Ask a Mozilla Person About Firefox 2.0

Last week's interview guest was Dean Hachamovitch, formal title "general manager Internet Explorer at Microsoft Corp." This week we have Chris Beard, Mozilla's Vice President of Products. (Here's a recent "pre-Firefox 2 release" interview with Chris that you might want to look at to avoid duplicating questions.) Chris will be calling on other Mozilla and Firefox people to help answer your questions, but he's the point man here. Slashdot interview rules apply, as always.

FireFox 2 Rendering Speed Compared to IE7

[MSTCrow5429]

Dear Chris Beard, I have used Firefox since before 1.0, and one thing that Internet Explorer has always beaten FF on is rendering speed. With the release of IE7, Microsoft has made IE at least feel faster than before, and it certainly has adopted many features that made FF such a stand-out, security not withstanding. I would like to know if Mozilla has made it a priority in the past to give FF a rendering speed competitive with or faster than IE, and if we will see FF becoming competitive with or faster than IE in rendering web pages in future releases? Thanks.

Competition

[Phroggy]

What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Opera?

What do you feel are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Safari?

What do you feel are the greatest strengths of IE7? (I won't ask about weaknesses...)

Strategy

[otacon]

With the continued growth of Firefox, there are still a lot of users out there that do not even know they have a choice as far as browsers go. Is there any effort to reach the average joe consumer, other than word of mouth, and if so what would that strategy be.

Of all the things you did...

[Walter Wart]

Why didn't you fix Firefox's single huge glaring flaw, the memory leak that makes it practically unusable?

Well, how about

[also-rr]

If Microsoft were to GPL Internet Explorer (warning: suspension of disbelif required) why would you carry on developing Firefox/Gecko?

Future?

[nine-times]

What does the long-term future have in store for Firefox? Is the web browser going to become more feature rich, or is the Mozilla team going to aim at keeping Firefox very minimalist and optimized? If the former, what features do you think will help advance the user experience of the web? If the latter, how will you differentiate Firefox from its competitors and maintain the brand in absence of flashy new features?

Tackling The DOM

[x3nos]

With the most recent releases of FF 2.0 and IE7 almost simultaneously, from a person who does QA for a web deliverable software company, trying to debug and locate the source of inconsistencies in the way that FF 2.0 and IE7 handles DOM - what steps is the Mozilla foundation taking to help blaze the trail for some kind of standardization in DOM? I realize that IE has its own version of DOM, but is there hope that 1) Mozilla will better respond to erratic DOM programming from those that develop for IE or that 2) Mozilla will somehow influence the Microsoft camp to come over to standards?

Handling of cookies

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did the options for handling cookies change between the versions? In FF 1.x I had the ability to only accept cookies from the originating site but I don't see this option in FF 2.x. Was this intentional or an oversight?

Thanks,

Jim

Firefox Features

[Eideewt]

Firefox was created partly as an alternative to the bloated Mozilla suite. Now as Firefox matures, it too is gaining features. While all of them are fairly useful, some, such as spell check, web feed previews, and session restoration, might be better implemented as extensions. Firefox is still a fairly lightweight browser, and I appreciate Firefox 2.0's improved response speed, but I still worry that Firefox is becoming the kind of software that I hate.

How committed is the team to keeping Firefox's core as small as possible, and what, if any, features might be turned into extensions in the future?

Add In Validation

[Jarhead1972]

Chris;

Does FF worry that an unscrupulous add-on developer could produce what could be a click-fraud capable bot net hidden in an add-on that could be promoted and distributed by FF team? What steps are taken to prevent it given the add-ons are no signed or hosted by FF?

Thanks

Paul

Two Things

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things really turn me off about Firefox.

1. Non-native widgets. Why not use native widgets (ala wxWidgets)? Why is Firefox the ONLY application I use on a daily basis that looks out of place on my system?

2. Memory leaks. I realize that people say that it's not Firefox leaking all the RAM, but instead its extensions. Why not sandbox the extensions, or provide some other facility to clean up after messy extensions?

A relevant question about the IE cake

[merc]

I'm sure you'll see a lot of tongue-in-cheek questions here about the recent IE team cake--but in all seriousness do you think Microsoft was sending any message, subtle or not, with their gift? Was the cake a gesture of altruism or do you think they were telling Firefox not to forget that they are a competing member of a browser war?

How do Firefox members believe they are perceived by the "competition"?

Old Bugs

[SeaFox]

Has the Mozilla team considered adopting timeframes to the resolution of bugs, no matter what the severity. I've seen bugs on Bugzilla that while minor, have been open since before the browser was named Firefox, some without any comment besides the initial confirmation they exist. Why do issues stay unaddressed after multiple major releases?

Add-Ons vs Built-In

[TheFlyingGoat]

Many of us first switched to Firefox because it was so much smaller and faster than Internet Explorer. In fact, much of the early progress was directed at removing unnecessary code. Now it seems as though Firefox is following in the steps of Netscape Navigator by including many more features, some which everyone will use (spell check) and some which many may not (better RSS handling). The result is a larger download.

How does the Firefox team choose which features are going to be included and which ones should be left as add-ons? From a marketing aspect, is it possible to promote a product for being small and compact, or is a long feature list necessary?

Firefox and Tab Mix Plus

[Andrew Kismet]

The Tab Mix Plus extension is widely considered to be greatly enhancing to any Firefox experience, alongside extensions like AdBlock Plus and All-In-One Gestures (and similar gesture extensions). Are these 3 features - enhanced tab manager, advert blocker, and gestures - going to be included in the initial Firefox package at any point?

And along the same lines, what would you rather do - streamline Firefox by removing features and making them optional add-ons, or enhance Firefox by building in more features which can be enabled and disabled without the need for extra installations?

I know I'm not meant to ask multiple questions, but it's all on the same theme - would you consider creating two major download versions for Firefox, one which is "barebones" and the other preloaded with the most popular extensions?

Planning for the future

[madpianoskills]

The question: What is Mozilla planning to do about supporting current and future design strategies and technologies such as SVG (I know it partially works/is partially in the pipeline), embedded XML support, proportional table rendering, and though I despise them, ActiveX Controls? In other words, what is Mozilla doing to incorporate more support than its competitors?

The rationale: If FF supported a greater number of standards, technologies, and design paradigms than its competitors, I can only imagine it would meet with a significantly greater market share and interest. The only reason I keep IE on my computer is that some pages are not supported adequately by Firefox. Many layout and design elements seem to render improperly. For example, I have always had trouble viewing friends' MySpace profiles - FF has a tendency to stretch and skew the proportions of table layouts that use proportional sizing. The reason I suggest ActiveX support is only because I have run across numerous webapps (often proprietary ones, such as educational portals like the one my college used) that are not FF friendly. Generally this is only because developers refuse to develop crossbrowser support (not that I blame them). I recently started developing extensively with SVG, and FF's native support is not sufficient for its many capabilities. Though IE does not have native support, the Adobe plugin (unsupported though it may be come 2008) is smoother and faster.

Re:Of all the things you did...

[Vellmont]

Right now I'm running FF 1.5.0.7 on Linux and I'm using up 200 megs of memory. I've seen the same behavior on Windows on my machine, and on a clients machine. The only plugin I've got running on the linux machine is dictionary, and the clients machine had no plugins installed.

Maybe the difference is you kill firefox and restart it every day. I leave it running days at a time.

Trademark nonsense

[littlem]

Do you believe that forcing Debian to rename the high-quality patched version of Firefox that they will distribute in Etch, conforming to the FHS and generally forming a harmonious part of a distribution renowned for its stability, and with security fixes to be backported long after Mozilla have abandoned that version to the wolves, will be good for the Firefox brand?

Future of Thunderbird

[Kelson]

Thunderbird, as a companion to Firefox, seems to be getting the "also-ran" treatment. Releases tend to trail Firefox releases by weeks or months, and there seems to be very little promotion or marketing.

Do you expect the influx of Eudora developers to change this? Are there any plans for more coordination between Firefox and Thunderbird in terms of scheduling, marketing and promotion?

The Firefox Microsoft Visit for Vista.

[oscartheduck]

As reported on Slashdot, Microsoft invited the Firefox team over to the headquarters to discuss compatibility with Windows Vista. Did you learn enough about Vista to be able to offer a significantly better experience on that OS?

Firefox and Macs

[chrisgeleven]

When will Firefox get some much needed love on Mac OS X? The toolbars look hideous, the form widgets don't look aqua like, and there is no integration into OS X services (like the dictionary). Plus there is always a need for speed improvements.

Re:Of all the things you did...

[alexhard]

Because I want everything to be up and running the moment I turn my screen on...I never close any of my programs (that includes digital audio and image manipulation software) because I want to have them accessible with one click...I also restart about once a month MAX, which leads to my programs almost never being shut down...

the rest can take it, why can't Firefox?

Re:Of all the things you did...

[Jester99]

nearly every 1.5.0.x release has fixed some memory leaks. 2.0 has fixed a bunch more. They still have more to go, but it's not as if they sat down and said, "Let's ignore the memory leak."

As an add-on: Is there a reason Firefox does not just use a garbage collection library to free up memory that is missed by the explicit delete operations?

Iceweasel and Trademarks

[MostAwesomeDude]

Recently, it has been confirmed that the Debian Project will be stripping out Mozilla Foundation trademarks such as Firefox and Mozilla from their main repository when Etch is released, renaming the "firefox" package to "iceweasel." What are your thoughts on the usage of such trademarks, and do you have any comments on the non-free permissions of the Mozilla Foundation's trademarks and artwork?

Re:cake

[LiquidCoooled]

The spell checker is useless(at least in my English/United kingdom dictionary) it thinks Firefox is misspelt.
It gives options for firebox and Fire fox.