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The Demise of Firefox
Posted on March 20th, 2009 4 commentsI stumbled across this article today which in words manifested a gut feeling all of us web developers have been feeling for the last year. The sensational title: ‘Firefox may already be dead’, rings true if the systematic revolt against Internet Explorer is any lesson. To understand why Firefox may be on the death march, one must understand why IE is so reviled by developers and security experts alike. All of the myriad symptomatic technical issues all boil down to one simple problem which is that IE failed to evolve. Firefox rose to popular heights because it satisfied a terrible itch that IE refused to, that of standards compliance, attention to security and intuitive interfaces. History repeats itself again as much like IE was the atomic bomb dropped on netscape, Firefox was the community response to IE. Just as IE did not continue to improve after its sole competition was decimated, the folks at mozilla labs have either become equally complacent or they have forgotten their mission. Firefox, which was once a sleek and slim browser and the poster child for innovation has been seen as slipping in it’s roadmap (3.1 fell to the status of vaporware), and discussion forums are clogged with complaints about memory usage, sluggish performance and more frequent stability issues.
I’m not just citing the anecdotal evidence of other people as justification for this flaming of everyone’s favorite browser, to be fair, I push the browser very hard personally probably beyond its intended design. Being a web developer, I abuse firefox with a library of plugins which no doubt contribute to the collective unstability of the program. As full disclosure here is a list of extensions i currently have installed:
- ColorZilla
- Download Statusbar
- DownloadHelper
- Firebug
- FlashGot
- Foxytunes
- GBookmarks
- Google Gears
- Html Validator
- It’s All Text!
- JSView
- keyconfig
- Novell Moonlight
- S3 Firefox Organizer
- SDBizo
- Stop Autoplay
- Tab Mix Plus
- Tamper Data
- Ubiquity
- Url Link
- Web Developer
It’s quite an obscene list, I admit but not all that uncommon among my ilk. My thinking is that if a software proclaims superior extensibility it should assume the worst that extension developers aren’t the brightest knives in the drawer and won’t pay alot of attention to memory management therefore the host program should be diligent in cleaning up after it’s children. My experience has been that by the end of the day, Firefox memory footprint has bloated to 700+ Mb and it has crashed atleast twice (On Linux). Regardless of Mozilla’s justification of the memory usage, I would rather take a performance hit than sacrifice all of my ram.
When Chromium comes out for linux in a usable form, I’ve already decided to make the switch and I suspect I’m not alone. I read the lengthy comic that google put out and even if the browser doesn’t live up to the high expectations in real world performance, I am already persuaded by the architecture of the browser and expect that I will not experience most of the issues I experience with Firefox. As long as Chromium or plugin developers provide the same love to web developers there will be little reason to stay loyal to Mozilla. I agree whole-heartedly with the parent article that Firefox will most likely fail because it has too much momentum to stop, not that it’s developers have the desire to alter course. I for one welcome our new Google overlords.
4 responses to “The Demise of Firefox”
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Asa Dotzler March 20th, 2009 at 21:14
So Chrome, a browser which is not available for your platform (because its creators consider you a second or third class citizen of the web) that has none of the 20+ extensions that you use with Firefox is about to dethrone Firefox?
Wow. You’re very optimistic about vaporware and very pessimistic about the tool in hand. I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side of the road.
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Well the truth is that Mozilla is going to have to pull some miracles out of their hat in order to pull ahead of the innovations that Google is pumping out. I seriously doubt that Mozilla is going to completely rework the internal guts of Firefox to meet the demands of today’s users and address all of the complaints that have plagued it. Maybe you know something we don’t and if that’s the case and Mozilla surprises us all with Firefox 3.5 that’s once again sleek, fast, and efficient I will gladly bow to you. I’ve heard rumors that the Firefox internals are still deeply rooted in the old Netscape codebase whose age shows almost as bad as that of Trident. I’ll concede that is probably nothing more than heresay but I’m inclined to believe it given its single threaded, memory sharing architecture. Additionally, I wouldn’t go so far as to call Chromium vaporware considering I have it installed and get regular updates for it. I used it just yesterday to test some javascript heavy sites and it works well enough even if its not a complete replacement yet. I expect once Chrome becomes available on all platforms, we will see extensions become available. And I only sound pessimistic because I am history’s pupil and no one stays a hero forever and there will always be a new kid on the block, and today that is Google. Android and Chrome are both part of an obvious strategy by Google to reset the status quo. Call me a google fanboy, but when I see something done right, I call it like I see it. Thanks for the feedback.
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Asa Dotzler March 21st, 2009 at 09:54
I’d warn against paying too much attention to rumors and hearsay and you’re right to be skeptical of it.
I’m not going to call you a Google fanboy but I do think you’re overly optimistic about Chrome on platforms other than Windows and I think you put too much faith in their promised future of extensions.
Both will certainly happen, to some degree, but as you can already see from their comfort shipping a 1.0 product that had neither cross-platform parity (or even non parity) nor extensions, those pieces of the puzzle you consider important are clearly not priorities for Google.
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[...] of you may remember my inflammatory article about the demise of firefox, and I thought it would be wise to post a follow up as I am a man of my word and when the situation [...]
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