Closer To The Ideal

FireFox can crash any machine. Not “crash” in the sense of “blue screen of death” but crash as in “uses up all memory so the machine becomes unresponsive”. This is a reliable fact of using FireFox, regardless of whether you are on Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, or Mac OS X (I can’t speak of Camino, as I don’t use it).

Sometimes I say this to other programmers and they respond “It’s not FireFox that is the problem, it is the plugins that you use – it is FireBug and Session Manager and all the others.” Of course, any programmer who reveals this attitude needs to be re-educated. If you offer a plugin system that is unable to manage the plugins, then maybe you should not offer that plugin system? It suggests a (possibly frightening?) willingness to shirk responsibility if a programmer defends a plugin system that can crash a computer.

I wonder what Brendan Eich is thinking?

One suggestion for others: if you use FireFox, every time a new version of FireFox comes out, FireFox will ask you if you want to upgrade. I used to always say “yes”. Now I realize, if your computer is more than a year old, you should say “no”. Each version of FireFox tends to be heavier and slower than the previous version. My Ubuntu machine is from 2006, and that is part of the reason why FireFox is so slow on it.

On my Windows machine, I just switched over to Google Chrome as my new default browser. I’m giving up on FireFox. On my Ubuntu machine, I am stuck with FireFox for now. I’m not aware of any other serious browsers for Linux.

For email, I would love to give up on Thunderbird, if I could find a substitute. I run Thunderbird on my main desktop machine which runs Ubuntu. Thunderbird has had a persistent bug that has survived several upgrades (of both Thunderbird and Ubuntu). The bug is with the address auto-completion. If I type an address fast, hit “Enter” to accept and start typing again fast, Thunderbird crashes. This can lose a lot of work for me (Where “work” might simply mean “Opened email and left them open because I found some that were important and so answering them will take some time.”). Apparently there is no equivalent of SessionManager for Thunderbird, no way of remembering which emails were open, waiting for a response, when Thunderbird crashes. No, instead, after Thunderbird crashes, I need to re-start it, go back 3 days, and then read through all my email again, looking for the important ones.

At work we had a deadline today, and I worked through the weekend to meet it. I kept getting feedback from various people testing the site. Some of the email I got was thoughtful, and offered intelligent suggestions about what we should do next. By this morning, I had about 20 emails open, waiting for me to have the time and focus to write a reply. Then Thunderbird crashed and they all vanished. I yelled so loud my throat was sore. Now I have to go back to Friday and read through all the email again, to find the ones that I wanted to respond to.

If I could find something better than Thunderbird, that runs on Linux, I’d switch immediately.

For much of the last 3 weeks I’ve used Windows laptop running XP (instead of my usual Ubuntu Linux machine) which gave me a chance to try out some of the browsers that have no Linux version.   One of the greatest aspects of the current web development scene is that most of the surviving browser projects are competing on how well they can implement web standards and HTML5 (contrast the current scene with 1996, when Microsoft set out to break the web, with its “embrace, extend and exterminate” strategy).

I’ve already noted that FireFox seems to have surpassed Internet Explorer, in terms of usage. Microsoft will hopefully soon kill Internet Explorer and replace it with something else.

I admire much of what Brendan Eich has done. And for the last several years, FireFox has been my web browser of choice. But FireFox drives me crazy with its demand for resources. Compared to any other browser I’ve tried, it demands more RAM. With just one window open, it will grab 60 to 90 megs of RAM (compared to, say, 14 for Chrome). With several pages open, which is normal for me, FireFox will grab 200 to 250 megs of RAM. Chrome might grab a 3rd of that. (These statements are true for FireFox 2 and 3, and Chrome 1.)

FireFox allows plugins, which is the main reason I use FireFox. The Firebug and Session Manager plugins are essential tools for me. However, FireFox doesn’t police the resource usage of these plugins. They can crash any machine: Macs, Linux, Windows. (Those of you who want to claim “Linux never crashes”, please note that a process can use up most of the memory on the machine, and then the machine becomes unresponsive. For the user, this is the same as a crash, even if in some hair-splitting way it avoids the technical definition of a crash.)

Chrome has the kind of plain, minimalist design that is a signature of most of Google’s products.  I like it a lot, though it has many annoyances. Yahoo Mail normally auto-suggests email addresses as I start to type them, but this doesn’t happen when I use Chrome. Also, when using WordPress, Chrome embeds inline styling, whereas other browsers do not. Also, again with WordPress, Chrome erases all line breaks every time I update a post, so that the text is reduced to one giant paragraph. Basically, most of the Javascript that is out there was not written with Chrome in mind, and Chrome has some kind of conflict with it. Also, surprisingly, I’m not able to log into some of my favorite forums with Chrome.  I get no error message, but I am not treated as logged in, even after giving the correct username and password (I have the same problem in Safari, but not in FireFox).

Scrolling a web page, using the arrow keys on the keyboard, is important to me. I read a great deal online, and for me it seems natural to want to use the arrow keys to move down the page as I read. Here is one area where Chrome is especially good. It scrolls smoothly. FireFox is usually broken in this regard – it tries to move the cursor down the page, but if the HTML is laid out in a way that allows the cursor to skip the main text of the page, then FireFox simply drops to the bottom of the page. This drives me crazy.

Safari 4 seems to be in between Chrome and FireFox in terms of resource use. It is wonderfully standards compliant and leads the way in supporting HTML5. I admire it for that, though until more browsers support HTML5, I can’t imagine using any of the new tags on a commercial web site.

Right now I can see using FireFox when I want to use my favorite plugins, and I can see using Chrome when I want a fast web browser, but I’m not sure what would cause me to use Safari.

I’m comfortable making this prediction: IE will continue to fade, and Microsoft will continue to fade, and FireFox, Safari and Chrome will all have more browser share a year from now than they currently do. So it is time for designer to start checking their designs in all of these browsers.

Brendan Eich invented Javascript back in 1994, when he was working at Netscape. He’s since been busy with Mozilla. He is on the board, and he is a leading voice arguing that Thunderbird must be cut off from the rest of the Mozilla organization:

Turning this into a “I doubt MoCo ‘cares’ for other XUL apps than Firefox” is both:

1. irresponsible — sayrer’s right, we have to favor Firefox, “we” being the whole community, but especially MoCo (as distinct from MoFo); and

2. categorically confused — emotional when the topic here is technical: how to do Mozilla 2 so that all XUL apps have a better future, without serializing with 1.9 or taking on impossible workload in keeping to the current tree rules every day we develop Mozilla 2 in the new repo.
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Money is not the issue. Hiring is one issue. Management bandwidth is another. Build infrastructure is yet another. Organization focus is yet another, and it’s a vague term, but obvious to anyone who has worked at a startup that grew into a big company. I could write about it at length and define it concretely, but I’m out of time here.
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I’m focusing on Mozilla 2. That’s necessary and overriding. Thunderbird will have to fly free. If it does not reach a promised land, even with a good plan and some investment, I will be sad. But I will not jeopardize Firefox and the platform, which depend on Mozilla 2, by spending more time on it than my MF board duties require.

So again, apart from my board duties you won’t hear from me on this thread. And I’m not going to speak for the Mozilla Foundation board, or preempt them in any way. All the above is my opinion, which I’ve shared before. I’ve given my reasoning. I hope it’s both sound and valid, and that it can overcome raw feelings and help others, so that we can all improve the situation.