Submitted by “When Firefox launched in beta release five years ago, it burst on the open-source browser scene like a young Elvis Presley – slim, sexy and dangerous. Since then it has attracted millions of users, generally set the agenda for browser development and unseated Microsoft’s IE as the de facto monopoly in the field. But, with Firefox 3.0 poised for release later this year, the ‘IE killer’ is in danger of morphing into an early Fat Elvis, if increasing numbers of die-hard fans turned reluctant critics are any guide.”
Anybody using the nightlies will already be aware of the noticeable improvement in speed, what with the new graphics backend. If anything, the webpages we use are getting more bloated. More sites are using reams and reams of javascript, lots more flash & ajax, this all adds to massively increased RAM requirements.
Whilst Mozilla have standards for patched accepted, they could go one up, and do as Webkit – no patch may regress speed—at all.
“””
Anybody using the nightlies will already be aware of the noticeable improvement in speed,
“””
Not to disagree, but I have been watching Mozilla development from the day that Netscape released their code. And I swear that for 3 years whenever anyone criticized Mozilla in any way, the response from the community was “Use the latest nightlies! They’re great!”.
Something horrible must happen to the “wonderful” nightly code when it is released in a stable version.
It’s weird.
Edited 2007-05-18 20:04
Not only that, but Firefox became freakin´ slow as time passed by. Mozilla Seamonkey, having been kept up to date by only a handful of developers – not sponsored by Mozilla Corporation, it seems – in order to “backport” some of Firefox niceties such as AdBlock+ and often accused in the past as being sluggish, is WAY faster than most of the recent FF iterations.
The only reason that I still use Firefox instead of Opera is that I prefer the way how FF rendering engine tries to work around broken websites compared to Opera´s and the fact that the Opera Adblocker is not nearly as good as Adblock+ but anyone comparing FF and Opera speedwise and claiming that FF has an edge must have his or her head examinated. Not to mention that Opera´s cache management knows no rivals.
Opera lacks the mindshare, yes. It could also benefit of an extensible API so that its users can build the nice things that the community around Mozilla built on top of Firefox… True. But Opera definitely surpassed Firefox some time ago.
In my sister´s slower machine, the choice is a no brainer. Firefox definitely needs to go back to its roots if it wants to keep the lead over the competition since even MS seems to be waking up and getting their stuff up to the snuff!
Edited 2007-05-18 20:40
Actually, that is the case, IIRC.
Nightly builds are usually taken from an active-development tree (where devs can ‘freely’ make changes to the code (once meeting certain criteria), as patches).
Stable builds are taken from a fine-picked assortment of the code submitted in between releases, and resides in its own tree, making it possible to have vast differences between the two trees.
That and the difference in compiler options in stable builds, extra code (feature) patches applied, etc…
It can get fun finding the best nightly to run, though, so I’d stick to the stables if your unsure 🙂
–The loon
I for one have gone back to using Safari as my browser of choice. There have been content rich pages (like the World of Warcraft Armory pages) which have caused Firefox to choke and consume 100% of my CPU speed for 5 – 10 seconds before successfully loading the pages.
Just taking this article as an example. Safari uses about 10% CPU power to display the page and the adverts. Once the animations complete, CPU usage drops to 0 – 3%. In contrast, Firefox 20 – 30% CPU usage to display that page and when the animations are done, CPU usage drops to about 5 – 10%.
This is really sad, as I much prefer Firefox since more pages render correctly.
It’s probably Flash. Flash + FF is not yet a terribly friendly pairing. There’s one of those stupid intel quad core ads (the one with the leopards) that causes my machine to hit 100% CPU usage everytime. I couldn’t, easily, test this on IE as browser detection on the server side was returning a single GIF to IE but a .swf to FF. No idea why. I gave up at the point and just install FlashBlock!
That’s because you need a quad core to see the ad.
It’s not just the webpages though. I still have an old version of Phoenix installed (0.8) and it runs circles around Firefox. Sure Firefox does a lot more now, but it comes at the expense of speed, let’s not pretend it doesn’t.
Firefox has always been a ‘Fat Elvis’.
I find it amazing that people believe it’s a ‘light browser’. But I do agree that web pages are getting way too bloated in general.
There are so many web pages that have javascript and I can never work out what it’s being used for.
For some reason people forgot that a webpage is just a document with hyperlinks. I blame graphic designers and programmers those that never learnt real programming.
That takes alot more memory than Firefox, last time I looked it was 60Mb within a few minutes.
Firefox is no more bloated than the other popular browsers, so if anyone can give me the numbers(unlike the artical has) then fine.It can be the case that web pages are more boated then ever, flash is slow and people want more features there is a price to be paid.
People also have to realise that Firefox runs on top of a cross-platfrom UI library, XUL. Firefox runs on OSes as diverse as OS/2, RISC OS and BeOS. Firefox cannot be as perfect as a wholly native browser, like Safari; ergo, one must cut Firefox at least a bit of slack.
People also have to realise that Firefox runs on top of a cross-platfrom UI library, XUL.
Yeah, if Opera was based on a multi-platform toolkit, it’d be slow, too!
Although admittedly Opera doesn’t run on as many OSes as Firefox.
Trying to be funny? Opera runs on my phone and my Wii.
I hope you are being sarcastic because Opera is based on a multi-platform toolkit. It uses Qt.
I hope you are being sarcastic because Opera is based on a multi-platform toolkit. It uses Qt.
You’re partially right, but it’s not based on Qt, it’s based on their own toolkit, (I can’t recall the name). Most of the user interface is built on that, Qt is actually used for very little (printing is one of the major things, and only on Linux).
Also, in Skype, only the Linux version uses Qt. The UI for the Windows version is completely separate and doesn’t use Qt at all. I always thought that was a hell of a strange way to use a cross-platform toolkit, especially one as nice to work with as Qt.
The Skype dev’s said that they wanted the most “native” approach for every platform, which is fair enough I guess, but I think less important to normal users than we developers tend to think. Every second Windows app looks slightly different, but I’ve never heard any normal user complain about it.
Edited 2007-05-18 21:05
You’re partially right, but it’s not based on Qt, it’s based on their own toolkit,
Kindof like Firefox runs on it’s own toolkit, XUL.
You can say the same for Opera
That takes alot more memory than Firefox, last time I looked it was 60Mb within a few minutes.
Opera uses much, much less memory than Firefox. Especially if you don’t restart your browser every 15min.
At about 100 tabs Firefox easily breaks 1GB of memory and more (at least it did before I stopped using it), Opera stays below 300MB. Additionally, Opera loads faster, it’s crash recovery is more reliable and somehow they managed to fit the browser and half a dozen apps I’ve never used in a download that’s half the size of Firefox.
Opera’s cookie managment is still a PITA and I miss a few features of Firefox like nuke everything (and Firesomething; the endless possibilities always put a smile on my face and I’m not even being sarcastic =).
Please don’t say lies like this, it’s totally false.
I’m a Opera user since early 9 version to the today’s one (9.10) and I’m very unhappy with the experience on Opera. This occour to me even more than with Firefox.
I experienced a lot of bugs seeing certain sites, crashes that later deleted my bookmarks and tabs. I was unable to recovering those pages I needed to read, so again using google and wasting even some hours.
I had very bad experiences with most web browsers: Firefox and Opera both are quite buggy and corrupt bookmarks and unable to recover sites. Even both haver quite big rendering problems and slowdowns. On the other hand, Internet Explorer is even worser in most aspects.
I hope more renderers like WebKit or better are going to be developed, but that maybe cannot happen due to the web world becoming an annoying mass of bloated technologies. I think the web must evolve into a new standard with all the needed stuff but becoming simple and avoiding bloat.
Maybe the WebKit port to KDE could help the appear of kightweight browsers using toolkits like FLTK2. Sometimes I use Dillo because is quite fast, but it lacks most standards for becoming a really usable browser. It seems tkhtml2 is a dead project, it was promising at the time.
Edited 2007-05-18 22:05
I have to agree with SlackerJack, last time I *tested* it Opera 9.x did use more memory than Firefox. I did my own tests, opening a set of ‘heavy’ webpages in both browsers and monitored usage.
The fact is memory is irrelevent as long as you can spare it and it’s managed properly by the application. *You* are correct in that Opera tends to *manage* it’s memory alot better than FF, and in terms of UI, tab and webpage responsiveness I don’t think Opera can be beat.
Now if only Opera would ship a 64 bit binaries for Linux (and other platforms) so I can start using it again. I am sick of dodgy fonts and an ugly UI on my otherwise beautiful pure 64-bit system. Give us a 64-bit build! We have nspluginwrapper, let us have it for the love of God…
time blurrs the memory
Elvis was a bit before my time, but AFAIK, the guy was still a ‘sex symbol’ in his later years when he put on the pounds.
Proof there’s hope for us guys with a little extra baggage.
“””
Proof there’s hope for us guys with a little extra baggage.
“””
Actually, I think it was Ron Jeremy who eventually proved that indisputably. 😉
I ask that because Firefox performance on XP and Ubuntu Feisty is fine for me. It has historically been slow to start and a bit hungry with memory but it does not cause me any repeated crashing or slow page load problems at all. I do have heavy CPU utilization w/FF on Ubuntu when I visit digg.com, but other than that, no issues. That can be ascribed to JS and not FF on linux though maybe?
Edited 2007-05-18 18:20
Not great. Firefox on Mac has lagged a little, but is generally good enough for most users. I miss the lack of text services mostly. Firefox 3 promises cooca fields and decent speed improvements. To fix the fact that the theme looks like ass go to http://takebacktheweb.org
It should be noted that Firefox 3 will be using Cairo for graphics, which allows platform-specific rendering backends. Work is underway to provide a Quartz backend that should be able to provide hardware accelerated graphics through the native API. If that is delivered optimally, then we could be looking at a really smoking Firefox on Mac experience.
… produces no better code than closed source — and vice-versa. It all boils down to engineering discipline, balancing features with solid design, and adjusting expectations about what “bloat” really means. For example, if Firefox’s customers expect to have all of the functionality that it provides at the same time, then there is a memory footprint cost to be paid.
Whilst quality of code, as in your first sentence, is down to the team, and the engineer, you also have to bear in mind:
“By my count, the absolute most conservative view is that 100 paid people are supporting more than a dozen funded startups building extensions for Firefox, more than a half dozen funded startups building completely new applications, countless web-based application startups, and more than a million users per employee. All for less money than Adobe is putting into Apollo’s launch. Way less.
That’s crazy high leverage. As much leverage as any organization I know of in the world.” – John Lilly
Mozilla are doing more in some areas than Microsoft, Adobe et al, with less. There hasn’t [to my knowledge] been such debacle in Mozilla like Windows Vista, a product that the engineers, and especially the managers totally failed to get to grips with– Mozilla did their code reset back at the start when they inherited the absolute abomination that was Netscape 4- and that wasn’t a multi billion dollar project with infinite resources.
edit: attribution
Edited 2007-05-18 18:49
Mozilla are doing more in some areas than Microsoft, Adobe et al, with less. There hasn’t [to my knowledge] been such debacle in Mozilla like Windows Vista, a product that the engineers, and especially the managers totally failed to get to grips with– Mozilla did their code reset back at the start when they inherited the absolute abomination that was Netscape 4- and that wasn’t a multi billion dollar project with infinite resources.
I’ll agree that Microsoft really made some mistakes with Vista, but I think that primarily has to do with some bad technology bets that the company made (ie. using managed code in the Shell) — and management led by Jim Allchin that was wholly disinterested and incapable of charting a course away from disaster until the cost was exorbitantly high.
Microsoft has a lot of capital — but it doesn’t have infinite resources, btw. They are notorious tightwads when it comes to team composition, hardware, etc. Part of the problem is that they have gotten so BIG over the past decade that they are increasingly incapable of prioritizing resource allocation across teams. For example, a less important team may have the same resources as a more important team — and, if you try to change things, you will get tremendous political pushback from dueling management chains. Thus, Microsoft’s biggest enemy is its own bureaucracy.
That’s not true. OSS is generally higher quality eventually (perhaps not so POLISHED but higher quality internally, less bugs etc.), because of peer review.
There’s an easy comparison:
Closed source is like a group of scientists working secretly for a company on something no one else will see until it’s done, and even afterwards no one will be able to do any change on it.
Open source is like if those scientists put all their work, theories etc. in publications and many others joined in on improving it or criticizing (which is also important).
OSS has 2 problems one of which doesn’t relate to firefox:
1. If the popularity of the project is low, peer review can be 0, thus the advantage goes away (not the Firefox case for sure).
2. Polish is missing because there’s no one to shout “easy clickeys” at the devs, who find the interface etc. “good enough” while concentrating on the internals mostly. I think Firefox is past this as well.
Hope that explains why OSS is better in many cases.
That’s not true. OSS is generally higher quality eventually (perhaps not so POLISHED but higher quality internally, less bugs etc.), because of peer review.
Well, that assumes that the many eyeballs are actually looking at the code — which is by no means certain. I think that what tends to happen is that code which is most interesting and sexy (ie. Linux kernel) tends to get a lot of attention, while less interesting code languishes without any peer review at all.
1. If the popularity of the project is low, peer review can be 0, thus the advantage goes away (not the Firefox case for sure).
Yes, but the granularity is a lot finer than simply by project. There are parts of code in any project which are simply tedious and uninteresting to read; hence, they get a lot less scrutiny.
2. Polish is missing because there’s no one to shout “easy clickeys” at the devs, who find the interface etc. “good enough” while concentrating on the internals mostly. I think Firefox is past this as well.
I dunno. Most software have really crappy interfaces. Firefox is no exception.
Many, many people say this, but there are a great deal of other factors that go into good software which arent taken into account.
First of all, there is the boring stuff. Bug fixing (intermittant bugs especially) is the worst part of any programmers job. Since there is zero financial motivation for the vast majority of open source devs, bugs which do not directly effect a core developer will sometimes take years to be fixed.
Secondly, you mentioned how unpopular projects will often not have any real peer review. The thing is, popular projects will frequently have the same problem! When it comes to a massive codebase that you have to learn, it takes a significant portion of your life to become involved. OO.o for example is one of the most widely used pieces of open software, but 99% of the work is done by people on SUNs payroll. Most OSS devs pick their poney, a kernel hacker will probably not be a regular in GNOME for example.
Third of all, the other thing developers hate is stupid users. Fixing bugs that can be avoided with common sense, making good interfaces, writing good documentation are all things developers hate doing, and usually will only do if they are getting paid. This isnt as big a problem as it once was, for the sole fact that we have so many big companies paying for the work to be done now. (if you have been using linux long enough, im sure you will remember this http://www.fh-muenchen.de/home/ze/rz/services/projects/xcdroast/e_0…)
Lastly, your analogy is a little off. Open source is like academia, closed source is big business. Lots of cool stuff comes out of the universities, and they are very important to our society as a whole, but to get the job done the quickest and cheapest way possible, the answer almost alwas comes from industry. This is why the GIMP is more then good enough for hobbyest use, but is still not an adiquet tool for a professional (even the artists hired by OSS companies still use photoshop). Or while audacity is good and all, ALSA is really not good enough for serious recording (i have found up to an 80ms latency difference between vista and feisty.). Or how OGL/SDL has improved tremendously over the years, it really doesnt come close to directX. I have been around long enough to have written more then my share of DOS and bash scripts, but I mean come on guys, its 2007. Lets get with the program and upgrade to what has been the standard interface for everything since about 1980. As much as apache is so much greater in so many ways then IIS, why is it that I MUCH perfer IIS while developing any sort of web stuff? It is because it is because its a few clicks to configure anything I want. Sure, I know how to use apache, I also know how to use slack, but just because I *can* deal with the added pain of working with text files and commandline interfaces, doesnt mean I *want* to.
I could go on, but I will stop here.
Open source development has alot of strengths, but it also has alot of weaknesses. The strengths are remarkably well articulated (ESR did a great job with the CatB articles), and are expressed regularily. The weaknesses however are rarely articulated by anyone except for outside competitors, and are typically then dismmissed as FUD.
First of all, there is the boring stuff. Bug fixing (intermittant bugs especially) is the worst part of any programmers job. Since there is zero financial motivation for the vast majority of open source devs, bugs which do not directly effect a core developer will sometimes take years to be fixed.
This depends on “itching”. If the bug itches someone with the skill there’s a quite good probability it’ll get fixed unless it’s some deep-shit kind of bug.
When it comes to a massive codebase that you have to learn, it takes a significant portion of your life to become involved. OO.o for example is one of the most widely used pieces of open software, but 99% of the work is done by people on SUNs payroll. Most OSS devs pick their poney, a kernel hacker will probably not be a regular in GNOME for example.
True but OO.o is a piece of bloated… you know what.
Third of all, the other thing developers hate is stupid users. Fixing bugs that can be avoided with common sense, making good interfaces, writing good documentation are all things developers hate doing, and usually will only do if they are getting paid. This isnt as big a problem as it once was, for the sole fact that we have so many big companies paying for the work to be done now.
Not necessarily true. It boils down to personal pride and feeling of accomplishment. I for one hate improper GUIs and wouldn’t release anything like that out (at best in beta or such but never as the 1.0).
Lastly, your analogy is a little off. Open source is like academia, closed source is big business. Lots of cool stuff comes out of the universities, and they are very important to our society as a whole, but to get the job done the quickest and cheapest way possible, the answer almost alwas comes from industry. This is why the GIMP is more then good enough for hobbyest use, but is still not an adiquet tool for a professional (even the artists hired by OSS companies still use photoshop). Or while audacity is good and all, ALSA is really not good enough for serious recording (i have found up to an 80ms latency difference between vista and feisty.). Or how OGL/SDL has improved tremendously over the years, it really doesnt come close to directX. I have been around long enough to have written more then my share of DOS and bash scripts, but I mean come on guys, its 2007. Lets get with the program and upgrade to what has been the standard interface for everything since about 1980. As much as apache is so much greater in so many ways then IIS, why is it that I MUCH perfer IIS while developing any sort of web stuff? It is because it is because its a few clicks to configure anything I want. Sure, I know how to use apache, I also know how to use slack, but just because I *can* deal with the added pain of working with text files and commandline interfaces, doesnt mean I *want* to.
SDL/OGL is more than adequate if you also use OpenAL for audio and some other SDL minor libs together. It’s not as nice package as Dx but it’s about as powerful, it’s that you have to mix it up. Not much problem for anyone who knows what he’s doing (OpenGL is not less powerful than D3d, if you think that you have a problem).
As for the polish well it’s as I said. There’s no one to shout “bells and whistles” at the guys. But if I compare Windows XP programs I use to Linux versions, the Linux versions are less annoying, more to the point, and lately, easier to use. For comparison.. “WinRAR/WinZip/Winwhateverarchiver” vs the default gnome front-end archiver. Or Firestarter vs some windows firewalls (not the default one tho that one is simple
). It’s not all black and white.
Professional level software is a special case in which OSS has problems and always will. It could penetrate (see Blender, not top but good enough for many professional things) but commercial backing is a must in this case.
I agree with you to some extent, and as a programmer who is working on an OSS project AND has to get some money, I am more or less a supporter of the mixup group (those who shout “coexist!”
). It’s just that overall I feel (as a user) that OSS software is proving to be of higher quality, albeit somewhat frustrating at times. (I could sing about my windows/$$ – software troubles which were sadly unfixable)
It could become bloated and it’s surely grown up a lot since I tried it at version 0.5.0 but it’s much better.
Cleaning up Gecko instead of adding patches would have helped both speed and memory footprint, not to mention bugginess.
Since they’re using more native GUI pieces in version 3.0 the responsiveness has become better and the pages actually look right finally.
Standards compliance, while also handling IE-oriented sites, has to be daunting and adding to the code bloat. What a nice, slim world it would be if every website were standards compliant.
Still, Firefox 2.0.x works well and crashes less than Firefox 1.0.x and from what I’ve seen Firefox 3.0.x will be an improvement in almost all areas.
Most people don’t even know how to write any simple program – not comparable to such huge codebase as Firefox , linux kernel or windows have.
If the code grows bigger and bigger, it’s impossible to avoid the so called “bloat”.
By the above definition, some people who complain about anything being “bloated” shouldn’t even use computers, because hardware which computers are built upon is complex (“bloated”).
All operating systems and good software are “bloated”, because they take a lot of memory and hardware resources.
If you don’t want “bloated” software, stick to DOS or buy better PC. You won’t have to worry about such unneeded things as advanced 3D graphics, all sort of USB stuff, FireWire, networking and high definition sound.
If Firefox has to support your favorite XHTML or CSS fully, it has to use more complex page rendering algorithms.
I think you are misunderstanding features and bloat. Bloat is something that is over-engineered, unexplainably inefficient or not of any practical use for most users.
XHTML & CSS are necesary, required, basic features. Having your hardware supported is not ‘bloat’.
See, to slightly quote Chris Rock, I’m “TIRED, TIRED, TIRED” of people like yourself who incessantly reply “buy a new PC if your current one can’t handle Firefox”.
I’m using a “new” PC right now, a 2006 HP Pavilion dv6000 notebook with AMD Turion, 1.61 GHz, 992 MB of RAM, 14.8 out of 80.5 GB of HD space, with WinXP MCE ’05 using Firefox 2.0.0.3.
Currently, it is using 165,000 K, and can shoot up to 500,000 or 600,000 K in a single session. It requires going to Task Manager > Processes to manually strangle the life out of the firefox.exe-beast.
Oh, and Windows XP is supposed to be the one on which Firefox works best?
Dude, crack is wack.
“””
If the code grows bigger and bigger, it’s impossible to avoid the so called “bloat”.
By the above definition, some people who complain about anything being “bloated” shouldn’t even use computers, because hardware which computers are built upon is complex (“bloated”).
All operating systems and good software are “bloated”, because they take a lot of memory and hardware resources.
If you don’t want “bloated” software, stick to DOS or buy better PC.
“””
Yes. But to help people understand, perhaps an analogy would be useful.
It’s like diet.
If I keep on eating and eating more and more high calorie food every day, it is impossible to avoid so called bloat. There’s is nothing I can do to avoid getting fat. It’s just part of modern life.
So anyone who dislikes being fat should (by definition, as you put it), not eat at all, or eat only green salads without dressing (and perhaps a bit of plankton), or simply buy larger clothes.
Does that clarify matters for everyone?
Edited 2007-05-18 20:36
And lust like diet: different people react differently on the same food. Some people can eat a lot while not becomming fat. Some need more workouts, some less.
Just like the different browsers render the same sites in a different way. Some do it more efficiently without becoming fat.
“””
Some do it more efficiently without becoming fat.
“””
And as with people, some light is less flattering than other light.
Here’s some unflattering light for modern applications:
http://tinyurl.com/3cjm22
“Here’s some unflattering light for modern applications: ”
Dude, you tinyurl’d a PDF document…at least give us some warning!
1) It is possible that Firefox, or the technology behind it, was never built to handle more than 10 tabs in a single session, something that falls far below the demands of today’s furious, high-maintenance web surfer, who can open as much as (I repeat this from a comment on Digg) 180 tabs.
2) If other browsers (x-platform like Opera or mono-platform like Safari) are going fat like Firefox under the such circumstances (cache/fastback), then I think its because today’s systems (both hardware and OS) aren’t built to handle our web browers, treating them as simple applications rather than as forefronting cornerstones of the user experience with a computer.
How about this: a document-processing unit (DPU) that handles the more insane amounts of flow for web documents, and hardware acceleration for web browsing.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6088709.html
This will allow for web documents, all 200 of them in a session, to be easily handled by dedicated hardware.
My memory was vague, but wasn’t there thoughts floating around of creating XML-node hardware; being able to store and access an XML tree in hardware would be great!
>> “today’s furious, high-maintenance web surfer, who can open as much as (I repeat this from a comment on Digg) 180 tabs”
I wonder what all those 180 tabs are used for. Porn?
I can name a few:
Wikipedia (both for reading and editing)
Digg
Google Search
YouTube
Blackboard (online classes for web design diploma)
More Wikipedia
Apple
More Google
etc.
I don’t usually go much further than 65 tabs in a session, but I can and have done so.
Plus, I put the laptop to sleep overnight with the browser on, wake up, get back on, and start back to the browsing routine.
———————–
Who in their right mind would have that many tabs open? At most I will have maybe 10, normally 3-4. I close tabs when I’m done getting the information I want from the web page, and it would be very rare that I would have any reason to have more open than 20 maximum. If I want to go back to something, I will bookmark it. I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly keep track of 180 open tabs. Firefox’s memory usage has never bothered me. I rarely have more than 100MB of memory usage with Firefox, and with 2GB of RAM, that is a very small percentage of my available memory (5% in fact).
You can always close tabs, that is what bookmarks are for people…
Wasn’t 10 tabs considered insane back in 1999? 🙂
(Oh crap, now I’m doing the same thing that I accused someone else of earlier up in the thread).
To be honest, I don’t think browser-side bookmarking is as necessary as it once was. Why should I have to treat a single web document with such status that I would have to close and save it for later, for fear that it will take up my memory?
I just want to open the webpage, put it aside for when I need it, and go to the next webpage in the meantime.
Oh, and if you couldn’t tell, I “open link in new tab” alot. Almost all the time that I open a link from Google or some other site.
So maybe there is an issue with Firefox on the side of the OS or hardware; we won’t be stuck with just 10 tabs for web surfing in the future.
Edited 2007-05-19 02:59
———————–
I have no fear of it taking up memory, it is simply that I am not able to keep track of more than a dozen or so open tabs at a time. I tend to read one thing at a time, and usually I will have multiple tabs open when I am comparing products from a range of retailers for example. I also turn off my computer and close my browser, so bookmarking useful links, or just googling to find them again is more useful to me than keeping the browser running with hundreds of tabs open.
Not needing more than 10 – 20 tabs has nothing to do with any limitations of computers or browser software per se, but rather my brain – I’m just not that good at multi-tasking. I don’t have more than a couple of windows or apps open at a time for the same reason. That’s just me though, I have no problem with anyone wanting to have lots of tabs open, though unless there is a large market for it, I don’t see it as something Mozilla devs should be focusing on.
How about forking the rendering engine into one that only takes clean HTML and another as a fall back renderer. So if the page is correct, it can load faster because the renderer doesn’t have to account for bad HTML, if it fails, it falls back to the “slow” renderer.
So…. basically… kill the user experience.
There are so many poorly written sites out there that such a set up would constantly have the user bringing into memory, the bad renderer… and if you must have your least bloated running, that means every time you render something with it, you then kill the instance and remove it from memory so that you can run at peak system efficiency rather than peak user experience.
So if the page is correct, it can load faster because the renderer doesn’t have to account for bad HTML,
You can already do this. If you create a page in XHTML, and serve it correctly (i.e. the mime-type is set to application/xhtml+xml instead of text/html) then Firefox will not make any attempts to work around bad code. If something is screwed up, then it will show a yellow screen with an error message.
Of course nobody does this because IE craps it’s pants when it is handed the application/xhtml+xml mime-type.
A good way to get around this is to check the HTTP Accept Header to see if the browser advertises support for application/xhtml+xml and set the mime-type accordingly. (Very easy to do in Rails)
It’s undeniable that Firefox is sluggish, the main reason is the architecture, XUL, JavaScript etc.
It appears the architecture allows outstanding extensibility, all the great extensions proof that, I rather be able to tweak a application to death like Firefox like being stuck without extensibility like Opera, sure Firefox and Thunderbird are sluggish but still very usable.
Maxthon looks, feels and performs pretty nice but feature and extensibility wise there is no competition, Firefox is too far beyond.
The more I browse with FF, the more it becomes slower and eventually I restart it (usually less than a day of heavy browsing is enough) and this is on a computer with 2GB of memory, with only the ‘flash blocker’ extension running so it *is* bloated.
That plus closing some tab for some website takes several seconds (weird) and sometimes the whole browser freeze when I open some tab (poor tab management, the tab itself could be slow to load but the other tab should never be impacted) usually when loading a PDF.
So nowadays, I do half of my browsing on Opera9 which is much more responsive, why only half the time?
Because Opera’s ‘intelligent’ tab management tend to make me crazy, plus if I click not right on a url it goes into scroll mode which is annoying.
I uninstalled the DOM inspector (which you might have) and the feedback agent.. now pages load up fast and smooth.
My hopes are now in Konqueror (if gets ported to Windows).
I’ll second that. My theory is that the free software development model just doesn’t work well on software that developed and evolved as a proprietary product. Firefox and OpenOffice are the two most uncharacteristic applications on the free software desktop. They’re these huge, beastly source trees that come surprisingly close to being their own desktop environment. Nobody wants to touch that code. They don’t use the kinds of toolkits and libraries that free software *nix developers are accustomed to using. They duplicate functionality, they don’t look and feel right on our native desktops, and they have troubling performance issues.
Free software applications don’t have these problems. They have other problems, but not these. Most projects have modest code bases, built on a rich set of system and desktop libraries shared by many other applications on the desktop. They share functionality, depend on one another, look consistent, and generally perform well. They might be missing some features, they occasionally have some broken functionality, and they might not be as polished as one might like. But these are very different problems than the ones we experience with Firefox and OpenOffice.
Konqueror is an application that you can’t even download from their project page. They just say that it’s a part of kdebase and depends on kdelibs. It’s a modular and extensible web browser, file manager, file viewer, and application container. It’s more ambitious than Firefox even aspires to be. It’s practically it’s own desktop environment, but it implements very little functionality in and of itself. It’s merely the central hub of a large constellation of interdependent libraries and applications. Konqueror is a perfect example of how the free software community develops applications. It has some usability issues that are being addressed, but it’s a remarkably powerful, functional, and efficient application.
KDE4 on Windows probably won’t be ready for most users for about a year, possibly a bit sooner for Mac users. Maybe then users of these platforms will see for themselves the difference between adopted and native free software applications. Don’t get me wrong, I’m using Firefox to post this comment, and I think Firefox is a pretty good browser. But it’s hard not to be excited about KDE4 and how it promises to usher in a new era in the evolution of the free software desktop. It represents a higher level of modularity, extensibility, and integration than we’ve ever seen before on the desktop. Compared to Firefox, Konqueror is not only a better platform for the web, but it’s also a better platform for the desktop.
Slowly but surely the browser is becoming the desktop. Which is closer: Firefox or Konqueror?
Edited 2007-05-19 07:32
Thereis in my humble opinion absolutely nothing wrong with FF.
As with a lot of other apps it depends on how well the overall system is configured.A malware loaded system due to inadequadely configuration will make everything sluggish after a while.
Edited 2007-05-18 21:17
“Thereis in my humble opinion absolutely nothing wrong with FF. ”
Firefox by itself is a very nice, lean, fast browser. Install just a few skin/plugins and it starts to go downhill fairly quick. However a Firefox install without plugins is about as useful as…well, IE.
The problem lies in the plugin architecture, and the fact that there aren’t many FF “standard” guidelines for writing plugins, or any type of sanity checks provided by the FF runtime to try and tame any out of control plugins other than just disabling them. There needs to be some sort of FF profiler to assist plugin devs.
I have 10 or so plugins installed, and regularly see FF go over 150 megs of memory after an hour or so.
A profiler type extension would be great for Firefox, it could pinpoint exactly how much memory and cpu each extension and tab you have open is taking up. It would probably require a ton of development from Mozilla to put in the support for it, though.
I have 10 or so plugins installed, and regularly see FF go over 150 megs of memory after an hour or so.
According to htop on my ubuntu machine the memory consumption with FF and a lot of plugins loaded is 150-160 meg and that is Gnome included.
With oowriter 2.2 (OpenOffice) also loaded it’s 190 meg.
So i find it hard to believe FF alone is consuming 150 meg.
Edited 2007-05-21 15:17
As a matter of fact, I don’t remember any version of Firefox that was quick to start and low on memory, and I used since the days when it was called ‘Phoenix’. It was announced as slim and fast, a contrary to Mozilla suite.
In fact, last versions of Mozilla were faster and slimmer than Firefox. Sometimes it makes me wonder what the hell are all those people talking about.
Linux version does feel a little sluggish compared to its Windows counterpart. But if you have a fairly modern system with say atleast 512MB RAM and a 1Ghz+ CPU then its not that noticeable.
I was hoping it would use less resources so lightweight linux boxes could have a decent web browser. I’m talking 128MB machines. Dillo just doesn’t support everything that todays sites are made of.
But the “fat phase” was when Elvis Presley singed more beautifully… 🙂
“and unseated Microsoft’s IE as the de facto monopoly in the field”
As much as I would love this to be true, you can’t go throwing round statements like this! Firefox is not the monopoly in the field, not de facto, not even close.
Perhaps bloat does exist, but this article brings up a lot of frankly silly points about page caching and 3rd party extensions and never proves the agenda it’s set itself.
Edited 2007-05-19 00:55
Er, re-read that sentence. They “unseated” MS, it doesn’t say they took the seat for themselves.
Firefox/firebird re-ignited the browser wars. That 15% marketshare was enough to effect a paradigm shift in how websites code their layouts. You don’t have to trade one monopoly for another to benefit the market, competition is better.
I was having a lot of problems with FF locking up my computer until I installed Flashblock a few days ago and the problems have went away. Flash and JS seem to be degrading the web in a lot of ways now.
Personally I hope that the FF devs make Firefox more memory efficient and that they do something to make extensions play more nicely together. I have 18 extensions and I often wonder if they aren’t a large source of my problems although after installing Flashblock and having my problems go away I’m really starting to wonder. Could FF or Flash be changed in some way so that they play more nicely together? Personally I just want more web standards support and I want FF to be as rock solid and stable as possible.
Also I’m looking forward to KDE4 and the possibility of having a cross platform Konqueror or what ever the primary web broswer for KDE becomes. I personally hope that KDE creates a lightweight crossplatform web browser with an extensible API and allows Konqueror to remain the excellent jack of all trades that it currently is.
I love firefox,ive been using it since it’s firebird days, but as much as I don’t want to diss it out, i’m using opera more and more each day.
IMO mozilla firebird .7 was the lightest/fastest release so far! I loved the look too. Still use it most of the time. Seriously.
Given that EVERY version from 0.89 right up to 2.0 has the nasty habit of not only chewing absurd amounts of memory, but hogging the cpu to the point one’s only choice is to kill it. Again, since when attempting to report this via bugzilla instead of addressing the problem or using the instruction I posted to allow anyone to recreate the problem, they resorted to verbal attacks over my using the word ‘crash’ instead of ‘hung’ – a distinction I’ve not heard in three decades of computing. THEN they try to sell us on that being a ‘feature’ not a ‘leak’, and of course it can’t be related to the download manager even though that seems to be what excasterbates the problem most. Seriously, what the hell is with routing all image saves through the download manager, often REDOWNLOADING the images instead of grabbing them from that wonderful ‘feature’ known as a memory leak… uhm, I mean cache.
To hell with Firefox – Or at least, that’s the attitude I’d take if I wasn’t a web developer and basically now HAVE to support it. (but then, I try to support all browsers made after the millenium as much as possible – I only just dropped IE 5.x support).. and because I’m a web developer using all major browser engines all day long, I have to kill firefox at least eight times a day regardless of OS/Platform – be it Linux, Windows or OSX. Doesn’t exactly endear itself to me.
But again, want to talk bloat? How big is firefox for just the browser on windows? 5.7meg distro and 22.5 megs installed? How big is Opera 9.2 again? 4.7 meg download and 8.4 megs installed… and that’s WITH a mail client and >80% of the stuff put out as addons to FF BUILT IN… By the time you add thunderbird and enough add-ons to approach the functionality of Opera out of the box, you are looking at 15megs of downloads and over 60 megs of disk space used.
It’s funny because you often get firefox zealots complaining about Opera being bloated because it ‘comes with so much crap built in’… These of course are the dumbasses who need to learn what the word ‘bloat’ means.
‘Danger of becoming fat’??? Hate to break it to you, it’s been there a long, LONG time.
Edited 2007-05-19 07:07
they resorted to verbal attacks over my using the word ‘crash’ instead of ‘hung’ – a distinction I’ve not heard in three decades of computing.
While end users don’t care about the distinction, the developers trying to fix the problem surely do so I can see why they would have tried to correct you for future bug reports. If the thing just devolved into a flamewar, then that is very unfortunate. Without seeing the entire conversation it is hard to pick sides as to who started it, though, as you clearly aren’t impartial on the matter.
THEN they try to sell us on that being a ‘feature’ not a ‘leak’
I assume you’re referring to the cache here. That is a feature, no question about it. It’s one that takes a large amount of memory, which some people have complained about but there is no leak. You can even turn it off if you really want to.
Seriously, what the hell is with routing all image saves through the download manager, often REDOWNLOADING the images instead of grabbing them from that wonderful ‘feature’…
That is pretty stupid, and I would hope it would be fixed soon. In fact the entire download manager pretty much sucks.
To hell with Firefox
That’s a very unfortunate attitude you’ve taken. Maybe instead of getting so upset about it you could decide to just ignore it and use what you like. (Opera apparently).
But again, want to talk bloat? How big is firefox for just the browser on windows? 5.7meg distro and 22.5 megs installed? How big is Opera 9.2 again? 4.7 meg download and 8.4 megs installed… and that’s WITH a mail client and >80% of the stuff put out as addons to FF BUILT IN… By the time you add thunderbird and enough add-ons to approach the functionality of Opera out of the box, you are looking at 15megs of downloads and over 60 megs of disk space used.
Many things both right and wrong in the above paragraph.
First, where you’re right: Firefox takes up a lot of extra hd space. I’m not sure an extra 15MBs actually matters to anyone in these days of 1TB drives, but it does appear more bloated at one level. The download of 1MB extra doesn’t matter to anyone – even on dialup it only takes a few extra seconds, and with auto updates of < 1MB you probably end up saving bandwidth in the long run.
Where you’re wrong: There’s no point in adding tons of theoretical extras to the download and install size – most people don’t get that many and don’t need nearly as many features as Opera comes with. So do your comparison with the average install (close to minimum) not some theoretical thing that never happens in real life.
What you’re missing: You say Opera has a ton of extra features built into it, like a mail client, and you are of course correct. But Firefox also has a ton of extra stuff built into it that you ignore (probably because you’re looking at it from the point of view of a user). Firefox basically bundles an entire toolkit within itself, called XUL. It’s a lot like Eclipse in the way that it is more of a platform than a simple app. Like Eclipse has entire applications built as plugins on top of it, Firefox is just another “plugin” on top of XUL. That is a very large and significant “feature” added in and obviously requires more space than a simple email client like Opera includes. Now you can argue that this sort of functionality doesn’t belong in a web browser and is just useless bloat added to it, but then I could argue the same about having a bittorrent client in a browser.
It’s funny because you often get firefox zealots complaining about Opera being bloated because it ‘comes with so much crap built in’… These of course are the dumbasses who need to learn what the word ‘bloat’ means.
I believe those people are usually referring less to the actual resources used, and more to the usability of the UI. I think Opera has done a good job the last couple of years cleaning it up a bit, but it still doesn’t feel quite as simple as Firefox to me. I’m sure a lot of people prefer it that way, though. To each his own.
‘Danger of becoming fat’??? Hate to break it to you, it’s been there a long, LONG time.
I’d agree with that. Although I think every major modern web browser out there is fairly fat right now, Firefox is clearly at the upper end of that group.
Opera is a great browser and I’m glad you like it. It clearly does some things well and Firefox could learn a lot from it. Still, I’m glad to have the choice, and I’m still sticking with Firefox for now. We’ll have to see how 3.0 ends up turning out. Hopefully we can both agree to wish it the best and hope it turns out to be a major step better.
P.S. Sorry about the long message, but apparently I had a lot to say.
>> That’s a very unfortunate attitude you’ve taken.
>> Maybe instead of getting so upset about it you
>> could decide to just ignore it and use what you like.
Believe me, I would if I could… but with Firefox having >15% market penetration and my working as a web developer, that’s just NOT a viable option for me – so I’m pretty much forced to use Firefox all day long. (Just as I’m pretty much forced to use IE6 all day long – the horrors… and IE7, and Opera, and Safari – blessed be the KVM on that last one)
>> I assume you’re referring to the cache here.
>> That is a feature, no question about it. It’s one
>> that takes a large amount of memory, which some
>> people have complained about but there is no leak.
See, I’ve heard that arguement before. If it’s such a ‘feature’ why do all the other browsers LACK IT? Though to be honest, the memory use doesn’t bother me as much as it constantly spiking to 100% cpu and having to be killed.
>> P.S. Sorry about the long message, but apparently I had a lot to say.
I can be a bit long winded myself – my own original post to this thread about a third one of my normal ones
Edited 2007-05-19 14:26
My surfing style is to google a topic, open several sites in background tabs, close the original search window, and then go through the results i selected one after another, opening all their links that interest me in background tabs and then closing the original windows. It’s not hard to end up with a couple dozen tabs this way.
The difference between the current Opera and Firefox:
Opera starts ratcheting my hard drive when i start *closing* tabs. My guess is that it consumes all the memory caching pages for it’s recycle bin. In no time it is totally unresponsive and not useable.
Firefox does not have this problem.
Because instead it just locks up the whole PC without warning.
It seems like just yesterday that Opera was ‘returning to its roots’ as a ‘lean, fast browser’, but instead we have all this crap stuck into it. There should be a way to limit how many pages it’s recycle bin will cache, or a way to clear them and restore memory. And by the way I am not on the latest one, I found it abominable and reinstalled 9.1
Also on my monitor the preview thumbnail frame is much much bigger in 9.2, but the actual thumbnail is still the same size and does not fill it and so it looks stupid. They’ve become sloppy plain and simple, like all their changes are done by some punk kid that figures everybody has the latest pc and nobody is on a dialup anymore. For other companies to do that okay, but it’s not the image Opera cultivated initially.
There is no longer any browser fit for older computers.
If opera starts ratcheting my hard drive when you start *closing* tabs, you realy should get a better pc. Most likely a little bit more ram wil help.
Opera is a lot lean as it was and you can strip all futures jou don’t want.
If you have many things in the recycle bin you can clear it bij choosing empty trash.
With trumbails look stupid as the trubnail frame is nicely filled bij the thumbnails?
Maybe it’s because of Gecko 1.9 versus 2.0’s Gecko 1.8. But it just -seems- faster and lighter.
Can’t speak to bloat, but it does take awhile to load in either the Ubuntu 7.04 GNU/Linux distro or in Microsoft Vista. Once started, it seems peppy enough. I love the tabs, and the automatic spell checking (I use Gmail), and I have found some useful add-ons.
As always, YMMV.
Why can’t the “Official” Firefox have optimized builds?
Sounds like a plan to me:
Optimized Firefox 2.0.0.3 Mac G4 | G5 | Intel
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2007/03/29/fire fox-2002 [beatnikpad.com]
hylas
“””
Why can’t the “Official” Firefox have optimized builds?
“””
Are these “optimized” as in compiling with processor specific, or really aggressive optimizations?
Because, if so, you can probably achieve the same effect by apprending -G4, -G5, or -Intel to the name of the existing downloads.
Processor specific optimizations have mostly a placebo effect. Or at least that is the conclusion that I always come to when I compare “optimized” builds of software side by side with builds that use only the usual, common optimizations. Sometimes they are a tiny bit faster, sometimes the same, sometimes slower.
But optimized builds *always* have a fan base of people who are blown away by how much faster they are. 😉
Edited 2007-05-19 20:21
“Are these “optimized” as in compiling with processor specific, or really aggressive optimizations?”
Processor specific.
Optimized Firefox 2.0.0.3 Mac G4 | G5 | Intel
Try it for yourself – here’s a link that [hopefully] works this time:
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2007/03/29/firefox-2002
hylas
I post a message criticizing Opera programmers, now today when I go to my ebay seller’s page it’s flagged as a ‘Fraud’ site. This happened once before, I popped-off here about Opera and a couple days later my own godaddy hosted website got the ‘fraud’ warning. That one only repeated two or three times though, so maybe these are just flukes. But there was an earlier similar incident, in the days of the ad-bar, I wrote to them about a perfectly stupid default setting and no reply but the next day my adbar came back on. Will this pass or do I need to contact somebody to find out how I got on their fraud list?