Happy 5th Birthday To Firefox 252
halfEvilTech writes "Five years ago today, Mozilla released Firefox 1.0. Ars celebrates the occasion by taking a trip back in time to revisit our classic coverage of the original release." For fun, we dug up the oldest Slashdot Firefox story, which was a Firebird story proclaiming yet another name change from Feb '04. At least this name change stuck.
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:5, Informative)
GP is confused due to this sort of news [pcpro.co.uk]. Parent is correct [mozilla.com] in that there will be no such interface.
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:2, Informative)
Thanks non-AC.
And of course, if you get right down to it...
http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory [dotnetperls.com]
Now of course, Firefox has a process-per-tab build too, I just hope it never becomes default. (although forcing plugins into a separate process might be nice, esp since I whitelist Flash anyway)
In terms of rendering speed, Firefox tends to be slightly ahead on rendering, and TM/SFX/V8 are basically all tied up way beyond IE8's JScript. TM does have a couple of issues. I'd say the work on implementing merge traces should help the most w/ things like jsMSX, and expanding the size of strings with its problems in string tests.
TM, last I checked, still has more efficient arrays than V8.
Open source cake! (Score:2, Informative)
Recipes here. You can pick your own and then compile it yourself:-)
http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/Cake
Re:A cake is in order (Score:3, Informative)
These comments remind me of this video (where Mac and PC get poisoned with a cake):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mg6wrYCT9Q [youtube.com]
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:5, Informative)
You can disable it entirely (the functionality not just the look) in FF3.5, so what exactly is your problem with me using it?
Re:Anyone using Lynx? (Score:3, Informative)
Why use lynx? Why not use something that renders a little more nicely, like elinks or w3m? There's even image support if you want it. There's also dillo, which is graphical, but still really fast as it doesn't support things like javascript. I can't think of any reason to use lynx anymore.
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:5, Informative)
Gecko's memory usage now is less than it was in the early 2000s in many cases. So this particular program is actually using less memory than it was in the early 2000s. Since just the shared libraries for it are bigger than 32MB (uncompressed, on some OSes, etc), it's hard to see how it could fit in 32MB of RAM...
If your question is why there are these big shared libraries, the answer is that it's trying to do too much. The SVG1.1 spec is about 800 pages last I checked. And this is not because it goes into excruciating detail or anything. The CSS2.1 spec is about 300 pages (and while it's better on the detail, it's not perfect). You just end up with a huge gob of code to handle all those behaviors the huge specs require.
How much memory do you think a web browser handling modern web standards should take up? How does that number stack up against existing web browsers?
There's also the data set. People think nothing of sending hundreds of kilobytes of JS per page to the browser (last I checked, cnn.com has upwards of 500KB of JS just linked directly from the page; who knows whether they load more?). People think nothing of sending large amounts of graphics, etc.
Which brings us to the last point: programs are bigger because they _can_ be. If you have to fit into 32MB of RAM, then you can't just decode a 3000px by 3000px image into memory (it's be 4 * 3000 * 3000 bytes, or 36MB). You do it piece by piece and forget the pieces after painting them, or something. You don't even cache decoded smaller images, since it's so easy for that to fill up memory. If you feel like you have more ram to work with, you might make the space/performance tradeoff of keeping the decoded image in memory instead of decoding on every paint...
Re:I've been using it since (Score:3, Informative)
I was running Linux from 1995 on. No IE on Linux.
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:4, Informative)
1. Most of the Web needs JS now. Without it, you get a niche browser most people won't use.
2. An awful lot of FF is written in JS.
Re:A cake is in order (Score:5, Informative)
Oldest Firefox (then Phoenix) story on Slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
Hmm... This is the initial announcement I found from Sept 24, 2002... Back before the project was renamed Firebird, then FireFox
Enjoy: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/24/1215252 [slashdot.org]
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:3, Informative)
a) preferences, privacy>suggest results from:>Nothing
b) It's not a well-kept secret it's just some people prefer to bitch about stuff rather than bother looking
A lot of people put a lot of effort into figuring out how to remove IE from Windows. Basically it's impossible to completely remove it. I think any unbiased observer would agree that this is a bad thing.
No i think people that remove IE from windows are idiots, if you don't like some functionality don't use it, removing it from the OS to save 100MB on a 7GB install is a waste of time.
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:2, Informative)
That that was the goal is a myth. These were the real goals of Firefox:
From the Mozilla Firefox Development Charter [archive.org].