Firefox is fat as fuck
Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 3:14 pm
I've been having a ton of problems with Firefox lately, many involving its new "keep the last eight pages stuffed in RAM" feature, which means Firefox ends up sucking up nearly as much RAM as Azureus, and some just involving it being, you know, slow. And I wondered if anyone else had noticed that Firefox was walking the same road as IE: more features.
Well, other people noticed, too.
I always think it's amusing how people cut on Microsoft. "This OS is bloated! Linux is faster! I can't use this browser because it has so much shit." Except people don't realize MS is just trying to satisfy its market, which is, like, 80 percent of the people out there. When your OS needs to run on any computer, when it needs to drive every piece of hardware - MP3 players, cameras, scanners, speakers, USB audio cards, 16-monitor systems - you end up with bloat. When your browser needs to be able to view every page on the net, and accept hundreds of extensions and plugins, you end up with bloat. When your Office software needs to do every single operation any of the millions of people who use it want it to, you end up with bloat.
"Oh no," cry the MS deniers. "Look at Linux!" I did. And it is so far from satisfying every consumer out there that it's not a viable OS for MS's market. Yeah, it's sleek. Yeah, it's fast. But it ain't no 80-percent-market-share OS, and it's not going to be. Firefox, in the interests of increasing market share, keeps trying to please more people, and that means more bloat.
Companies keep coming out with slimmed-down products, because people are so sick of bloat, but then they realize they can't do all those fancy things they wanted to. Ever try to use Google's app suite, and then compare it to Office? I'm sure it's okay for some people, but in my work production environment, it would never be even close to useful. Google - like Firefox - had the laudable goal of making all your bloat optional, but the framework to support the optional bloat ends up being bloat, itself.
I understand the problem. I used to add any feature I thought was even remotely cool to Bulldrek, until it was a teetering disaster waiting to happen. [Which it did.] When I built freespeech [and its predecessor, Bulldrek v2] I went in the other direction: take everything out users don't absolutely have to have. And would you know it? I think people prefer Bulldrek to freespeech, in functionality and convenience. I think users, though they complain like crazy, like bloat, need bloat. I think you can slim your bloat down as much as possible, and built a more efficient framework, but if you're going to be massively popular, you have to include something for everyone.
Well, other people noticed, too.
I always think it's amusing how people cut on Microsoft. "This OS is bloated! Linux is faster! I can't use this browser because it has so much shit." Except people don't realize MS is just trying to satisfy its market, which is, like, 80 percent of the people out there. When your OS needs to run on any computer, when it needs to drive every piece of hardware - MP3 players, cameras, scanners, speakers, USB audio cards, 16-monitor systems - you end up with bloat. When your browser needs to be able to view every page on the net, and accept hundreds of extensions and plugins, you end up with bloat. When your Office software needs to do every single operation any of the millions of people who use it want it to, you end up with bloat.
"Oh no," cry the MS deniers. "Look at Linux!" I did. And it is so far from satisfying every consumer out there that it's not a viable OS for MS's market. Yeah, it's sleek. Yeah, it's fast. But it ain't no 80-percent-market-share OS, and it's not going to be. Firefox, in the interests of increasing market share, keeps trying to please more people, and that means more bloat.
Companies keep coming out with slimmed-down products, because people are so sick of bloat, but then they realize they can't do all those fancy things they wanted to. Ever try to use Google's app suite, and then compare it to Office? I'm sure it's okay for some people, but in my work production environment, it would never be even close to useful. Google - like Firefox - had the laudable goal of making all your bloat optional, but the framework to support the optional bloat ends up being bloat, itself.
I understand the problem. I used to add any feature I thought was even remotely cool to Bulldrek, until it was a teetering disaster waiting to happen. [Which it did.] When I built freespeech [and its predecessor, Bulldrek v2] I went in the other direction: take everything out users don't absolutely have to have. And would you know it? I think people prefer Bulldrek to freespeech, in functionality and convenience. I think users, though they complain like crazy, like bloat, need bloat. I think you can slim your bloat down as much as possible, and built a more efficient framework, but if you're going to be massively popular, you have to include something for everyone.