Re: On what planet is Firefox bloatware? #
Walker, your fanboy's Firefox thong is showing.....
Firefox has become an immense piece of bloatware over how it started, and there are many people that fail to see how it is bloat. Bloat is more than how big the installer is!
It started with good intentions, of being small and fast compared to the Mozilla suite. FF became popular quickly, and instead of focussing on getting FF trimmer they seemed to focus on pandering to the sudden masses of users. So it got face lifts and interface shuffle-arounds, with only minimal back-end changes, but it got more and more users.
At some point Google got involved to fund the project, meaning suddenly FF was not as focussed on being a good browser, but being a platform for Google to make money - things like Google being the default search engine, I think the OCSP verification, etc..
But with all these users suddenly FF was looking to be a credible threat to IE, so people's jobs at Mozilla changed or became more targeted at getting IE users onto FF. Pay rises, promotions and other perks based on numbers of users of FF means FF is now chasing the section of society that uses IE. Hardly people that are very discerning about software!
This was most noticable when FF3 came out with that massively messed up URL bar. It may be great if you don't know how to use a browser, but if you do it is a royal pain. That is a feature that should have been an extension all along, but because FF has become bloatware it got shovelled into the main project and forced on all users!
Sorry, but I don't want to run an IE by another maker. I want a light, fast browser where I add the features that I want, not be given hand-holding features and told "it'll make it easy to use". It was easy to use: I knew how it worked - it cannot get any easier than that!
And what features has 3.5 brought? The <video> tag? Well, that failed IIRC, and some damn feature where a website can find out where you are automatically? No thanks, I do not want that ability! If a site needs to know where I am, it can ask and I will key in the info. If a user wants this feature, maybe they should have it in an extension?
The geolocation tab might be useful for the a very small minority of computer users who have netbooks, but otherwise it is just an advertisers' wet dream.... see, the Google involvement again.
Unfortunately I cannot code, but if I could I would be very tempted to fork Firefox and make something good. I wish someone would..... A browser that is just a box for rendering HTML and showing images, and supports extensions.