Another great step along the way towards a compacting GC.
I wonder how much more memory can actually be saved in Firefox.
I wonder how much more memory can actually be saved in Firefox.
But after all the bugfixes and everything Firefox is still no snappy. And they landed that Hideous Australis UI.
I want a practical browser that does what I need it to. Yet with each new release of Firefox we tend to see further useful functionality stripped away, additional config panel options removed, and the UI dumbed down in one way or another. So whenever an update happens, it's off to searching for add-ons to basically undo whatever unhelpful changes the developers have just made.
Add-ons and customization should be there to enhance and already good piece of software. They shouldn't be there as band-aid that's applied to fix the numerous mistakes and bad decisions of the software's developers.
I find that with every release of Firefox, I need less and less addons. Better dev tools? Okay, goodbye Firebug. Download popover instead of a different window? Goodbye DownloadStatusBar. Australis? Goodbye Firefox-button mover and FXChrome (I use Tree Style Tabs, but FXChrome make everything else look prettier anyway).
In KDE I can hide the FF window decorations, and it then uses no more real estate than Chrome, while still offering a better native UI. I'm just crossing my fingers that any UI changes in FF don't negatively impact us Linux users or drift too far away from native widgets.
I get frustrated because all the people who complain about the new Ausrtalis UI seem to want to drag FF back to the oldschool Netscape/IE6-looking thing. I think FF's UI is in a perfect place in the current version - clean, crisp, and compact. My only complaint about current FF is the redundant "bookmark-star" button in the Address bar that I'm constantly accidentally clicking.
In order to fix it, they first should provide a compact version: same button sizes on the toolbar, smaller and better looking tabs, less wasted space between interface items.
Which would be justifiable (not good, but justifiable) if there was a tablet where Firefox would actually be usable.
Whilst the new UI is a little bit of an improvement on touch devices, it still kind of sucks. The main problem is the poor scrolling performance of FF though.
Sure, they can make a touch-friendly interface, but they should just put in behind a flip switch in the options. Using the mouse for half a minute to enable it will not break anyone's hands. Best way to feed the goat and keep the cabbage.
#1: guessed the numbers, but I will eat my non-existing hat if the touch screen monitors are over 5%
Taking less space, and looking nice is one thing. Easy to use is another thing.
Mozilla, fighting against a current to open source the only proprietary competition to Internet Explorer in its day, has spent over a decade improving a lot of old, ugly code, and making not just a good (maybe not great to you, even if it is to me; I will try to word it fairly) browser, but a spate of technological advances and solid policy positions.
Chrome and Google might be the new hotness, but I respect how much Mozilla has done with Firefox, and how they take their time to make the right choices (to them, you might not agree; that is ok).
And if you think moving the whole underlying architecture of a widely distributed browser is an easier milestone than changing a skin that runs an easily prototyped UI in Javascript (XULRunner), I strongly encourage you to download the source, read the very solid documentation, talk to the community, and compile.
I know your attitude re Firefox is commonplace, but as a younger hacker I am disappointed how people think their more-than-a-decade long project to build a browser is just not fast enough.
Now only if they would get their crap together with the X11 server ...
(Yes, that was a joke, just to be clear.)
* Hitching and lagging coinciding with dumping tons of garbage into my syslog [1]
* A six year old bug whereby duplicate SSL certs result in a page not being able to be viewed. No override, no nothing. [2]
Meanwhile, the Chrome UI is minimal but fast, and doesn't seem to have fallen victim to the "redesign for redesign's sake" that seems to be plaguing many open source projects (Australis is downright ghastly), my required plugins work without the lag, and bugs that hamper basic functionality don't sit around unfixed for half a decade! Or even a full decade in some cases!! [3]
Maybe I sound entitled, but that second bug in particular is downright infuriating (HP iLO simply cannot be used), and the fact that it's been sitting untouched has unfortunate implications for the dev culture at Mozilla. And don't say it's been forgotten about in a backlog either - read the history and you'll see instances of tickets being marked a duplicate of this one, so the awareness is there.
Firefox may be an amazing hammer, but I can't use it and can't recommend anybody else does either until it stops embedding splinters in my hands.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/984296
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435013#c15
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435013
Huh, first time I've ever been downvoted for saying that bugs suck.
I mean, we're not talking about something taking a couple of extra clicks here. We're not talking about a minor annoyance. We're talking about affected webpages being completely unviewable. Full stop. Just like that.
But doing good in the past simply doesn't mean everything. May be people hold different standard. But to me and a lot of others, Firefox today is the slowest browser of all, be it Safari on the Mac, IE on Windows, or Chrome/Opera on all Platform. And just a reminder Chrome was released on September 2008. And in many ways Firefox still cant match Chrome snappiness. 6 years! That is an awfully long period in tech industry.