Why Firefox needs a Revamp

After using Opera 10 RC, I feel like I have to write about Firefox, my favourite browser till date. It’s not perfect in fact it has enough quirks to make someone hate it.

• Memory footprint – It easily takes 200MB in any configuration and if you run videos(especially Youtube flash videos) the footprint goes up to 400 – 500MB – which is criminal. Firefox needs to learn a thing or two from the way Opera and Google Chrome function – both of them have brilliant memory management. With all the features that Firefox development team is looking into, the one thing it definitely needs to revisit is its memory management. Process isolation between tabs(sandboxing in Chrome) can be a starting point for this but as I am not familiar with the codebase maybe this is not exactly true.

• The reason I love Firefox is its extensions. The ones I use regularly are Google Toolbar, Adblock Plus, SmarterFox, ShowIP, Tab Mix Plus, WOT and Download Statusbar among others(there will be a separate post for this). Now, Firefox has been supporting extensions since 0.9. But even now I don’t see a task manager kind of utility for Firefox which picks up the culprits among these extensions which cause problems with the general functioning of the browser – like memory leaks and too much CPU utilization. I would love to code this as this will be helping the users as well as developers of the browsers and extensions.

• Startup Time – Firefox has a reaaaalllly long cold startup time and even a hot startup is not comparable to the fastest one – Chrome. Firefox has some solutions to this (check this) but I am still hoping that they’ll improve this.

• Speed – Overall browser is fast but once the memory footprint becomes huge, the browser becomes non responsive. The only solution is to restart. From the point of view of an application which is meant to be used the whole day by people on a computer this is an unacceptable situation. Once again, solving the memory footprint problem should solve this, but I am only guessing.

In an era where browsers are taking up the functions of OS I don’t want firefox to loose the battle because of these reasons. Even though the development plan for Firefox doesn’t involve some of these I hope the development team will take it up and consider including these features in the future releases. For those of you running firefox, this link has tips on how to prevent Firefox from hogging memory (although I don’t know how anything that mentions restart as a solution is a good one ;))

P.S: Update – LifeHacker has an article on Five Feature They Want to See in Firefox. Seems like our wants match 🙂

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