Firefox 3.5 -- Faster? Slower?

If there is one application I truly am a fanboy of, it’s Firefox. Firefox is an open source success that is changing the way people use the web. Its sole purpose is a browser that is built by people, for the people. According to GlobalStatCounter.com, almost 1 out of 3 people use Firefox, whilst 58% use IE. What’s funny is when you look at their graph, you can tell which days were work days, and which ones weren’t as people left the office browser and used the home browser. Clearly, the fox is here to stay and show the world what a browser should be.

As a former nightly [build] tester, the improvements behind the browser are monstrous. But the average Joe user is still left in the dark in my opinion, and here’s why I think so.

It’s hard for me not to form a biased opinion, because I absolutely am disgusted with Microsoft, and the entire IE line (Include IE8, which is a great improvement). I would like nothing more than the very browser Microsoft ‘shutdown’ (Netscape) come back and destroy them. Oh… Im supposed to be talking about why Firefox 3.5 sucks… ok, here I go.

One thing that really makes me angry is the slowness behind Mozilla. It’s one thing to be delayed on every single beta release, but its another when you hold up simple enhancements. Here’s one pet peeve: Auto completing Tags.

This was a feature that was added in Firefox 3.5, which started development back in September 2008? It took them that long to make these user set tags -- auto complete? Are you kidding me?! This is a massive failure on Mozilla’s part to ‘keep up’ with the stiff competition. There is absolutely NO WAY – you can say they couldn’t have made a Firefox 3.1.0 with that feature in a reasonable timeframe while they worked on other issues. It should have taken them 2 weeks to 1 month to build, test and integrate that feature and make it available. Producing software with these huge long waiting periods is not smart now. Browsers are released regularly these days almost monthly...Competition among browsers these days is at an apex. I know mozilla's tagline with brower releases is: "when its ready, we'll release it" but thats very different than: "when everything else is ready". Simply put, releasing a Firefox 3.1.0 with auto-completing seems like a very easy and quick way to 1) improve user experience immediately 2) Respond to community feedback quickly.

Another thing that really irritates me is it seems Mozilla is not listening hard enough to its users, and now it’s finally starting to bite them I think. Some of the most common complaints that users are quick to point out with Firefox is:

1) Memory usage
2) Start-up Time
3) Add-ons decrease the performance of the browser.


It just angers me that Mozilla has started to slip on things. We shouldn’t be waiting so long for quick easy enhancements. The good news is that It’s now scheduled to improve start-up time (and other internal events) on Firefox 3.6 by atleaset (greater than) 50ms, which is really a whole lot considering Safari 4 starts up in .54 secs now. Firefox 3.5 starts in 2.82 secs… If Mozilla gets smart about things (they usually do) they’ll focus on performance with add-ons… that is, adding a bunch of add-ons won’t degrade performance as much. If they can set that in motion, firefox 3.6 will be more in line of browser's like chrome 2 – easy, robust, and compatible/compliant.

I really am excited about Firefox 3.5 thou... But i think 3.6 is really going to get the users going with lightweight add-ons, themes, and an overall better browser (not browsing) experience.