More Firefox Bloat? Say It Ain't So, Mozilla

Found on Wired on Thursday, 17 May 2007
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When Firefox launched in beta release five years ago, it burst on the open-source browser scene like a young Elvis Presley -- slim, sexy and dangerous.

But, with Firefox 3.0 poised for release this summer, the "IE killer" is in danger of morphing into an early Fat Elvis, if increasing numbers of die-hard fans turned reluctant critics are any guide.

The alleged culprit: bloat, the same problem that once plagued Mozilla, the slow, overstuffed open-source browser spawned by Netscape that Firefox was originally meant to replace.

In our poll, readers rated Firefox's mysterious habit of gobbling up every remaining scrap of a computer's memory their No. 1 gripe about the browser. Complaints of slow performance and instability ranked highly as well.

In an effort to stamp out incompatibilities between extensions, the Firefox team has slowly been adding standard features that were previously available as add-ons. Firefox 2.0, released in November 2006, saw the addition of an inline spell-checker, an RSS reader and a new search engine manager.

I can spell decently, I read my RSS in Thunderbird and I can bookmark my major search engine. From what I know, Firefox is based on the old Netscape codebase, which has been modified heavily. Everybody who wrote a program knows how dirty this gets. Mozilla should throw out the current version, and start completely from scratch, concentrating on what's important: correct HTML/CSS rendering and a powerful plugin system. Trying to stuff every (un-)necessary extra in ends up in a bloated version. Look at projects like µTorrent and Miranda: they are small, resource-friendly and fast, doing what the user expects; and in Miranda's case, even highly extendable.