Google's Shadow Over Firefox 385
eldavojohn writes "The Mozilla Foundation's chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google's cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash."
Would it make you feel better... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Would it make you feel better... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not saying that the Mozilla Foundation is likely to lose Google's cash any time soon, but that's a general principle - don't put all your eggs in one basket, and all that.
No, but I'd like more individual donations (Score:3, Interesting)
If you (and I mean the general slashdot reader, not the GP) want to have more input on the decision-making process when necessary, participate in the funidng. Any software project will treat you better if you show more commitment than just downloading and using the software, and many sources of funding make the pow
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Actually it would make me feel better (Score:3, Insightful)
Other Revenue Sources? (Score:5, Interesting)
What sources other than Google fund Mozilla? And why?
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Re:Other Revenue Sources? (Score:5, Interesting)
For placement of their search engines.
Read more here [mozillazine.org].
Re:Other Revenue Sources? (Score:4, Informative)
This is incorrect. Mitchell received $300K/year salary, not half a million. If you doubt it, read the actual financial statement rather than second (or third) hand commentary.
As for the question you raise, this amount is well below the average and even slightly below the median salary for CEOs of other non-profits I've looked at, though I haven't found a breakdown between private foundations and public-benefit foundations so there could be some disparity there. Also, CEO pay in the non-profit sector is about 1/10 of what they could be making in traditional for-profit businesses so it's a safe bet that non-profit CEOs aren't in it for the compensation alone.
Add into that the costs of living in the Bay Area, where Mozilla is headquartered, and the ridiculously competitive employment landscape there, and reasonable people will surely mostly agree that this is reasonable compensation.
- A
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ie: Why would I leave my 100K tech job, to become a team leader unless it pays more.
Re:Sold out (Score:5, Informative)
We made these decisions because it was the right thing for users, not because it was a revenue opportunity. If we ever have to decide between doing what's right for users and a revenue opportunity, we'll put the users first every time. The nice thing about the current situation is that it's both the right thing for users and a revenue opportunity.
And this is just about the "defaults" in Firefox. If you don't like Google, switch it to Yahoo. If you don't like Yahoo, you can add any one of more than 13,000 additional search services to the Firefox search toolbar with just a click or two at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]
- A
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The lesser of two evils (Score:5, Insightful)
they're not limited to two evils (Score:4, Interesting)
Which means Mozilla could consider a third evil and join the nasty capitalist system by figuring out exactly what value they are providing to their customers, and charging for it. Instead of trying to figure out for which rich aristrocrat (e.g. Google or MS) they want to be the bought mistress.
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> "Which means Mozilla could consider a third evil and join the nasty capitalist system by figuring out exactly what value they are providing to their customers, and charging for it. Instead of trying to figure out for which rich aristrocrat (e.g. Google or MS) they want to be the bought mistress."
When the competition is giving their browser away for free, and its the default in the near-monopoly OS, charging for it isn't a realistic option.
Besides, better to be "owned" for $50 million a year, than
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(Opera works, but
Re:they're not limited to two evils (Score:5, Insightful)
Top notch programming can be done for free, but for large products that is the exception rather than the rule, even for open source applications. Most of the people who think large open source projects are done primarily by unpaid developers as a hobby, simply don't have any real experience in OSS development.
Most open source projects that work really well are capitalist endeavors. The difference is that the users of the software are also the developers, instead of having developers sell the software to users after marking up the price. Mozilla provides a functional and useful Web browser, with better security than IE. The company I work for has done a very small amount of work on Firefox, because we use Firefox and wanted a feature for our own use. We're users and developers. Other companies that have standardized on it hire developers to program and contribute some feature to the project. We do this because it makes our business money by improving our tools. I guess my main point is that most OSS projects are driven by capitalism, just with the "programming as a service" instead of "code as a product" model of capitalism.
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Mozilla is highly successful, but this success seems to have more to do with paying for advertising in places such as the NY Times than actual technical excellence.
Anybody who's looked into the guts of XPCOM and XUL knows that the code base is way messed up. It's so messed up that it took about five years of (paid) work from the time Netscape provided the initial open source code to the time that Mozil
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NO messing with firefox will be tolerated (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:NO messing with firefox will be tolerated (Score:5, Funny)
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My wife for hire!
More money... (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a growing market for google-talking apps out ther, not just the browser. Integrating stuff from google to your collaboration infrastructure comes to mind, to your intranet portals... i dunno, a bunch of stuff could be developed for the google "platform".
I think differently from those that look at SAAS as a potential danger to software/data freedom. Sure, theyll be able to offer a great deal of services that will force you to upload data and then you will only be able to do what they expose in their apis, but thats okay, if you dont want it, then dont use it.
The fact that google has been able to mostly provide open apis so that one can work with them opens a wealth of posibilities like the one mozilla is exploiting. How about gnome integrating google stuff as a first option for several things like the remote gmail drive perhaps-- which we do have, just not "on gnome" as it is, and letting google plaster some advertising somewhere in exchange (and youd be able to opt-in for that if you want it, granma could opt-out if SHE wanted. And then some google money could flow into gnome, or kde, or both.
Good, good thing for the future.
Money spent on R&D (Score:5, Insightful)
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They're spending far, far more than $300,000 on their software developers. Do you really think they have just three developers?
BTW, what "important memory leak bugs" do you think need fixing? I'm seeing almost no signs of memory leaks. I'd rather they focus on bugs that I actually see, such as not remembering the scroll position [mozilla.org] or not importing IE favorites in the correct order [mozilla.org].
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Re:Money spent on R&D (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone I know using Firefox on the Mac has the same problem. Reproducible? Perhaps the foundation could just buy a Mac for testing.
In the six months since I switched, the system has been rock solid and every other application has been fine, only Firefox needs to be repeatedly restarted due to ballooning memory use.
Right now, after just two hours of light usage since Firefox last slowed my entire system to such a crawl that it had to be restart, one window and three tabs open (Gmail, Google reader, slashdot), Activity Monitor shows Firefox at 322MB real memory, 824MB virtual and growing. I don't actually know how high it goes before becoming completely unusable (haven't bothered looking) but it must be pretty high - I have 4GB of memory installed in this laptop and, usually, no other apps running.
That is with the most recent FF, 2.0.0.9 - there is, absolutely, a problem; perhaps if the foundation were not in such a rosy financial situation they would have an incentive to fix problems that affect a significantly large minority of their users.
Re:Money spent on R&D (Score:4, Insightful)
As for addressing the problem, is the a bug ticket on it? Can yo reproduce it on a clean ff install? Can others reproduce it? It's hard to solve a problem that cannot be reproduced and that seems to be the case for many of these bugs that people somehow think can magically be fixed in 10 seconds.
Re:Money spent on R&D (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what the "less than $300,000" thing refers to. Maybe it refers to monetary grants to other open-source projects, or maybe it refers to things like buying laptops for volunteers so they can contribute more effectively.
Beyond FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Mitchell (Mozilla's "chief lizard wrangler") wrote a fairly large blog post [mozillazine.org], not only about the numbers as published, but also saying some things on the directions Mozilla is moving.
Far more interesting reading than the fluff news.com article, let alone the random FUD spouting by the submitter.
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http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/10/firefox_finance.html [mozillazine.org]
Worth a read.
What is REALLY bothersome (Score:5, Interesting)
They DO spend a LOAD of money on OSS (Score:2)
they also hire 90 people (Score:3, Insightful)
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Our university president gets a quarter of a million a year - how is that fair? It's
Damn you, FF... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, people: capital is good, that's how you pay for stuff and people, and fund projects. And it's not like Google is bribing the Firefox Foundation, the money comes from search engine integration in Firefox. Also, I can't recall Firefox being involved in any shady business where they have sided with Google against Microsoft. Furthermore, The Firefox Foundation did negotiate with Yahoo before sealing the deal with Google, so they clearly have other options than just Google. Who knows, when the contract with Google expires in 2008, maybe even MS will try to make a deal with The Firefox Foundation.
From the summary: Nowhere is this fear expresses besides in the summary. Less editorializing, please.
Re:Damn you, FF... (Score:4, Funny)
Only thing preventing this deal would be if, say, Microsoft developed its own BROWSER CALLED INTERNET EXPLORER!
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The Bigger Point (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Bigger Point (Score:5, Informative)
It's really hard to say if the CEOs pay was worth it. Really, really hard. If the foundation knew it wasn't, I bet they would find a different CEO. Apparently, they have less than perfect information yet still find the arrangement acceptable.
Money for Google well Spent (Score:5, Insightful)
With operating revenues in the billions, Google is getting a huge benefit for a very small outlay with the money flowing into the Mozilla Foundation. These days, it is less common to have a hotlink lingering around for your search engine of choice because they are so ubiquitous that they are expected to just "be there".
And if you run Firefox, the default search engine at the top corner of the screen is none-other-than Google. It is a beautiful interface that has been embraced by users (me and you), the vendor (Google), and the merchant (Mozilla). A rare win-win-win for all. You and I get easy access to search online for anything with the click of a button. Google gets a way to funnel us into their site so they can show us their advertisements. Mozilla gets money to pay their engineers to improve a world class software application.
Given this information, it is silly to think that Google would terminate their beneficial relationship with Mozilla because it would significantly hurt them where it matters most (getting users to their site).
Bullshit! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure the Samba and Apache crews can use a little of the love. Hell, the people who created Adblock are the reason I use Firefox... Give them some of the damn cash! Which other open source projects do you think have done the community a lot of good and deserve some of the bank?
Re:Bullshit! (Score:4, Insightful)
A good CEO for a for-profit company can easily make millions or tens of millions. Those for non-profits can easily make hundreds of thousands and Mozilla isn't exactly a tiny non-profit.
They're paying the CEO what is essentially a fair wage for the position and even then the person being paid it is sacrificing massive amount of potential money just by working for Mozilla (instead of a for-profit).
Re:Bullshit! (Score:5, Insightful)
It kinda pisses me off that a couple years ago as a starving college student I donated money to the Mozilla Foundation. If I knew their CEO would one day be raking in that kind of cash I would have donated to a more worthy cause. Not that there aren't other non-profit directors raking it in (I'm looking at you, Red Cross [bbb.org]).
Re:Bullshit! (Score:4, Informative)
I'm probably naively misjudging, but I'm going to assume you're not trolling and reply.
Actually, that would be "along with about 130 to 140 million others".
If you define need as very short term, then you could possibly have a point. I don't, and the rest of the people making Mozilla and Firefox don't think about things only in the short term. Mozilla's mission to promote choice and innovation on the Internet and to advocate for people using the web, is a long-term mission that still has not demonstrated sustainability beyond a few short years.
I'd wager that the percentage of Firefox's 130+ million users who even know what open source is falls somewhere south of 10%. Those who "believe in the open source community" are far from making up double digit percentages, much less a majority. That doesn't change the fact that our mission is dependent on the support and participation of a large community of contributors, but our mission is much larger than open source and cannot be considered anything of a success if it's limited to those "who believe in the open source community."
From the way you phrase this, it sounds like you're suggesting that the Mozilla project is not "open source community". I take issue with this. Mozilla is one of the most important communities in the entire open source ecosystem and I think it's completely reasonable that the money that Mozilla generates go first and foremost into forwarding Mozilla's mission. Beyond that, we're building a grants program for other projects with strong alignment that's already giving out hundreds of thousands of dollars. But a grants program requires a lot of work, work that we think is important to do but that we don't have all of the right people for today. We're working on it. You can throw stones at slashdot or you can help us make things better.You could do better than that. You could work with your favorite OSS programs developing and writing grant proposals. You could work with OSS projects to help them develop revenue streams. You could contribute in so many positive ways that going out of your way to remove resources from an open source project seems misguided. That is, unless I was being far too generous in assuming you weren't just a troll.
Actually, we're not 90 people. We're thousands of people working to further the Mozilla Mission. The overwhelming majority of Mozilla's full-time staff are organizing and managing a much larger area than simply their direct reports or their code modules. If you want to make comparisons with more traditional organizations, I'd wager that Mozilla is operating much more like a company of about 1000 employees than a company of 100.
If you think there exists a competent CEO who could lead Mozilla effectively for less than a six figure salary, you're living on a different planet. If you think there's a CEO that would lead any non-profit company with 10s of millions in annual revenue, for less than six figures, you're living in a fantasy land.
If you really care about open source software, you'll seek out positive ways to contribute and bashing a project that's delivered open source software to the desktops of more people than any other project in the history of OSS will fall way down on your list of priorities.
-A
Every time this comes up... (Score:2)
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Funny but this AJAX thing that powers many of Googles sites was originally powered by an ActiveX control.
Conflict of interest between Firefox/Google (Score:5, Interesting)
lwn.net had a story about this a while back. Worth reading at http://lwn.net/Articles/256904/ [lwn.net]. One of the comments in particular:
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The "ping" feature is a poor example. Sites can already do what "ping" does, just slower and in a way that's more difficult for users to disable.
Firefox & Google Money (Score:5, Interesting)
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/10/firefox_finance.html [mozillazine.org]
Mozilla.org financials, 2006 (Score:5, Interesting)
Expenses: $19,776,193
Expenses breakdown:
Program Services: $ 540,384
Software Development: $11,775,516
Sales and Marketing: $ 4,836,238
General & Admin: $ 2,624,055
"Profit" (or, change in net assets, since it's a non-profit): $27,893,735
Damn, it's good to be free. You'd think that the foundation would donate its money to fund other OSS projects, but as software people have discovered, the first priority of a foundation is to ensure the existence (and a lucrative existence at that) of its staff.
Advertising supported irony (Score:3, Insightful)
I see where the problem is! (Score:3, Insightful)
So, I guess the danger is that google could force firefox into all of us and begin to charge us... wait. firefox is open source and not even "MS-open source", so we can always fork it even if we got dependant on it! (For a browser which does not try to add propietary extensions that sure sounded hard...
Ok, so that wasn't the problem so what the problem really is? I SEE! We should give the money to other open source projects! Yes, why should all money go to mozilla? It is unfair! ... Now that I think of it, this was money earned by firefox, then I see absolutely no reason to give this money to apache or mysql... sorry guys but that just doesn't make sense...
Ok, I can't think of any other creative reason to think there is actually any problem with this, I guess just in case we could go to opera! ... Err, wait! It is closed source, so opera is a browser that can actually lock us in! Not only that, but it is probably meant for that, and that's the reason they get money from the WII deal! Oh no, then using opera just in case is not an answer...
Then go Safari! ... err, it comes from apple which is just the second biggest Linux hater...
Then go any other open source browser! I'll just stick to firefox because: a) I like the plugins I use, b) I see absolutely no problem with this.
We could just calm down, an true-FLOSS project getting money absolutely from donations and zero charges to users, or would you prefer mozilla not to get any money? And just let firefox die?
Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:5, Informative)
Opera doesn't need add-ons to do everything useful. For some reason they figured they might as well integrate them.
Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:5, Informative)
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Rightclick on page with annoying flash ad -> Block Content..
Click the offending ad -> it disappears with "Content Blocked" across it
(Opera 9+)
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Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. (Score:5, Informative)
Filterset.G is deprecated with Adblock Plus (Score:5, Informative)
From Adblock Plus FAQs [adblockplus.org]:
In short, the Filterset.G extension duplicates functionality already in the Adblock Plus extension, it's slow, and it's harder to use. The filter subscriptions supplied by Adblock Plus are the recommended alternative.
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If I said "Just use Internet Explorer, and all the pages will show up correctly," I'd be modded down "-1 Troll" before the page finished submitting.
Yet when somebody says something similar but recommends Firefox, they're "+4 Informative".
Firefox sucks. It leaks memory like a sieve, it's a memory hog, it's slow, it requires tons of plugins to do mundane stuff that's built into every other browser, and it's less standards compliant than Konqueror, Opera, and Safari. At this point in time, you can be
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Yup. Games and videos, mainly. The only time I've had flash annoy me is when it's ads.
Re:Opera allows those ugly Flash ads. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:5, Informative)
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea that the Mozilla Foundation *appears* to be dependent on Google's advertising revenue, and I can see how that *could* impact decision making, but I dont see a whole lot of alternative funding streams, nor a threat that could not be overcome, that is after all why we like open standards and open code, no one person or group truly has 100% control and it is nearly impossible to take something that is free and open and turn it into something proprietary and closed..
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Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I don't mind advertising too much, if I'm looking at a site that is helpful or one I like, then I certainly don't mind, the only times where I can actually say I find it intrusive is on sites that are there purely for ad revenue, usually with content scraped from other sites, and those I can detect almost entirely (using a manual process no less) by the fact that they are infested with advertising, so in a sense gratuitous and inappropriate advertising is a deterrent all on its own, sure I am giving whoever is responsible for those sites revenue on that one instance where I come across the site, but then that's it, surely advertisers must realise that sites like that are not generally going to generate revenue anyway.
So I guess you could say I do most of my ad-blocking mentally, with an added bonus of blacklisting useless sites at the same time.
As a side note, I find it quite interesting when you compare the web in general (and the advertising therein), second life (and the commercial mess that particular sim already is and appears to be aspiring to become) and real life (I spent a moderate period of my life in Hong Kong, a place where the adverts and neon certainly add to the atmosphere) and try and figure out which advertising actually works. I seem to find that I buy things that I hear about from others, much more than what I see advertised. maybe its time for people to be able to get cash for real life referrals for any type of product (you could fill out a form to say who recommended what when you pay for your shopping....). Advertising only really seems to work when the advertiser has a novel product, that is useful or attractive *and* it is not already well known.
Oh and cold calling (telephone or in person) and junk mail (whether email or real mail) never work, If I want a credit card, I'll talk to my bank and then shop around, if I want double glazing, I'll find someone to do it.
Funny, maybe I should take my own views into account when I organise my own advertising.
Re:Google has influenced Opera, also. (Score:4, Insightful)
We've reached a point where advertising is causing some serious social problems. For example, the marketing of pharmaceuticals directly to consumers has increased the cost of medicines and has given us entire lines of less effective drugs that come to market just because the pharmas know they can push it on unsuspecting consumers who get suckered by the ads. Perfectly fine and effective drugs are overlooked because the patents have run out and forever-growing profits must be maintained. My next-door neighbor, who's a physician, says that a majority of his patients come to his office asking for a specific drug because they saw an advertisement. Sometimes, even after he's explained to his patient that there's a more effective or just as effective generic, the patient insists on the more costly, well-advertised drug. He's had patients leave and go to other doctors when he's refused to prescribe some pill with a good commercial.
We really need to have a little pushback when it comes to marketing. It would be more effective than you may think in slowing down the complete takeover of our lives by corporate power.
Don't think for a second that there's not lobbyists trying to get adblocking software defined as malware so there can be a law passed against it. With the ready availability of consumer information, and sites like Gizmodo hawking new products, consumers no longer need advertising at all, I would suggest. It's intrusive, it's damaging, and given that we've just had 24 straight month of a negative saving rate in this country, and with consumer credit finally getting a little less free and easy (thank God), it's hurting us in a very real way.
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Perhaps because the built-in "block content" feature is excellent, so no add-on is necessary?
Thunderbird? (Score:2, Interesting)
Thoughts?
Google wanted Thunderbird killed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Mozilla Foundation stopped supporting Thunderbird development apparently because the organization got no money for it, and Google wants you to use web mail, so that you will see the ads.
Mozilla Foundation gave no adequate explanation for killing its support of Thunderbird.
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Re:Google wanted Thunderbird killed? (Score:4, Informative)
For the same reason that Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Google wanted Thunderbird killed? (Score:4, Informative)
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Besides, Google basically ignores Opera (and Webkit) in their web apps...we don't have much better situation now than creating webpages for IE only.
Now people create for IE and Firefox (most of you don't see the problem of course...). I wonder when we'll have webpages that simply follow standards...
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Unless, of course, you count the many built in settings that together provide all the functionality of an ad-blocker even if they aren't labelled as such.
File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
First, the Firefox CPU bug you've been complaining about (Firefox consumers lots of CPU after the computer wakes up from standby or hibernate) was fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.8 [mozillazine.org]. If you're still having any problems with the latest release of Firefox, let developers know by filing a proper bug report, including steps to reproduce the problem.
Second, there is no sign of any "memory gobbling bug" that I can see, just a few little leaks here and there and some memory fragmentation [pavlov.net]. If you're still having any problems with the latest release of Firefox, let developers know by filing a proper bug report, including steps to reproduce the problem.
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Oh, please. That's nowhere near as fun as bitching on random websites.
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Yeah, if he actually filed usable bugs, they'd get fixed, and then he'd have nothing to whine about any more.
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Now that said things are improving, the developers are paying attention, and I look forward to improvements in FF3. But it has been people insisting that there aren't bugs are everything is fine for years while that w
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There are no "minimalist browser" roots. Firefox was always meant to be a web browser with 'right set' of features. Check the roadmap [mozilla.org].
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you completely uninformed or are you being intentionally untruthful here?
You're just plain wrong here.
The original goal, that I helped define in early 2002, was to make a browser that could actually compete with IE and gain market share where the feature bloated and designed by committee Mozilla Application Suite had failed. We didn't skimp on features and included many features, bringing it up and beyond parity with IE, that the suite never had.
Horseshit. We cut launch time and new window time in half in just a few months. We cut the download size by almost 300%. Simply removing the other app XUL overlays was a huge performance win all by itself. Then top developers (this was Dave Hyatt, the creator of XUL, and Joe, Ben, and Blake, the most experienced XUL programmers on the earth at that time) writing much cleaner XUL with sane CSS rules and avoiding the known slow XUL features, were able to get the new browser so far ahead of the Suite performance and usability that the Mozilla leadership agreed it would be a better path forward than the Suite.
From the 0.1 release [mozilla.com] (the first public release of the browser that would become Firefox) notes:
(emphasis mine.)
And that was the first release before we'd even grabbed all the low hanging performance fruit. Speed and size continued to improve with every single point release while we built great new features like complete settings and data migration, extension management, customizable toolbars, web form auto-complete, and more. The browser was more featureful, faster, and smaller than the Suite.
Yep, we gave users a set of features that people wouldn't or couldn't implement in the Suite. We listened to the users, which had outgrown the Suite's user base in size and involvement long before we shipped 1.0, and built the browser that we believed they would love using enough to spread to their IE using friends, families, and co-workers.
Again, this is just bullshit. Go back and read the Phoenix 0.1 release notes. "Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Shall I repeat it. "a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Where in that statement of purpose do you read that the goal was to make a minimalist browser?
When we shipped Firefox 1.0, the Windows version clocked in at a 4.7MB download compared to the Suite's 13MB download. Firefox 1.0's startup time on low to medium end systems was half that of the Suite and a noticeable improvement even on the fastest systems. Firefox 1.0's memory usage at startup was about 10% better than t
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
Asa, I normally agree with you on most things, but I think you're being untruthful here.
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html [howtocreate.co.uk]
The original goal, that I helped define in early 2002, was to make a browser that could actually compete with IE and gain market share where the feature bloated and designed by committee Mozilla Application Suite had failed. We didn't skimp on features and included many features, bringing it up and beyond parity with IE, that the suite never had.
That sure wasn't the goal I saw. The original Phoenix work came from mainly Blake Ross complaining that he didn't agree with the committee designing the Suite. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think there were a few other names involved, but Blake is the one I remember being most vocal at the time. He stripped the browser down to not much more than a url entry box and the back, forward, reload, and stop buttons. Every single feature he hesitated on adding back in due to size and/or speed concerns. To the point that "offline mode" was an extension, even though the only part of that functionality actually in the extension was the UI for it. Perhaps you disagree with my choice of words in calling it minimalist before, but he sure was trying to keep it to a very small feature set.
Horseshit. We cut launch time and new window time in half in just a few months. We cut the download size by almost 300%. Simply removing the other app XUL overlays was a huge performance win all by itself.
And at this time period, you were just getting to the point of putting things like the history functionality back in. When you cut out 90% of the functionality, of course it's going to be smaller and faster. I also remember the days when the Gecko engine was going by it's original Raptor codename. It was extremely small and fast back then - but it also wasn't very usable, so you couldn't compare it to anything.
Again, this is just bullshit. Go back and read the Phoenix 0.1 release notes. "Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Shall I repeat it. "a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Where in that statement of purpose do you read that the goal was to make a minimalist browser?
I did go back. And apparently I found the confusion. I forgot that it Phoenix wasn't the first name. I'm remembering back to the days when it was known as mozilla/browser. That was around for a while before it got the Phoenix name.
When we shipped Firefox 1.0, the Windows version clocked in at a 4.7MB download compared to the Suite's 13MB download. Firefox 1.0's startup time on low to medium end systems was half that of the Suite and a noticeable improvement even on the fastest systems. Firefox 1.0's memory usage at startup was about 10% better than the Suites, mostly thanks to a smaller overall UI footprint (they both used the same Gecko rendering engine which makes up about 90% of the overall program size).
Let's be fair. I just dug around the mozilla.org ftp and checked the installers. The largest Suite release was under 12 MB, with most releases being under 11 MB. Second, the default download on the web site was usually the net installer, which was a 250 KB download. If you did the browser only install, it was about a 6 MB download. And you probably also know that the Firefox installer uses 7zip while the Suite installer used zip. Firefox installers built with zip were around 6 MB, making it similar in size to the Suite's browser.
Also, I'm sure you've seen the (several year old now) browser speed tests [howtocreate.co.uk] that showed FireFox to be slower than Mozilla at just about everything.
But, in the end, the proof is in the pudding. There are about 130 to 140 million Firefox users today, coming up on our third m
Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
The original phoenix work came from Blake, me, Joe, Dave, Bryner, Pch, and a couple of others later on and the motivation was not to create a minimalist browser. I was there. I was a part of it from the first checkin to mozilla/browser and the goal was not to create a minimalist browser, it was to create a good browser. Viewer.exe was a minimalist browser but it was not a good browser. Chimera, the cocoa Mac browser, something we modeled some of the early m/b work on (but, in our case, using XUL) was not a minimalist browser. Ben's short-lived c# Manticore browser that pre-dated Firefox, was not intended to be a minimalist browser either, though it didn't get much past that.
Yes, it was called m/b for about three months of early active development. The people were the same as when we named it Phoenix and the goals were the same.
And that bullshit about telling users not to download Mozilla is just that, bullshit. You're remembering pre Mozilla 1.0 days. I was responsible for those pages and when I shipped 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7,and all of the dot releases in between, all of them messaged the Suite as a strong and community supported end-user offering. Claiming otherwise is simply lying.
I was there. I was responsible for every single Suite release going back to M17 and all the way up to the 1.7 release. I was responsible for every Firefox release from the first binary of m/b posted at my blog all the way up until Firefox 1.5. I shipped those products and wrote much of the user-facing content on release pages. Don't come in here and tell me I'm re-writing history unless you're going to cite some one or some documentation from someone more authority than me.
- A
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Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Open up digg.com (without your noscript extension running).
Open the first 20 or 30 pages in new tabs.
Close them, repeat.
Firefox will now be using in excess of 500MB of memory.
Close firefox and re-open (with the same session), and FireFox will drop to between 100-200MB.
Let it sit or browse again, watch it inflate memory use again.
Close all the tabs except one, go to about:blank (or whatever firefox calls it).
Notice how the memory use doesnt go down?
These are pretty much textbook definitions of memory leaking, firefox is consuming memory when it needs it, but then not giving the memory back when its done.
It's quite easy to get FF to grow up to 1GB or so of memory usage, standby and hibernate helps.
It's trivially reproducible.
The only way you dont encounter this is if you use very few tabs, and you close and restart firefox often.
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I got up to 272 MB after opening up 20 pages in 20 tabs, and after closing all tabs but one memory usage went back down to 131 MB. I opened up 30 different pages in 30 tabs and memory use went up to 205 MB, and after closing all tabs but one memory use went back down to 136 MB. It seems like memory use is going down after closing tabs to me. You may want to discuss the matter further in the Firefox Bugs forum on MozillaZine [mozillazine.org] to see if anyone else can see the problem. Like I said, I have not been able to repr
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Re:File bug reports rather than whine on Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
There is, sort of.
Stuart Parmenter [pavlov.net] has found memory fragmentation happening which makes it look like FF is consuming lots of RAM.
Basically, because FF loads many components, including Javascript, strings, sqlite, CSS parsing, HTML parsing, etc, the RAM between each used block may be unavailable as contiguous memory even if FF isn't using it. The problem is showing up mainly on Windows because the 2.6 and above kernels have built-in RAM defragging, but it could catch a Linux user if an app requests more RAM before the kernel can make it available..
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Volunteers tend not to work on commercial products (Score:2)
and what exactly.. (Score:2)
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