Aside from Gran Turismo and maybe a couple of other games I'm forgetting, this is true. But it's a moot point since the PS2 has been out for seven years now.
I did forget about Gran Turismo. But my point is Sony's been in the game industry for about 12 years now, but they've only started making much of a name for themselves in game development in the last 4 years or so. The PS3 not having much of interest doesn't help that out there either.
That's a problem with second-party developers in general. Nintendo's Mario Party games, for example, are done by Hudson Soft, a subsidiary of Konami and therefore not really a second party. Most people would say that Mario Party is a second-party game, however, due to the license.
I think the only second party to ever get much attention was Rare. I hadn't realized Mario Party wasn't done in house by Nintendo. I don't know what you'd call that relationship. Nintendo's done that a lot lately though - GBC/GBA Zeldas, GameCube/Arcade F-Zero, arcade Mario Kart. Second party usually means a developer that has an exclusive relationship with the console maker. Hudson & Nintendo don't fall into that category.
I played the first hour of Metroid and though it was a great deviation from the Metroid-norm, it still didn't do much for me.
Not sure what to say in response to that. The first hour or so of Metroid Prime 3 is pretty bad, but, that's because its nothing like Metroid. Once you get past that, it becomes more like the other Prime games. Other than a lame bit near the end...
I think that Sony only started making good games after the PS2 had been out for a while. They didn't do much themselves for the PS1 or early PS2.
Second party is different, as it's not that obvious who their second party developers are. Is Naughty Dog second party? I was under the impression they were 3rd party but chose to only do Sony projects. Past that, I wouldn't have a clue.
Windows Vista will still run Win16 software. Results will certainly vary when that software tries interacting with other software or hardware that wasn't around in its day.
The Nintendo GameCube is a different brand than the older consoles, so you wouldn't expect it to run the older games. Anything with the GameBoy name in it does run older titles in the same line though. NES / SNES you could have expectations for, and in fact Nintendo did try to make them compatible but didn't succeed.
The Prius comparison doesn't even make sense, it's not even remotely related.
Intel is the easy part. They publish full specs for their processors on their website. You can download the PDF or even ask them to send you free printouts. Also, remember that Microsoft bought the company that made VirtualPC for the Mac. There's your x86 on PPC emulation right there.
NVidia is the harder part, but remember, all the games are coded to DirectX, which MS sets the standard for.
I'd say the hardest issue is NVidia avoiding patents.
Also, last quarter their games division posted a profit, for the first time.
Second time. They also posted a profit the quarter Halo 2 launched. They still haven't shown any signs of being able to post a profitable quarter without a new Halo game.
As if Virtual Boy and Super Game Boy and weren't ill-advised hardware.
Virtual Boy certainly had its issues, but the Super Game Boy was a smart move. It was basically a stripped down version of the GB dev tools, released due to demand. It cost them very little to develop, so really had little downside to it.
The M3 (at least the M3 Simply DS) doesn't boot like a regular game, but instead takes advantage of some aspect of the boot process to hijack the booting. Instead of making you press a button and showing the regular DS menu, it goes right to the ROM of the M3. This means it -is- still a hack as it alters the typical functioning of the device.
There's a flag in the DS ROM header that tells the DS to skip the normal boot sequence and boot directly into the game. I'm not sure if Nintendo has ever used it, but they did put the functionality into the DS firmware. It's not a hack at all.
While not a truly hardhack, it is still basically a mod chip and questionably legal since it helps skirt around the copy protection of the games.
It's not a modchip in any way. It doesn't modify anything. It's just a DS cartridge with removable storage. It doesn't skirt around copy protection in any way, it just passes the ROM directly to the DS. Flash cards actually won't play copy protected games - of course, the copy protection in DS games is trivial and can be removed from or added to a rom with ease using the homebrew dev tools.
I don't think you can call the GameBoy Color a failure. It probably had an extremely high return on investment for the development costs. They just did minimal tweaking to the existing GameBoy and got to resell it. And most GBC games also worked on the old GB, so you didn't fragment the market that much.
The key to using GIMP effectively is finally learning: EVERYTHING (well, nearly) can be done by right-click on the image window.
I've never found right click menus particularly pleasant to deal with as they grow in size. It's hard to predict the position of the item you're looking for, as if you initiate a menu too close to an edge of the screen, it has to move the menu to compensate.
And the lots of little windows approach just doesn't work well unless you can dedicate a virtual desktop to GIMP. Not too big a deal on Linux, but on Windows...
P.S. BTW, I don't think... intelligient GIMP defenders would write you off when you complain about GIMP UI. In fact, GIMP developers are accutely aware of this problem. So accutely that they set up this blog.
The problem is there most of the really vocal defenders of open source (especially on a place like slashdot) aren't the intelligent ones but rather the "it's all your fault" type.
That too has its advantages and disadvantages. What's worse, calling Microsoft, only to have them tell you its HP's issue, while HP insists the problem lies with Windows, or going online to a forum, and being told to RTFM? Even in terms of support, proprietary software can be just as bad as open source.
You're definitely right. But the average person would rather make a phone call to the company who makes the product than post on a random forum/mailing list. And the bigger issue is perception - the average person would expect better support from a phone call than from a web forum.
Many also end up trying to use at least one open source app at some point, but it in some way fails (eg GIMP has a weird window layout that is a little bit hard to get used to, and on Windows there's no built-in "force windows to stay on top" function).
That right there is the problem. GIMP isn't just a little weird. It's off in its own world. Most GIMP defenders write it off and say "use a better window manager", but the reality is it just doesn't play well with the normal usage patterns most window managers are coded for. And of course it's a much bigger issue on Windows, where you can't change the UI.
Don't blame the user for not understanding when you throw something at them that works totally differently than every other program they've ever seen.
And they are all asking "Why not Visual Studio?", which they all have pirated of course.
Why pirate it? It's free unless you want the high end editions. If you're the type of person who doesn't know why they should or shouldn't be using Visual Studio, you don't need the versions that cost money.
They do not believe me about the crappiness of proprietary software
Because to most people, especially home users, it doesn't matter. Most of them would never be able to do anything with the source code, nor would they have the money to pay someone who could. And they like having a company to call for support.
Proprietary data formats, however, are a completely different story. Those are bad for everyone but the maker of the software.
Zelda and Metroid had two each, but Metroid wasn't 1st party,
Metroid was first party. Nintendo has owned Retro Studios 100% since early in the development of the game - about the time it switched from 3rd person to 1st person.
HAL Labs and Intelligent Systems are also Nintendo 1st party studios. I think there's a few others as well.
Why isn't there, for example, multiplayer (even local) support anywhere in the Metroid Prime series? Even something of mediocre quality where powerups for Samus are scattered around a map seems like it would be pretty trivial to throw together.
They did that in Metroid Prime 2, largely due to the rather vocal "It's an FPS and I won't play an FPS without multiplayer" crowd. The people that used lack of multiplayer as their excuse for not playing still didn't like the game, as the single player nothing like an FPS, and they didn't like the multiplayer because it was mediocre.
And the people that liked Metroid to begin with mostly just ignored the multiplayer mode.
The original quote was from a writer for a web site who claimed that long stories don't get read. He was speculating on how well long stories work for magazines based on his experience with the web.
Hence my point that it's more likely the amount of advertising than the amount of content that's causing the trends he's seeing.
That is just plain ridiculous. If I am eagerly anticipating game X, and a magazine has an in-depth 8 page preview- of course I am going to read it. Are we all such twitchy ADD zombies that nobody can maintain their attention for more than a page? I call bullshit on that...
If it's an 8 page preview because it has 1 paragraph and 15 ads per page, then it's not going to keep many people's attention.
In the Conclusions section of that site, it links to an email discussion in which they point out that the reason for this was a difference in versions of the underlying rendering engine, Gecko (1.7 vs 1.8). For a meaningful comparison, you'd have to compare a version of the Suite to a version of FF with the same Gecko version underneath.
If you notice, that site was later updated with Firefox 2.0 numbers, which uses Gecko 1.8. It was faster than Firefox 1.5 but still slower than Mozilla.
The browser speed test you cite is bogus. Firefox, during all of my time being involved with its development and release, has always been faster at start-up, new window, and pageload, than the Suite, (with the possible exception of startup with the suite with the preloader on (turbo mode) Even then, on the hardware I had during the development of every pre-1.0 release of Firefox, Firefox bead Suite in turbo mode on a first start after reboot).
The speed test matches my experience. As for the Suite with turbo mode, you had to get a computer with so little memory that it was constantly swapping to disk for the browser window to not come up instantaneously with turbo mode on.
And that bullshit about telling users not to download Mozilla is just that, bullshit. You're remembering pre Mozilla 1.0 days. I was responsible for those pages and when I shipped 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7,and all of the dot releases in between, all of them messaged the Suite as a strong and community supported end-user offering. Claiming otherwise is simply lying.
Here's the Mozilla 1.3 download page from 2003, with the warnings still there. It's the same text that was there since the 0.x releases. Archive.org doesn't seem to have the download pages for 1.4+, at least not on the random dates I tried.
The original goal, that I helped define in early 2002, was to make a browser that could actually compete with IE and gain market share where the feature bloated and designed by committee Mozilla Application Suite had failed. We didn't skimp on features and included many features, bringing it up and beyond parity with IE, that the suite never had.
That sure wasn't the goal I saw. The original Phoenix work came from mainly Blake Ross complaining that he didn't agree with the committee designing the Suite. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think there were a few other names involved, but Blake is the one I remember being most vocal at the time. He stripped the browser down to not much more than a url entry box and the back, forward, reload, and stop buttons. Every single feature he hesitated on adding back in due to size and/or speed concerns. To the point that "offline mode" was an extension, even though the only part of that functionality actually in the extension was the UI for it. Perhaps you disagree with my choice of words in calling it minimalist before, but he sure was trying to keep it to a very small feature set.
Horseshit. We cut launch time and new window time in half in just a few months. We cut the download size by almost 300%. Simply removing the other app XUL overlays was a huge performance win all by itself.
And at this time period, you were just getting to the point of putting things like the history functionality back in. When you cut out 90% of the functionality, of course it's going to be smaller and faster. I also remember the days when the Gecko engine was going by it's original Raptor codename. It was extremely small and fast back then - but it also wasn't very usable, so you couldn't compare it to anything.
Again, this is just bullshit. Go back and read the Phoenix 0.1 release notes. "Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Shall I repeat it. "a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Where in that statement of purpose do you read that the goal was to make a minimalist browser?
I did go back. And apparently I found the confusion. I forgot that it Phoenix wasn't the first name. I'm remembering back to the days when it was known as mozilla/browser. That was around for a while before it got the Phoenix name.
When we shipped Firefox 1.0, the Windows version clocked in at a 4.7MB download compared to the Suite's 13MB download. Firefox 1.0's startup time on low to medium end systems was half that of the Suite and a noticeable improvement even on the fastest systems. Firefox 1.0's memory usage at startup was about 10% better than the Suites, mostly thanks to a smaller overall UI footprint (they both used the same Gecko rendering engine which makes up about 90% of the overall program size).
Let's be fair. I just dug around the mozilla.org ftp and checked the installers. The largest Suite release was under 12 MB, with most releases being under 11 MB. Second, the default download on the web site was usually the net installer, which was a 250 KB download. If you did the browser only install, it was about a 6 MB download. And you probably also know that the Firefox installer uses 7zip while the Suite installer used zip. Firefox installers built with zip were around 6 MB, making it similar in size to the Suite's browser.
Also, I'm sure you've seen the (several year old now) browser speed tests that showed FireFox to be slower than Mozilla at just about everything.
But, in the end, the proof is in the pudding. There are about 130 to 140 million Firefox users today, coming up on our third m
How often do you close Firefox? I generally have one session open for weeks at a time on my laptop, staying open through several hibernation cycles a day. On the rare occasion I check on the memory usage, it's always 150+ MB for typically 4-5 tabs without anything fancy in them. I've never had any extensions installed until I just recently added Adblock, which doesn't seem to have changed things.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's public domain, it's free. Permanently. You can't revoke it.
If someone builds off that code, it's a new work. It doesn't matter if that work is free or not, the original still is.
Aside from Gran Turismo and maybe a couple of other games I'm forgetting, this is true. But it's a moot point since the PS2 has been out for seven years now.
I did forget about Gran Turismo. But my point is Sony's been in the game industry for about 12 years now, but they've only started making much of a name for themselves in game development in the last 4 years or so. The PS3 not having much of interest doesn't help that out there either.
That's a problem with second-party developers in general. Nintendo's Mario Party games, for example, are done by Hudson Soft, a subsidiary of Konami and therefore not really a second party. Most people would say that Mario Party is a second-party game, however, due to the license.
I think the only second party to ever get much attention was Rare. I hadn't realized Mario Party wasn't done in house by Nintendo. I don't know what you'd call that relationship. Nintendo's done that a lot lately though - GBC/GBA Zeldas, GameCube/Arcade F-Zero, arcade Mario Kart. Second party usually means a developer that has an exclusive relationship with the console maker. Hudson & Nintendo don't fall into that category.
I played the first hour of Metroid and though it was a great deviation from the Metroid-norm, it still didn't do much for me.
Not sure what to say in response to that. The first hour or so of Metroid Prime 3 is pretty bad, but, that's because its nothing like Metroid. Once you get past that, it becomes more like the other Prime games. Other than a lame bit near the end...
I think that Sony only started making good games after the PS2 had been out for a while. They didn't do much themselves for the PS1 or early PS2.
Second party is different, as it's not that obvious who their second party developers are. Is Naughty Dog second party? I was under the impression they were 3rd party but chose to only do Sony projects. Past that, I wouldn't have a clue.
Windows is a software platform. Playstation is a hardware platform. Different beasts.
Windows maintains all compatibility it possibly can. The PS3, obviously not.
An x86 processor running in 64 bit mode isn't capable of running 16 bit code. Blame AMD & Intel for that, not Microsoft.
The 32 bit version of Windows is fully capable of running 16 bit Windows code.
Windows Vista will still run Win16 software. Results will certainly vary when that software tries interacting with other software or hardware that wasn't around in its day.
The Nintendo GameCube is a different brand than the older consoles, so you wouldn't expect it to run the older games. Anything with the GameBoy name in it does run older titles in the same line though. NES / SNES you could have expectations for, and in fact Nintendo did try to make them compatible but didn't succeed.
The Prius comparison doesn't even make sense, it's not even remotely related.
Intel is the easy part. They publish full specs for their processors on their website. You can download the PDF or even ask them to send you free printouts. Also, remember that Microsoft bought the company that made VirtualPC for the Mac. There's your x86 on PPC emulation right there.
NVidia is the harder part, but remember, all the games are coded to DirectX, which MS sets the standard for.
I'd say the hardest issue is NVidia avoiding patents.
Also, last quarter their games division posted a profit, for the first time.
Second time. They also posted a profit the quarter Halo 2 launched. They still haven't shown any signs of being able to post a profitable quarter without a new Halo game.
Two answers:
1) Super Mario World, Star Road 3. Get to the normal exit by walking right one screen. Secret exit by going up one screen.
2) WarioWare games - they're just a series of microgames, each approximately 5 seconds long
As if Virtual Boy and Super Game Boy and weren't ill-advised hardware.
Virtual Boy certainly had its issues, but the Super Game Boy was a smart move. It was basically a stripped down version of the GB dev tools, released due to demand. It cost them very little to develop, so really had little downside to it.
The M3 (at least the M3 Simply DS) doesn't boot like a regular game, but instead takes advantage of some aspect of the boot process to hijack the booting. Instead of making you press a button and showing the regular DS menu, it goes right to the ROM of the M3. This means it -is- still a hack as it alters the typical functioning of the device.
There's a flag in the DS ROM header that tells the DS to skip the normal boot sequence and boot directly into the game. I'm not sure if Nintendo has ever used it, but they did put the functionality into the DS firmware. It's not a hack at all.
While not a truly hardhack, it is still basically a mod chip and questionably legal since it helps skirt around the copy protection of the games.
It's not a modchip in any way. It doesn't modify anything. It's just a DS cartridge with removable storage. It doesn't skirt around copy protection in any way, it just passes the ROM directly to the DS. Flash cards actually won't play copy protected games - of course, the copy protection in DS games is trivial and can be removed from or added to a rom with ease using the homebrew dev tools.
I don't think you can call the GameBoy Color a failure. It probably had an extremely high return on investment for the development costs. They just did minimal tweaking to the existing GameBoy and got to resell it. And most GBC games also worked on the old GB, so you didn't fragment the market that much.
The key to using GIMP effectively is finally learning: EVERYTHING (well, nearly) can be done by right-click on the image window.
... intelligient GIMP defenders would write you off when you complain about GIMP UI. In fact, GIMP developers are accutely aware of this problem. So accutely that they set up this blog.
I've never found right click menus particularly pleasant to deal with as they grow in size. It's hard to predict the position of the item you're looking for, as if you initiate a menu too close to an edge of the screen, it has to move the menu to compensate.
And the lots of little windows approach just doesn't work well unless you can dedicate a virtual desktop to GIMP. Not too big a deal on Linux, but on Windows...
P.S. BTW, I don't think
The problem is there most of the really vocal defenders of open source (especially on a place like slashdot) aren't the intelligent ones but rather the "it's all your fault" type.
That too has its advantages and disadvantages. What's worse, calling Microsoft, only to have them tell you its HP's issue, while HP insists the problem lies with Windows, or going online to a forum, and being told to RTFM? Even in terms of support, proprietary software can be just as bad as open source.
You're definitely right. But the average person would rather make a phone call to the company who makes the product than post on a random forum/mailing list. And the bigger issue is perception - the average person would expect better support from a phone call than from a web forum.
Many also end up trying to use at least one open source app at some point, but it in some way fails (eg GIMP has a weird window layout that is a little bit hard to get used to, and on Windows there's no built-in "force windows to stay on top" function).
That right there is the problem. GIMP isn't just a little weird. It's off in its own world. Most GIMP defenders write it off and say "use a better window manager", but the reality is it just doesn't play well with the normal usage patterns most window managers are coded for. And of course it's a much bigger issue on Windows, where you can't change the UI.
Don't blame the user for not understanding when you throw something at them that works totally differently than every other program they've ever seen.
And they are all asking "Why not Visual Studio?", which they all have pirated of course.
Why pirate it? It's free unless you want the high end editions. If you're the type of person who doesn't know why they should or shouldn't be using Visual Studio, you don't need the versions that cost money.
They do not believe me about the crappiness of proprietary software
Because to most people, especially home users, it doesn't matter. Most of them would never be able to do anything with the source code, nor would they have the money to pay someone who could. And they like having a company to call for support.
Proprietary data formats, however, are a completely different story. Those are bad for everyone but the maker of the software.
Well, that's WHY Wii Sports is the most popular game... everyone has it. If they had sold it for $50, it would be be very low on the totum pole.
In Japan, Wii Sports isn't a pack in and sells at full price. It's still the highest selling game on the Wii over there.
Zelda and Metroid had two each, but Metroid wasn't 1st party,
Metroid was first party. Nintendo has owned Retro Studios 100% since early in the development of the game - about the time it switched from 3rd person to 1st person.
HAL Labs and Intelligent Systems are also Nintendo 1st party studios. I think there's a few others as well.
Why isn't there, for example, multiplayer (even local) support anywhere in the Metroid Prime series? Even something of mediocre quality where powerups for Samus are scattered around a map seems like it would be pretty trivial to throw together.
They did that in Metroid Prime 2, largely due to the rather vocal "It's an FPS and I won't play an FPS without multiplayer" crowd. The people that used lack of multiplayer as their excuse for not playing still didn't like the game, as the single player nothing like an FPS, and they didn't like the multiplayer because it was mediocre.
And the people that liked Metroid to begin with mostly just ignored the multiplayer mode.
The original quote was from a writer for a web site who claimed that long stories don't get read. He was speculating on how well long stories work for magazines based on his experience with the web.
Hence my point that it's more likely the amount of advertising than the amount of content that's causing the trends he's seeing.
That is just plain ridiculous. If I am eagerly anticipating game X, and a magazine has an in-depth 8 page preview- of course I am going to read it. Are we all such twitchy ADD zombies that nobody can maintain their attention for more than a page? I call bullshit on that...
If it's an 8 page preview because it has 1 paragraph and 15 ads per page, then it's not going to keep many people's attention.
In the Conclusions section of that site, it links to an email discussion in which they point out that the reason for this was a difference in versions of the underlying rendering engine, Gecko (1.7 vs 1.8). For a meaningful comparison, you'd have to compare a version of the Suite to a version of FF with the same Gecko version underneath.
If you notice, that site was later updated with Firefox 2.0 numbers, which uses Gecko 1.8. It was faster than Firefox 1.5 but still slower than Mozilla.
The browser speed test you cite is bogus. Firefox, during all of my time being involved with its development and release, has always been faster at start-up, new window, and pageload, than the Suite, (with the possible exception of startup with the suite with the preloader on (turbo mode) Even then, on the hardware I had during the development of every pre-1.0 release of Firefox, Firefox bead Suite in turbo mode on a first start after reboot).
The speed test matches my experience. As for the Suite with turbo mode, you had to get a computer with so little memory that it was constantly swapping to disk for the browser window to not come up instantaneously with turbo mode on.
And that bullshit about telling users not to download Mozilla is just that, bullshit. You're remembering pre Mozilla 1.0 days. I was responsible for those pages and when I shipped 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7,and all of the dot releases in between, all of them messaged the Suite as a strong and community supported end-user offering. Claiming otherwise is simply lying.
Here's the Mozilla 1.3 download page from 2003, with the warnings still there. It's the same text that was there since the 0.x releases. Archive.org doesn't seem to have the download pages for 1.4+, at least not on the random dates I tried.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030401090222/www.mozilla.org/releases/#1.3
Are you completely uninformed or are you being intentionally untruthful here?
Asa, I normally agree with you on most things, but I think you're being untruthful here.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
The original goal, that I helped define in early 2002, was to make a browser that could actually compete with IE and gain market share where the feature bloated and designed by committee Mozilla Application Suite had failed. We didn't skimp on features and included many features, bringing it up and beyond parity with IE, that the suite never had.
That sure wasn't the goal I saw. The original Phoenix work came from mainly Blake Ross complaining that he didn't agree with the committee designing the Suite. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think there were a few other names involved, but Blake is the one I remember being most vocal at the time. He stripped the browser down to not much more than a url entry box and the back, forward, reload, and stop buttons. Every single feature he hesitated on adding back in due to size and/or speed concerns. To the point that "offline mode" was an extension, even though the only part of that functionality actually in the extension was the UI for it. Perhaps you disagree with my choice of words in calling it minimalist before, but he sure was trying to keep it to a very small feature set.
Horseshit. We cut launch time and new window time in half in just a few months. We cut the download size by almost 300%. Simply removing the other app XUL overlays was a huge performance win all by itself.
And at this time period, you were just getting to the point of putting things like the history functionality back in. When you cut out 90% of the functionality, of course it's going to be smaller and faster. I also remember the days when the Gecko engine was going by it's original Raptor codename. It was extremely small and fast back then - but it also wasn't very usable, so you couldn't compare it to anything.
Again, this is just bullshit. Go back and read the Phoenix 0.1 release notes. "Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Shall I repeat it. "a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Where in that statement of purpose do you read that the goal was to make a minimalist browser?
I did go back. And apparently I found the confusion. I forgot that it Phoenix wasn't the first name. I'm remembering back to the days when it was known as mozilla/browser. That was around for a while before it got the Phoenix name.
When we shipped Firefox 1.0, the Windows version clocked in at a 4.7MB download compared to the Suite's 13MB download. Firefox 1.0's startup time on low to medium end systems was half that of the Suite and a noticeable improvement even on the fastest systems. Firefox 1.0's memory usage at startup was about 10% better than the Suites, mostly thanks to a smaller overall UI footprint (they both used the same Gecko rendering engine which makes up about 90% of the overall program size).
Let's be fair. I just dug around the mozilla.org ftp and checked the installers. The largest Suite release was under 12 MB, with most releases being under 11 MB. Second, the default download on the web site was usually the net installer, which was a 250 KB download. If you did the browser only install, it was about a 6 MB download. And you probably also know that the Firefox installer uses 7zip while the Suite installer used zip. Firefox installers built with zip were around 6 MB, making it similar in size to the Suite's browser.
Also, I'm sure you've seen the (several year old now) browser speed tests that showed FireFox to be slower than Mozilla at just about everything.
But, in the end, the proof is in the pudding. There are about 130 to 140 million Firefox users today, coming up on our third m
How often do you close Firefox? I generally have one session open for weeks at a time on my laptop, staying open through several hibernation cycles a day. On the rare occasion I check on the memory usage, it's always 150+ MB for typically 4-5 tabs without anything fancy in them. I've never had any extensions installed until I just recently added Adblock, which doesn't seem to have changed things.