Dennis Forbes is a Toronto-based software architect. While focused primarily on the .NET and SQL Server worlds, Dennis frequently ventures outside of this comfort zone into game development and image processing. He has been published in several industry magazines, has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and has been interviewed by NPR.This entry is just a lead-in to the next entry that'll be about an exciting technology in Firefox 3.5. I didn't want to bloat up that entry with my parentheticals and rants, so just wanted to get that out of the way here.
Have you tried out Firefox 3.5 yet? It’ll happily install side-by-side, so there’s very little risk giving it a spin.
While currently a Release Candidate, it is already supported by most popular add-ins, such as Firebug and Adblock Plus, and brings a bounty of new functionality, more comprehensive emerging standards support, all while improving performance.
Performance has never been Firefox’s strong suit. While some incorrectly believe that Firefox has just recently been overtaken by upstarts like Webkit and its bastard child Chrome – the lore being that Firefox’s creaky “old” legacy code is not as nimble as the newer projects – the truth is that Firefox has always been a performance laggard compared to all but Internet Explorer.
It has always used more memory, done things more slowly, with benchmarking and resource consumption metrics that seldom earned it praise. The history of Firefox (aka Mozilla Suite, Phoenix and Firebird) is a tortured legacy littered with complaints about slow start-up times, a slow page layout engine, massive memory consumption, and middling JavaScript performance.
These are the costs of building on the XUL abstraction, along with some expensive add-on scaffolding. The ability for an add-on to dramatically change the behaviour of the browser (all from within a world of JavaScript and chrome) isn’t just an accidental happenchance, but instead is the result of considered, pervasive design choices.
If a small footprint and snappy response were the keys to success, Opera would have taken the market by storm given that it’s been evangelizing and focusing on that pursuit, to a great degree of technical success and leadership, for well over a decade now. Yet most users care more about a slightly better bookmark manager than they do about even magnitude differences in JavaScript performance.
But performance does matter. As web applications grow richer and more elaborate, the weakest of the contenders will get pushed out of the race. Already web applications like Slashdot and Facebook are getting unpleasant with a few of the current contenders, yet some of the new features of standards like HTML 5 promise dramatic new functionality that will completely blow the top off of the domain restrictions of the browser world.
So with recent releases the Firefox crew has reduced the toll you have to pay for these architectural choices, and through a lot of hard work it’s getting to be a memory lightweight, as far as web browsers go, and performance has improved across the board, sometimes dramatically.
And to sidetrack for a moment about a personal peeve, let me kick down the frequent whiners’ complaint that it’s “just a web browser”. Every time someone make such an ignorant, misinformed statement -- usually during some entitled complaint about resource consumption on their obsolete PC -- I think a universe blinks out of existence in some alternate reality.
There is very likely nothing that you do on your PC that is as rich and complex as the things that you’re doing right now just browsing the web. It’s isn’t “just a web browser”, it should be “I can’t believe how much is happening for me to loll around on the web for a bit!”.
