Michael Calore at the Compiler blog has interviewed Asa Dotzler from Mozilla. In this interview Asa addresses the bloat problem and feature creep in Firefox.
Firefox initially was supposed to be a lean clean version of the Mozilla Application suite (Now Seamonkey) which the Mozilla Foundation thought to be too bloated and cumbersome to maintain. Thus a small standards compliant browser was born. As you all know, Firefox grew, and now controls approx 15% of the browser market. Firefox has a dazzling array of features, themes and extensions and the upcoming Firefox 3 (set to ship in June) only adds to this list.
Asa states in the interview that Firefox was initially a simple browser with an address bar rendering content. Nothing else. Then features were added if they were deemed essential and if they would be used by the majority (it not all) of users. Since those humble beginnings Firefox has become a behemoth of a browser, packing loads of features and taking lots of system resources.
Everyone at least once has experienced frustration with the vast amount of resources Firefox can consume. Since Firefox 2 shipped, thousands if not millions of users have complained about the poor memory management of Firefox. Memory leaks had become a huge problem for Firefox. Google’s Gmail would cause Firefox to become sluggish if the browser kept it open for too long.
However, with numerous improvements to Firefox 3’s memory management, one may think this is a problem of the past. Read the interview on how Asa describes on how Mozilla has dealt with such problems.
