Firefox Going the Big and Bloated IE Way? 653
abhinav_pc writes "Wired is carrying an article pondering whether Firefox has become big and bloated, much like IE. As the browser's popularity has risen, the interest in cramming more features into the product has as well. Slowdowns and feature creep have some users asking for a return to the days of the 'slim and sexy' Firefox. 'Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer. Firefox addresses this issue somewhat, setting the default cache lower on computers with less than a gigabyte of RAM. Though the jury is still out on where the perfect balance between too many and too few features lies, one truth is apparent: The new web is pushing our browsers to the limit.'"
Very nice FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Disingenuous FUD aside, I can't for the life of me imagine how IE could be "bloated". It never had much functionality to begin with.
Kudos to Bashdot. Even the current Digg submission [digg.com] doesn't mention IE at all.
well (Score:3, Insightful)
The amount of RAM used for caching pages could be set by the user in the options. I think most Firefox users could handle that.
Firefox=Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Opera! (Score:5, Insightful)
Streamlined Version (Score:5, Insightful)
Shared Javascript Namespaces (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I quit FF a long time ago. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Opera! (Score:5, Insightful)
And I think it should. Guess that's why different things matter to different people.
Re:Firefox=Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
become? (Score:5, Insightful)
I still use Firefox. Why? Because Firefox works well enough, it's up-to-date, compatible, and, most importantly, has tons of useful extensions.
I hope the Firefox developers will be able to clean up their act, but unless it gets a lot worse, I'm sticking with Firefox, because, on balance, it's still the best browser there is.
Firefox stopped being lean a long time ago (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla never was slow (at least not after it reached the point that it was good enough to consider using as your standard browser) and really wasn't a memory hog. That perception came about from the people who really didn't want an integrated email program, but absolutely refused to choose "Browser only" when the installer asked what they wanted.
Around the time of the name changed from Phoenix to Firebird, the two browsers were about on par. By the time the name changed to Firefox, it was already more bloated than Mozilla. The project goals moved more towards grabbing attention than being lean.
If Mozilla had just made a theme that blended in to the OS (Classic doesn't do a good enough job of it) and put a link on the download page to an installer that only had the browser included, there never would have been a need for Firefox.
Re:well (Score:2, Insightful)
There should definitely be an option to tell Firefox to use less than n megabytes of memory, and let firefox figure it out, instead of setting the memory limit through the number of undo levels per tab.
Firefox would have to default to something, doesnt mean you shouldnt be able to change the default amount.
Re:is it time (Score:5, Insightful)
The majority of websites could do with a simple and less cluttered layout like google's website for instance. Compare it to yahoo and you'll see that yahoo has a bunch of "advanced features" like inpage tabs and whatnot. Lots of this extra junk you'll find around the web is javascript that chooses CSS based on browser and that displays advertisements. Lots of it is just poor use of HTML often from WYSISYG programs. More features in language means more junk on website. More junk on website means more junk in browser.
Firefox, the new EMACS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Opera! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time (Score:1, Insightful)
I looked into my RAM recently, I have 2 1gig sticks running in dual, and I know for a fact many people are getting less use out of 4 gigabytes of RAM. I'm just saying, its a big number, but there is an even bigger amount of leeway.
Back on topic, the RAM topic is a bad one because IMHO any browser should be able to still run very easily with 512mb RAM, and run okay on 256mb - if it's set up correctly.
IE is bloated? (Score:4, Insightful)
True, 3rd party add-ons for IE can bring it to a crawl, but that's not IE's fault. The same problem exists in any browser that supports extensibility via a plugin model.
I use Firefox on XP because it's safer than IE, certainly not because it's less bloated. Firefox consistently uses far more ram (I have several screen shots of Firefox using 1.5GB+ of ram with *no* plugins enabled and just one tab open), dies a painful death due to poor integration with things like Flash (100% CPU Flash advertisements, anyone?), or simply just crashes.
On Vista I use IE 7 w/Protected Mode. Why? Well, again, because it's safer. But it also has the benefit of returning me to the days when a browser didn't use 2x the RAM of Photoshop. Imagine that.
The Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how the file size (the other definition of "bloat"), of a FireFox installation compares with other browsers but it doesn't seem like an overly large file to download. It also seems to me that when I check my FireFox preferences it actually has a very basic, simple feature set similar to what's available in almost every other browser. If the feature set is roughly the same as other browsers, how can it be rightly called "bloated?"
I think the problem with FireFox is one of performance, not "bloat" per se. I run FireFox on a Mac with only a single extension and a single theme. My computer is relatively new, the OS is up to date, it has a Gig and a half of RAM and a fast video card. On this machine FireFox is as slow as molasses. It takes ages to start and ages to load a page. It also crashes (a lot!).
I use FireFox because of AdBlocker and because as bad as it is, it's still the best there is on the Mac right now. This will likely change in October when the new Safari comes out so this summer's FireFox 3.0 release will have to be extremely, extremely good just to keep the same market share IMO.
OS Level Control? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opera! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:is it time (Score:5, Insightful)
There's still a lot of people out there who are limited to dialup, satellite, or some other jerry-rigged internet connection.
Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Opera! (Score:3, Insightful)
I call bullsh1t on this. You've reviewed all the source of all the pgms you use? Stop this argument, please, it's not a real reason to choose one over the other unless you're actually willing to go through the source of every one of them, and I doubt you have the time, and if you do - you should do something better with it
Re:Memory And Performance Rot (Score:4, Insightful)
This performance penalty is perhaps hard to notice. The easiest way to experience it is to run some old applications; they absolutely scream on modern hardware, to the point that the instant response becomes almost worth the loss of extra features. This is probably why things like xfce prosper.
Bad excuse (Score:2, Insightful)
rethink the OS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Opera! (Score:2, Insightful)
Proprietary software is not practical, especially in the long term. The best tool for the job must also be practical.
Re:Opera! (Score:1, Insightful)
I guess the trouble with comparing Opera to Firefox four years ago is that Firefox didn't exist four years ago (not as Firefox, anyway)
Firefox on Linux crashes occasionally when I try to leave pages with embedded an Google Video object or multiple embedded Youtube videos. It freezes and I have to kill it. The most recent time this happened was yesterday.
The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the problem is the foolish complexity of it. Their whole XPCOM idea sounds nice in theory. But then you actually go to implement it in C++, and it becomes a pile of crap. Soon enough, difficult tasks start to become hard, the damn near impossible tasks can't be done, and nobody really has a good idea of what large portions of the codebase actually does. That's not the way to create an efficient rendering engine. You'll end up with memory leaks galore, and excessive CPU consumption, just as we've witnessed with Firefox.
Although it's unlikely to happen now, the best thing for them to have done would have been to throw out most of the code released by Netscape, rather than rewriting a lot of it (at the same low-quality level) in the following years. Then they could have re-implemented it using a natively-compiled implementation of Standard ML. One benefit of this would have been an elimination of the memory leaks that we hear to much about today, due to the garbage collection of SML. Additionally, functional languages are well-suited to parsing (ie. of HTML, XHTML, etc.) and language implementation (ie. JavaScript), more so than C++.
The scrutiny canard is getting really old... (Score:1, Insightful)
Most F/OSS users just don't want to pay for software and that's OK. BTW Opera is 100% free and has been for years now).
But please don't try to sell me the old canard that you scrutinize every line source for all the F/OSS that you use - I'm not buying. My guess is that there is a FAR greater likelihood of some clever programmer slipping something by you in one of your beloved plug-ins than Opera ever doing anything untoward (a for-profit company has a lot more to lose from bad PR on its primary product than some reprobate teenager in Bakersfield or Bratislava). A little degree of paranoia is healthy only if directed correctly.
For me, Opera (although not perfect) stands head and shoulders above IE and several inches above FF in terms of performance, security, utility and functionality.
And then you're nothing but IE... (Score:4, Insightful)
As to the parent post, let's see now:
RSS Support:
I could easily see removing RSS support. Firefox's implementation is nothing an extension couldn't do, and do much better. It's a joke for handling more than a handful of feeds, and stifles development of third-party extensions. Gee, and we used to complain about competing against built-in programs...
Security:
Can you honestly say a browser should be shipped without these, or even an option to not install them? Especially for the popup blocker - are you insane, or have you simply forgotten what the popup-infested web was like? Phishing protection is unobtrusive and useful, as is auto-update.
Miscellaneous:
Integrated search was one of the highlights of Mozilla ages ago, and is now a standard feature in every single browser. Firefox/Mozilla did a particularly good job by adopting an existing open format (from Apple's Sherlock) rather than reinventing the wheel. Search suggestions are the latest evolution of that (primarily thanks to Google Suggestions, if I'm not mistaken). Spell check is marginal - many operating systems offer their own - but I don't see how a third-party extension could improve upon it. Accessibility is just critical for those who need it. Session Restore I'm torn on, as many extensions handled it, but not necessarily well. I see that as the Firefox team deciding to take all of the lessons learned from the third parties, and do it right (much like Apple did with iTunes 1.0).
Bloat is only a problem if it hinders program development, maintenance, execution, or usability. The examples given here don't generally meet those criteria. Most of the features here are simple, self-contained, unobtrusive, and likely have low code and memory footprints.
Re:Besides the cache (Score:3, Insightful)
For a seminal work that explains this concept to the intellectually unenlightened: Bloatware and the 80/20 myth. [joelonsoftware.com] It's not that bloated, slow software is preferred, exactly, it's simply that so-called "bloat" features are actually an advantage.
I'd personally prefer that FF has automated updates. I noticed the spell-checker after an update, and think it's kinda nice, although my spelling is generally pretty good. The popup blocker is quite nice. The other features I just don't care about, and I never noticed any particular performance decrease on my dual-core, 2 GB RAM laptop. Thus, for me, this "bloat" is something I either like or don't mind.
Other people may think an RSS reader is DA SHIZNIT! Some people lean hard on the anti-phishing features. And they will find bloat just as tasteful as I do. Go ahead - read the article I linked to, and then think about it. Of the functionality, what 20% do you want? And, is that the same 20% that everybody else wants? There's the reason for your bloat.
Want just a browser and only a browser? It's open source code, dude. You are welcome to create a fork and do whatever you like with it.
Re:Opera! (Score:3, Insightful)
The issue you have is that you don't trust the set of eyes, but the process is fundamentally the same if you do not review the source code yourself. You are trusting someone else to assure you nothing is wrong, and confusing motive with action.
The people who try and claim that FOSS is better than closed source because you can't be sure the evil corporate grmlins are stealing your soul are grasping at straws, and don't understand the fundamental benefits of closed source or FOSS, and IMHO, they are doing a disservice for OSS by promoting something that is not a reasonable benefit of OSS nor something which is an inherent difference it has.
Re:Opera! (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh so Open Source is all about relying on someone else to review the code for you? Please tell me how this is different from a software house paying QA guys to do it, apart from the fact they're paid professionals
I've said it once, and I'll say it again, you're trusting someone you don't know to check it's ok, and if that's the case, there is NO difference whether it's Open Source or not - so stop using it as an argument. There are many more arguments a lot better than this for using FOSS, it simply doesn't need BS like this.
Re:Opera! (Score:3, Insightful)
Seeing as most people who look at firefox's source code go blind soon after, I'm not buying this.
Yes, hundreds of thousands of people can in theory look at the source; but then all of them think that someone else will do it, and nobody actually *does*. (Not counting full time mozilla employees, since MS has full time IE employees, and they don't count towards the "many eyes" effect)
Fix the Printing Bugs (Score:2, Insightful)
I work on a web application where people print a lot and they cause the browser to crash all the time. You have to go to the task manager to kill the firefox process.
Don't add another feature until that is fixed, please.
Re:-1 troll (Score:2, Insightful)
All software... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it was. (Score:3, Insightful)
In the early, early days of Firefox, Internet Explorer was pretty slow and bloated. Most of its snappiness came from being "part of the OS". (Or I was a deluded fanboy then, maybe...)
So, on Windows, you had the choice between Netscape (which was big and bloated), or Mozilla if you were smart (which was also big and bloated), or IE (which was bloated, for a browser). Mozilla was not so terribly bloated, except for the fact that it was a browser/mail/news/irc/dev platform/kitchen sink, and not just a browser. So, if you needed web and email, Mozilla was fine, but if you just needed web, IE was faster.
At the time, I believe Opera was somewhat buggy, and still cost money. I am not sure whether Konqueror existed or not; I only fairly recently became aware of KDE as being better than GNOME in just about every way (at least, as a desktop environment).
So, the Phoenix project was started. I used that from maybe 0.6, and it was good. A bit unstable, yes, but it would come back up in 2 seconds. And on the machines of the time, that was pretty damned impressive. It only seemed to be getting smaller and lighter. If anything was slow/buggy about it, it was that Phoenix required the full Mozilla sources, but the existance of Phoenix was actually cleaning up quite a bit of Mozilla.
And yeah -- Phoenix vs Mozilla was amazingly dramatic. Consider that Windows at the time sucked so much (at least for me) that I'd have used Linux even if it meant using Netscape 4.0, Mozilla was kind of ok. But Phoenix just kicked ass.
Now it's Firefox, though, which has sort of just become a word, and lost its meaning. I know why they changed the name, but still, Phoenix was cool -- the beast that was Mozilla (stomping on IE) had died, but from its ashes, Phoenix rose and became Firebird, something that could fly on its own, with no concern for IE at all...
So, where'd all that go?
Well, some of it's memory leaks. Some of it's almost by design -- note that Firefox uses Gecko for EVERYTHING. Firefox doesn't just embed Gecko, it IS a Gecko app. The menus, config options, the entire UI is coded in XUL, which is basically XML + JavaScript, with some C++ libraries. (Correct me if I'm wrong here.) Firefox itself was an AJAX app before AJAX even had a name. (And so was Mozilla.)
That's another part of it, but it's not really the whole picture.
Extensions, I think, are what kills it. The more extensions you add, the more likely you are to break something. At the same time, extensions are what sold it. There's still two that I miss dearly, now that I mostly use Konqueror -- adblock (the real adblock is so much better than Konqueror's adblock) and unplug (lets you download anything normally viewed via browser plugins, including YouTube videos as FLV files). For awhile, you could even get Thunderbird as an extension -- it was called something else at the time, I think -- and you still can get Sunbird as a Firefox or Thunderbird extension.
Extensions are the killer feature of Firefox, and they are also what kills Firefox performance.
I think it could have been a bit better. I know part of it is bad/buggy extensions, but I imagine part of it is also that extensions are written in XUL/JavaScript. I mean, yes, that enables them -- it's easy to transition from web developer to Firefox extension hacker -- but I do wonder, occasionally, if we could do better, starting from scratch. Konqueror is right out (though we might borrow KHTML or Gecko for awhile), but maybe something written in, say, Python, or LISP, or some good language with a really solid design? Maybe a killer app for its platform, so that people start making Python faster to make their browser faster? (If you think Python is fast enough, you're deluded -- why does the GIL still exist in these days of multicore processors?)
Re:Firefox stopped being lean a long time ago (Score:3, Insightful)
I did several benchmarks at the time, and even way back then it was only nominally faster or lighter on RAM. The myth of Firefox being lean and fast is complete marketing.
IMHO, Firefox has only ever had two things going for it beyond Mozilla and Seamonkey... More customizable interface, and per-user extensions/Add-ons. And that's traded-off in things like a horrible user-preferences page that's only getting worse with time, lack of an editor, etc., etc.
Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:5, Insightful)
I once attempted to create a page-rendering engine, starting with XHTML. Eventually, I got a decent-working rendering engine. Unfortunately, anytime there was an error (even a minuscule one), my engine would completely fail. I can't even being to imagine the hell Gecko goes through to render a site like MySpace [w3.org]. I've often thought about a better way to implement a rendering engine, but most involve fixing the web developer's crappy code before attempting to render it, which is not possible in most cases. In C++, you can't compile with an error. Perhaps development software that isn't notepad (my software of choice) should add in validation service in the same way Visual Studio 2005 does.
The internet: We have the tools to rebuild it, but we don't want to spend a lot of money.
Re:Besides the cache (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Opera! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes the best tool for the job depends on how far into the future you are looking. Free Software advocates are more pragmatic than you think. You just need to stop thinking about what works today and start wondering about what will work tomorrow. Mark Pilgrim wrote a couple [diveintomark.org] of decent articles [diveintomark.org] about the kinds of problems proprietary software can cause.
Now I don't use Opera for anything other than testing, so I don't know what kinds of risks that particular software exposes you to. What I do know is that staying in control of your computer is a decent policy to stick to, and Opera would have to be significantly better than Firefox or Konqueror for me to use it. That's not being "blind", as you put it, it's being sensible in exercising caution.
Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:well (Score:2, Insightful)
Making stupid assumptions that "my users are geeky enough to overcome my development laziness, I'll just make them change a bunch of caching settings once its shipped." is about as stupid. This is why a lot of (FL)OSS doesn't get off the ground: arrogant developers that expect way too much from their users.
I love (FL)OSS just as much as the next slashdotter but if you're going to make your software usable only via arcane knowledge don't whine and complain that 99% of the populace hasn't caught on yet. They won't. I don't mind software that's written for the dummy, as long as software is made to be able to change so that non-dummies can use it too.
But please don't expect your user-base to be 99% non-dummies while you market it to a world full of dummies.
Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than that there really isn't anyone to take their place. Oon windows I highly doubt that you'll see many converts going back to IE, even if microsoft somehow makes it stop sucking with IE8, which I guarantee won't happen anyway.
Modern users are a huge resource hog (Score:1, Insightful)
Kids these days don't know how to write code."
Uh, huh. And "back in the day" could you run a VM, host two operating systems, and run a web browser? All in 512K? Didn't think so. Old folks, always living in the past.
Re:Opera! (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. The same "someone", usually. And a "someone" whose interests are not those of users.
This is the same reason we usually trust a result published in a peer-reviewed journal more than one reported by a corporation with only internal peer review, even when the resources available for the internal peer review may be excellent.
It's the difference between "here's our results, here's how we got them, feel free to try yourself and see if you come to the same conclusions" and "here's our results, our best people checked them, honest!"
Re:Firefox, the new EMACS (Score:1, Insightful)
What!? You don't hope that Firefox will be a super-good browser in 30 years?
I'm still editing DocBook documents (well, really "books" actually) using emacs + nxml (XML mode supporting realtime RelaxNG validation). I also happen to write
Oh and btw, maybe emacs was a pig 12 years ago but nowadays on my Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of ram I can't really notice that
What's your point about emacs? Isn't this a Good Thing (TM) that a bunch of real hackers, more than 30 years after it was created, can still beat the crap out of any other IDE for most tasks? And once I find way better, I switch... Like, say, to IntelliJ IDEA. So don't call me an emacs fanboy. I'm simply being realistic about what is more productive and what is not.
Of course now that
Re:The flip site of strict error handling (Score:2, Insightful)
A raised bar doesn't automatically equal programmers making web sites. A quality web site is made by a technical person who understands text and design.
Re:Firefox 2.x crashes all the time (Score:3, Insightful)
1.) New rendering paradigms in the operating system that require more resources, like resolution independence, vector graphics, and hardware acceleration of window textures in Quartz and Avalon.
2.) In the same vein, screen resolutions and color depths have increased.
3.) Sound cards are operating at higher frequency and bit rates, and multiple speaker systems are not uncommon.
4.) Today's audio and video codecs are higher quality but more resource-intensive.
5.) Convenience services like metadata file indexing, spellchecking, garbage collection, automatic network configuration, automatically updating RSS feeds, background system snapshots (e.g., System Restore), automatic file defragmentation ala Mac OS X, and more.
6.) Today, I bet you commonly have 20 or 30 browser tabs open at times, maybe more. Five years ago, you might have had only five or ten open. Before that, you only browsed with one or two windows open at a time. And websites back then used lower quality JPEGs and GIFs, while today we have high-resolution, high-quality PNGs and JPEGs and high-quality video clips running through Flash and Quicktime.
We have a lot more things running at once that all add up, and to have all these things running smoothly enough for a responsive user interface, it takes a lot of resources allocating precious cycles at every opportunity. Your 48MB GameCube doesn't have to run a general purpose operating system, and its specs are set in stone so that developers can specifically optimize for it to extreme degrees that desktop applications relying on high-level APIs and cross-platform compatibility can't afford.
Re:The flip site of strict error handling (Score:3, Insightful)
Right. Well put.
Nonsense. If you can write a buggy HTML document, you can also write a compliant one. You don't suddenly need a bloody programmer! Especially not if the browsers themselves (or external validators) had given reasonably helpful error messages, which they would have.
Re:Opera! (Score:3, Insightful)
Haha, so 6 billion monkeys will be able to spot a security problem and submit a bug report? Remember it has to be done before the software is exploited (whether secretly or not).
Sure, many users can spot a UI problem, but only a very few people can and will spot security problems, and fewer will bother to actually report them to the right channels. Plenty of evidence for that - gaping holes in open source that were not spotted and fixed till years later.
There's too much crap code out there for everyone to look at it. Hackers will just pick a target, find exploits, exploit them, when they run out, they pick another. And only a few people actually go around fixing the bugs (or writing good code in the first place).
Thoughts on rebuilding codebases (Score:4, Insightful)
In a moment I'll talk about my views on rewriting large code bases, but first I'll say that I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was with the GP poster up until the SML advocacy, and then disagreed. Even given the neat way that functional languages tend to model parsing problems, web browsers do a lot more than parse HTML and CSS files. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this is the easiest problem they solve. Systematically resolving the layout rules in arbitrarily complex cases is a somewhat difficult problem, given the way those rules are expressed in CSS. And of course, web pages are no longer the static things they used to be: today's browsers need to cope with scripts moving the goalposts arbitrarily, maintaining the integrity of the display as much as possible during lengthy downloads of large pages or after AJAXified updates, etc. etc. It's far from clear that a language like SML offers better support for these naturally concurrent operations than the many alternatives.
I do disagree with the parent post on one fundamental point, though:
I'll see your reuse dogma, and raise you my "plan to throw one away" dogma. :-)
Actually, I don't cite this as some sort of dogmatic adherence to ConceptsTryingToSoundMoreCleverThanTheyAre at all. Rather, I happen to agree with the principle based on practical experience. In general, software design is difficult, and few people are good at it. Even those who are rarely have the good fortune to know exactly what their design will be called upon to do a few years later, and will inevitably allow more flexibility (and commensurate overhead) in some places than is really needed, while making some things unnecessarily strict and thus making later changes more difficult than they might have been.
It's been my experience that in long-term projects, far too many managers aren't willing to throw out a whole module, subsystem, or even product, because of popular wisdom that anything they replace it with will just have bugs of its own. I believe this is a mistake because, again speaking only from my own experience, a high proportion of bugs originate in special or boundary cases. According to my reasoning above, a new project built from scratch with no prior experience will rarely get an overall design that automatically avoids these completely. Discipline is rarely good enough on software projects to allow for this and ensure that new requirements are integrated into a clean overall design rather than bolted on; indeed, in a commercial environment, this may not be realistic given short term deadlines and the typical management and marketing pressures. However, over time, such bolted-on special cases will tend to build up. They start to interact, they don't always get properly documented, and new people on the project team either don't know about them or at best don't know all the original reasoning behind them, making safe maintenance difficult.
Sometimes, this problem is manageable, particularly if your project leadership consistently take a long-term view and give maintenance and testing the priority they deserve. But usually, IME, the problem reaches a certain critical mass where the costs of ongoing development of a code base full of dubiously documented special cases outweigh the costs of stopping to clean things up.
As an additional, very practical concern, tools and programming techniques are always developing. Over the sort of timescales we're talking about here, it's entirely possible that more effective tools will have been created, or more effective techniques discovered, that could solve the underlying problem much more effectively in a different way.
Thus, s
Re:The Gecko source code is a mess. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which would make perfect sense, except that the person running the C++ compiler probably wrote the C++ code they're putting through it, or at least has direct access to it so if something doesn't work they can fix it. For how many of the web pages you visit regularly did you write the HTML and CSS?
Following the established user interface principle that when things go wrong, you don't make it the user's fault.
Where "crap" presumably means a hugely popular service used regularly by a bazillion people?
Technical details and web standards and browser workarounds and so on are just means to an end. That end is getting web sites that people want to use onto their computers so they can use them. The means matter exactly up to the point that they help to do this, and no further.
Re:Very nice FUD (you too) (Score:3, Insightful)
Before you people mod me down for stating this, and before you mod the Firefox apologist up, please do a comparison between any two concurrent release versions of Firefox and plain Seamonkey. The Firefox version has always had a bigger footprint than Seamonkey. Yes, really. Try it, dammit!
And also keep in mind that Seamonkey builds on the Gecko engine that Firefox uses, and not, like some people seem to think, the Mozilla codebase with proprietary code going all the way back to Mosaic.
The big difference is that Seamonkey follows the Mozilla suite paradigm of separating out the major pieces and allowing them to be installed or not as per the user's preference, while Firefox became an "Everything but the kitchen sink" project, where "kitchen sink" equals e-mail. This despite the intentions to be lean. Things included with Firefox have been stripped from Seamonkey, because if a user wants to install "Browser only", that's what the user should get -- not fifty different built-in "helper" apps that may or may not assist with certain types of browsing.
Both are great browsers, but they are directed toward different audiences. If you want the leaner version, try Seamonkey "browser only" install before assuming that it's going to be big and bloaty. You may be in for a surprise.
--
*Art
Re:The flip site of strict error handling (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree -- both with you and the post you replied to. It should be classified neither as a problem nor as a benefit. It's a consequence, and with it comes both good and bad things. The bad is that we have so many horribly coded web sites. The good is that we have much greater interest in the internet today than raising the bar would have allowed. Interest in the internet was a prerequisite to development of E-Commerce. I don't think the pool of academics and technology enthusiasts would have been sufficient to entice Amazon, Ebay and the like to set up shop.
You have cited capabilities required for business and technology. Aunt Tilley isn't interested in making brochures for a firm, nor is she interested in developing OS kernels. She wants to put together a small web site with pictures of friends and family and maybe a blog area where she and her friends can talk about her adventures with her 14 cats. In order to get that, she has to pay for an internet connection, and her friends have to pay for one too. This greatly increases the number of subscribers, which ultimately increases competition (in the ISP market) and lowers costs. Do you remember how dialin used to cost $30 - $40? Aunt Tilley and her friends are the one who created a market big enough for competition to drive the costs down. Furthermore, once online, Aunt Tilley's friends stumbled across some of the experimental online shopping sites and started the uptake of E-Commerce. If you had told Aunt Tilley that she had to use a text editor to develop her website and had to make sure each and every tag was valid and closed properly, do you think she would have been persistent enough to do it anyway? Not likely.
Now, having said all of that -- it's perfectly reasonable to expect any web authoring tool to generate compliant code (ahem, Microsoft???), and it's also reasonable to expect commercial and large social sites to at least run their code through a validator.
Re:The flip site of strict error handling (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, but you overestimate the ability of much of the population. Many people building web pages do not fully understand what they are doing. The copy and paste other code, and when it looks right to them in Internet Explorer, they feel they are done. They don't know their HTML code is buggy, and they wouldn't be able to fix it if they did. This type of person isn't stupid. They just do not have the interest or inclination for technology that you have. I'm sure they have other skills that would amaze you.