back to article Mozilla's ‘Great or Dead’ philosophy may save bloated blimp Firefox

For some time now Firefox, the once mighty web browser, has been bleeding market share and – perhaps more importantly – developer mind share. Between bundling unwanted features such as Pocket, proffering popcorn-worthy CEO dramas atop Mozilla, being led by a seemingly clueless management, and the fact that that Chrome feels …

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  1. sisk

    On the 'polarizing CEO' front it should be pointed out that the drama was neither his fault nor appropriate. The gay rights community was completely to blame for that. There was no reason to get up in arms over a political donation made ten years ago. And the fact that he was hounded out of a job over it is nothing short of disgusting. And I say that as a gay rights activist. It should have been a non-issue. After all in America we're supposed to have the right to support whatever political camp we want. Not only that but that particular political camp was in the majority at the time of his donation.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      What ?

      A CEO lost a job over a donation made TEN YEARS PRIOR ?

      Fuck.

      If only politicians could fall as easily, we might just have ourselves a democracy.

      1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Re: What ?

        If only politicians could fall as easily, we might just have ourselves a mob rule.

        FTFY

        1. Mike Flugennock

          Re: What ?

          f only politicians could fall as easily, we might just have ourselves a mob rule.

          What, you don't think we don't have "mob" rule now? Take a look around at who's running your country, or the company you work for. Go ahead, take a good, long, steamy look.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I agree completely, he should have lost his job for inventing JavaScript instead.

      1. sisk

        I agree completely, he should have lost his job for inventing JavaScript instead.

        Oh come now. JavaScript is actually pretty good so long as you use it only for what it was intended. It's when you start doing crazy things like take it out of the web and make it the primary scripting language of a desktop (the hell was the Gnome team thinking?) that it falls down.

    3. Robert Grant

      It's standard stuff - a group that's oppressed (or even one that merely views itself as oppressed, although that's not relevant here) learns how to fight, and that fight becomes part of its identity, making it more like a tribe, and then the tribe keeps fighting long after its won (or about to win) the stuff it's been fighting for, because the fight is all it knows.

      Thus the old liberals become the new conservatives, because they were never genuinely liberally minded in the first place. They just happened to want certain changes that liberals wanted. But once that change appears, they defend it using classic conservative tactics.

    4. Orv Silver badge

      We have the right to support whatever political camp we want, yes. But we don't have the right to be protected from others exercising their right to complain about it.

    5. Mr Lion

      "The gay rights community"

      Wtf is that? Anyone who doesn't support the rights of gays, or any other human, is an arsehole.

      So if by your comment you mean that the drama is down to non-arseholes being opposed to discrimination - I guess you're correct, but it's a bloody weird way to say it.

  2. DJV Silver badge

    That is (hopefully) good news

    Firefox is still my browser of choice due to the multitude of developer add-ons that I've become familiar with and now rely upon over the years. However, if things like Classic Theme Restorer hadn't also been available to reverse many of the completely idiotic things Mozilla have tried to impose then I would have ditched it some time ago.

    1. Gordan

      Mozilla has gone through cycles like this more than once before. Back in the days for v1 it was a debloated fork of Netscape.

      It then went on a massive diet with v4, where it actually managed to maintain a smaller memory footprint than contemporary Chrome.

      It sounds like it is time to lean out the code base and cut out various useless crud. Big deal. It will no doubt happen again some time, but the fact that it is happening periodically is a good sign that there are developers ready to take positive action when things start to get bad.

      FF will still have the advantage over Chrome when it comes to packaging due to much more sane and sensible treatment of shared libraries it requires to build against (Chrome has to bring most of not all specific versions of 3rd party projects with it because it won't build against anything else, needless enlarging the memory footprint and reducing performance).

    2. fung0

      Re: That is (hopefully) good news

      It's all about the add-ons for me too. There needs to be at least ONE browser that delivers maximum power, not minimum UI. Microsoft's IE and its new Edge, for instance, seem perfectly designed for people who open exactly one Web page at a time. I typically have several hundred open at one time, and what I need are more tools to help me manage the information overload.

      Unfortunately, when Mozilla talks about Great or Dead, I assume that means it will dump indispensable features like Tab Groups, based on the logic that it's easier to kill them than to make them Great. (Pale Moon already ditched Groups, making it a certainty that I'll never move to that particular Firefox fork.) Surely I'm not the only one who wants MORE features, rather than less??

      1. Tannin

        Re: That is (hopefully) good news

        "There needs to be at least ONE browser that delivers maximum power, not minimum UI."

        There is. Its name is Seamonkey. These used to be another one which was even better, but it hasn't been updated for a very long time and won't be. The company (ir)responsible now markets a pointless Chrome clone under the Opera name, though nobody knows why.

      2. Physeter

        Re: That is (hopefully) good news

        Yes, Pale Moon did get rid of natively supporting Tab Groups. However, the Pale Moon website offers a Tab Groups add-on, easy to find under the "tools" tab. I've been using Pale Moon ever since shortly before Austrailis was shoved down our throats, and never looked back.

        And if you're willing to try a WebKit based browser, have you heard of https://vivaldi.com ? They have tab stacks!

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: That is (hopefully) good news

        tabkit 2nd edition is my must-have addon: vertical tabs, groups, colours, it's all there.

    3. Mike Flugennock

      Re: That is (hopefully) good news

      I finally blew off Firefox a couple of years ago because of bloat and speed issues, but mostly due to their "sponsored frame" deal they started shoving off on new user installations.

      I've been using SeaMonkey since then -- quicker, not as bloated, and almost all Firefox add-ons work with it, and the ones that don't have versions specifically for SeaMonkey.

  3. Christoph

    If you don't like Firefox bloat, use Pale Moon.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Thanks for the tip. I'm giving it a try.

    2. elDog

      Yup - I switched to PaleMoon when the UI was hosed and haven't looked back

      I know, I know that there is at least one add-on that reverts many of the pieces of the tab/menu structure but it wasn't quite enough when I tried it.

      All of my current add-ons work in PaleMoon and I use quite a few as a developer. I think the leading-edge changes to Firefox (such as disabling Flash as default) may not make it in to PaleMoon immediately but they do seem to be pretty responsive.

    3. Hollerith 1

      PaleMoon sometimes

      I use PaleMoon, but I find that sometimes i have to switch back to Firefox because it gets 'stuck' on some sites (e.g. banking sites) and has occasional other hiccups. But the add-ons I want are there for the having and I didn't have to wrestle with it to stop it doing things I hated, which I have to do in Firefox.

    4. fung0

      No Tab Groups = no Pale Moon for me.

      Cyberfox is a better option. They've built in the User Interface Restorer, without needlessly ripping useful stuff out.

      As for "bloat" - are you kidding? Cyberfox is a 40MB download. I'd be just fine with 400MB, if I could have ten times the functionality. We're talking about PC browsers here, not smartphone apps.

  4. Chemist

    "Chrome ...... performs noticeably faster at common tasks, like switching between tabs."

    Blimey - you must have quick reaction times ! Even this old dual-core, 2GB with on-board graphics switching tabs is 'blink and you'll miss it ' .

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Chrome ...... performs noticeably faster at common tasks, like switching between tabs."

      "Even this old dual-core, 2GB with on-board graphics switching tabs is 'blink and you'll miss it "

      Don't worry. That was just the El Reg Copybot (tm), making things up as it goes along. It's amazing what technology can do these days.

      I suppose at least it hasn't got as bad as the Mail, where the Moral Outragebot has terminated all the other copybots, or the Guardian/BBC Axis of Evil, where the Climate Changebot has done the same thing.

    2. P. Lee

      Re: "Chrome ...... performs noticeably faster at common tasks, like switching between tabs."

      >Blimey - you must have quick reaction times !

      +1 for that. UI speed is not a problem for me. Privacy and inclination towards evil is, so FF is the norm with chromium (usually in privacy mode) reserved mostly for "sites that expect IE" and, occasionally, if I can't be bothered to mess with noscript.

      I have to say though, not all feature-creep is bad. There is an increasing tendency from OS providers to try to own the entire stack, provide all features and squash third parties. This helps their privacy-intruding search ambitions. Technically, should video-conferencing be built into the browser? Probably not. However, there is something to be said for doing so to promote cross-platform interaction and prevent lock-in by facetime or skype.

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: "Chrome ...... performs noticeably faster at common tasks, like switching between tabs."

      Even worse is "the fact that that Chrome feels faster, more stable and less bloated". Scott, here's a tip: when you say something feels a certain way, that's a hint that you're making a subjective evaluation, not stating a "fact".

      Try this: "I think Chrome feels faster, but I don't have any data to actually support that, or a real argument why it should matter. So disregard this point."

      (Personally, I've never noticed Firefox being any more sluggish than anything else on any of the systems I've run it on. And I find Chrome makes my skin crawl, on the rare occasions where I use it, typically to test site glitches that might not be obvious under other browsers. It reminds me of the smarmy polish of an inspirational speaker.)

  5. Dan 55 Silver badge

    Ditching XBL/XUL would mean Mozilla shooting itself in the foot

    This is what makes plug-ins like CTR work and themes customisable. No CTR and no officially supported classic themes will mean very grumpy users.

    The main problem with XBL/XUL is that it's not well documented. If they throw it out because new staff don't know how to make it work (you know, just like they've got no idea about UX design) then that would be very unfortunate.

    1. teknopaul

      Re: Ditching XBL/XUL would mean Mozilla shooting itself in the foot

      XUL has been replaced. I liked it, I've written a lot in it, it was a good UI framework in its own right even outside of FireFox, but I can see that it has to go, you can't have two plugin frameworks. Also agree you can't just ditch it today.

      I'd vote for keeping FireFox as it is and apply security fixes and what ever corporate integrations only and for someone at Mozilla to fork a SlimFox without XUL, if you need some XUL plugin use FireFox. That worked for the migration away from Netscape, do it again. You can't do that too often, but FF is at version 39.

      Should probably split FireFox Dev and FF lite. The DEV tools are second to none, but that's not what you want for browsing. "Open in FireFoxDev" menu would suffice.

      1. Preston Munchensonton
        Thumb Up

        Re: Ditching XBL/XUL would mean Mozilla shooting itself in the foot

        @teknopaul Thank you for a well-reasoned and useful post. These are becoming too rare these days and these types of contributions are exactly what Mozilla needs to hear.

        Take note, dear trolls, to see how it's done.

      2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

        Re: Ditching XBL/XUL would mean Mozilla shooting itself in the foot

        XUL has been replaced

        But... by what? Some other XML format? Griffon? (I wish)...

        1. Rhyd

          Re: Ditching XBL/XUL would mean Mozilla shooting itself in the foot

          There.is.only.xul

      3. Neil Stansbury

        Re: Ditching XBL/XUL would mean Mozilla shooting itself in the foot

        Yeah I agree - XBL/XUL was truely a game changer that very few people knew about, even XAML was obviously heavily "influenced" by it. But then most people never heard of GRE or XULRunner - a Node.js before its time. Even now XPCOM/XPConnect, its interfaces and sandboxed module support is a joy to use to compared to others.

        By 2007/8 it was becoming increasingly obvious that a rich "HTML5" was going to steal its thunder eventually, and they should have pushed to an HTMLised markup then, though to be fair the anti-XML and namespacing camp hadn't clearly won by then. XBL 2 lives on in Web Components though....

        I suspect the real problem in Mozilla is actually product focus and marketing.

  6. nedge2k

    Re: Chrome is neither sleek nor speedy these days...

    Chrome is becoming a bloated joke itself. I recently used a shitty old Macbook running Safari on a 3rd world connection and it fetched and rendered pages MUCH more quickly than Chrome was on my 2015 i7 XPS 13 - although full disclosure, I'm running W10. Still...

    ...and when I say "much", I mean a couple of seconds compared to tens of seconds.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Chrome is neither sleek nor speedy these days...

      I've noticed this trend in FF too. I've been wondering if they're gradually drifting away from the render-something-before-completing-download strategies on account of affluent people now being expected to all have fast(ish) connections and not giving a fuck about the "third world"

    2. jelabarre59

      Re: Chrome is neither sleek nor speedy these days...

      Chrome, from my experience (and that of our entire dev/test group at my last job) was anything *BUT* fast and stable. Considering that you would get a tab crash from loading even a BLANK page (yes, literally a blank page, as I tried making a home page that consisted of nothing but head and body tags, and Chrome would still crash). That was on MSWin7; if you run Chrome on Linux, it brings the ENTIRE system to s standstill; if you load Chrome, then nothing else will run, or even be selectable.

  7. Stephen Leslie
    Go

    Edge

    FireFox is bloated.

    IE is legacy.

    Chrome is bloating spyware.

    Edge is the new lean machine.

    1. Chika
      Mushroom

      Re: Edge

      Edge is the new lean machine.

      It is for now. Every new browser has been there right up until the standards change or a malware vulnerability shows up or some headbanger wants a change of the UI. That's where the bloat starts. Edge is new, streamlined and is catching attention but, like Chrome and Firefox before them, it is just a starting point.

    2. elDog

      Re: Edge

      Windows only.

      Yeah, I know this is about Windows 10 (and lots of reminisces about Windows 3.xxx, etc.) but most of us like to use a browser that we can have on multiple platforms. I may have missed an announcement about this running on unmanaged C++ or Java or Perl, but I don't think it will port easily.

    3. sisk

      Re: Edge

      Bah. Edge is IE just like Sharepoint Designer is Frontpage. A change in the name and cosmetic differences on top of the same old codebase does not a new product make.

      1. fung0

        Re: Edge

        Edge s most definitely a new codebase, since it's been developed using the new UWP API. (Formerly known as WinRT, Metro, Windows Store Apps and about a dozen other names.) That's exactly the problem - it's an app that supports only this one mutant mobile ecosystem that offers no advantage to anyone but Microsoft. Doesn't run on other platforms, doesn't even truly run on Windows. Ugh.

  8. Len
    Go

    Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

    I have no issue with Mozilla using diversified income streams to support its development. It makes them less dependent on a single company or power dictating direction. And at least their growth strategies are above board, instead of the malware tactics used to force Chrome on unsuspecting users.

    Of all the major browsers it still is relatively light on bloat and fast. I just hope that they shelve electrolysis. One process per tab is exactly the type of bloat that makes other browsers so heavy on overhead, CPU and memory. The main source of browser instability, Flash, is already running in a sandboxed process so can't kill Firefox any more.

    The one thing I would really wish they'd do is become the web's driving force for new technologies once again. Drive new standards, be the first ones to develop and implement actual solutions to actual problems. For example, make a list of the ten reasons some sites are still using Flash and tackle those as a priority (copy to clipboard comes to mind).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

      The one thing I would really wish they'd do is become the web's driving force for new technologies once again. Drive new standards, be the first ones to develop and implement actual solutions to actual problems.

      ^^^THIS^^^ This is how Eich suffocated Mozilla. If anyone tried to do anything that wasn't either his pet project of the day or at least excusable under his "IE parity" mantra he pissed all over them. In public. ^^^THIS^^^ is why everyone* left.

      I'm sure his single minded drive makes him an excellent project[1] manager but it makes him an unimaginably horrible project[2] manager.

      [1] Small, tight, single task, group "project"

      [2] Large, loose, disparate, collaborative, community FOSS "project"

      *(Well me anyway)

    2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Paris Hilton

      Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

      One process per tab is exactly the type of bloat that makes other browsers so heavy on overhead, CPU and memory.

      Err... hello? Care to explain WHY?

      Modern machines and OS are MEANT to run multiple processes and processes share identical memory pages and communicate via shared memory. Single-process architectures are just arse-backwards UNLESS you are very sure of your capability to run threads and very sure about the security of your single process. Or you want to accept the security risk to do fast even processing (and even then, please write in Erlang). But Firefox is not Nginx.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

        Why? Each process comes with its own baggage, if you have more of them running at once there is more baggage.

        http://stackoverflow.com/questions/200469/what-is-the-difference-between-a-process-and-a-thread

        Chrome has a command line option which changes it from one process per tab to one process per website. It reduces memory usage.

        1. P. Lee

          Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

          >Each process comes with its own baggage, if you have more of them running at once there is more baggage.

          But you forget Chrome's intent. It is a trojan horse to get apps onto Windows, not a pure "for fun" browser. In that scenario, far better to have one process per tab so that different apps don't interfere with each other when they (inevitably) go wrong.

        2. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
          Flame

          Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

          Why? Each process comes with its own baggage, if you have more of them running at once there is more baggage.

          BULLSHIT LEVELS OF CRUD! That "baggage" is EXTREMELY MINIMAL. Synchronization, locks and context switching won't magically disappear. Threads give you tons of problems in return that you need to keep in the box. Today one has supercomputers on the desk and processes are "too much baggage"? Why dontcha go for fibers while you are it. Processes were ok in the 70s and 80s but now that all the cool kids absolutely need to shoot themselves in the foot (while tweeting while taking selfies while falling downstairs thinking about how cool Node.js is) by ill thought-out multiprocessing ideas that were borderline braindead (unless used for very specialized contexts), which used in wholly inappropriate contexts using wholly inappropriate abstractions in stateful programming environments. LIFE IN "IT" IS ETERNAL COMEDY!

          Why Threads are a Bad Idea (for most purposes) -- John Ousterhout.

          1. Dan 55 Silver badge

            Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

            I wasn't suggesting that threads should be used, I was just illustrating the baggage that comes with using several processes. It is, after all, like running x copies of of the browser (read-only data excepted) and IPC is a bottleneck.

            1. billk33

              Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

              Threads wont work because the sandbox needs seperate processes. Threads basically have full interspection of each other, they can see everything that is going on in each other, which moots the point of a sandbox. The multiprocess model does not significantly increase memory usage, in fact, it will probably make memory usage better, by allowing rendering processes to be killed without bringing down the whole browser, it gaurantees memory used for rendering is freed. Also, most libraries are shared memory so its not as if these libraries are loaded again and again with each process.

    3. billk33

      Re: Ditch electrolysis, drive progress

      The reason electrolysis is absolutely necessary is that it is necessary for sandboxing to work. Sandboxing works at a process level so you have to divide the program into seperate processes. However, this will not result in significant increases in memory use as the libraries the browser uses use shared memory anyway so there is little duplication. The rendering code that be placed in a seperate process which has just the permissions needed for rendering code, since rendering is one of the most complex parts of the browser, this keeps the rendering code isolated and sandboxed well. With the problems with security today, the browser is a major point of vulnerability. So, A sandbox is necessary to protect the user. We hope that software does not have any bugs but if one should slip into the rendering code, the sandbox adds a layer of protection. Its not perfect, but you will be far, far safer with it.

  9. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Stop

    Chrome sleek and fast, Firefox bloated and slow

    Maybe it was true three years or so back, but not any more...

    http://www.ghacks.net/2015/07/10/garbage-collection-improvements-in-firefox-improve-memory-usage/

    http://lifehacker.com/why-chrome-uses-so-much-freaking-ram-1702537477/1706076873

    http://gizmodo.com/fuck-it-im-going-back-to-firefox-1685425815

    http://www.ghacks.net/2014/01/02/chrome-34-firefox-29-internet-explorer-11-memory-use-2014/

    So why people repeat it is rather puzzling. Maybe they see Chrome's still got the same UI and think everything's the same.

    1. streaky

      Re: Chrome sleek and fast, Firefox bloated and slow

      Except firefox's gc classifier can't figure out where 90% of memory goes and then can't do anything about it.

      Firefox is easily the worst offender for all sorts of slow browsing failures. I use it every day and it's by a long way the best web dev platform - and lets not even talk about Chrome's font rendering on high pixel density displays - but if you're doing stuff like watching twitch streams or using amazon's site very bad things happen when they don't in Chrome or IE. You could say "ah but that's twitch's fault" or "it's Amazon's fault" but when you can point to another browser that doesn't fail so catastrophically with the same code somebody just isn't competitive.

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