A History of Firefox 199
chrisd writes "Firefox module owner Ben Goodger has written what I think is a very interesting post about how Firefox came into being. It goes into details unheard of to date about the inner workings at Netscape and he fills in a timeline spanning from the open sourcing of Netscape to the release just recently of Firefox 1.5. Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'. Anyhow, I consider this required reading for any fan of the Firefox browser." Or even just a programmer. Worth reading.
A history of Opera would be more interesting. (Score:3, Interesting)
It would also be excellent if Opera were to release the source code to some of their historic (and now obsolete) releases, say Opera 3 and earlier. While there may very well be licensing issues concerning some of the code, even being able to store a fair portion of it would be a blessing to computer historians around the world.
Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike Mozilla, Opera has always had make money, and that in a situation where they've had less than one per cent of the market. So Opera hasn't been able to take "shortcuts" and rely on donations until it turned out that searches could actually pay for development, alongside other deals of course.
That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.
Opera was also a power user program for many years. It is not until recently that Opera has cleaned up the default user interface to make it easy for newbies to start using it as well.
While the payware, the ads, and so on were necessary to keep the company afloat, it has also hurt Opera. Firefox could come around to steal the thunder at exactly the right time, and backed by a massive marketing campaign. Firefox's timing was incredible. They released 1.0 when everyone was talking about how dangerous it was to use Internet Explorer.
While Firefox was free as in beer, easy to use, and ready for the masses (more or less), Opera still had to rely on ads, and had to charge for the browser. But they cleaned up the UI, and last year Opera was released for free-as-in-beer.
Some may say "too little too late", but Opera has never been huge. There isn't much of a market share to lose! Opera has a small but loyal following, and it's still smaller, faster, and it has more functionality out of the box than Firefox.
Now that Opera has simplified the UI and removed the ads, it can only grow. It will need proper marketing, though, and it will need to differentiate itself from Firefox and establish an identity which gives people a clear vision of what Opera is about, and why they should use it instead of something else.
Opera has always been the "browser innovator". Most features in Firefox were available in Opera ages before Firefox did it, and some were even invented by Opera. But these days Firefox takes all the credit, and that's partly because it can rely on others who have done everything, so it can simply pick and choose from other browsers' innovations. And it can avoid the pitfalls too, because Firefox already made those mistakes back when it was "Netscape". Firefox obviously benefits from being Netscape's "successor". All web designers know about Netscape, after all. So they can't ignore it when designing pages.
Opera has done a lot, but one wouldn't think so just by looking at its market share. It's a pity, really. Opera was the only independent browser, and they put real money into open standards. IE was Microsoft and Mozilla/Firefox was AOL/Sun/Nokia/IBM/etc. Everyone else was in some major corporation's pockets, but not Opera.
Now Firefox has stolen the thunder, partly deserved, partly undeserved. But I think Opera can make it too. They just need to get the marketing right.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
I switched to firefox and haven't looked back. And if they had taken $$ for linux/solaris, I would have paid.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:4, Informative)
It seems to take Opera a few versions to really get up to speed on a new platform. Opera for Linux debuted at version 5, and was -- well, the only reason I paid for it (I was already a paying customer on Windows) was that I wanted to encourage them to keep going in the Linux market. Fortunately that strategy seems to have worked, as Opera 8 is excellent on both Windows and Linux.
I don't remember when they started the Mac version, but it's taken a while to catch up in stability. I think I tried it around version 6 and it was terrible at the time, but the last time I tried it, it was much better. With luck Opera 9 will be the version whre it finally catches up.
Lately they've been doing simultaneous releases on Windows, Linux and Mac. (I haven't been keeping track of Solaris, FreeBSD, etc, so I'm not sure about those.) The last major delay I recall was 8.0, where they held onto the Mac version for a few weeks, probably for polishing.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not anymore, as of version 8.5 (last September).
And even when it was, at least it was benign adware like Eudora in sponsored mode, not nasty adware that brought up a zillion pop-ups behind your back, inserted extra links into web pages, and surreptitiously installed more pop-up generators.
Granted, the ad bar was #*@!$ annoying, but it was hardly in the same class as, say, Gator/Claria/whatever.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for my view, I find that people who think *everything* should be "Free as in beer" and "Open Source" are naive and selfish. There are benefits abound on both sides of the street. These capitalistic companies that have closed source software/hardware laid the ground-work within which we walk today.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not really fair to lump Firefox with the big corporations. Its entirely because they rebelled against their roots that they got where they are today.
And its not really fair to talk about "out of the box" only when Firefox and Mozilla's key innovation is XUL. The fact that you can actually create applications or applets specificially for it is its unique innovation - an innovation not ever used by Opera. And its not at all fair to say that all the rest of the innovation in Firefox came from Opera, or that all of Opera's innovation came from Opera itself. The "innerHTML" property always springs to mind as one heckuva convenient thing that came out of Microsoft's browser.
There are some things I have always really liked about Opera. In the bad old days, it didn't render nearly as well as Mozilla. I couldn't find any ways to do the neat things with javascript that I was pulling off in IE or Firefox in Opera. But Opera was fast - something I attributed to not actually having the ability to support these features.
Those days are gone, though, and Opera has most of the capabilities that the other two browsers have. The only thing missing from the current version that I'd like are:
1) iframes. You can't put one on top of another. z-indexes don't work with iframes.
2) opacity. Both of the other two browsers have a mechanism for blending layers. Opera doesn't, AFAICT.
Those are deal-breakers for me. I can't work around them.
Of course, Opera isn't alone in missing features. Firefox won't let you change the color of the scrollbar or status bar, but Opera and IE will. IE has serious problems doing vertical layouts, and all of them have their issues with CSS3. These are all issues I can live with, though.
I 'spose most people see the past with rose-colored glasses, though. Hopefully I haven't shattered them too much.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
As a mere user, I just want to say that as far as I'm concerned, that's a feature, not a bug!
IMHO, websites should *never* mess with the browser itself, which for me includes the scrollbar. Coloured scrollbars are tacky at best.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
XUL lets you access things that are part of the browser itself. XUL is still in the sandbox of the browser; ActiveX isn't.
Further, XUL applets can only be installed via the extension installer interface, and then only by approved sites. So its quite difficult to trick someone into installing an extension that they don't want.
Finally, XUL is for extending the browser. ActiveX is for plugins. An example of a XUL applet I have on my system is a debug
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
You say this, but give no backup, why are they good and Mozilla guys not? Mozilla.org has given not one but two decent browsers, a XML cross platform GUI, and various build tools to the community. I feel they should get a good guy label as well.
before Firefox came around and stole the limelight.
You state this as if it was somehow unfair, as if Firefox was some Johnny come lately with style but no substance. Firefox has been around for a long time as well. It was a b
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
Haha... Umm, no. The ads were slightly annoying, and the price was rather high, but that wasn't the problem... not at all. The problem was the terrible interface.
Look at the bookmarks system. Every menu and sub-menu has 4 different items I'd never use which clogged-up the screen space "Open All" "Bookmark this page
Opera doesn't suck (Score:3, Insightful)
If you were trying to make a
Re:Opera doesn't suck (Score:2)
Re:Opera doesn't suck (Score:2)
Re:Opera doesn't suck (Score:2)
Tab Mix Plus completely enhances Firefox's tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.
Taken from here [mozilla.org]
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is both good and bad. Good because you get a clean program to start with. Bad because extensions are extremely unreliable and buggy, and clutter up the thing. And besides, Opera is as clean as Firefox by default now anyway. And it's still a smaller download (and that's including the Flash plugin which is almost a meg).
Yes, definitely most. And did you see the
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
No, but live RSS is a sad excuse for newsfeed handling. Even Mozilla knows that, and that's why they are going to fix it.
I never claimed that it did.
Dear oh dear. Opera's User JS is from back in the day when they released the bork version. That was, what, version 7? Ages before Firefox was even being considered.
Re:Opera - kind of a sad story in a way? (Score:2)
Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting. (Score:2)
They made it.
A few people bought it for a while.
Mozilla and Firefox borrowed some of their ideas.
Firefox takes off in a way that Opera could not.
Opera makes their browser free and stuff it full of ads.
Still not good enough, Opera takes all ads off their browsers.
Firefox releases version 1.5.
Opera cries "what about me?" as it's broken down on the side of the road while the bullet train that is Firefox advances towards IE.
Sorry, pick up hitchhikers will only slow us
Re:A history of Opera would be more interesting. (Score:2)
"Hitchhikers"? The few you speak of where able to use a free browser much better than IE, long before it became trendy to switch. I think that Firefox is great both in terms of being open source, and raising awareness - but it's ridiculous to categorise Opera as "broken down on the side of the road" when it made the journey long before Firefox came along.
How Firefox came to be? (Score:4, Funny)
The Firebird name was taken, so they got a new suffix with the Firesomething random animal generator.
ok, I'm off to RTFA...
the true power of opensource (Score:3, Insightful)
Free from business buzzwords and company politics mumbojumbo.
all that remains is a top notch stable product.
Pardon? (Score:4, Insightful)
If there were any efforts to limit the inclusion of low quality patches, I think such efforts failed. But then again, what would be a low quality patch to the FreeBSD project may very well look like a real gem when compared to the awful codebase that makes up Mozilla.
The true power of open source is letting us see how awfully written many of the most popular software products are, Mozilla included.
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
It takes a long time to understand how a large project operates. I couldn't tell much from the source without a few months to think about it.
At your advice, I'm pulling it down to have a look.
Do you have any examples of what I should be looking for, or is it really that obvious?
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Informative)
But we had a lot of fun :-)
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't believe it either, because for me, NS 4.x actually did crash after 5 minutes of use, most of the time.
Re:Pardon? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've never looked at the firefox code but I've always assumed that the firefox team took the useful parts of mozilla- gecko and the portability librar
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
However, I do believe that such matters can be dealt with in far more efficient and effective ways than is done so by Mozilla. A browser like Opera, for instance, offers many of the same capabilities as Firefox without even a quarter of the memory consumption, and often with a far greater respon
Re:Pardon? (Score:4, Insightful)
So, if you want what Opera has to offer and only that, then use Opera. But don't bash Mozilla's codebase because we don't offer the same feature set that Opera does and therefore a bunch of our code is needlessly complex.
"It appears that the Mozilla project has overcomplicated them, for whatever reason."
I think if you put even 5 minutes into thinking about "whatever reason," you'd not be saying that. Again, I'll use XULRunner and Firefox Extensions as examples of things that Opera does not do and will never do in its current form because they lack the (complex!) infrastructure that allows for such capabilities.
It is easy to bash code and get a good response from people - a large part of slashdot is just that. It is much harder to defend code, and that is something I just can't do for the Mozilla project in the time I have allotted for myself to post on slashdot. All I can say is if you want to know how good/bad the Mozilla code is, give it a lot more thought time or ask someone who would actually know. You could start with Mozilla developers. We're not all so biased and blinded as to blatantly lie about the quality of the Mozilla code.
Re:Pardon? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
Re:Pardon? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for XULRunner and the infrastructure involved in that, it would surely be a shame if the Firefox extension system was not around. By asking why we're messing with XULRunner, you're basically also asking why we're messing with Firefox extensions in their current form, because the infrastructure for both has a lot of overlap (XUL, XPCOM, nspr...). Sure, y
Re:Pardon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this seriously your attitude? It's no wonder that Firefox and much of the other software from the Mozilla project is so bloated. Even on systems with 2 GB or more of RAM, it is still a relatively scarce resource, and thus should not be wasted. I have used release builds of Mozilla 1.7.x that consumed upwards of 400 MB of RAM after being used for a few weeks, and that's with the cache disabled. That's 400 MB resident, mind you.
Remember, 400 MB for a web browser is still a massive consumption of memory on a 1 or 2 GB system. When there are many regular folks with systems that only have 512 MB of RAM, you start running into serious performance issues (which is often reported to be the case).
You say it's not a big deal to waste memory. Sorry to say it, but you're fucking wrong. Firefox will continually be looked upon as an inferior browser by those with any software development background if such a trend of waste continues.
I hope you understand why I keep coming back to Opera. They've put out a product that's just as portable and just as featureful as Firefox (if not more so). And they manage to do it without consuming hundreds of MB of RAM.
Re:Pardon? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
You're welcome.
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
Actually, almost every program I write includes a furious knife-wielding monkey.
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
Any professional developer should print the paragraph below out.
-- snip -- I work with the code every day. It is complicated, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is all badly written. I think you probably don't unders
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
We are in the process of replacing MORK with SQLite.
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
Re:Pardon? (Score:2)
Re:the true power of opensource (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the true power of opensource (Score:2, Interesting)
Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares? (Score:5, Funny)
Where Did IE7 Come From, Why and Who Cares?
The story of Internet Explorer is long but yet lacking in detail or any real value. There are many perspectives. This is mine. IE was of course written by Spry and acquired by us at Microsoft.
Since then, we've added many new bugs (I mean features), security holes (err... features),
stolen and duplicated ideas (umm... innovations). Even more importantly, we added tons of
new code to work around things in the original Spry browser we didn't understand... tons...
and since bigger is better, that alone makes IE7 the best browser on the market.
IE7 keeps Windows users working twice as productively (doing System Restores and removing viruses)
on their machines - what other browser forces (I mean allows) a user to sit in front of their
computers doing (recovery and restore) work?
Such amazing new security ideas like sandbagging (umm.. sandboxing) IE will force IE to write
files and such to only the temp directories (though since so many viruses and spyware already
write themselves there and then execute this is another item our Marketing Department needs
to spin as an improvement).
All in all, our newest browser is bigger, (bloatier), (borrowed and outdated) feature rich and
far more (or less) secure!
Footnotes
1. Some people claimed we didn't create all the new innovations in IE7 like tabbed browsing,
but you need to remember that Time is relative. Besides, even though we were the last ones
to come out with these innovations, our amazing Marketing Team can still convince the world
we are first - we call it our "Leading the Pack From the Rear" methodology.
2. "How to Secure & Stabilize your browser(TM)", or "The Mozilla Advantage" as it is more commonly
known as.
3. "Module Owners" - Microsoft, Microsoft and only Microsoft - where we "borrowed" the ideas, code
and technology is irrelevant.
4. "Moving Target" or "Barely Crawling Target" as we prefer to call it.
see also (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html [jwz.org]
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html [jwz.org]
Effectiveness often breeds resentment (Score:5, Interesting)
Impressive, indeed to admit to having been heavy-handed. Then again, there is a stark difference between leadership and running a popularity contest.
OTOH, even Emacs will have another release Real Soon Now. The ones to fear are those who claim to have Teh One True Way.
Re:Effectiveness often breeds resentment (Score:2)
Of course, things *can* work that way. The Linux kernel and the notion of Linus Torvalds a
Mozilla: a good PR move for Netscape... (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox:A tripartite golden braid (Score:3, Interesting)
Kenobi:Skywalker:Use The Force, Luke :: ::
Baranovich:Gant:You Must Think In Russian
Firefox:Goodger:In Open Source, You Must Think.
Re:Firefox:A tripartite golden braid (Score:2, Funny)
this is
Re:Firefox:A tripartite golden braid (Score:4, Funny)
Ask not what you think of your country.
Ask what your country thinks of you!
Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:4, Informative)
Someone arriving at Netscape at 1999 would have been someone boarding a sinking ship, it would seem...
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:2)
Funny story; it also had the side-effect of saving MS money. I heard that they bought the Spyglass source code rights for a small amount of cash and a promised share of the profits. Since no copies of IE were ever 'sold', Spyglass never got paid. Microsoft never miss a trick, do they?
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:2, Insightful)
They later sued Microsoft for contractual shenanigans [wikipedia.org] and settled for $8 million.
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:2)
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:3, Interesting)
Netscape took their share because IE was practically unusable. Once Microsoft geared up development internally, which Netscape should have anticipated, Netscape still had the opportunity to maintain their edge and leveraged themselves as a "cool app" company which would have suited the market fine for years after their decline. They could have done any number of things to counter the fact they'd have to give the product away free, using the Opera model for example.
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:2)
The market they lost was the business market. Companies that bout 10, 30, 100 copies to put on their employees' desks. That, and ISPs looking to provide a browsr for their users. Back then you couldn't take a brand-new computer and download
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:2)
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:2)
Remember - that was 1997. A 5 meg download was quite annoying back then.
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:2)
Bah! 56K modems were already comming out in '97, and 33.6 modems weren't bad. I downloaded 600MB Linux ISOs over dial-up (it took 2-3 days of course).
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free (Score:2)
Also, Netscape had the majority share of the browser market from version 2 to 4. It was only IE 4 that starte
History of Mozilla (Score:4, Interesting)
Something about the mozilla suite on linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone remember the style-sheet changer?
Re:Something about the mozilla suite on linux? (Score:2)
Re:Something about the mozilla suite on linux? (Score:2)
That's just nonsense. Mozilla was evangelizing to Windows users long before the switch to Firefox, and Firefox wasn't only better/faster/popular on Windows, but on every platform.
What you're really thinking of, I don't know.
The AOL Factor (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The AOL Factor (Score:2)
Maybe i remember stuff wrong...
But...
Didnt AOL use a netscape 3.0 based webbrowser back in the time?
And... the normal AOL (or even EVERY non-geek) user wouldnt be able to tell apart browsers anyway... if you take themes into the picture, just imagine how you could find out which browser somebody uses without resorting to the help/info menue?
Re:The AOL Factor (Score:2)
Re:The AOL Factor (Score:2)
if you want to see AOLfox, look at Netscape 8. *shudder*
The only good thing that AOL has done is to open source the Mozilla codebase. The hands off approach is the only thing that saved Mozilla.
Even 0.3 was very usable (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox history (Score:2)
1982: Clint Eastwood directs and stars in Firefox [amazon.com]
1983: Craig Thomas writes Firefox Down [amazon.co.uk]
2004: 'You must think in Russian!' jokes [as seen below] swarm the internet.
There may also have been mention of some internet browser, but that hardly seems relevant...
Hum along... (Score:2)
Is it just me, or does this page need a musical theme accompaniment? Something orchestral, stirring, and
But why so much Gnome stuff? (Score:2)
1)Some of the options are controlled by prefs within the gnome-control center. There is no way to set/override them from within Firefox itself, nor is there even a hint as to where to find the control. By default, Firefox sends mailto:s [mailto] to Evolution, not Thunderbird!
2)Why, oh why did they abandon the rather good native file-widget in favour of the horrendous abomination that is th
Irony... (Score:2)
I tried to print the page for later reading, but Firefox 1.5 didn't preview or print it correctly...had to open it in IE to print.
Things that make you go "hmmmm"...
Re:When are they going to patch (Score:3, Informative)
Re:When are they going to patch (Score:2, Informative)
Re:When are they going to patch (Score:2)
Opera did heavily influence Firefox. (Score:5, Insightful)
Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).
It's not a bad thing at all that Firefox draws from Opera. The goal is to provide the best product possible, and that does at times require the implementation of good ideas that were thought up elsewhere. Browsers like Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb and Safari innovate; Firefox brings those innovations to the masses.
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox. (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox broke into the mainstream, but the only innovation is the extensions system. Opera and OmniWeb have tons of innovative features, but most people never get to know about it.
And some of these features are actually possible to do as Firefox extensions.
It's almost as if there's no point in any other browser :) You can use Firefox, and if you need more features, you can just install extensions.
But I actually find extensions to often be very bad substitutes for properly integrated features. Not everyone wants to deal with extensions.
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox. (Score:2)
And, of course, not everyone wants to wait while all of the "properly integrated features" add an additional 3 minutes to the program's load-time. I imagine that if you "properly integrated" all of the extensions available for firefox, you'd very quickly obtain an unusable beast of a program (e.g., MS Office, where 90% of the users use 10% of the features). Not every
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox. (Score:2)
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox. (Score:2)
Opera didn't invent tabs, and frankly, the tab support in Opera was insane. Mozilla was the first to have sane tabs, going from one side to the other (right to left first, now left to right), rather than back in your history, which makes no sense considering human usage patterns of a web browser.
Mouse ges
Re:Opera did heavily influence Firefox. (Score:4, Funny)
Now just because they incorporate such ideas doesn't mean they do it well. The problem with IE isn't so much the feature set it offers, but how it insecurely and poorly offers those features. Opera, Konqueror, OmniWeb, Safari, and even Firefox to a lesser extent, do a better job of implementing such ideas.
Re:Innacurate (Score:5, Informative)
I appreciate the nod. Richter made a similar comment on the post itself. I attempted to respond with the following about an hour ago, but it seems it didn't make it past the moderation filter, so here it is:
"Hi Richster,
I'm not sure either. My post on Firefox Religion [blakeross.com] from this time last year did mention Ben. But to be fair, Ben's article does begin with a discussion of perspectives
I haven't lost interest in Firefox by a long shot, but coding-wise I prefer to work in leaps and bounds in small teams on fledgling products. Firefox no longer fits that profile--which is mostly a good thing! So I've been working with Joe Hewitt (another of the original Firefox guys) on a new project that will complement Firefox.
I think when we release, it will become clear that I never actually strayed too far from the fox. But I also know that the kinds of things we're working on could never be achieved--or achieved quickly enough, at least--if attempted in a project that has grown as large and mature as Firefox. Thus, our new project is in many ways a realization of where I would take Firefox today were it still as pliable (and thus immature) as 2 years ago.
Given that there are only two of us on the project right now, it consumes about all the coding time I can muster...so I allocate my Firefox time on SpreadFirefox and its campaigns, such as our newest, Firefox Flicks [firefoxflicks.com].
Thanks,
Blake"
Re:Innacurate (Score:2)
Re:Where is version 5.0? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Firefox: Most unstable program in common use = (Score:2)
I tried what
To understand, read everything. (Score:2)
It's just one aspect. To understand what people know about this very well-publicized bug, you should read everything. It's interesting to note that no Firefox or Mozilla developer has done this; it's obvious from their replies.
Anyhow, does it seem reasonable that opening 3 tabs showing the same 4 megabyte HTML f
Re:To understand, read everything. (Score:2)
I just tried the same test using Opera 9 Preview 1, and it takes about 165 MB to show all three tabs. So you're saying that Firefox using 200 MB is obviously unreasonable, but Opera using 165 MB is obviously perfectly reasonable, demonstrating "no problems of this nature"? If so, can you explain how you've made this determination? Sure, Opera uses nearly 20% less memory in this case, bu
You are only being adversarial. (Score:2)
Re:You are only being adversarial. (Score:2)
If you can demonstrate a memory problem, CPU hogging problem, or crash, give some steps to demonstrate the problem. Look, there's space right below my post for you to report the problem for all to see. Otherwise, I have
Re:Firefox: Most unstable program in common use = (Score:2)
Of course. That's why Firefox developers created the memory leak detection tool and are hard at work fixing memory leaks [squarefree.com]. They're all in denial I tell you!
Sheesh. What needs work are the Firefox trolls. Maybe do some research next time so your trolls are at least convincing?