400 million downloads later, I miss Phoenix
September 11thAll highly successful large projects battle bloat and complexity. Sooner or later, lighting a controlled burn can really help out. Microsoft has done a great job with this in their Office line. Office 2003 did a lot to reduce code size and speed launch times. Office 2007 does away with more than a decade of familiarity in favor of a new and more thoughtful user interface.
Phoenix was born out of the need to cast off the horrific bloat and instability that characterized the Netscape/Mozilla suite in 2001. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross wanted a lean and mean browser that would load and run faster and provide a simple and extensible way of defining the user interface. They did a great job.
Renamed Firefox, the project just hit the 400 million download mark. Despite all this success, I can’t help but think that somebody needs to start a controlled burn on Firefox. Each month that passes I find myself progressively more dissatisfied with Firefox. Launch times are ever increasing despite my progressively newer hardware. It is wildly unstable on OS X - crashing daily. On Windows it is better, but not much. It doesn’t have to be like this. Don’t make me run IE.
Somebody get moving - build me me a better browser
Tags: Rant, Software Development, Web
October 11th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Thats odd. I use FF daily under OSx and haven’t had it crash yet. I’d wonder if there isnt something else to be concerned about. And depending on the number of extensions you have installed it would slow it done considerably.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:53 am
I find the most user friendly browser is Opera. I epected nothing from it when i first gave it a whirl and i never look back… Except when pages just dont work :/ (Occasional problem).
Despite not working with some pages out there, it’s still my preferred browser. If you haven’t, give it a go (with no settings changes) for a few hours of browsing. Defacto setup is almost a perfect fit for me. Naturally YMMV.
January 4th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I agree that FireFox is getting slower and slower. Some of the slowness is extensions’ fault, but the browser is just slow (still is easy to use).
A better browser is already built - Opera. It’s small, incredibly fast in innovative. The number of non-working pages is getting smaller and smaller(and it’s not Opera’s fault but webmasters’). For me 99,5% of pages are working fine.
February 14th, 2008 at 12:28 am
I recently wanted a browser that I could launch via a desktop shortcut to a particular site (online reference book, actually). I wanted it to be fast opening, and minimalistic as I didn’t want the 3 rows of toolbars (plus menus and tabs) I have in my FireFox sessions.
My solution (to my surprise): Apple’s Safari browser for Windows!