OneAndOneIs2

I saw on ars the other day that IE8 and Chrome are the two browsers with the most momentum at the moment: IE8 because it's the least-bad IE version, and Chrome because it's the hot new kid on the block, one imagines.

Strange, really, when one considers how Firefox was the browser that came from nowhere and rekindled the browser wars.. it became huge, made standards-compliance matter, forced MS to start upgrading their browser again.. and yet right now it's really not a browser with a lot of buzz around it.

The sad thing is.. I'm not really surprised.

Remember the days when Firefox was a lean, resource-light little browser? When it wasn't proverbial for memory leaks and buggy extensions? When the whole point of it was to be a rock-solid, feature-light web browser, and any additional functionality on top of that core purpose was only available via add-ons?

I miss those days. I used FF back then, in the 0.x days. People were still laughing about how often its name had changed. When I got FF installed on my work PC, my job satisfaction literally doubled as a result. Maybe tripled. And I wasn't even in a web-based job at the time. I loved that browser.

These days? To be honest, if there were any other browser that could do everything I need it to, I'd seriously consider switching to it. Firefox has grown up to be a bit of a problem child.

I have two profiles - one for my usual browsing-around activities, with all my bookmarks, and extensions such as adblock and greasemonkey seeing regular use.

The other one is for web dev things, and the vital extensions here are the developer toolbar and firebug. It has a lot of site passwords and a different set of bookmarks - I need the ability to switch between two completely separate Firefoxes, so it's handy that I can easily do this.

On paper.

The problem is, whenever I exit my personal profile, it's a 50/50 bet on whether or not FF actually exits properly. It either stays partially-running so clicking on the Firefox button launches a new window under my personal profile; or it just sits there blankly informing me that the profile is already in use, so I have to use the task manager to kill the process.

That's not helpful.

I have 2GB of RAM on my laptop. More than half of it is in use right now. The application using the most memory? That would be Firefox, using double what Acrobat is using for a large PDF and nearly triple what Thunderbird is using for my half-dozen email accounts. And about ten times as much as VLC is using to play a movie file that's over a Gig in size.

When I first starting running FF, I had half a Gig of RAM and got concerned if I was using more than half of it.

People used to recommend switching from IE to FF as the simplest way to make Windows more secure and stable. Now it seems like every new release fixes a plethora of critical security issues. How did all those vulnerabilities get in there in the first place? What happened to the code quality?

On a more technical note, FF still doesn't have official 64-bit support, and they plan on spending the next year or so on adding multi-threading to take advantage of multiple cores - putting them in the unfamiliar position of playing catch-up on IE.

Sigh

FF is still, IMHO, the best browser around - multi-platform, excellent community, free, open-source, and it does literally everything I need.

It's just that, these days, I like it in spite of all the bugs and frustrations. And I remember when I liked it for just being so bloody good.

It'd be nice if Mozilla would make one of their next big priorities less about adding funky new things and making it bigger, and instead focussed again on making the browser as reliable and bloat-free as possible. That *was* the whole point when they started out, after all..

they set out to build a stripped-down, stand-alone browser, a refutation of the feature creep that had grounded Netscape. "Lots of Mozilla people didn't get it," Ross recalls. "They'd say, 'This is just the product we have now, but with less features.

Source: Wired.com