EconTech

There has been an ongoing benchmark battle between Webkit/KHTML, Firefox, and Opera. The Firefox devs, after seeing their browser lose (anyone surprised by that?), suggest “turn off extensions.” Well, yes, that ends up improving performance. But the point is, they forked from and then shot in the back the Mozilla Suite/Seamonkey, which implemented tons of features that Firefox stripped out for the sake of simplicity. Of course, like the Gnome devs, the Firefox devs mistake crippling features with an easier interface. There is always about:config, and you do not have to kill features to make a simpler interface (and I STILL fail to see how it is any easier to navigate than Seamonkey’s). Anyway, they killed the features and slightly modified the interface in the name of streamlining. As we all know, that failed miserably (because the majority of the bloat was coming from elsewhere, and they were refusing to implement patches that fix it, e.g. the full pixmap images in memory stupidity). Then they make a (much nicer than seamonkey’s) add-on interface and tell users “Use add-ons to make the browser work how you like!!!” (aka how it worked before they stripped out functionality). THEN, when you complain after 2 hours of surfing around the net finding the 30 extensions you need to get back most of the browser that used to Just Work that Firefox is working slowly, they tell you “uninstall your extensions for speedups.” But, WTF! You just told me to install these damn things. I got them from mozilla.org/com. Make up your damn mind. Of course, we all know they are incapable of doing that. Thus, we must sit and wait for a complete merger of KHTML/WebKit and more complete implementations of the related browser on the other platforms so that we can jump the Gecko.