Hacker News Reader

Glad to see I'm not the only that finds it ironic how Firefox only took 2 versions to abandon the original reasoning (lightweight, fast, better UI) that made them so much better than anything else. It's not like in the last few years people have suddenly wanted heavier, slower, harder.

View on HN

I never thought they did such a great job of that anyway. For example, the early versions of Firefox were about twice as big as Opera (in download size) and had a fraction of the features.

Yeah, they basically switched off a bunch of stuff in the full Mozilla suite (now Seamonkey) but it was only later (for certain things much later) that they actually removed unused code and focused on speed and memory.

So anyone who thinks that Firefox had "Features", "Speed" or "Lightweight" as original killer features is deluded.

They did on the other hand have a fairly stripped down and therefore non-threatening usable UI (now leapfrogged in that regard by Chrome and Safari), extensions, being both open source and free of cost (without being ad supported), faking native Windows UI reasonably well, and not being IE6 in their favor.

Right, and maybe you're right that I was deluded, but my recollection is that the original motivation for Firefox was "Mozilla (and IE) are bloated and slow, let's fix that"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com