1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
|
Firefox is no longer a fringe browser. With xx% of the browser market Firefox has made it to prime time, but the browser is still no panacea for your web woes, issues remain.
Because of Firefox's open-source origins, the browser has remained somewhat sheltered from the harshest performance criticisms. However, as Firefox's adoption rate grows and it continues to gain market share against main competitor Internet Explorer, we can no longer turn a blind eye to its biggest flaws.
In fact, problems arising from poor memory handling and feature creep make Firefox start to look like the very beast it was originally meant to replace -- a slow, bloated and over-stuffed piece of software.
The appeal of a browser is after all, as Chris Pirillo say, "not just about standards compliance -- it's about raw speed."
And when it comes to speed, Firefox just might be bogging down your internet experience.
In a recent Wired survey, users rated Firefox's memory gobbling problems as their number one gripe about the browser.
Even Mozilla's Vice President of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer concedes that performace can be an issue. "Memory usage is its dependent on the environment -- other software, add-ons, extensions and other things can impact performance."
So what gives? What's making Firefox slow and heavy?
It could be the add-ons.
When Blake Ross first started writing the code that would eventually become Firefox, one of his goals was to slim the browser down by moving any non-essential functionality into a user-customizable extensions framework. To this day, Firefox's customizable nature remains arguably its greatest strength.
But those extensions can also be the source of many Firefox woes -- including speed issues. Memory leaks are not uncommon, and often extensions conflict with one another.
_________ _________ of Flock, a social networking browser built on top of Firefox, argues that extensions often aren't ready for prime time. "A combination of extensions may serve some very specific purposes, but does not create an integrated experience that's built for the end user."
Pirillo agrees and thinks that "to compete further, I do believe that Firefox must contain more "awesome" functionality out of the box."
"Otherwise," he says, "you're having to run a browser with a zillion plugins - and none of them aware that other plugins might be running."
But the question is what add-ons make the grade?
Mike Schroepfer, Vice President of Engineering at Mozilla, says that "one of our goals with new features is to hit that 90% use case."
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."
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, but now much faster thanks to their inclusion in the core code.
However not all users are happy with the added features, some say the dreaded feature creep is threatening to weigh down Firefox.
Schroepfer admits 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."
Chris Pirillo argues that feature creep could be inevitable. "How many millions of people use Firefox? Can you imagine if each one of them wanted to see something different in their core browser?"
Is Firefox caught between a rock and hard place?
Bruce Perens, an open-source advocate and observer, believes that the blame for bloat can't be levied entirely upon Firefox.
"The real cause of web bloat and feature creep is the rich content offered on the web these days," he says, "which goes so far beyond vanilla HTML in its performance demands."
But browsers such as Opera and Apple's Safari manage to handle rich webapps as well as Firefox with far less code. Not only that, but both of those lighter browsers pass the ACID 2 test, a test against the World Wide Web Consortium's recommended web standards that Firefox fails.
|
