopeless mess, and I suppose Safari is multiplatform these days, but I don't see it getting much traction on Windows. thank god for Firefox.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No, it's not distinct. That Sun is still alive is the sort of denialism I might have expected from the Nicean Council, not supposed rationalists -- well, rationalists being nothing more than non-practicing Judeo-Christians with a smug bourgeois paint-job, maybe I shouldn't be surprised!
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
And maybe we don't really need "progress" anymore, yet for some reason we seem to pursue it for its own sake. Some people seem to just live to put a coinbox between every itch and its scratch, and those people are tiresome.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
And it's that kind of attitude that lead to 10+GB Operating Systems, GB+ Office suites and the need for 3Ghz dual core machines and 8GB RAM in order to do *anything* useful.
Meanwhile back in the '80s a C64 or Apple][+ could run a combat flight simulator in about 40K of RAM and 1 *MHZ* Cpu. In the '90s Amigas were used for special effects and genlocking.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I mean, if you were more interested in delivering a just society rather than blunting the corners of the one from which you profit just enough to keep your position (and that of the downtrodden) secure within the correct order, your actions would be effective toward that end instead of the other, wouldn't it?
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
It's INFOWORLD: The Trabant of the IT journalism world. If you want Clue, look elsewhere.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
and I use all of the following browsers
Firefox
Chrome
Opera
SeaMonkey
They all have their virtues
As long as you do not use IE you won't go wrong
> What makes you think that was auto-corrected at all?
Your suspicion is right: it wasn't auto-corrected.
> Spelling, grammar and just general knowledge of what the fuck a word means is abysmal nowadays.
You're right, again... }:-)
"Crescent" means "growing", "increasing" (see Oxford or Merriam-Webster).
Admittedly, English is not my native language; I tend to use words which are too literary... though usually you refer to the Moon as "Crescent", originally it was just an adjective: a growing Moon.
Sorry guys, but I am not waiting for a Firefox specific in-browser chat tool. I got better chat programs that are compatible with the rest of the world. And if I want to chat with someone I enable my chat program. What I am waiting for is a browser that starts fast, loads pages fast, allows me to switch tabs and kill a tab instead of showing when a flash ad kills it's performance. I used to pay Mozilla some money. A long time ago.
I realize the word is uncommon with that meaning ("increasing"); I'll try to look for more usual terminology next time.
Please see my response ahead to Oligonicella.
Thanks, I appreciate your interest, since I value curiosity and it allowed me to learn a bit more about English.
Have you looked at the data Chrome sends around?
I have and I wasn't happy about it when using Chrome for something that should have remained private to the application's users.
I tried every combination of command-line options, including undocumented ones, to turn off reporting to Google, including the options that are for this purpose, and there was still a trickle of reporting things that I didn't want reported.
But that was a few years ago. Maybe Chrome is more privacy respecting now :-)
I don't mind that it talks to Google by default, after all there are some good services if you like them, and phishing protection (for example) is a good thing.
But I was surprised and disappointed that using all the options to turn off reporting didn't turn it all off.
Every time I fire it up I cringe, it just looks terrible to me. It's mostly how it displays tabs and the url on the same level, just throws me off
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
> Spend the $30 and purchase 4GB of DDR3-1600, stop using an 8086.
I think I must make my point a little bit clearer...
First, maybe one of my linux computers can use such memory; but that's not the point. That "just add more memory" is what got Microsoft into trouble. And using less memory made e.g. the iPhone possible (back then).
My point is there's no need to have more RAM! Ok, VMs (like buchanmilne points out) do require memory in excess, as well as other poster mentioned about sandboxing -- but for a simple, mom-and-pop browser 1 GB (or 512MB) should be plenty. What are these guys putting in a browser these days?
OK, they are including Skype, it seems, but even so a smartphone, for instance, already has the phone part? Can't it be reused?
Microsoft has not given up on having a better browser, Spartan is IE minus a lot of the backward compatibility stuff. As a user experience I have no opinions on modern IE / Spartan but when it comes to rendering html & css and executing javascript the most recent IE versions are every bit as good and fast as the other browsers when it comes to standard web content and not bleeding edge html5 feature experiments.
They're both hogs. FF needs a restart every other week. Chrome slows to a crawl while gifs are loading. Chrome tabs crash more than firefox but when firefox crashes the whole app crashes. Firefox opens much faster than chrome because it only loads the active tab initially. But chrome can run for a month without a restart, you just have a few individual tabs crash every now and then.
Though Firefox has some features I still like, I just couldn't, in good conscience, support an organization that would run their technological/business leader out for agreeing with well over half the country on traditional marriage.
at least not in early builds. It was MDI (multiple document interface). Maybe it was in betas or something, but back when tabs were first introduced in Firefox Opera still had an MDI interface. I remember trying it and being frustrated with how clumsy MDI was for changing between pages...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sun was run out of business by cheap Intel hardware + free Linux devouring their core business (expensive high performance workstations and servers). Nobody makes money on Java. Even IBM doesn't. They make money hiring out cheap Indian programmers. That didn't leave Sun a viable product. Intel hardware + Linux (Lintel?) got too cheap too fast. It didn't matter if you're Sun box was 10x faster. I could roll out 100 Lintel boxes for 1/10 the price.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There should have been plenty of businesses to buy up and use that hardware. There's never a shortage of people that could put computer hardware to good use. otoh I've seen economists talking about how in the 70s businesses spent 40 cents of every dollar on investment and now it's like 10 cents, with the rest going into the shareholders/investor's pockets, so it's possible we're just seeing the effect of run away parasitism sucking all the capital out of our economy (I think the quote was something like:"Finance used to be a way to get money into productive businesses, now it's a way to get money out").
But I think it's more likely that a lack of demand for Sun hardware existed. If you're selling something for 1/10 retail it's because nobody really wants it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There's still a tonne of things that Firefox does for extension authors like myself to make our lives easier. I've been toying with a Chrome port of my plugin but it's been slow going since there's so much networking stuff Firefox does for me that Chrome doesn't yet (and maybe never will). Heck, I can't even use the "let" keyword yet without hacking into Chrome's config...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the incident was 6 years ago, and FF has been struggling for longer than that. Losing Google and the revenue it brought was a big blow. I felt like they wanted him out and used that as an excuse. Not that people don't lose their jobs over stupid things all the time. It's just odd to see it happen to someone so high up. Usually their above all that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Firefox opens much faster than chrome because it only loads the active tab initially.
Yeah, what's with this anyway? This is the most brain-dead thing I've seen in Chrome. The Firefox way is smart because it recalls all your tabs, but doesn't slow your computer to a crawl for a minute or two by trying to load everything at once.
I will say I haven't seen FF crash in quite a while now; I'm using 36 on Linux. A couple years or so ago, it was pretty bad, but lately I haven't had any trouble at all, though I do have to restart it every other week like you say.
Let me start by saying that I have been using Mozilla (the suite) since the 0.x beta days and I am using SeaMonkey (the successor to the Mozilla Suite) to write this post.
The things I dislike about what Mozilla are doing:
1.The way they are forcing all sorts of new UI onto people without ever considering what its users (both users who have been using for years and those new to Firefox) actually want.
2.The fact that they have become conservative when it comes to supporting new web things. In particular new image formats like mng, jng and webp. It used to be that they would support all these new web things and push the envelope, now they are behind Chrome and even IE in some of these areas.
3.The way they dont care about the corporate market, dont provide official installers that the corporate IT people can use and push to all their machines, dont provide the configuration options the corporate IT people need, dont provide a way for the corporate IT people to block updates except when they are ready to push them locally and dont provide a way for the corporate IT people to turn off all the things (phoning home etc) that the corporate IT people dont want.
> Websites are now far more complex that you realize and you a 2GB machine really doesn't work today like it did 10 years ago.
You may have a point, but they're selling a lot of 2GB notebooks here (and not only Linux ones, but W8 ones, too!). I don't expect to buy a 2GB machine and then go right to a technician and ask for more RAM. That would be insane.
> Get yourself at least 8GB of ram (it's cheap, Mr. "I got the money")
Well, I didn't get to be Mr. "I got the money" by throwing dollars at the problems to see if things sort out by themselves. That would make me be "Mr. Fool and his money are soon parted". And with Linux 4GB RAM is a lot -- except maybe for video production.
> or 16 if you want to not worry about ram (for now).
I think the "for now" part is key. Next year they will devise a way to make the computer need 64 GB RAM and some guy will tell me to replace my low-spec 16GB RAM computer. Tsk!
Meanwhile back in the '80s a C64 or Apple][+ could run a combat flight simulator in about 40K of RAM and 1 *MHZ* Cpu.
I wonder what Chuck Yeager thought about 4-color graphics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sun is not defunct. Sun is sold to Oracle, for a huge amount of money. In capitalism, they call that success.-Ignacio Agulló
That was just an example. Even with more realism, more colors and better graphics it doesn't explain why the same kind of game needs 4-5 GB today (except for bloated coding). Especially when you can do the following in under 100k (CPU power is needed because everything is done from procedures)
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
Besides, colors and sound don't make a game, gameplay does. Look at DooM (the remake). Looks nice but gameplay is nowhere near the original, same goes for Half-Life vs HL2
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
That was just an example. Even with more realism, more colors and better graphics it doesn't explain why the same kind of game needs 4-5 GB today (except for bloated coding).
Well, mostly it's textures and audio. Look at any AAA game and that's where the bulk of the install comes from.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"