Back few years ago, there are a bunch of dude released a lightweight browser named Phoenix (way back in 2001-2002) as an alternative to the current Mozilla browser release.
This lightweight browser which contains no more than bare component (Gecko) to enable web browsing was a major attraction by itself. Then they changed the name to Firebird and finally to Mozilla Firefox because of legal issues. Its not about the naming problem though, a rose by another name is still a rose.
Mozilla Firefox gain the fame of being a lean and mean web browser, as in its original vision. But then things started to change. As the user grew, they started to add features that make the browser become more complicated. Bugs and usability problem begins to rear its ugly head. One of the things people might notice is it began to eat up much of valueable resources. CPU usage starts to shoot up, memory leaks being the norm since 1.5.x release. It does not feel like a “lean and mean” browser anymore.
What matter most is not the bell and whistle, if people want that, they would just download Seamonkey, because why else it is being offered in the first place? Fix memory and CPU resource problem because it is so damn obvious it failed to act as lightweight browser there. We dont need all the bell and whistle, a “simple lightweight” browser would suffice.
Perhaps we need another “Firefox” to Mozilla Firefox, this time for real…
I think that a lot of people have forgotten the rules of Unix program development, too many programs are written to do too many things, the golden rule is “do one thing and do it well”. GNU diff for example IMHO is bloated to buggery. If the Unix rules were adhered to then Linux distros wouldn’t matter (and to a point today they don’t matter), it’s the GNU software as a whole that makes a distro.
That’s firefox’s problem, it does too much, it should be a shell to the web and a shell only, plugins can feel free to add functionality, as long as each plugin only does one thing.
@mypapit
At the moment, Epiphany satisfies most of my need of a lightweight browser. And the alpha release Webkit browser, Midori, is taking my attention lately.
@andrew
single distro is quite unable to cope the nature of OSS. lots of people have lots of different goals they want to achieve. Having only one project made it a hostile environment where there can be a lot of infighting because of the difference of opinion.
plus, the diversity of oss world is what made its stronger against attackers as there are no one-point of destruction like in windows world.
What we need is not another offshoot browser with good intentions. What we need is for those developers who have issues with the current open source browsers to jump in and help with those existing projects, to make them better.
Just look at linux. There are so many distributions it’s ridiculous. Yes, some of them work semi-out-of-the-box (Ubuntu, for example :D ), but imagine what a killer, stable OS we could have if every linux distro team worked on the same, single distro?
What we need is not *more* alternatives, but *better* alternatives.