A lot of people are talking about the interview with John Lilly that discusses the relationship between Mozilla and Google.
People like to paint think black and white. Either Mozilla is Google’s poodle (Mozilla is to Google as Tony Blair was to George Bush) or there is a falling out and they hate each other.
Of course, the answer is grey as John points out. From my standpoint, focusing on the Open Web, I see more areas to collaborate on than to fight over. When I was at Google I knew that the Open Web was very important to the long term future. Now I am at Mozilla, the same is true. At the micro level there will be differences, but at the macro-level there is alignment.
Switching gears a little, I have had some folks talk to me about responsiveness issues with Firefox 3. I have had a fantastic experience, and currently I run Mozilla nightlies / Minefield / Shiretoka (3.1.*) and WebKit nightlies side by side. I am very happy with the shape that Minefield is in.
Of course, the issue with the extension mechanism with Firefox is that you get a window to the entire world (which has also been a reason that lead to amazing add-ons). Since this is the case a bad add-on can do a lot.
Chrome does a good job showing you basic info about a tab (memory etc). What if we did that and more for add-ons. Give me top for the browser.
Now, this is a lot of engineering away, so can we use the crowd to help out?
What if we created an add-on that would track responsiveness information and send it back (anonymously) to the cloud (say, to Weave). We could use math to work out probable culprits and could even ship that information back to the people using the add-on. Thus, you would then find out that FooAddOn seems to be a culprit that slows down the browser. Maybe it could be called Vacinate-addon.
What do you think?
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:07 pm
It would be great ! This would create incentive for the add-on developers to include performance in their decisions and benefit all their projects. I’m all in favour of this one.
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:27 pm
What do I think? ;)
My gut feeling is that Firefox will evolve into a Godzillean OS-like monster with typical OS features like protected memory spaces, tab scheduling, antivirus addons and whatnot :)
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
@Evren,
Yes, and we could of course give them feedback through the system. I am sure there are situations where multiple plugins can affect each other etc. We need to give our addon developers more tools!
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
@Vladimir
Hahaha nice. I guess as the client of the Web platform, as developers build richer apps, we need to give them more :)
December 22nd, 2008 at 1:00 pm
I don’t think it would be that hard. The JavaScript debugging interface gives you access to that kind of information, you can get the execution times for each script and cross-check that with the origin of the script. Problem is, profiling needs to be turned on explicitly – and when it runs it slows JavaScript down a lot, it also changes execution times somewhat. Finally, JavaScript execution time isn’t everything, sometimes JavaScript will trigger native code and that won’t be as easy to attribute to a particular extension.
December 22nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm
It’s certainly a developer’s feature, not a typical user’s feature. I also think that it is not worth the time competing with Google for the sake of it. Should everyone adopt the multi-process model simply because Google did it? If so, why not go a step further and dump XUL and all that jazz and take up Erlang instead? Fads are one thing; sound computer science quite another.
December 22nd, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I like to paint think. :)
December 22nd, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Yes, it’s really ‘complicated’ between Mozilla and Google~
December 22nd, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I think that would be BRILLIANT!
Right now I’m suffering from a sluggish browser with new windows taking up to 10 seconds to display (not new tabs).
A debugger to help diagnose would be cool.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:34 am
@Wladimir: if profiling hurts performance too much, it’s probably not the way to go. But why not do some simple sampling of timers on highly visible performance areas? For instance: opening a tab, a new window, etc.
The problem with profiling an addon is: you don’t know what the addon is meant to do. For instance, lets say someone builds an addon that does some image blur filtering before page load. The load time of a page increases, but wasn’t this to be expected? Blaming an addon for being ‘badly’ programmed in such a case doesn’t seem right.
Perhaps the statistics should be added to the AMO site, so that people can decide if the performance impact is worth installing extra functionality.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:37 am
Duh, that last part should read: if installing extra functionality is worth the performance impact.
February 6th, 2009 at 5:15 am
i like Mozilla,use it ,i have more choice,but Chrome don’t have any show for me.