400 million downloads later, I miss Phoenix
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007All highly successful large projects battle bloat and complexity. Sooner or later, lighting a controlled burn can really help out. Microsoft has done a great job with this in their Office line. Office 2003 did a lot to reduce code size and speed launch times. Office 2007 does away with more than a decade of familiarity in favor of a new and more thoughtful user interface.
Phoenix was born out of the need to cast off the horrific bloat and instability that characterized the Netscape/Mozilla suite in 2001. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross wanted a lean and mean browser that would load and run faster and provide a simple and extensible way of defining the user interface. They did a great job.
Renamed Firefox, the project just hit the 400 million download mark. Despite all this success, I can’t help but think that somebody needs to start a controlled burn on Firefox. Each month that passes I find myself progressively more dissatisfied with Firefox. Launch times are ever increasing despite my progressively newer hardware. It is wildly unstable on OS X – crashing daily. On Windows it is better, but not much. It doesn’t have to be like this. Don’t make me run IE.
Somebody get moving – build me me a better browser
