Q&A with Firefox's Blake Ross 145
dotlin writes to tell us the Seattle PI is running a lengthy and interesting interview with Firefox's Blake Ross. In the interview Ross addresses many of the issues surrounding the future of Firefox including their attempt to streamline Firefox in 2.0, the feature comparison between Firefox and IE, different ways of measuring browser market share, and many more.
Re:old news (Score:3, Insightful)
After all submissions are made based upon what users of websites find, so its inevitable that some of those sites are on your bookmarks list.
As it happens I read 2/3 of the sites you listed, but hadn't read this interview so slash is doing its job.
Pesky users (Score:4, Insightful)
Having wombled around the Firefox support site for awhile looking for answers to memory issues, I came to the conclusion that there was a certain level of disinterest in problems that were less than exicting to fix; more so, than other OSS projects. (I fully accept the subjectiveness)
This snippet sort of ties in with this feeling.
Sure, OSS developers can do what they like - I'm not paying them so I don't have much right to complain, fair enough.
But if you want to compete against MS, who are too customer focused then maybe a balance needs to be found which doesn't involve letting so many go.
Know thy enemy. (Score:5, Insightful)
And quoting The Art of War [wikipedia.org] from Sun Tsu:
I, for one, have pleasure being in the Firefox side of this "war".
And it's relieving to know that Blake seems to have a very clear sight while leading this.
Re:Pesky users (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks like the 1.0 release because most of the work that has been going on has been to make it more stable, how do we fix the memory problems that people are complaining about, how do we make everyday tasks easier
I'd say they're heading in the right direction...
Re:Pesky users (Score:1, Insightful)
at least (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pesky users (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Pesky users (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it might not be a memory leak, but I'd argue that it is a bug. If I leave my FireFox pointing at a auto-refreshing page for a couple of days it *will* OOM my machine. Whether or not that's a memory leak, I'd argue that causing the OOM killer to come out and start blowing away applications is a bug. Now I understand that this memory is supposidly used to cache content to speed up the browsing experience but I'd counter that argument by pointing out that if FireFox is so deep into swap space that it causes my machine to go on holiday for 5 minutes every time I do something because it's thrashing the swap then this isn't speeding up anything.
I've had firefox running for days at a time without seeing anywhere over 100 MB. I rarely ever see it go over 75 MB. Then again, I haven't kept it open for months at a time. Maybe if I did, then I may see problems.
I never close my FireFox unless I absolutely have to. Currently it's using about 281MB:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1934 steve 15 0 281m 94m 8624 S 0.0 12.5 191:18.84 firefox-bin
(Yes, I know this includes mmap()ed resources, but I doubt FireFox is mmap()ing much huge stuff).
Then again, its a web browser. You can turn it off once in a while.
That's not really an excuse though is it... Hey, no need to fix memory leaks in Windows, it's only an OS, you can reboot it every so often...
Re:Seamonkey vs. Firefox/Thunderbird (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe now we need a light weight version of the light weight version of Mozilla
Re:Pesky users (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, if you leave FF open for a while without using it, it takes a couple of minutes (really, *minutes*) before you can use it. The UI doesn't update, and the machine is thrashing. This has gotten better over the last few releases, but it still happens, particularly under Windows.
Crashes occur most commonly for me because of Java, Flash, Acrobat, or the Flashblock extension. Java pretty consistently screws up the browser whenever it's started, as does Acrobat Reader. Flash is a random thing, so I'm not certain of how to reproduce it, but sometimes it will trash FF. Flashblock has a memory leak in its JS code. The biggest memory leaks seem to happen by just using the browser, though. Right now, on my Ubuntu box, it's using 256MB total virtual, and 154MB actual RAM.
As far as why you might do this... well, often you are looking at something, and have to leave. People that go and do thing that aren't sitting at the computer 24/7 often have this happen. I doubt even the most hardcore anti-social type on this site never leaves their computer. It's silly to clog up your bookmarks with something you only wanted to finish looking at, too. So, as you're going through things, you pop up a window, minimize it, and come back later. Later might be in a day or two.
Another reason might be that you're reading documentation, and haven't finished what you're doing. This is also rather common. You might have a few sets of documentation that have to be gone through to finish something, so you may even have *several* windows open, that you need to go through.
There are tons of reasons why you might leave the browser running. People leave their IM client open, a lot leave their email client open, you leave your UI open, and your OS running. Why should we have to restart our web browser when we don't restart any of those?
Re:Forms, Textboxes and the Cache (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not Firefox; at least, I never see this behaviour on any of the various versions I run on Mac , Windows or Knoppix. It sounds like the owner of the relevant page has stuck a bit of JavaScript in there to do this; that's the only way I've ever seen this behaviour implemented on any browser. Complain to the owner of the site(s) where you see this (as you say) risky behaviour.
I think people see Google doing this and think "Oh, it must be OK, Google do it". They are morons, because behaviour that enhances usability on Google's home page (where one wants to type in a search query, otherwise one wouldn't be there) can, as in the case you cite, actually detract from usability in other circumstances.
(I suppose the culprit might also be an extension: people have been known to dump irrelevant and unnecessary "cool" features like this in them, too.)
Re:Seamonkey vs. Firefox/Thunderbird (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately, David Baron wrote the Leak Monitor [mozilla.org] extension, that looks for a relatively common type of leak, which you can install, but it doesn't catch everything.
Re:Pesky users (Score:3, Insightful)
Who knows? Who cares? A user can leave non-buggy apps running for weeks without them misbahaving, whether or not I know the user's reason for doing that. Users are unhappy that Firefox doesn't behave like a non-buggy app.
Re:Pesky users (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pesky users (Score:3, Insightful)
If you read TFA you would have read the part about where MS abandoned IE for years. Where it didn't give a flying fuck about what was happening to their customers in terms of security and the features their customers wanted.
Do you really think MS track record with IE is better then firefox? If so you need to get educated. MS abandoned this project while their customers were suffering from a relentless assault of security problems.
Re:Seamonkey vs. Firefox/Thunderbird (Score:4, Insightful)