Firefox Bloat

Firefox is experiencing growing pains in more ways than one and two of the bloating problems they have encountered appear to be intertwined -- browser code and Google money. The browser war may be pushing the Firefox project too fast and down the wrong path.



Recent estimates place Firefox with a little over 15 percent of the market and Internet Explorer around 78 percent. Most of the market share that Firefox has gained on Internet Explorer came with the royalty deal that Google struck with the now for-profit Mozilla Foundation, who has 90 employees and revenue of more than $100 million in the last couple of years.

Mozilla plans to make enough money to keep growing ... Google, which, like the other search companies, is always competing for better placement on browsers. Under the agreement, the Google search page is the default home page when a user first installs Firefox, and is the default in the search bar. (Google has a similar placement with Apple’s Safari.)

The transparency of Mozilla is coming into question by many critics, mostly because of the level of secrecy that has to be maintained in its arrangements with Google. That issue caused tension around getting the deal done and disclosure.



Other critics claim that Mozilla is percieved as an extension of Google:

... they note that one of Google’s growth areas, Web-based software applications, would have a better chance of success with a browser not controlled by its biggest rival, Microsoft.

With money comes change. Firefox is evolving in directions that nobody would have imagined a couple of years ago.



The surge in popularity of Firefox has caused a backlash effect from Microsoft who is shelling more money into the advancement of Internet Explorer. The release of IE 7 shown remarkable improvements over previous versions and demonstrated to the Google/Mozilla camp exactly what they are capable of accomplishing.



When Firefox launched over five years ago, "it burst on the open-source browser scene like a young Elvis Presley -- slim, sexy and dangerous.", says Scot Gilbertson of Wired. But now he fears that with the "IE killing" release of Firefox 3.0 later this year will be in danger of becoming

the later version of Elvis -- fat.

Anecdotal reports of problems, from sluggishness to slow page loads and frequent crashes, have begun circulating in web forums, along with increasingly loud calls for Firefox to return to its roots. The alleged culprit: bloat, the same problem that once plagued Mozilla, the slow, overstuffed open-source browser spawned by Netscape that Firefox was originally meant to replace.

The "roots" was Firefox's small memory footprint, fast load time and extensibility thru plugins. It was a roll-your-own bare bones browser. It was this root that became one of Firefox's major selling points to non-geeky computer users. But now that is coming under more scrutiny as reports from reader polls cite that Firefox's mysterious habit of gobbling up huge chunks of memory as their number one complaint.

Actual data is hard to come by, but Mike Schroepfer (Mozilla's vice president of engineering) opines that memory problems can be blamed on the users environment which is influenced by other software, add-ons, and extensions. To keep the bulk down, Schroepfer's team sets a high threshold for the addition of features. New features aren't built in unless they are useful to at least 90 percent of Firefox's users.

Despite those safeguards, some now-standard features could be adversely affecting performance.

Firefox's page-cache mechanism, for example, introduced in version 1.5, stores the last eight visited pages in the computer's memory. Caching pages in memory allows faster back browsing, but it can also leave a lot less memory for other applications to use. Less available RAM equals a less-responsive computer.

It is a fine line that Firefox has to walk when trying to find a balance between what is perceived to be a "needed" feature and one that is not. What is too much? And does Firefox have a choice in that matter?

Slowly but surely, Internet Explorer is catching up to Firefox. In IE7, Microsoft added tabbed browsing and integrated RSS support to its browser. If Firefox is going to continue to compete, it will need to up the ante, but it must do so without making users add extensions .. and possibly introduce compatibility problems.

With the emerging technologies appearing on the web today, it will certainly push the limits of the new breed of browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer. The change is inevitable and I do believe that neither will be going back to their roots and will continue to grow with the web.



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