Firefox Is Lagging Behind, Its Co-Founder Says 646
sopssa writes "Firefox's co-founder Blake Ross is skeptical about the future of Firefox. He says that 'the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive, and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly.' Within the past year Chrome has been steadily increasing its market share, along with the other WebKit-based browsers like Safari. Meanwhile Mozilla's (outgoing) CEO says that while Firefox is more competitive than ever, they're looking forward to their mobile version of Firefox. 'Clearly, both are annoyed at what has happened to their former renegade web browser. But, by many accounts, Firefox is no longer considered to be the light, open alternative it once was.'"
It always seemed bloated... (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Things Mature (Score:2, Interesting)
If that were true, then lighter browswers like Chrome should not be gaining in marketshare.
Re:Things Mature (Score:5, Interesting)
To Mozilla, if you're listening...please please please plug the memory leak that is constantly plaguing your product! There is no reason that Firefox with 5 tabs should be using over 300 MB of RAM without any Flash or PDF files open.
My take as an old time firefox user ... (Score:5, Interesting)
People don't move to chrome because of the ui(well okay, some do, most I know didn't), they moved because it was faster and less buggy.
What firefox needs is optimization/cleaning, not new features.
I will personally stay with the fox until chrome or opera allow for both real gui modification(which both opera and chrome lack) and extensions(chrome has that, or at least starting to pick up).v
Re:Things Mature (Score:2, Interesting)
IE might be losing marketshare, but even IE has features that Firefox doesn't. For example, process separation between tabs. And IE9 is quickly bringing the JS performance and standards compliance up to par with Firefox.
I mean, feel free to hate Microsoft, but there has to be something wrong at Mozilla if even Microsoft's slow, super-careful, backwards-compatible development methods are caught up so quickly.
Chrome is seriously lagging behind (Score:5, Interesting)
Switched away long ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
Like many I was one of the first on the big wagon ride using firefox in the various names it had before its current guise....
but... it just got too slow and clunky, startup times got longer load times of pages lagged... the benefits it had started to lose value.
So I switched to Opera and Safari...... I use firefox on the few websites I use that require it (yes that sounds odd).. I wish it were like it used to be.
Bloated over time? (Score:5, Interesting)
In at least one way, FF has been bloated all along.
Every time I've used any version of FF for the last four years, once it's been running for an hour or more it starts getting these little halts/pauses where the whole browser and UI freeze for half a second every 10-30 seconds. It gets worse the longer it's been open and the more pages i've opened. I've seen it on macs, windows, and linux. I've seen it on every machine I've ever used FF on. It is independent of all plugins and add-ons because it happens in a bare browser. I don't know what causes it, but intuitively it feels like garbage collection meets a bad memory leak.
It makes video unwatchable, which is pretty much death to a browser in today's world. Incidentally, it's happened three (now four) times while writing this post.
I've seen at least 5 bug reports and at least 10 threads in the Mozilla support forum. In every case, the developers/support people seem to not understand, or not believe that it's real, yet I've (another pause there) seen it on dozens of different computers and platforms, and never met a single computer with FF that *didn't* reproduce the problem. No matter how many bug reports get filed, this problem in FF never gets fixed.
And yet, I depend on my plugins for both browsing and developing. As it is, I use FF for almost everything, but I have to switch browsers to watch video, which is really annoying, and restart FF every (another pause there) three hours, which is even more annoying. /rant off
Re:Things Mature (Score:5, Interesting)
Opera's memory footprint is comparable to that of Firefox. "Feels light" is purely subjective and has nothing to do with actual resource usage.
Then try Palemoon (Score:1, Interesting)
A friend pointed me to a Firefox Windows optimized derivation called Palemoon (http://www.palemoon.org).
Several people bash it saying "Ah is just a guy messing with the compile options and is not for Linux!" - but despite that I tried it. And I saw that Palemoon cut off some unwanted things that Firefox coders think that we should need by force (Personas, parental controls, and other code not needed for me at least). This have a nice side effect: Lots of pages that doesn't work well on Firefox works fine on Palemoon and the program deals better with plugins that I need only. So Palemoon fills the gap that was only exclusive for Linux users and those custom builds.
If Firefox works more on made a good browsing experience rather to work on odd UIs or things that I don't want (personas) maybe it would be the #1 again.
Side notes: Chrome is not for me, I like that google do not spy on me. Opera is nice but lacks of plugins. M$IE? You are kidding, right? Now troll whatever you want. I won't read them anyway. XD
Re:Things Mature (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple already has licenses for h.264 which are included with the OS. It makes sense for them to include that support. MS is also offering that support with their higher end versions of Windows 7.
There is no reason that Mozilla couldn't simply rely on the same. it would not require that they charge anyone in those cases. Simply offering the option to use the OS's built in codec is a simple solution. As to what it will 'do to the web', it won't do anything. H.264 is already in use, on a multitude of high profile sites. Simply claiming Theora is better simply because it's OSS doesn't make it logistically a better fit for everyone. H.264 has obvious advantages including hardware acceleration on a huge number of devices where none exists for Theora. Also taken into account that Apple and Mac have already paid those license costs for the OS. Why not use them?
Bugs are not being fixed. (Score:3, Interesting)
While in the past there were crashes that could kill FireFox related to Flash, I don't see that like I used too. Now I see the browser spiking my CPU and raising its temperature by a few degrees because of bugs in the Java Scripting and AJAX engines. I am not sure if the culprit is memory leaks, or just faults in the software. It just seems like there are bugs in the renderer that are not being fixed and causing the CPU usage to spike in certain complex pages coded in certain ways.
Re:Things Mature (Score:5, Interesting)
All process separation in IE8 has done has made a slow browser even slower. In the time it takes for the copies of IE8 on every computer I use to bring up my Google.com home page, I'm already checking GMail on Chrome and Firefox. I don't give a shit at this point whether this or future versions of IE gain standards compliance, the browser just plain sucks. I'd sooner restart Firefox once a day than have to put up with IE and all those "features" that make it so slow. Of all the mainstream browsers, IE is probably by far the worst.
Firefox plugins (Score:5, Interesting)
If it were not for the plugins I'd drop firefox in an flash. It's s a bloated slow to launch pig. that get's dusted even by safari on page loads.
But flashblock, adblock and zotero are pretty sweet things.
Re:The issue for me is responsiveness (Score:5, Interesting)
The UI should be instant
Yeah, people were saying this about the Netscape Suite in 1996. Then Mozilla. Then finally Firefox came out and everybody said, "wow, this is great, oh, wait, it's still got a single threaded UI?". And it was told how complicated it would be to re-architect things, and that if only you didn't use this extension or visit that poorly designed site or open too many tabs, or... whatever it wasn't Firefox's problem. I think they finally gave JavaScript its own thread in a recent release, which helps. They've had multi-process Firefox working for a year in the lab, but it's still another six months out for a release (until it slips again). Fedora 15 time, probably. As I recall the entire Firefox project was done in half that time.
Google apparently wised up to the intractability of fixing MoFo a few years ago. It's too bad, some of the better Mozilla technologies are likely to get lost for several years as Firefox wanes.
Why is Webkit winning the embedded mkt? (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing I've really wondered. . . Firefox is a great browser, but it seems like almost anyone creating a mobile phone, tablet pc, etc. has chosen Webkit instead of Gecko. Why did Apple decide it needed to take Konqueror and create Webkit in the first place, instead of just using Gecko? There must've been some reason - I'm sure they must have at least *looked* at Gecko before making a decision? Why did Google choose Webkit for Android and Chrome? Why is Webkit being used in all sort of places, but Gecko is only being used by Firefox and a couple other desktop web browsers?
Is there some technical deficiency with Gecko (too bloated, too memory intensive, too slow, too complicated/hard to develop for? Maybe it's a licensing issue, where other companies don't like the Mozilla license?
Anyone have insight into this?
Re:I want software freedom instead. (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera is a major backer of web standards; typically the most compliant browser (Chromium guys don't seem to have a problem with pointing that out [chromium.org]); they initiated HTML5 video tag and are backing Theora-only solution from the beginning. Plus there are just so many ways to keep the browser afloat - while all other big ones exist thanks to major corporate backing (yes, also Mozilla...you don't remember AOL?), Opera simply always chosen to go without corporate daddy...but that needed a way to make revenue for a long time already, not only when lately revenue from searches became viable. They not only found their niche, but are giving for free a usable browser to the fastest-growing segment of the market. Millions of people who wouldn't have a browser otherwise.
Give them some credit...
PS. What was that mess with Firefox (free?) and Debian?
Re:Misses the point (Score:4, Interesting)
It is Gecko, not Gheko, and there is plenty of room for two, three, maybe even four major engines. Webkit is an excellent engine, and in many ways is better than Gecko, but in other ways Gecko is better. And there is certainly plenty of life left in Gecko. Already Gecko 1.9.x is very different from 1.0. Many more changes are planned even before 2.0, and 2.0 should be very nice indeed.
Re:Firefox plugins (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it bloated? What makes you say that?
You mention launch time and page load times, but that does not indicate bloat. That indicates that there are performance issues that can (and are) being investigated.
Is it the 8.1 MB installer? If so, that is small compared to others.
Is it the startup time? If so, there are I/O bottlenecks that are being investigated and addressed. And at the end of the day, how often do you actually open the web browser.
Is it the responsiveness? If so, that is due to graphics performance and there has been work to improve things. 3.6.3 is better at scrolling on Linux, and the team are looking at supporting Direct2D/Write on Win7 (they were the first to investigate that, before Microsoft announced IE9).
Is it page load times? If so, there may well be improvements that can be made.
Is it the look of the UI? Chrome has a more minimal UI, so could be perceived as having less bloat. Firefox is converging to a similar (not identical) UI.
Is it memory usage? There have been memory leaks that have been plugged over the 3.x browser lifetime. There may be others, I don't know. Note also that a high memory usage may be flash (out-of-process plugins will help here) or may be image/page caching algorithms/logic (which help with responsiveness).
Is it the heavy use of COM in internal interfaces? If so, the mozilla team are aware of this and have been making changes to slowly remove this (but not from the DOM). The mozilla codebase is large (as is true with any sufficiently large codebase, including WebKit) and making large changes takes time.
Is it JavaScript performance? Firefox is not the fastest in this, but the speeds are sufficiently capable to run even more demanding sites comfortably. And also, work is being done to improve this.
Re:How fast does it need to be? (Score:4, Interesting)
Freshly installed laptop, Windows 7 x64, Core Duo P8600, 2 GB RAM.
Chrome with 6 plugins loads instantly (1sec).
Firefox with 1 plugin (Firebug) loads in 6 seconds.
After months of use, Firefox gets to a point when if freezes for 1-2 seconds when you're typing a URL and other weird things like that.
I only use Firefox for development, because Chrome Developer Tools are no match for Firebug, but for daily browsing I definitely prefer Chrome.
Have your cake and eat it, too (Score:4, Interesting)
In a literal sense, you are correct. When you add features, you add stuff for the computer to do.
But that doesn't represent the reality of the past 30 years. For 30 years, we've gotten significantly more for the *same* amount of consumption. My computer today burns about 120 watts total, about the same as the first 286/20 I ever had. So we have a millionfold improvement in performance at *no* meaningful additional cost.
Software may cost more to run to add more features, but this is countermanded by the fact that all of today's software is grossly inefficient and there is incredible room for improvement in overall performance if we only take the time to do so! I've seen software performance improve 100x simply by limiting the amount of data involved in a string pattern match, for example!
Yes, in most cases, you can have your cake, sell a piece, and still eat it, if you focus on software inefficiency and make your software work quickly. I improved the performance of one of our products by about 70% in two days by running lots of testing to find out what the cause was.
The result is an application that seems WAY FASTER without doing any less than before. w00t!
Re:Bloated over time? (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox is by far my main browser, that's due to AdBlock and FlashBlock mainly. I don't have a gazillion plug ins, just the aforementioned plus sun's java, & flash,
So...mainly due to features which are in no way exlclusive to it?
Re:Things Mature (Score:4, Interesting)
Features of a "robust GUI" (not quite the term I'd use, but hey...)
By this measure, I give the "robust GUI" prize to:
Re:Things Mature (Score:3, Interesting)
Fortunately, at least Silverlight is nearly nowhere.. :)
Neflix uses Silverlight.
Re:Things Mature (Score:0, Interesting)
I just meant that people can increasingly do things for themselves, rather than having to go to exports. Or that the skill level required for experts to accomplish goals isn't as high as it used to be. But fair enough. How about different words for you, like "independence", or "self-sufficiency", or "douchebag".
At the risk of you calling me a douchebag, I will be devil's advocate here ( for the record, I disagree 110% with everything below, but I probably disagree with your stance more than that :) ).
As a developer nowadays, any time you try and do something for yourself, or try to be self-sufficient, someone chimes in "just use this pre-existing program/spreadsheet/web app". or "why don't you just use an existing library" or "you know there's already an app for that, right?".
How is relying on other people's pre-built apps and libraries or web sites self-sufficient?
Am I just supposed to cross my fingers & hope the company will be in business five years from now, and that website will still be up, or that library/binary will still be maintained for future operating systems?
Bookmark something right now, anything, and check back in a few years -- I can pretty much guarantee you will get a 404 or redirected to a domain squatter or "DNS name not found" (what you get depends on the resources/size/finances behind the site in question).
from "Coders at Work"
Thompson: But it's worse than that. The operating system is not only given; it's mandatory.
If the browser is the new operating system, I think the same applies too.
No, users don't need to know everything a developer does, but I would hope a developer has knowledge the user doesn't (and doesn't care to know, or need to), and there is still some distinguishing factor between the two groups.
Merging the two and pretending they are the same is a disservice to both parties.
the skill level required for experts to accomplish goals isn't as high as it used to be
Could also just mean people have lowered their standards. I don't think expert means what you think it means.
Today, most software is so easy to use that if you don't intuitively know how to accomplish what you want to do, it's pretty much crap.
If you know intuitively how to accomplish what you want to do, you are not learning anything, or must not be doing anything very interesting or difficult.
If one is not interested in learning anything, then I wouldn't call them an expert. A true expert knows they don't know everything. It is newbies that think they do.
If they are an expert, and done learning, that expert status won't last long.
It must be maintained -- it is not something you reach and then "I'm done".
The difference in productivity between that kind of thing and what we to today is staggering.
I don't think productivity means what you think it means. Getting the job done faster does not necessarily imply more productive -- it usually means less. Whether that shows up on a balance sheet somewhere or not is another story.
Today I write software by assembling modular bits of subprograms together rapidly, string it together with this or that, and wham, it's working. Back in the day, everything had to be written from scratch.
This doesn't jibe with your "self-sufficient" claim.
"and wham, it's working"
doesn't exactly inspire confidence in my estimation of your abilities :)
Radical productivity differences. Developers are radically more productive than they used to be. Things that used to take days or weeks to do are routinely done in hours now.
Speed does not equal productivity.
(Example: Today, computers from diff
Re:Firefox plugins (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Things Mature (Score:5, Interesting)
You are obviously too young to remember the days when programmers wrote optimised and intelligent code. These days all of the lazy fucks that call themselves programmers just point and click in pretty drag and drop IDEs that require 10MB of RAM just to print "hello fucking world".
I worked with a nice fellow. Let's call him Fritz. Fritz is kind of a COBOL-on-mainframe master; if I ever want an accounting system that will work for the next 80 years, I'll give him a call. His problem is that he can't not optimize, even when it's totally inappropriate.
For example, he was tasked to write a Python program to take a flat text file of invoice line items and match them up to the invoices in our system. When he proudly debuted the "working" product, it made the database cry for several hours as it looped across the text file one line at a time, queried the DB for the matching invoice, inserted the line item, then moved on to the next. Once I recovered from shock and looked at his code (which I'm convinced was also valid COBOL), I realized that it didn't cache anything. If two adjacent lines would've matched the same invoice, his code didn't care. It just repeated that query as many times as necessary.
I finally got it through to Fritz that I would not allow that code in production and to please add some memoizing. His response was to spend the next week optimizing for the special case where those two adjacent lines (in an unsorted text file) went to the same invoice. That got runtimes down to just a few hours. I finally gave up on asking him to do it, spent a morning adding a hash that mapped invoice numbers to their database rows, and saw the program run in 8 seconds (I have witnesses).
So I gave it back to Fritz and asked him to make a couple of minor adjustments before rolling it out live. When he was finished, runtimes were back up to several hours. I was horrified and furious to learn that he'd stripped out all my caching code. When I asked why, he laughed and shook his head at my naivety because my program wasted over 250MB of RAM, but his ran in under 1MB.
In production, it was going onto a server with 16GB of RAM.
I tried to explain that I'd much rather "waste" 1/64 of the machine's RAM for 8 seconds than 1/16000th for 5 hours of database pain, but he never really got it.
Notice where I started by saying that I worked with Fritz? Well, I'm still at the same job, but we're no longer coworkers.
My point in all this is that you see every saved byte as a moral victory over today's decadent youth. I see it as an old man tilting at windmills. Memory leaks need to be caught, of course - even a low drip adds up to gallons over time. Embedded programming still has a place for clever coding that saves bits whenever possible. But in general-purpose desktop code, I couldn't possibly care less whether a program I'll be practically living in uses 1/60th of my computer's RAM (100MB) instead of merely 1/120th (50MB). If that "laziness" lets the authors add handy features to it and fix bugs in a more timely manner than if they had to micro-optimize for every nibble, then more power to 'em.
Re:It always seemed bloated... (Score:3, Interesting)