"Recently, I have been pondering why is Firefox so darn popular? This is a question that I honestly ask myself sometimes, often while browsing the web from within the browser itself. The real trick is that there are so many different ways to answer this." More of the editorial here. Additionally, the first set of release candidates for Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 have been posted to the Mozilla FTP of nightly releases.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-10-17
Member since:2006-03-12
Indeed, delving further into the Firefox not being bloated and ugly bit, what does the man think extensions are? A majority of the people I know that use it run with at least 10 extensions, minimum - does this not make Firefox bigger and more bloaty?
Or is because these are not being officially developed within Firefox suddenly make the memory they take up not get used by Firefox?
Also, when comparing Opera and Firefox, running on the same machine, despite Firefox being "smaller", Opera loads up faster and and renders faster than this more popular browser, I have never understood how they managed that with Firefox.
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-03-20
A majority of the people I know that use it run with at least 10 extensions, minimum
Wow...the majority of people I know use Firefox without extensions, including me.
People want a simple web browser to do their business and browse sites...the rest of the available stuff are out there for 'advanced' users.
When a program covers 90% of what people need, people won't switch to another product even if that product is superior.
IE up to version 6 has some big problems, mainly with security. The easy fix to the problem is a 5 MB download which is a few clicks away...other than that, why should one care about how fast a browser zooms or other petit details?
Edited 2006-07-10 08:54
Member since:2005-11-02
Seamonkey and Firefox not very similar in size and memory usage, despite the fact that Seamonkey offers far, far more features?
I just recently just did a comparison after installing Seamonkey on Ubuntu. It in fact uses less memory than Firefox and feels more responsive.
I still use Firefox as my primary browser though, I have been using it since Pheonix 0.5 when I switched from Galeon so its a long time since the Mozilla suite was my primary browser and I feel more at home in Firefox. The same applies to Opera which is a lighter more responsive browser than Firefox.
Member since:2006-06-15
Firefox's slowness isn't always the problem of Firefox. It can be really fast and responsive (again, it depends of your system memory and processor, so for some, Opera might be faster).
Ubuntu's Firefox is suffering from a known bug - but official Firefox from mozilla repositories, as Seamonkey, aren't affected.
It's just a shame due to some distros misconfiguration, Firefox gets a bad reputation.
For more information, see https://launchpad.net/products/firefox/+bug/32561
Member since:
2005-11-24
From the article: 'Firefox is not bloated. Both Netscape Navigator and Mozilla Suite are quite bloated. This by itself likely presented enough of a challenge on people running machines that may not have done all that well with running such a bloated program.'
I hate to post this without some statistics to offer, but are Seamonkey and Firefox not very similar in size and memory usage, despite the fact that Seamonkey offers far, far more features? Perhaps he refers to the interface, though the fact that he mentions 'machines' belies that...
Also, when he heralds this new era of 'choice', why is there no mention of Opera, Konqueror, Safari, et al? Perhaps no one of them provides all the aspects of Firefox about which he raves (cross-platform, OSS, easily extensible, etc.), but surely they at least deserve a link...