Over the past few years, like lots of Linux users, I have become increasingly frustrated with the performance of Firefox in Linux. Though I haven't been as vocal as others of the state of Firefox, it was clear that most of us were just sick and tired of Firefox being a "good Windows browser that happened to run in Linux."
I was not alone. Over the past year I've noticed that a good number of people I know have switched over to Epiphany. Epiphany is a great browser to begin with. Native controls, quick, and very GNOME-y. Epiphany was rocking an "Awesomebar" long before it was cool. But still, there's something about Mozilla as a whole that was always close to me.
First off, is the influence that Mozilla people have had over other open source projects. I know plenty of people who can directly point to Asa Dotzler and say "He was the guy that got me into open source". I'm one of them. And he's just one guy. Think of the other heroes that gutted it out, like Blizzard, roc, scc, caillon, etc...
The second is pure, unadulterated perseverence. I remember around M18/Netscape6 when it was the bleakest of the bleak. When we were all doomed. The engineering team had been laid off, and as far as we knew, the concept of the free web was almost dead.
Then Firefox came around, and all of a sudden, it was cool to be open, and free, and usable. Awesome. However, those of us using the Linux desktop didn't get to share the same success. All of a sudden our "gateway drug" had become a full blown coke addiction; the idea that if people loved an open browser that they would naturally love a full blown open operating system died a quick death. But that's another story...
Fast forward to last year, and all indications point to Firefox being a Windows browser. On the Mozilla side you have the expected "Hey, if you want to fix it, send patches, we develop for our biggest user base." Novell and Red Hat really did lots of heavy lifting for us over the years by sponsoring upstream work (thanks guys). The rest of us, those of us who have supported and evangelized Mozilla during the "dark times" (read: Linux users), got the short end of the stick, despite the excellent work from the fulltime Linux guys. Eventually, Firefox's market share dictated that they should prioritize Windows features, and since (not suprisingly), us Linux users are better at bitching than actually contributing, Firefox on Linux got worse, and worse, and worse. Anyone ever having to stick a custom crap lpr command in that dialog box to get Firefox/Mozilla to print in Linux knows how painful this is.
In fact, it got so bad, that people seem to think that a webkit-based browser is the future. Somehow, we got to the point where the poster-child of what's good about Open Source takes a back seat to the poster-child of everything wrong with computing. (Nothing against the KDE khtml folks and other people working on WebKit, I respect your work, but, come on, are our relations with Mozilla so bad that Apple is considered a viable alternative? Because, you know, they're really open source friendly. (... and I'm going to quit smoking and drinking too!)
Luckily all this hand-waving crap is behind us. I used to make fun of Ryan Paul for tracking Firefox 3 features. "Dude, they don't give a shit, stop trying ...." He even did an article about the new Linux features coming up. At the same time, I would spend night after night on IM bitching to Dave Camp about how Mozilla had deserted us, and goddamn it, someone owed me some printing/GTK fixes, and oh, "I know your sleeping in all that Google cash, come on dude!" Dave, being a good sport, always told me that patches would be accepted. (See above note about us being better bitchers than contributors.)
So then, in an effort to get Ryan to shut up about Firefox3, I tried the beta, and I realized that ...
Firefox 3 beta 1 is totally, freaking, awesome.
There are some bugs. The font work still needs some loving, and there are a few instances where the memory gets out of control, but overall, for a beta .... wow. Just wow. Alexander Sack (the Ubuntu Firefox maintainer) had told me it was really shaping up. But I didn't believe him. I didn't want to believe Ryan either. I haven't been this excited about Firefox since 1.0. Seriously. I feel like an unbeaten step-child.
PS - There are issues with FF3, but given that it's a beta and considering how terrible FF2 is in Linux, I'm willing to forgive and forget ... when it's final. :)
PSS - Epiphany is still awesome. GNOME ftw.
WebKit is attractive not because of Apple, but because technically it kicks ass. It's small and fast, has much lower resource footprint than Gecko and it's native: WebKit is to Gecko what Epiphany is to Firefox.
Posted by: thebluesgnr | November 21, 2007 at 23:53
Have they removed the non-free logo and fixed their stupid trademark policies?
Posted by: Foo Bar | November 22, 2007 at 00:05
Ahh, now I know why Jordan asked if you had your flame-proof undies :)
Posted by: nixternal | November 22, 2007 at 00:35
Full-time Mozilla folks devote a radically disproportionate (to the Firefox OS market shares*) amount of time on Linux and Mac both.
And, I think that's a good thing.
We're cross-platform and that's a key part of our DNA.
But, when it comes to Linux, it's a bit more difficult than Mac or Windows. We've got Gnome vs. KDE and within both there are gobs of different window managers and configurations. With Mac, we're basically focusing on Leopard for our overall look and feel. For Windows, we're going to cover Vista and XP. For Linux, we're trying to cover GTK+/Gnome on a "contemporary" reference platform.
I'm a proponent for FLOSS (I hope there's little contention on that point) but Linux is really difficult. For the reasons you stated, the fragmentation of the platform, and the strange (to me) vendor lock-in that distros are propagating by trying to cut out the ISVs like Mozilla, it's a more difficult world to operate in.
Still, I'm thrilled at the folks that have stepped up to make Firefox 3 kick ass on Linux.
- A
* Windows accounts for about 95% of Mozilla's Firefox users. Mac accounts for almost 5% of Mozilla's Firefox users. Linux accounts for somewhat less than 1% of Mozilla's Firefox users.
Posted by: Asa Dotzler | November 22, 2007 at 01:07
Thanks Asa for taking the time to respond!
For the "Linux question", to me it's pretty clear that Ubuntu and Fedora have Firefox as the default. I believe openSUSE makes the default desktop a choice (don't ask me why), but out of that they either pick GNOME or KDE, which means they either pick Firefox or Konqueror.
I get the general impression that the main distros default to Firefox. I'm wondering why you guys care about different window managers and all these minor details when it's clear that the major distros ship Firefox out of the box, and the ones that don't ship Firefox ship Konqueror instead. Surely that handles all the major use cases? Why do you guys care about Firefox in KDE when clearly the KDE browser is Konqueror? (Not a troll, just a general question)
Also, I'd like some clarification on your last statement, is the 1% of mozilla users mean "people using mozilla from upstream?" as in downloads, or is this based on some other metric? I'm wondering if this is taking into account the mozilla installations shipped with the distro or if it's pure upstream-only numbers. Thanks!
Posted by: jorge | November 22, 2007 at 02:07
So webkit is the poster-child of everything wrong with computing? I'm speechless.
Posted by: Flavio | November 22, 2007 at 06:26
Why do you guys care about Firefox in KDE when clearly the KDE browser is Konqueror?
That's like saying "clearly the GNOME browser is Epiphany". Most KDE distros ship Firefox too.
is the 1% of mozilla users mean "people using mozilla from upstream?" as in downloads, or is this based on some other metric?
I seriously doubt it's upstream-only. Who downloads binary Linux apps from websites these days? I'd imagine it's from UA counts from people hitting addons.m.o or such.
- Chris
Posted by: Chris Cunningham | November 22, 2007 at 07:00
Every time I hear somebody complaining about Firefox on Linux, I'm just stunned. I dunno... maybe I drank too much "kool-aid" (ahem) during the FF launch party down at Dragonmead, but in my opinion Firefox is far and away the best browser on this (or any other) OS. And I like FF on Linux better than I like FF on Windows, although lately they seem to be pretty near indistinguishable from one another. Konqueror blows, Opera just doesn't do it for me, and Epiphany... well... is for GNOME. :-P
I've actually been anti-FF3 until recently. My general opinion was "what's the point?" Then I tried beta 1 the other day, and I finally got some decent explanations of the new features, and I think it'll be a good thing. As soon as all my favorite extensions get ported over. Because that's really the key. Firefox without extensions is nothing super. Firefox with AdblockPlus, NoScript, ScribeFire, Del.icio.us, Google Notebook, Email This, Download Statusbar, FireGPG, and Tabbrowser Prefs... that kicks butt!
Posted by: Wolfger | November 22, 2007 at 09:45
Well, I'll start using Firefox on Linux at 3.0 if the pixmap patches made in. Does anyone have update on those? Firefox will stop reserving pixmap cache memory from X11 process? It has been extremely error prone since 0.3 or so and constantly lead into X processes growing and growing until at several gigabytes you are forced to ctrl-alt-backspace. That as daily activity plain sucks.
Firefox has had incredibly better memory management on Windows, and the memory usage benchmarks have been more honest as well. Note that on Linux benchmarks they should _always_ count also what is in the X process. There is often a lot. Hopefully this changes at 3.0.
Posted by: troll | November 22, 2007 at 11:03
Enough with the concept that Konqueror is the KDE browser of choice." I tend to always use FF on any platform possible, and although I love Konqueror to death, its web browsing just isn't as good as FF. I'm not sure how its possible that KDE wins Desktop of Choice year after year on various polls, yet it gets ignored by these companies or projects that want to create a good GUI app. QT is croos platform, why not stick with that? Or, KDE4 will be cross=platform, why not that? Because, IMHO, there is little good about trying to use GNOME apps. The print dialog sucks, the open/save dialog is worse, and the overall options inherent in its use is minimal and makes for a weak desktop experience. If its an 'ease of use' issue, thats application design, not the widget kit.
If someone wants Power Users to come to Linux, then you have to let them use Power Tools. Apps based on Gnome are like the little toy vaccuume cleaners which just pop up balls, or like a manual screwdriver. Any real work needs to be done down-and-dirty in GNOME, where as in KDE the options for real work are all at your fingertips. If Firefox wants to improve it should really consider using KDE or at least integrating better with it.
Posted by: lefty.crupps | November 22, 2007 at 13:38
I'm glad you have finally seen the light! Now you can stop bitching about my excessive Firefox 3 coverage. ;-)
Posted by: Ryan Paul | November 22, 2007 at 16:55
The reason epiphany is toying with KHTML is because gtkmozembed is a PITA. Mozilla suffers from the "do everything" problem that afflicts OO.o and windows and mac applications in general, whereas true n*x apps are built out of shared parts. See also the new visual identity for Firefox 3 on OS X and Windows XP and Vista http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/11/15/the-shape-of-things-to-come/ where it's noted that "The reason Linux isn’t shown above is that all of the feedback we’ve received so far indicates that Linux users would be happier with a theme that uses native GTK icons in the navigation toolbar ..." - integration with the rest of the system is far more important on Linux than OSuX or Windows where custom apps are very common, despite strong visual guidelines from Microsoft and Apple.
The reasons for strong integration are twofold - one, FOSS means it's generally pretty easy to integrate with other applications and the system; two, excellent package management means shared components can be managed safely and easily vs DLL hell and silo applications that include all their dependant libaries on OS X and Windows. GTK+ on Windows suffers from this, as many applications say "download the app and also GTK+ if you don't have it installed" which is great from a sharing point of view but sucks from a "I just want to run this program, why do I have to download two things?" view.
Posted by: TRS-80 | November 23, 2007 at 03:20
personally, I found the FF-3 beta to be ponderous and slow. Swiftfox feels much more agile. Maybe because you can get an (oh my god) optimized build for your particular arch, in my case a p111 but than again you guys prolly have much better hardware than I do.
Posted by: Dekkard | December 03, 2007 at 20:57
Asa wrote: "For the reasons you stated, the fragmentation of the platform, and the strange (to me) vendor lock-in that distros are propagating by trying to cut out the ISVs like Mozilla, it's a more difficult world to operate in." What vendor lock-in? I remember you posting a short comment about it on your blog quite some time ago and you promised to write more about it later, but you haven't (or I have missed it). Mozilla is clearly focused on the Windows platform (which is also where most users are), but it is still sad to see that what's supposed to be a cross platform project is creating a features that clearly aren't cross platform focused. The biggest issue in that regard is the update mechanism. At least from what I hear, keeping Firefox updated isn't exactly easy for the various distros. The good thing is that there are other choices, which is why I use Konqueror and sometimes Opera too.
Posted by: Joergen Ramskov | December 19, 2007 at 10:42
Webkit is great, but I'm tired of hearing "Webkit is native, Gecko isn't" (at least compared to Gecko 1.9).
Webkit's use of GTK themes works exactly the same way Gecko uses GTK themes. Alp is actually using our code for this. (Which is great!)
Webkit uses cairo. Gecko uses cairo.
Webkit uses Pango. Gecko uses Pango.
Webkit uses internal crossplatform APIs to abstract away platform differences. So does Gecko.
It's true that Firefox's UI is not native but that's not a Webkit vs Gecko issue. (Although a ton of work has happened lately to make Firefox 3 look and feel more like a native GTK app --- thanks to Michael Ventnor, Ian Spence, Teune van Steeg and others.)
Posted by: Robert O'Callahan | December 19, 2007 at 13:46
> integration with the rest of the system is far more important on Linux than [OS X] or Windows where custom apps are very common
Custom apps on Mac OS X?
Posted by: Bob | December 19, 2007 at 14:49