Should *Mozilla* Fork Firefox? | Hacker News Reader

Should Mozilla Fork Firefox?

computerworlduk.com

2 pointsbensummers4 comments

Of the people I know who have switched from Firefox to Chrome, the reason is always speed. Chrome is undeniably faster than Firefox. Unfortunately for the author of this article piece, the problem isn't putting a new frontend on Gecko, the problem is that Gecko isn't fast enough.

I haven't been involved with the project in years other than following the blogs of key developers, but I've always been under the impression that the platform guys had the latitude to do whatever they wanted but making big changes for unknown gains is undesirable. This is very different from the Netscape controlled bureaucracy that led to the m/b fork.

When people actually test these things I think they generally show that Chrome isn't undeniably faster than Firefox.

Chrome wins on Javascript execution and Firefox currently has major startup problems because of a large codebase and poor UI that continually interrupts you and asks for restarts.

But Firefox wins, against stereotype, for memory usage and page load speed (more so with ad blockers installed).

They've clearly lost the faith of many vocal geeks, but I'm really not sure how much of that is based on fact rather than some kind of herd instinct.

> But Firefox wins, against stereotype, for memory usage and page load speed (more so with ad blockers installed).

I'll agree on memory, and that's one of the reasons I continue to use Firefox but memory is not speed. It's my impression that Chrome wins on JS execution and DOM manipulation/reflow, which is really what I are about as a developer and (generally) as a user. When you're on a low end machine, these make a big difference. When you're on a machine like most developers have, it really doesn't except in technology demos.

The Jaegermonkey and Layers work should help out, but I'm not sure that Firefox will ever catch Chrome. It's a difference in development philosophy. Webkit reverts ANY performance degradation while Mozilla reverts all performance regressions except for new features. I prefer Mozilla's philosophy since the places where this matters is generally a performance vs edge case correctness tradeoff.

This could be seen as a success of chrome, given Google's stated reasons for releasing the code:

Primarily it's because one of the fundamental goals of the Chromium project is to help drive the web forward. Open source projects like Firefox and WebKit have led the way in defining the next generation of web technologies and standards, and we felt the best way we could help was to follow suit, and be as open as we could.

A bit of competition has prevented the market from stagnating again.

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