Firefox needs more focus on its core development tasks.
Today I was reading an article concerning the design of new back and forward buttons for Firefox. While such thought and experimentation has its place, I’m not so sure it’s appropriate considering the current state of the Firefox codebase.
Recently, I read about how, as of the middle of November 2007, there were about 700 blocker bugs against Firefox 3.0. It is anticipated that about 80% of those bugs will not be fixed before Firefox 3.0 is released. And this is for a release that is already a number of months behind schedule.
In addition, a chief complaint of many Firefox users is its particularly poor memory usage. Several days back we gained some very interesting and insightful information concerning the rather severe memory fragmentation issues that Firefox suffers from. After reading that article, it is clear that the Mozilla team needs to do some serious work with respect to this fragmentation problem. Luckily, some of the offending components are already known, as indicated in that article.
Now, there are some efforts in progress to deal with the various memory-related problems that Firefox users must currently endure. These efforts are a step in the right direction. But they may not be nearly enough.
I understand that not everyone who wants to contribute to Firefox is a developer. In many ways that’s a very good thing, as a successful software project requires participants with a wide variety of skills and interests. But if Firefox wants to compete with other browsers such as Opera and Konqueror, which do not seem to suffer from such memory-related issues, its developers may need to rethink their current priorities.
A vastly improved memory management subsystem would seem to be a very pressing issue, as would be fixing the outstanding blocker bugs. Only after such tasks are complete should efforts be put towards changing the toolbar buttons, and other cosmetic changes like that. For it makes little sense to put so much effort into such minor usability changes, when the very core of the browser suffers from issues that have a much greater impact on how well it works.
November 19th, 2007 at 1:14 am
Don’t you think it’s a tad presumptive to assume that the developers who are working on revising the user interface would be at all capable of working on the more low-level issues such as memory fragmentation? Those tasks require vastly different skill sets and I think it’s ignorant to think that developers are developers and should be able to do any programming-related task.