First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010, and it's clear the FF team has moved to improve performance since then. Perhaps my impressions from that time frame are no longer valid, but the issues I checked in Bugzilla while writing my post seemed largely unresolved.
"This is an easily-demonstrated bug that "renders" (so to
speak) many pages unusable, or forces designers to impose
kludgey Javascript 'fixes' for Firefox users. This bug has
been around for many versions, and has been mentioned many
times.
Please, please someone on the Firefox team -- take on this project."
It's not just FF: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12916 is still unresolved, after eleven years, despite a hundred dollar bounty. Bugzilla is full of wontfix/worksforme legal wrangling where users unable to write the patches themselves (and having dealt some with FF's internals, I understand why) are told that their bugs don't matter.
Meanwhile, FF expanded from its stripped-down, single-purpose origins into a memory-consuming beast. On my Linux machines, it crashed daily. I would much rather see crashes, leaks, and slowdowns addressed before building new systems like the Awesomebar, tabs-in-titlebar, phishing prevention, and so forth.
Every developer I know has switched to Chrome. When I ask about it, I hear common rationales: speed, robustness, parsimony.
Does that clarify my criticism? There's a lot of great code in Firefox, but I don't think we should paper over the holes in the software or its development culture.
Aphyr, every single browser engine has longstanding bugs; it's just a matter of priorities.
WebKit doesn't have load events for stylesheets either, for example. It has buggy CSS selector matching, on purpose (doing the right thing was deemed too slow). There are multi-year-open bugs in V8 and Chrome, and that whole project hasn't even had an open bug database for more than a few years.
So I'm not sure the development culture is any different. You just haven't had a chance yet to file a bug and get it ignored by the WebKit folks for a few years. It happens all the time....
You're absolutely right; I've been bitten by chrome/webkit bugs as well, some of which remain unpatched. And Chrome's relative youth means the browser code hasn't acquired the same level of cruft--so I can't strongly infer a difference in process.
> First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010
Oh, ok. The last year was a big year for FF performance: There have been huge gains in speed and reductions in memory usage. FF4 began that, and FF7, 8 and 9 take it even further.
Given that you are talking about the time period before that, I can understand more where you are coming from - performance was a lesser priority then compared to other features. Thanks for clarifying that.
They now fire `load` events on stylesheet loads? Awesome! Shameful it’s been that way for so long. I’ve seen terrible work-arounds like always just firing a faux-load event 100ms after the stylesheet was added to the page, in the wild.
First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010, and it's clear the FF team has moved to improve performance since then. Perhaps my impressions from that time frame are no longer valid, but the issues I checked in Bugzilla while writing my post seemed largely unresolved.
I said "gestalt" to criticize not Firefox's actual development process, but the impression one might get as a longterm user (e.g. me.) Things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=474718, which stood unresolved for roughly two years. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185236 went unresolved for almost NINE years--was just fixed last week. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279048: five years.
It's not just FF: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12916 is still unresolved, after eleven years, despite a hundred dollar bounty. Bugzilla is full of wontfix/worksforme legal wrangling where users unable to write the patches themselves (and having dealt some with FF's internals, I understand why) are told that their bugs don't matter.Meanwhile, FF expanded from its stripped-down, single-purpose origins into a memory-consuming beast. On my Linux machines, it crashed daily. I would much rather see crashes, leaks, and slowdowns addressed before building new systems like the Awesomebar, tabs-in-titlebar, phishing prevention, and so forth.
Every developer I know has switched to Chrome. When I ask about it, I hear common rationales: speed, robustness, parsimony.
Does that clarify my criticism? There's a lot of great code in Firefox, but I don't think we should paper over the holes in the software or its development culture.