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+As Firefox continues to integrate add-ons into the core code, the same feature creep that once bogged down Mozilla's swiss army knife browser/email client/FTP solution may come back to haunt Firefox.
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+Memory leaks, feature creep and bloat are threatening to weigh down the browser that once enticed users by promising to help them "take back the web."
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+When Blake Ross first started writing the code that would eventually become Firefox, one of the goals was to produce a lightweight alternative by moving none essential functionality into a user-customizable extensions framework, which remains arguably Firefox's greatest strength.
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+But today many things that started out as extensions are now part of the Firefox core feature set and yet many problems remain.
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+Firefox 2.0 saw the addition of an inline spell checker, an RSS reader and a new search engine manager -- all previously available as add-ons -- and at the same time many problems that have plagued the browser since the beginning remain.
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+Mike Schroepfer, Vice President of Engineering at Mozilla, says that "one of our goals with new features is to hit that 90% use case."
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+Meaning that if a feature is useful to 90 percent of users, than it can make the cut, otherwise "if power users want something richer than that they can turn to extensions."
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+A representative from Flock, the specialized social networking browser built on top of Firefox, points out that extensions have their own issues. For one thing they often aren't compatible with each other. "A combination of extensions may serve some very specific purposes, but does not create an integrated experience that's built for the end user."
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+Schroepfer says that feature bloat is always a concern, but the main focus for new features is that they enhance without a performance hit. "The general philosophy, and one of the reasons it takes so long to get features in the browser, is that any new features should not affect the startup time or performance the browser."
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+By Mozilla's test Firefox 2.0 remains the fastest version yet, but Schroepfer concedes that "memory usage is its dependent on the environment -- other software, add-ons, extensions and other things can impact performance."
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+For some Firefox is a big fat RAM hog, frequently gobbling up nearly everything available and forcing users to restart the browser periodically just to keep from bringing their machines grinding halt.
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+Much Firefox's memory usage comes from a cache mechanism introduced in version 1.5. In Firefox, the last 8 pages that live on after you leave them (provided you have a gigabyte of RAM -- if you have less it stores less). 
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+Caching pages in memory allows faster back-browsing, but this can be a lot of data -- meaning faster performance as you navigate the web -- but less RAM for other apps to use.
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+Memory leaks and bugs are nothing new in Firefox. As Chris Pirillo points out, "the issue isn't really about cluttering Firefox with more features that could slow it down and make it more unstable -- the issue is in not fixing outstanding, documented, replicable bugs before adding more features to the core."
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+But Bruce Perens, an open source advocate and observer, believes that the bloat isn't just the fault of the browser. "I think the real cause of web bloat and feature creep is the rich content offered on the web these days, which goes so far beyond vanilla HTML in its performance demands."
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+Schroepfer claims that, according to Mozilla's figures, Firefox has "actually seen a significant drop in memory usage."
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+But as he admits, "everyone's mileage varies a little bit."
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+The advent of more sophisticated web pages and applications has driven the Firefox developers to a major rewrite of Gecko the engine that renders pages in Firefox. 
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+Firefox 3 will use Gecko 1.9 which offers significant performance boosts even in the early alpha builds available today. Firefox 4 is also scheduled to include [Tamarin][1], a new Javascript rendering engine donated to Mozilla by Adobe.
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+"In general we're psyched about the way people are pushing the limits of the web," Schroepfer says. "And we're excited about incorporating Tamarin into Firefox 4 which should significantly improve Javascript performance."
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+Bruce Perens, a open source advocate and observer, believes that whatever Firefox's problems, the community can repair them.
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+"If customers want a stripped-down version of Firefox, someone in the open source world will make one that they like."  
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+"The beauty of open source," says Schroepfer, is that "it's open to what people want -- the success of Seamonkey demonstrates that some people still actually like the integrated approach."
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+"If someone has a better idea and they can go off and run with it and if the idea is successful they will find an audience."
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+[1]: http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/11/adobe_releases_.html "Adobe Releases Tamarin"
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