This article on Wired (titled: “More Firefox Bloat? Say it ain’t so Mozilla“) is pretty good, and I can sympathize with most of it.  However, the statement at the very end attributed to Chris Pirillo: “For the record, Pirillo says he swears by the lightweight Maxthon browser.” is just fucking stupid.  I have to hope that Chris’ comment was taken out of context and not intended to stand alone like this.  First off, Maxthon is not a browser.  It’s a browser “shell”.  It runs on top of IE.  Yes, that’s correct.  Don’t believe me?  Check it out for yourself.

Yes, Maxthon is a better IE than IE, however, it’s still IE, and thus it suffers from the same ailments and limitations as IE imposes.  During the entire IE7 beta program, the blogs were full of testers begging the IE7 team to give Maxthon serious consideration.  Either as a potential acquisition target, or simply as a partner.  Why reinvent the wheel?  It was a valid point and a very good question.  Microsoft ignored it entirely.  It seems as though they ignored Maxthon entirely as well.  Too bad.  They could have learned an enormous amount of things that would have made IE7 a much more impressive release than it turned out to be.  Alas, we have IE8 to look forward to.  Or do we?  Last year, Microsoft mentioned it quite often.  This year however, they’ve adopted amnesia.  IE-what?

Maxthon 2 is really nice in my opinion (probably worthless to anyone reading this).  However, even though it has the best ad blocking (especially embedded ads) of any browser or toolbar plug-in I’ve used yet, it’s also noticably slower due to the precaching and scanning it does to block those ads.  Of all the browsers, it is the slowest to render complex web pages.  Firefox 2 and IE7 are about equal, but only because some sites render faster in one or the other, so the net result is a washout.  Opera is pretty good, but not as fast at rendering many sites as IE7 or Ff2 (again, in my personal experience).

Regardless, Firefox isn’t getting off the hook by me.  I’m in total agreement that Mozilla has taken up the crack pipe and seen the light at the end of the bloat tunnel.  Mozilla!  It’s a friggin train!  Headed straight for you!!  Turn back!!  I really hope FF3 makes a turnabout in that respect, letting users shoulder the use of extensions as they see fit.  We shall see.

Opera?  What’s that?  You say Opera is superior?  In some respects, yes.  I was an early user of Opera and it never ceases to amaze me how many features Opera debuted, which were so quickly copied without any credit given.  Opera didn’t do enough to defend their work.  They also stuck with the retail business model for far too long, giving free browsers an easy opportunity to close the feature gaps, and expand their marketing.  I dare say far more humans on this planet know about Firefox than Opera.  A pity.  But it’s their own fault.  Oh yeah, the IE emulation feature was a fantastic effort, but it doesn’t work nearly well enough, but that’s for another day.

So, we have 2-1/2 browsers to choose from.  IE7, Ff2, and Opera9.  I don’t count Safari because I don’t have a Mac and Apple doesn’t stoop so low as to port it over to Linux or Windows.  I’m only counting those which are cross-platform.  I don’t count KDE’s Konqueror, or any of the hundreds of one-off browsers either, because they’re completely stupid.  I can’t understand why anyone even bothers making yet another web browser these days.  Even as crappy as the front-runners are, there’s no more room in the top three.  Find another solution to create.

What pisses me off most about the top three is the same: BLOAT.  They’re just too bloated.  IE also screwed up the toolbar and UI and treats users like robots by withholding customization features.  Firefox has a decent UI, but the code is too bloated and slow and some extensions conflict with others at times.  Opera is also getting too bloated and some of the UI features are just getting cluttered too much.  It’s obvious that fans in each camp are not going to tip their hats or hands to the others and therefore it’s never going to be easy to satisfy all the fans with one product.  I can still complain though.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Yeah I Said it, firefox, ie7, techy-geeky, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.