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Comment by randomwalker | Hacker News Reader

Firefox seems like an obvious option for desktop apps. Yet it hasn't caught on, and I'm not sure why.

Isn't it obvious? XUL is slow as molasses compared to GTK (or anything else.) There are desktop apps written on top of Mozilla. Miro is one that I use every day. I know the pain.

The perceived speed of Firefox itself depends mostly on the speed of web-page rendering, and not so much the chrome. So I guess Mozilla's focus has been to improve rendering speed, whereas Firefox's preferences dialog still reminds of me of trying to use Netscape 6 on a machine with 32 megs of memory back in 2001. Oh, the horror.

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I agree. XUL isn't that bad, but it seems like XUL based applications use about twice as much RAM as their non-XUL counterparts. Firefox and Thunderbird are fairly competitive on that front with other web browsers, but Songbird easily uses over 100MB of RAM, and is sluggish, whereas even Windows Media Player, which for some reason has a reputation of bloatedness, uses under 30MB on my machine unless playing video, which Songbird can't even do.

That said, I think one of the advantages to XUL is that it allows for easy modifications and extensions. On the Firefox/Thunderbird front, that's worth it, but in some other cases, it might not be. I think even Amarok on Windows (when it works) uses less RAM than Songbird on Windows.

>Windows Media Player, which for some reason has a reputation of bloatedness

The reason is that when it came out it was competing with WinAmp 1.x which was the antithesis of sluggish.

This is my complaint about Komodo Edit. It has a lot of really nice features, but it's just slow compared to other editors (and even compared to Eclipse).

Y'know, I really feel bad for the folks at ActiveState. They put so much into Komodo. Really drank the Mozilla koolaid, I guess. And it's a great product, ... except for the speed. And they're a smart bunch. If there were a way to speed it up, you'd think they'd have found it.

I hate to say this, but you know what I'd really like to see happen? For them to cut their losses. Just take everything in Komodo that's not tied to the XUL (or whatever Mozilla pieces they're using), and redo their GUI in ... well, there's more discussion on that in this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423119

Are you using Linux, where fsync() syncs the entire filesystem rather than a single file?

SQLite (interoduced in FF3 for settings) calls fsync lots, hence tends to suck a bit on Linux. That's Linux's fault, not Firefox's.

Was FF2 preferences slow?

Another reason why it hasn't caught on, is its bloated/complex build infrastructure.

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