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Is Firefox 3.0 the "Fat Elvis?"
iphigenie:
To be honest there was the same kind of talk when FF2 was in beta, then most people just moved to it anyway. People say the same thing every time there is a new version of a tool like this "oh no bloat!" "oh no, design over substance".
What is there for FF since all the functionality is in the plugins? FF has become a web-rendering widget engine, but that makes the core product weak, and they are working on strengthening it. Makes sense to me. Don't rely on the add-on makers for basics anymore.
It helped early on to be tiny and lean and leave it all to the add on writers. That serves a geeky crowd well. Once you go for more market share (they didnt dream of that back then) this approach starts to backfire. Normal people installing FF just wonder what the fuss is all about, it is a "bah" product out of the box with no plugins.
Also a lot of functionality which was earlier done in things like add-ons, we now know how to do on the web, in a cross-browser way. So again, people wont install an add-on they will use a web app, and FF is again under pressure, since the advantage some of these add-ons gave is going away. And it has had as many security holes as anything else recently, so that advantage is gone.
I left FF after 1.5 - FF2 just rubbed me the wrong way, it was more instable and of course the existing plugins didnt work so I had to use plain FF again, and that is when you notice that FF is actually pretty lame without the plugins. I didnt want to use it plain, neither did I want to spend hours hunting plugins.
Also by then the FF community was starting to become really annoying and arrogant, so I bailed out. I dont like fanatism about anything, and it certainly is totally out of place on mundane things like software. Whatever it is you feel "evangelic" about, it's probably not that great or that important that you really ought to go around telling people to repent from their own software and use yours. ugh. I dont like FF only sites (eg: "Sorry, but we do not support the Opera web browser. However, Stumbleupon works well with Mozilla-based browsers, free open-source ones based upon Netscape Navigator. Our Toolbar doesn't work with Opera because it relies on browser features which Opera does not have. Mozilla and Firefox are ad-free, fast & stable, with banner/popup-ad blocking and tabbed browsing features. Install one now before joining the Stumbleupon community" Yeah, right.)
Most enthusiastic FF users do have a really good browser that works exactly like they want it to, but they spent 200 house over the last 3 years getting it that way. And they forget that.
I used slimbrowser, used kmeleon, and now opera. I am a lazy user and I spend a maximum of 1 hour over 3-4 sessions tweaking a piece of software. That's it. And I dont particularly like the plugin lottery.
Carol Haynes:
Not the version of Firefox I know. Having just reinstalled my system from scratch it took me less than 10 minutes to get FF2 resintalled from scratch - and that included downloading the latest build and the handful of add-ons I find essential.
In some ways I find it pleasantly surprising just how fast FF is at the moment. It still opens faster than IE (with 5 tabs) even though IE is essentially preloaded into memory at Windows startup.
One of the big problems in all Windows systems is that EVERYTHING gets slower over time - even when you make the effort to keep your house clean and tidy. The only reason I can think this might happen is the registry as you can clean off all crap from your system and defragment, clear out unused apps etc. but after a while it just doesn't seem to make any difference.
I also hate the way dependencies build up over time ... I just installed Office 2007 but Outlook 2007 demands Windows desktop Search be downloaded and installed to provide the search functions. This is understandable because O2007 was designed for Vista and Vista comes with WDS as part of the OS. Having said that XP is now running much slower again and there is a lot of disk thrashing after startup. I decided to uninstall WDS and use alternative methods to search Outlook data but when I came to uninstall it I was presented with a list of about 20 applications that COULD potentially be affected if I decide to uninstall. Personally I can't see why most of them would be affected but who knows what sort of DLL hell I might enter into if I risk it. The upshot is I have a slower system now than I had and a piece of crap I don't want to remove in case it has knock on problems. I have had enough issues in recent months and having spent a few days reinstalling I don't want to do it again!
The upshot of all this is systems slow over time and become more complex and less responsive in some sort of organic fashion. It is easy to blame particular software (such as Firefox as I have above and in the past) but now I am not so sure.
FF is not perfect but when installed on a clean system it isn't as fast as Opera but it is pretty responsive. Having said that the expandability of Firefox makes it much more functional and adaptable than Opera.
All the Opera fans go on about how fast and good Opera is. In some ways it is a bit like MacOS - if you are prepared to restrict your options by locking down the system (in Opera's case by banning extensions, in Mac's case by only allowing a small subset of available hardware) it is easy to make a system that retains its stability and speed but it is the open market place of Firefox (and even IE) and Windows hardware that make those platforms ultimately more trouble but also much more adaptable for users and attractive to developers.
f0dder:
even though IE is essentially preloaded into memory at Windows startup.
--- End quote ---
Ugh, would you please stop spreading that piece of false information? It really isn't. If you (on old enough hardware :)) time first- and secondary launch times of IE, you'll see a speed difference. People are all confused over this issue because things like the common controls were introduced with IE, but quickly became a set of core windows controls, used by many other apps...
Anyway, it makes sense to incorporate some plugin behavior as core program facilities - especially the ones that really are crucial for a good surfing experience, or those that are heavy and would benefit from being implemented in C++ instead of javascript (although the speedup for the JS engine in ff3 should help wrt. that?)
Imho FireFox starts pretty slowly, especially once you start adding those invaluable plugins. IE6 is king here, not even Opera starts faster than that. MS basically ruined that advantage with IE7 though, which starts about as slowly as a FF2 with plugins, and is very slow at opening new tabs.
I'd love Opera if it didn't crash on me all the time, didn't include silly things like chat and torrent in the core product, and had plugin/extension support. But as it is now, it's just not enjoyable for me to use.
Carol Haynes:
Ugh, would you please stop spreading that piece of false information? It really isn't. If you (on old enough hardware :)) time first- and secondary launch times of IE, you'll see a speed difference. People are all confused over this issue because things like the common controls were introduced with IE, but quickly became a set of core windows controls, used by many other apps...
-f0dder (April 15, 2008, 06:17 AM)
--- End quote ---
I was under the impression that Windows Explorer contains most of the core code for IE - which is why you can use IE to browse folders and WE to browse websites (OK with IE 7 the site opens in a new IE tab) ? Since explorer.exe is in memory from startup the iexplorer.exe just adds a thin veneer when IE is used - or am I completely wrong on this?
I was also under the impression that this is why MS said it was impossible to remove Internet Explorer from Windows (not least in the anti trust cases in court) and why using the remove option in the default apps options (such as replacing IE with MSN Explorer or Firefox) doesn't actually remove anything at all but just hides IE from the user's view.
f0dder:
Well, it's all component based. If explorer.exe recognizes you're typing an URL, it loads the IE component and lets that handle it. iexplore.exe itself is only a small stub that loads the IE COM objects.
Now, if you have "web view" enabled in explorer, it might very well load the HTML rendering components right away (as soon as you open a file explorer anyway, explorer.exe as a shell might not load that... unless you have active desktop enabled). I always disable webview anyway.
I'll have to admit I haven't done thorough traces or looked super-closely at loaded DLLs etc., but there's a noticeable speed difference on launching IE6 first vs. secondary times, especially on older hardware. (part of that speed difference is from loading the temporary files cache, probably).
As for not being able to really remove IE, that's partially because of the common controls issue - but also because a number of other applications depend on the IE html rendering controls. Some version of norton antivirus used it for it's UI, for instance >_<. Other applications use things like WinINet functions (InternetOpenUrl, InternetReadFile etc.) which are also done from IE components... see the picture? :)
It's wrong saying that "internet explorer is preloaded when windows starts", because (at least from my experience), large parts of it isn't. And the parts that are preloaded is stuff I consider to be part of the core windows, even if it was originally introduced with IE.
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