- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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Yeah, great, 2% of the X86 market, sure we'll port our software to OSX - Samo Korosec
Happy Birthday Firefox
THE OPEN SOURCE BROWSER Firefox celebrates its fifth birthday today.
Firefox was released by the Mozilla Foundation on November 9, 2004 and was immediately so popular that demand promptly crashed the server. The outfit spent an hour trying to get everything online again.
It was not clear how Firebadger 1.0 would go. The Mozzarella Foundation had a crack at releasing its own browser in 2002, but that was declared too cheesy by the great unwashed.
After five years, Firefox still has not killed off Internet Exploder but it has become a competitive player with something around 25 per cent market share, depending on who's counting.
However all is not well at the Fox set. In the good old days it was all about beating Microsoft and changing the world. Firefox forced the Vole of Redmond to look at web standards and take them more seriously.
However now Google and Apple are also entering the browser market and making a name for themselves.
The web has changed too. When Fireferret first peeked onto the wide world web the Internet was mostly documents and a few shopping sites. Now a browser is expected to run applications and share data. It is also expected to be positively secure and stop people from visiting attack websites.
Firefox did so well because it could adapt quite quickly and was packed full of features. It was also a lot faster than anything the Vole could offer because it was a fresh design and you could opt out of unwanted features.
But now the open sourcerers have to compete with shedloads of marketing hype from Google and Apple. They have been peddling browsers that look sexy and claim to be better than Firefox.
Firefox version 3.5 arrived in June and version 3.6 is due out by the end of the year. It is also starting to show signs of age. It is becoming almost as bloated as its principal rival, Internet Exploder. As a result Google's Chrome is starting to look a lot more appealing.
The next things that will happen with Firefox involve better support for HTML5, which supports the introduction of Web Open Font Format (WOFF) and the Ogg Theora video format. These will allow for webpage rendering using open source fonts and enable video to be played in the browser without requiring the use of proprietary technologies like Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flash.
However there is a slight problem in that these are just open sauce geek ideals. Most people don't really care if a web application is proprietary or not. What made Firefox great was that it was faster, more secure than Internet Exploder and offered more. If that stops being the case then the next five years could see Firefox fall out of favour and become a niche browser, while Chrome and Internet Explorer slug it out for dominance. µ
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Well at least for me. I switched from Ubuntu 9.04 32 bit to Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit that came with the latest release for Firefox. It seems much more responsive than the last version.
Chrome crashes when i try to play runescape on W7 64. I mean, really? runescape? how the hell does runescape crash? its just java...
SEAMONKY sounds So Dubai, OverWhelming Stuff IS Good to Pirate Monkees, Ultee' Being Sold Leadership Position, Waving DOS Colors LikeALL Night Barrage.
SEAMONKY IS & It Was 1963.
How?, SEAMONKEY In Preparing Its Packet For Transmission, Sends packet First, Then prepares GUI. Much Faster Response. By Time SEAMONKEy Up, Packet coming Back, Invisibley, Like that Snipe Ultee'. packet Sent Before DOS Infection Even Knows UlteeMonkee got Goods ONLINE & Page Streaming In so Fast Malware goes defunct....
Even with -=7=-, its just NOT IE Protocol & IF YOU DON'T HAVE COPY OF SEAMONKY READY TO GO, YOU BEE STUPIDEST SHIT EVER MET.
& met plenty dudes. ?theire Ultees' friends. Its Stinky,Stanky WAR.
FLUSH Goes IE, Moz,Chrome & ANY/All Other Stupido Browsers(Of which, there Are thousands).
My Cute Little SeaMonky Does Streaming NOW Too, Runs in 64 bit Envior & KILL Neighbors,errrr,Boss, just for bonus.
drashek
IE 7/8 is terribly slow
FireFerret .. come on now really? .. ugh
Chrome - crashes, doesnt load pages, video files dont display... and worse of all .. ET Phones home all the time.
SRWare Iron - see Chrome without the ET feature.
All in all they all suck.
If I had a five year old that had become that bloated and in constant need of medicine to cure it's never ending critical issues, the social services would have taken it into care by now and declared me an unfit parent company.
Firefox isn't half as bad as you make it sound, at least not yet. It's still a sight better than the competition, and unless mozilla lets success get to their heads which they inevitably will sooner or later, it'll stay that way.
FF is big now, it still eats more memory than it should and takes a bit to load.
BUT
IE8 is one slow snail, so noticeable slow I can't stand using it for more than testing if our stuff works there.
Chrome is faster but is still behind on add-ons and has certain annoying quirks rendering (related to webkit).
Regardless of criticisms FF is still the best browser outthere right now.
It's only been 5 years? Feels longer.
Anyways 5 years is an eternity in software world, and with all the features / bug fix Firefox had I'm not surprised to see it start to bloat up quite a bit as compared to v1.5 back when I started to use it.
All good features takes up processing time and space, Firefox is so very sweet because of the awesome plugin system, and of course that means using Gecko and all the extra code / speed hit which makes all the plugin access possible.
And there's the awesome bar... I love the damn thing, too many times you can't remember the URL of an article / site, but you remember the title of the article; most times it is the title of the page and it is trivial to find it with awesome bar.
I think Moz is doing a good job coping with the increased code base, and optimize performance where they can.
There's always a tradeoff between feature and performances, Firefox was lean and mean, and over the years became awesome but slower (but hey computers are faster too).
Anyways, use the right tool for the right job. Firefox without any plugins is plenty fast on its own, if that won't satisfy you go for Chrome/Safari; however I can't live without all the plugins now and there's no going back.
How come Firefox is bloated when it consumes the least amount of memory of all modern browsers? Just because it has more than 2 buttons by default?
The memory footprint of a browser usually increases with a new version, because it has to do more complex things and be faster at the same time. Trading memory for performance is a standard approach to achieve this.
Opera.
I tried chrome tried to like it. but it just looks to much like a toy and screws up left and right.
When chrome starts looking less kiddish ill give it a go again. Until then. No thanks.
@ Regulas - You need to look again. Firefox in 64 bit basically runs like poo. It should definately not be faster unless you it a bug. Do javascript benchmark you will see it's slower in 64bit mode.
Chrome still has a lot of work to do before it convinces linux users. It's an ok browser on windows but still has a few quirks. Safari may be taken up by the masses but will never go that far. Chrome is the real competitor.
Either way it doesn't really matter who wins. Firefox is a decent browser and it's alot older than what you claim. It comes from the netscape 6 days. So no wonder it's showing age.
What firefox did was open the general public to another browser. Wether they use it or not is not a problem but it means lots of people now will go download another browser and won't just stick with the default one!
Firefox is really great... also are the addons...
LMAO pathetic