For the past few years, I’ve been using Firefox. I ran it when it was Firebird. I ran it
when it was Phoenix. I ran it with a silly little extension that randomized its name to the amusement of many. The thrill, sadly, is gone.

When the Mozilla Project released a browser-only version of their client (which was basically just Netscape with a little more nerd-appeal), there were some pretty high hopes. It was highly-extensible, it was a tiny little file you could download quickly over a dialup connection, and was generally an excellent alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer, which many web nerds had grown fiercely dissatisfied. Now it’s time to look at Firefox without that new-browser smell and hopeful aspirations of beta and first-version software.

Standards

One of the things that originally appealed to me about Firefox was that it handled CSS and other web standards more gracefully than Internet Explorer. Dozens of upgrades later, Firefox still fails widely-available tests like Acid 2, some of which have been handled nicely by Konqueror or Safari for quite a while now. Additionally, in the past several months I have caught Firefox “helping” me out by changing oddly-coded HTML before displaying. This can make troubleshooting a display problem rather troublesome at times, especially when wading through old HTML code-soup that somebody else wrote. I spend a fair amount of time performing such tasks, so this is a non-trivial problem.

Size

Now, I realize that Firefox 2.0 is only 5.6MB (for the Windows release, in English), but download size is only part of the picture here. Firefox has a terrible memory management problem. The above screenshot reflects a Firefox browser with precisely three open tabs. How Firefox ended up with almost 200MB of my RAM tied up for those three tabs is simply beyond me. The memory management behavior has been around since the software was in beta, and should have been fixed before going gold. I’ve been assured that it isn’t technically a “leak,” but the distinction doesn’t matter to me.

Prognosis

Firefox remains my primary browser at this point purely out of inertia. I’m accustomed to how I have it set up at work and at home, and am generally resistant to changes in my workflow. I’m not ready to categorize this browser along with Safari or IE5, but I’m increasingly tempted to kick this commie open-source browser to the curb and go with something else.