I like to keep my that kind of operating environment in mind as some of the discourse around Firefox vs. Chrome heats up / cools down, particularly as some of the rhetoric revolves around the speed of said browsers (of which I contributed a small at amount), one thing that sticks out that Mozilla has yet to address is how heavy Firefox has become.  Sure Firefox 3.1 might be fast.  Firefox 3.0 might be fast for some.  

But there are two damnable things in my experience that Firefox has yet to improve with each iteration, which are all the more sensitive with older laptops and PCs:

1. boot up times: As stated earlier, it takes what seems to be an age and a half for Firefox to boot up.  Its so painful I have stopped using it, for fear its going to crash and necessitate me to restart it.  I have the attention span of a gerbil at times, and boot up times — particularly on this old laptop — have sunk into the unacceptable range many months ago.

2. memory footprint: Tried booting up Firefox 3.0 just for comparison’s sake.  Right off the bat, its using about 80 mb of space.  Its not uncommon for it to use about to 200 mb, and on my desk top closer to 500 mb.   Chrome?  About 60mb.  And that’s with all kinds of tabs and theatrics going on.

Sure, part of the problem are the plugins that I’ve installed.  Perhaps I need to optimize and tweak my about:config a little better.  But really?  The gerbil part of my mind says that I don’t have to do that when there’s an easier alternative at the moment.  Quite frankly, I don’t even miss my plugins that much at this stage of the game.

I mean, let’s go back to start up times.  On this old crickety laptop, Chrome boots up in about 0.5 seconds.  BAM.  Literally a blink of an eye.  And the sheer awesomeness of *that* is going to be something that’s hard to beat in this gerbil’s mind.

• Amanda Congdon leaves ABC: Mat Ingram has the best explanation so far — her considerable “assets” were special as a vlogger, but on a mainstream outfit, they’re quite … flat. Now, Ms. Congdon claims she’s got something great lined up, although it will only start “next year”. If everyone will still remember her … “next year”.
• Google Planning Multi-Terabit Cables To Cross Pacific Ocean: Actually, only one part of a larger plan for Google — the company that most people associate merely with search and ads — to build or acquire physical assets, so that it literally owns the bandwidth to fuel its future plans for world domination. [Do I *sound* like I'm kidding?]
• PirateBay Strikes Back: Wonder what the *real* result of an embarassing leak of internal emails last week from MediaDefender? Well, it turns out that your favourite p2p site (PirateBay) is using them as evidence of illegal activities, and is bringing a very familiar fight back *to* MediaDefender. I, too, love the pure schadenfreude.
• Smart People Can Be So Stupid: A popular MIT student claims that a taped electronic blinking device on her chest — while gripping a piece of silly putty — was merely “art”, after being arrested at gun point at Logan Airport, in Boston. Right. That’s about as real as the hair dye you’re using, honey.
• Google Continues to Pwn Search: … according to the comscore report for search in the month of August. Google pulls in 56% of searches, which is actually *up* a couple percentage points since the last report (July). Nothing else to see here folks, just Google doing its best to own search … keep it moving …
• Firefox Memory Leaks Evidence Open-Source Not Infallible? … merely the corollary of “Firefox continues to have memory problems even though the whole community is trying to plug those leaks”. Somewhere Bill Gates is having a chuckle, I’m sure.

In what has to be either the most: a) insulting b) drug-induced c) stupidest d) all of the above … statement of the year on Firefox, Mozilla President (of Europe) in a recent interview with TechCrunch UK has gone on — amongst other things — to deny that there is any bloat in Firefox. In fact, its getting “speedier and speedier”.

Ugh.

I have claimed a great many things to be absurd, ludicrous, and just plain ol’ stupid. Hearing that Firefox *isn’t* bloated, when it regularly eats up 200-300+ megs of RAM for *me* (and I’m not the only one) while using minimal plugins (and other settings) is simply beyond the pale.

What’s more outrageous is that Tristan Nitot goes on to champion the user by using DRM as a foil (and a rather cheap and easy one at that), by going on to say

“I don’t think DRM has a future. Treating your customers like thieves is bad business practice. Today the customer is not ‘king’, they are considered thief first.”

Mssr. Nitot, you know what else is bad business practice? Treating your customers like puerile idiots.

Firefox has had problems with bloat and memory leak for a long time and its the one thing that successive iterations never seem to address properly. Its almost like Mozilla is saying “well, its your fault for not optimizing Firefox and not having enough RAM — fools.”

I have no idea when Firefox will fix this issue, or if Firefox will get its comeuppance for this ongoing sin. But its just sad when the chiefs at the top won’t even acknowledge this issue, which has been plaguing an otherwise fine product for ages.

Having said that, I am SO glad that its shadier aspects are getting a little bit of a spotlight at Wired.

I mean, am I the only one who is tired of Firefox’s bloated size and gi-normous RAM footprint?  Yes, yes — I know, I should limit the number of tabs I have open, and limit the number of plugins I’m using.  Fine.  But, you know what?  I kind of do, and if I leave Firefox open for more than a day, I too find that my PC grinds to a halt.

The frustrating thing is that although this “problem” with Firefox isn’t new, it never seems to have been directly addressed by Firefox.  There are work arounds to the problem thanks to fiddling with the about:config, or even some separate plugins, but are these really optimal solutions?

I mean, while you couldn’t copy Firefox’s community, nor its gargantuan library of extensions, themes and plugins, I do wonder if this represents an opportunity for another browser to surface — one that is slim, fast, and is absolutely thrifty as it comes down to memory usage? One that adheres to all W3C standards?

Could it be done?

Does it already exist, but hasn’t yet gotten enough traction from the Geek community?

If so, let me know.

For the moment, I find myself using Firefox Portable, which is about 30MB, and seems a little faster than the “normal” version.  The “portable” aspect of it represents a rebuild so that it can be used off a portable storyage device, like a USB key.  Its not ideal for me, since it can’t “remember” anything (cached or otherwise — it doesn’t record a “history” for example), but it is faster, which is a trade off I’ll happily make.

But  like many others, there’s one thing about Firefox — regardless of the version — which I absolutely detest. It curls my toes. It makes my hair stand on end. It makes me … (shudder), hate Firefox.

Its a love-hate sort of thing, I guess. ;)

That “thing”, of course, is how much of a memory hog Firefox is.

Now, I’ve read all kinds of things — it depends on the number of tabs you’ve opened, the kinds of extensions you’re using, and even the entirely specious argument of “well, that’s what you have RAM for!” All of It all may or may not make a difference.

What I DO know (and what makes that argument so specious), is that when it starts taking up 250 – 500 megs of RAM, it starts S-L-O-W-I-N-G things down to an utterly unacceptable rate.

After all, the same behaviour that allows me to use multiple tabs is the same behaviour that allows me to have Messenger, Photoshop, Pando, Mozy, and Picasa open at the same time.

Anyway, I’m glad that with the release of IE7 and all of the hoopla surrounding its release, someone has finally mentioned what I think is the great unmentionable when it comes to these two browsers:

No matter what you think about Internet Explorer it uses less memory. And for me, personally — it also boots up faster, closes faster, and doesn’t crash as often.

Sacriligious? A little. ;)

At the end of the day, there are a whole lot of reasons to chose Firefox, but I’m glad someone has mentioned the unmentionable — because Firefox is far from perfect.

And this “imperfection” has been in Firefox for many many versions.

It includes links to appropriate websites AND “install this” links/xpi’s as well in one handy place for the following:

• Web Developer 1.0.2
• ColorZilla 0.8.2
• Aardvark 1.1
• Measureit 0.3.5
• Firebug 0.4
• IE Tab 1.0.9.5
• Screengrab 0.7
• LoremIpsum Content Generator 0.4.2
• Greasemonkey 0.6.5.20060727
• UserAgent Switcher 0.6.8

Go to my Lists page

(gasp!)

And its not optimized for resolutions less than 1024×764!

(double gasp!)

MSIE practically strokes out when it tries to render!

(triple ga– *faints)

What to do, what to do, what to do?

I guess at some point in the development cycle of a ‘software’ project you get to the *un*fun part, and that is the bug stomping and otherwise tweaking for maximum compatibility-ness.

I used to do a lot more web design a few years ago — before Medical School (1999), and with the Browser Wars it made browser compatibility issues such a headache I just didn’t bother.

Although there are seemingly MORE browsers around these days (Firefox, Opera, MSIE, Safari, and so on), the consensus seems that there is a better trend towards compatibility and web standards than the past.

Thank God.

Well, for all of the two people who know or read this website (thanks Mom! thanks honey), I may get around to tweaking this theme — optimizing for other browsers and resolutions, if for no other reason that at hospital it looks so sick.

(Not “good” sick, but really sick sick — not cardiogenic shock, sick, but more like nosocomial pneumonia type sick)

The fact that right now it really only looks ok with higher resolutions and firefox mostly betrays my own bias in the browser conflict.

Yeah … I go with Firefox.

I used to roll with Opera — and I loved those mouse gestures, but the seemingly infinite extensibility of Firefox is the greatest boon so far.

In particular, all of those web development extensions.

How could I do without:

1) Webdeveloper — with all of its swiss-army knife css-inspecting, code penetrating goodness?
2) Viewsource — its color-coded view-> source majesty I could never do without
3) ColorZilla — thanks for saving me from my own color-blinded self … the eyedrop tool is worth is weight in gold!
4) MeasureIt — how else are you going adjust a div’s position?
5) Aardvark — your real-time in-browser CSS-outlining abilities kick mammoth butt

Yes, its also faster, and safer apparently.

Is it perfect?
Hell no.

I gots my beefs …

Which is why there’s a part II to this post. Stay tuned!