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Firefox has a become the sacred cow of the digerati. Criticizing Firefox is socially on par with calling Earth Day a ___________________. But just as one day of awareness does nothing for the planet, glossing over Firefox's flaws doesn't make them go away.
Yet the way many fan-boys rush to defend even the most egregious of Firefox problems can resemble a screening of <cite>An Inconvenient Truth</cite> at an ostrich farm.
Of course the same kid gloves are almost never accorded to other browsers. When problems are found in Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser inevitably takes a bruising, diatribe filled round through the blogosphere.
And Firefox is not without problems. 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."
Firefox's popularity with the techno elite is a direct result of its extensibility. The browser itself is not much different than IE, Safari or any other, but the fact that Firefox is infinite customizability has long appealed to internet power users.
However with each new version of Firefox, more of the features that were once specialty add-ons are making it into the core code leading some to worry about bloat.
Firefox 1.5 was a 41.5 megabyte application, while Firefox 2.0 is 49.5 megabytes. Compare that to Safari’s paltry 16.8 MBs and Opera 9’s 24.5.
Hard drive space is cheap, does size matter? Consider that from 1.5 to 2.0 Firefox grew in size by almost 25%. If that rate continues Firefox 6 will have a file size on par with Photoshop.
The real question though is what you get for your bloat. Firefox 2.0 saw the addition of an inline spell checker, an RSS reader and a new search engine manager. All three of those features were previously available as extensions -- users that wanted them could use them, those that didn't still had a lightweight streamline browser.
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.
Mozilla was even reportedly considering including social networking features, borrowed from the Firefox-based Flock browser, into the next version of Firefox. While many users welcome such features, others have rightly suggested that the "Coop" as the new features all called, ought to remain a plug-in.
But plug-ins have their own problems.
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.
Part of Firefox's memory footprint can be attributed to faulty add-ons, but some of it can't. The Mozilla forums are filled with reports from users and Firefox 2 plugged over a dozen memory leaks that plagued earlier versions, but problems remain.
So what do you get for your RAM? Much Firefox's memory usage comes from cached pages that live on after you leave them. Firefox implements a cache to retain up to 8 rendered pages in memory for 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.
Add-ons are not however, something casual user seems interested in. Mozilla reports that roughly __% of Firefox users have some sort of add-on installed, which means that for most the browser itself is the appeal.
Mozilla recognizes that Firefox is far from perfect, even if the community is unwilling to. Firefox programmers recently put out a call for input from perhaps the most vocal Firefox abusers -- the Mac community.
Mac users have long had a serious bone to pick with Firefox -- Firefox doesn't look like a Mac application. Firefox eschews OS X interface elements in favor of its own, decidedly un-Mac equivalents, which makes the browser look out of place on the otherwise homogenous Mac platform.
Mac users being the finicky bunch that they are, often reject Firefox on that basis alone.
Camino, a Mac-only browser based on Firefox, looks more Mac like and enjoys widespread support in the community but it lacks Firefox's add-on capabilities.
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