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Mozilla is building an operating system

wiki.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#21

Post by owenmarshall »

hollerith wrote: post #11

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive. I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running. (I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)

Firefox has made memory overhead a serious priority in the Fx7 & Fx8 development cycles, with some impressive results:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#22

Post by mindcrime »

joakin wrote: post #15

Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser. If that's insightful or useful comments hit me... I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around lately. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that talks about other projects. If you dont like Firefox its f…

I think it's more like "tough love" than hate. If I bitch about Firefox, it's because I want to love Firefox, but I can't. That pisses me off. If I didn't care about it, like the way I don't care about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera, I wouldn't talk about it, like I never talk about Safari or Konqueror, or Opera.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#23

Post by rpearl »

norswap wrote: post #17
joakin wrote: post #15

Impressive how the most voted comments are rants about the browser. If that's insightful or useful comments hit me... I really don't understand this hate towards Mozilla that has been going around lately. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? It's a sincere opinion of a person who doesn't see a relation in critizising a project of an organisation in an article that talks about other projects. If you dont like Firefox its f…

Building an os is hard stuff, and if you can't produce a browser without memory leaks (or a caching strategy I can't possibly start to fathom), you're not headed in the right direction.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484

...etc... Guess Google shouldn't be writing an OS either?

I have three points with this post. My first is that, despite the extremely good marketing, Chrome has faults just like any other large piece of software. The point is that they have good engineers on the problems. So does Mozilla.

My second is claim is that a Firefox-based solution is good for the web. Even if it isn't as successful as Android, it will open up the web more! Android is a farce of open source (I cannot get the kernel code running on my phone. That is a blatant GPL violation. Nobody is doing anything about it. I cannot get the Android userland code running on my tablet. That is just not open source.) At the moment, Android is scarcely more open than iOS.

My last claim is that many of the "memory leaks" in Firefox are either caching--memory which is not being used is memory which is being wasted--and those which are truly memory leaks tend to be from binary extensions. The new extension SDK should mitigate this, since it is sandboxed JS code instead, from what I understand (disclaimer: i do not work on the extension API, nor do I write extensions, and I could by way off here.)

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#24

Post by burgerbrain »

owenmarshall wrote: post #21
hollerith wrote: post #11

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive. I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running. (I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)

Firefox has made memory overhead a serious priority in the Fx7 & Fx8 development cycles, with some impressive results: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058#c31

Too little, too late. It took them literally years to admit that they had a problem. I've long since migrated, and I know many other people that have as well.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#25

Post by MatthewPhillips »

j_col wrote: post #9
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wiki page doesn't do a good job explaining it, but what they're aiming at is mobile devices. Essentially they want a phone that replaces every native functionality with html/javascript. So a web application would be your phone dialer, a web application could access your NFC chip. All of the capabilities they're going for is stuff that's in the pipeline in W3C, they want to create an OS to accelerate the process (…

You mean like webOS?

No, I meant like web applications.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#26

Post by zobzu »

rpearl wrote: post #23
norswap wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building an os is hard stuff, and if you can't produce a browser without memory leaks (or a caching strategy I can't possibly start to fathom), you're not headed in the right direction.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 ...etc... Guess Google shouldn't be writing an OS either? I have three points with this post. My first is that, despite the extremely good marketing, Chrome has faults just like any other larg…

Unfortunately it's the new black to hit on Firefox/Mozilla. I fear this leads to a Google-monopoly that would be bad for everyone.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#27

Post by burgerbrain »

rpearl wrote: post #23
norswap wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building an os is hard stuff, and if you can't produce a browser without memory leaks (or a caching strategy I can't possibly start to fathom), you're not headed in the right direction.

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=64804 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=36142 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68304 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=90484 ...etc... Guess Google shouldn't be writing an OS either? I have three points with this post. My first is that, despite the extremely good marketing, Chrome has faults just like any other larg…

Honestly yes. Google should not be writing an OS either.

But lets be fair here, Google has waaaay more resources than Mozilla (hell, most of Mozillas resources come from Google...), and a comparison between Chrome and Firefox shows that.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#28

Post by runjake »

My first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than "me too"?

Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around its technologies isn't too appealing to me.

Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have any significant success.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#29

Post by dman »

runjake wrote: post #28

My first question is why? Do they have a real vision other than "me too"? Does anyone else remember when Phoenix was first released to fight bloated browsers? Now it is that bloated browser and running an OS developed around its technologies isn't too appealing to me. Find your roots before you start off on some other project if you hope to have any significant success.

What is your definition of bloat - size of download, application startup times, number of features, speed while being used, memory usage?

Firefox 5 without addons does not seem to be bloated to me by any of the above definitions. In terms of featuresets just for reference - Netscape communicator used to ship with a mail client, browser, news client, html editor and a calendar.

Re: Mozilla is building an operating system

#30

Post by dman »

hollerith wrote: post #11

I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that does not need to be restarted after every hour or 2 of browsing lest it become more and more unresponsive. I wish they'd concentrate on making a browser that can start scrolling before all the Javascript on the page has finished running. (I'm using FF 7 on Snow Leopard with 1 gig of RAM. Would I have to restart FF less often if I had more RAM?)

I am not on snow leopard yet so I dont know how much 1gig of RAM is by Snow Leopard standards but for reference how does Chrome / Safari do in comparison?
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