After using FF for 5 years it got so slow on my Mac that it became unusable. I made the switch to Chrome last year and I'm not looking back. I was an early adopter and supporter (including money) but FF is no longer what it used to be. The code base is bloated, performance is sluggish, they don't seem to care about developers anymore (websql anyone, lack of officially supported debugging tool). All of this in spite of cream-of-the-crop tallent that they have acquired in the last few years. I keep asking mysel and just can't figure: how did it all go so wrong.
Which pretty much everyone developing web browsers and working on the relevant standards now agrees was a bad idea, last I checked (if nothing else because it can't be sanely standardized). Firefox 4 is shipping with IndexedDB, if you note.
> they have acquired in the last few years
And who have been working on Firefox 4. Firefox 3.6 branched from trunk in August 2009...
Yes, the release cycle is too long; that's being fixed.
Well, bloat is somewhat subjective, so "evidence" is hard to come by. I don't know about the other poster's reasons, but I agree, so here are mine. That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc. are built from the same tree is the first indicator. Then there are the multitude of build options, a few pages' worth. The output of these two commands is somewhat telling:
(Painful to construct command lines like that on a phone, and that is a somewhat old version of the tree, but unless FF4 is significantly smaller than 4m lines and doesn't require building xulrunner and FF, the point stands.) The large number of dependencies is another indicator.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that FF is still my "workhorse" browser, and I like it a lot, despite the flaws and the bloat. (I've been using Arora for a long time, but it has some stability issues still. I like Luakit, which is small and hackable, but it's kind of a niche browser. I'm not at all a fan of Chrome.)
> That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc. are built from the same tree
xulrunner and Firefox are (since Firefox is a strict superset of xulrunner). Thunderbird pulls in the core code and has a separate tree for the mail-specific stuff.
The line of code count is what it is, but what makes that "bloated"? Have you compared that to any other reasonably full-featured web browser (e.g. not links)? Have you compared the dependencies to any other web browser? I think you're just severely underestimating how much stuff a web browser is expected to do nowadays...
Most of the build options are dead, in fact (as in, if you try to use them, they won't build). There's ongoing work to remove them from the configure script so as not to confuse people.
It's not a scientific metric; I did preface this by saying that "bloat" is a subjective term. But LOC of the codebase is a pretty good rule-of-thumb metric; I'm not pretending any more credibility than that. It's not hard evidence, but it is an indicator (and I chose the word carefully) that the codebase may be trying to do more than it ought to. It is an indicator in the same way that fatigue and a rash around your joints are indicators that you have strep throat, but the evidence would be the presence of some strain of streptococcus in your blood. There's no line of code that one can point to and say "Hey, that conclusively proves bloat."
It's true, without SSD, FF3.X cold-start is not what it should be.
However, many users do face an interesting dilema. They complain about slow startup time, and at the same time, call themselfs power-users with 10+ extensions, which makes it hard to switch browsers.
The recent Skype-disaster highlighted the problem of missing extension-benchmarks for the public. I don't know how that could be done, but besides the 5-star ratings, there could be a mozilla-provided performance indicator.
FF4 does improve performance, but power-users will still use the same extensions.
