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, Insightful)
Which piece of bloat would you remove first?
I've been using it since (Score:2, Insightful)
Netscape 1.0
Re:A cake is in order (Score:4, Insightful)
I was going to say something like, "thanks for beginning as a faster and better alternative but ending up just as bloated and crappy as we are" cake.
Re:cookies are delicious delicacies (Score:3, Insightful)
The addons deserve the real praise (Score:5, Insightful)
Comments about bloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. Firefox has certainly got bigger over the years (though of course not bigger than its ancestor Mozilla), but it has also grown in the features it provides. If it had stayed at the minimal functional level it had at the earliest levels of its development, everybody would be whining that it doesn't offer enough features.
We can't have it both ways. If we want more features, then we have to accept that they will take more codespace. Simple as that.
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:3, Insightful)
Awesomebar.
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't believe I'm making this point, but here goes...
As a web developer I actually appreciate the bloat. The average user does not have patience to look for extensions that fill in the core features that other browsers offer. Without the "bloat", those users would have likely stayed with IE, Microsoft would have no motivation to improve, and we'd likely be stuck developing for something much closer to IE6... ugh...
So for me, bloat is forgivable -- I'm just happy we're finally at a spot where web standards are taking hold. It's hard for Microsoft to embrace and extend they're losing so much ground.
Happy Birthday, Firefox =)
Re:Comments about bloat (Score:1, Insightful)
Software naturally becomes larger with more features over time
If you let it. That shouldn't happen with a project whose stated goal is to be simpler. Resist the feature creep. More isn't better.
Many of the features added are very good and very helpful
Be better if they could all be turned off to create a much faster browser.
We live in an era where memory is not a precious commodity.
People have been saying this for 30 years and it's never been true. Probably never will be. In fact, memory's been getting more precious lately because of the 4GB limit that a lot of MOBOs face. Not to mention all the older machines that would like to be able to at least search the damned web. Of all things, why should a *web browser* be a memory pig?
There are memory leaking and stability issues that should have been better handled by now.
God is that true.
Re:A cake is in order (Score:5, Insightful)
A "Thanks for trying but we are still #1" cake?
More like "thanks for raising the bar and forcing us to improve". I have long argued that the role of OSS isn't necessarily to take over the world but to make it a better place by doing things better for free than most companies do for profit. (Sort of like the NDP party in Canada, they'll never run the country because every time they have a good idea the Liberals take it, implement it and claim it as their own.)
Re:A cake is in order (Score:5, Insightful)
More like "thanks for raising the bar and forcing us to improve".
This!
I remember in the days of Windows 3.1, it seemed like a big deal that you could change IP address on Linux without rebooting. Once a few thousand geeks realised there was nothing inherent about the PC platform that prevented things like this, and memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking etc., there was a strong market incentive for Windows to improve.
I don't think Windows would be as good as it is today if it weren't for competition from Linux. I'm sure MSIE would be far, far worse if it weren't for Firefox. (Yes, yes, OK, Opera. But for years Opera cost money.)
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:2, Insightful)
The [not] "awesome bar".
Somehow it always makes it harder to find what I want, not easier [eg, for some reason, it appears to have decided that penny-arcade.com is the correct url when I type in "facebook"]
And no; "just turn it off" studiously avoids the OP's complaint - which was that things like this shouldn't have needed to be added in the first place. How soon we forget - the name "phoenix" didn't even appeared in the news post [although it is in TFA].
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which piece of bloat would you remove first?
I am sure that many will say "the awesome bar". I don't. In fact, I use it so much that I think that I could now live without bookmarks.
YMMV, of course.
NY Times Ad (Score:4, Insightful)
5 years now? Seems longer... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been using Firefox since Phoenix 0.5 (December 2002 iirc, almost seven years now) and I have to say, the community process and the extensions make Firefox what it is.
Yes, these days there's another open source browser on the block (Chrome) and it too is very good. But it's great to have Mozilla and Firefox around because you can be sure that Mozilla will look after users' interests far more than Google or Microsoft will. If nothing else, it keeps the others honest.
So congratulations Firefox, and here's to five more years!
Re:Comments about bloat (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course... Here is from my home system — the two instances belong to my (very) significant other and myself:
...
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND
4954 i 10 47 0 1798M 637M ucond 2 0:00 9.47% firefox-bi
48498 mi 11 45 0 1150M 810M ucond 3 0:00 13.09% firefox-bi
Three times more windows/tabs — or simply more visits to something "heavy" (like Google Maps), and she is done... And that's without Flash, which is not available for our platform...
Now, the actual memory consumption is smaller, than the total size, but on a 32-bit system, that does not matter — you are limited by 4Gb per process, because 2^32 is 4Gb... My system is, actually, a 64-bit one (FreeBSD/amd64), so I am "prepared" for Firefox to exceed 4Gb. My Firefox at work (RHEL-5.4, 32-bit) is currently under 1Gb, but that's because it crashes about daily (probably, due to Flash — or because some of the bugs [freebsd.org] that the FreeBSD ports fix, that are present in the "official" builds, don't know), and thus has less time to leak...
Another note, of course, is that simply by building in 64-bit mode, you significantly increase the sizes of many internal data structures (which hold pointers to other structs — each pointer is now twice bigger). Still, I don't think, that overhead is more than 10-15% of the total memory consumption...
So, yes, the 4Gb ceiling is within reach, even if most people don't yet hit it often...
Re:A cake is in order (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh, I can tell you why Internet Explorer has any market share at all - because there's millions and millions of corporate PCs where it is too much trouble to get anything else installed. I end up using it on a regular basis for no particular other reason than it's there. Just like my #1 most used graphics application at work is MS Paint to crop screenshots, doesn't mean it competes with Photoshop or really anything at all, just that it works good enough you don't get anything else installed. Even corporate intranets are starting to figure out it's not 2001 anymore, but there's still not a big return on switching or offering multiple alternatives...
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of being a small, simple browser that just did one thing well; Firefox has become way too bloated and indeed the plans for the future seem to impart it with a ribbon-like interface and more nonsensical things. Doesn't sound too good for a nice well-loved product.
The original goal was to make a browser that was just a browser, not a suite of browsing, mail, newsgroups...
Firefox is still that. This is why the Thunderbird project was started, and is still going, for that matter.
It was intented to be a project that did a browser, and did a browser well. It wasn't about making minimalist barebones features everywhere. There are other browsers for even leaner feature sets.
Re:...All together now! (Score:4, Insightful)
He didn't want to get fined $150k.
Re:A cake is in order (Score:3, Insightful)
Then there are mandates: Our internal corporate web site FORCES you to use IE for much of its content, for two reasons. Internally developed web apps are only tested on IE, because the beancounters won't give IT the budget to test and certify on anything else, nor will they give tech support even the meager extra money to handle the calls where they say to Firefox users, "What part of 'Only supported on IE' didn't you understand?". External apps (benefits, etc.) may or may not be supported on browsers other than IE, but nothing's *not* supported on IE.
Re:Anyone using Lynx? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure why this got modded "funny." A lot of my Linux interaction is command-line only, and elinks is a life-saver. On occasion, e.g. when the only documentation for a package is in HTML, the console-mode browser is almost indispensable.
Re:Original Firefox goals forgotten... (Score:2, Insightful)
Removing an application that you don't use is not something idiots do. It's only logical. Do you install Windows with every application it comes with? No? Why not? Right, because you don't use all of them!
Who the fuck cares if it's only 100MB (which is a lot for a single application, I might add, even Firefox isn't that big)? That's 100MB they could have used for something else that they do use!