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You forgot Risc OS you insensitive clod!

Crongratulations to Mozilla for making a genuine difference on the Internet.

Tru dat. I remember using Phoenix on a USB drive my freshman year of college (fall 2002). I think they are referring to the release of version 1.0, which was a year ago today (Wednesday).

OneStat unfortunatly measures all OSS Gecko browsers as one browser, and not Firefox alone (e.g. Epiphany, Mozilla and Camino are measured together). This is why it yield 11% on their stats and 8.6% on the other research firm's stats.

I can't imagine epiphany and galeon have any noticeable effect... But, Mozilla and firefox are, IMO, ok to count as one. I suppose galeon and epiphany are as well, but they're like 0.25% together, rounded up, heavily.

I don't know about that. If the developers are going to insist that people use extensions to get the same level of functionality as people enjoy in Opera and various IE shell browsers natively, then they're going to have to do some major quality control work.

For example, the release of Flash 8 broke something in Adblock, hence no Flash in Firefox w/Adblock installed for at least some of us. At least I knew enough to check Mozillazine to figure out why Flash suddenly stopped working. Try asking Joe Sixpack to do that. And don't even get me started on the f**king extension breackage from release-to-release. I have decided to stick with 1.04 for the time being until 1.5 is released, because of how things went horribly wrong when I went from 1.01 to 1.02.

Anyway, IE7 will be out soon enough with tabbed browsing, security fixes, RSS, and a host of other features, so that's going to take a bit of the wind out of Firefox's sails. I guess it was pretty easy for Firefox to gain momentum when the market leader has been sitting on its ass for the past 6 years. But now the sleeping giant has awakened, and the giant quite pissed

Yes, but IE7 won't have CSS support as many of us want and as it's supposed to do: as in standards!
I hate people telling me IE7 will be better once it has tabs and RSS support... this is old news in Mozilla/Opera world!

Use your brain - the total percentage use for IE has fallen - your claim is not logical. Just wishful thinking.

Edited 2005-11-10 04:51

I wouldnt say most people have heard of firefox. Most tech people have but not most people.

By that logic, you could say that it's mostly Netscape users who use IE now, since most of us were probably using Netscape in 1995/96

I agree with your post, with the addition that most of the new features of Firefox 1.5 were already present in Mozilla 1.8 a YEAR ago. Maybe that time was spent bugfixing and optimization (specifically on Windows). To its credit, a lot of memory leaks have been fixed (again, on Windows) and startup time has improved somewhat.

I'd really like to see something like the FreeBSD and Gnome roadmaps play out for Firefox, where new releases are shipped out every six months. A year since a major release seems rather pathetic for a project of this magnitude and almost rivals the development cycle of K-Meleon.

BTW, I did not know Varg Vikerness posted here. Is he out of prison again?

I have to agree. I've seen some pretty nasty conversations in the firefox bugzilla DB. Asa & Co., bickering with people who want some seemingly logical additions/changes to some of the smallest and littlest things in firefox.

To me however the biggest problem with firefox is simply how slow it is. It takes a lot of memory, on my system, with two tabs a few extensions and 512 mb ram, it's taking the #1 spot in memory consumption at 61.5mb (windows xp).

I'm not really concerned about features, I like a slimmer browser, I'll install extensions for the functionality I want. What I want right now is for an optimized and sped up firefox. One of the largest packages I've built on a linux system were firefox and thunderbird, the packages weighing in at a very large 30mb each, and these are bzipped! I'm not sure how much of this is actually compiled, but I'm sure a lot of it is, it takes a very long time to compile it compared to most other packages.

I still love firefox though, and wish it all the best. I've been using it since phoenix .6 and think that in time it'll be a great browser someday.

61.5 mb? Count yourself lucky.

http://www.binarymelon.com/taskmgr.jpg

One of the largest packages I've built on a linux system were firefox and thunderbird, the packages weighing in at a very large 30mb each, and these are bzipped!

That's because the source tree is shared for Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. So each time you download the source tarball, you are downloading components for all three programs, plus the Gecko engine, plus a bunch of other libraries. It's entirely possible to build each program from the same source tree; why most distributions don't include this as the default behavior is beyond me.

I suspected this, but wasn't sure. Thanks for correcting me.

Beta2 was so crashy to be mostly unusable, but at least they get feedback on the crashes without much manual user effort.

RC1 is much better. RC2 is scheduled for Friday. Now 1.5 is using cairo for the backend instead of GDI on windows. The interesting thing about it is that it actually seems faster than 1.7. Go figure.

I believe it is actually just SVG that's being switched to a Cairo backend (as opposed to the GDI+ one). The full Cairo backend will most likely not happen by 1.5.

There's experimental cairo builds on the Mozilla FTP; but it's no where near becoming default. For one thing, it can't render gmail correctly yet

I believe it is actually just SVG that's being switched to a Cairo backend (as opposed to the GDI+ one). The full Cairo backend will most likely not happen by 1.5.

Hehe, ok. That makes some sense. I thought it strange that Cairo on windows would be so snappy at this stage of its development.

There are about three comments about this, all of them before your comment. Use your brain, what big event happened with Firefox one year ago? If you can't answer that then you're probably more than a little slow.