Firefox slowing down
Posted: 2005-03-16 07:51am
Just with IE7 showing its not that big an improvement, here comes trouble for firefox.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote:Opinion: I think Firefox is the best browser on the planet, but it's not going to stay that way long unless the team behind it gets their act together sooner rather than later.
I love Firefox.
It is, without a doubt, my favorite browser ever, and I've used almost every one that ever rendered a Web page. No matter what the operating system—Windows, Linux, heck, even NetBSD—one of the first things I do now with any of my boxes is to install Firefox on it.
I'm not alone. There have been over 25 million downloads of Firefox since version 1.0 hit the streets in fall of 2004. It has come out of nowhere to shrink Internet Explorer's share of the Web-browser space for the first time in years.
Firefox is also gaining software support. In addition to smaller open-source add-on programs, mainstream helper applications like Yahoo Toolbar and Google Desktop Search are now coming to Firefox.
Last, but never least, Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer.
So, what's not to like?
Well, several things if you must know.
First, I said Firefox is more secure. That doesn't mean it's perfectly secure. You still must practice safe Web surfing to avoid phishing attacks and the like, and make sure to keep the browser patched up to avoid known security problems like the IDN (International Domain Name) bug.
Unfortunately, Firefox hasn't done a great job of making it easy to get its patches.
While Firefox does have an auto-update feature, the rollout of its first security patch, Firefox 1.0.1, was delayed for several days because of server overload problems.
Then, when it was rolled out, it was done slowly—20,000 downloads an hour—so as not to overwhelm the servers.
This is not good. In February, according to WebSideStory, Firefox was up to 5.69 percent of the Web browser market. Mozilla's avowed goal for Firefox is to get it up to 10 percent of the market this year. If Firefox does hit those kind of numbers, its back-end infrastructure must be built up or there's no way it can mount a serious threat to IE.
Quality assurance back at the servers also needs improvement. When the Mozilla Foundation first started pushing the automatic updates to Windows users out on Feb. 28, what actually ended up happening was that the Windows update was served up to Mac and Linux users!
Boy, did that do them a lot of good!
Besides, this 'update' isn't really an update. It's a complete new installation of Firefox 1.0.1. Can you say annoying?
To further confuse Windows users, the default installation of this 'patch' leaves you with entries for both the now-gone older version and the new one in Windows' Add or Remove Programs control panel.
It's a known bug that's been around since June of 2004 and it's still not been fixed. I am not amused.
It's not just Windows users who are facing a rocky upgrade route: Firefox 1.0.1 wasn't available for Linux and Mac users at all until several days later.
You would hope that as Firefox popularity grows by leaps and bounds, these kind of problems would be fixed. I wish I could be so optimistic.
Mike Connor, a core Firefox developer, writes in his blog, "In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think we're in trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews. And I'm on the verge of just walking away indefinitely, since it feels like I'm the only person who cares enough to make it an issue."
If Firefox's reviewing developers, the key people of any open-source project, have burned out on the project, Firefox is in a lot of trouble.
Forget about trying to get new and better versions out. They're not going to be able to keep up on security fixes and bugs. For example, it used to be that if you ran Firefox you never saw annoying pop-up ad windows.
That was then. This is now.
Today, instead of pop-ups, there are sites that feed you pop-unders: advertising windows that deploy under your current Web browser window, which you then see when you close your window.
It's annoying, it needs to be fixed, and if Connor is correct, I don't see that happening anytime soon. A Firefox extension, Adblock, can make the pop-under problem more manageable, but you must set it up manually for it to work.
Forget about Microsoft coming out with IE 7 to challenge Firefox. If Firefox rots from the inside out—the way so many other programs, like the original Netscape browser, did—then it's not going anywhere much beyond where it is now.