Are you done with Firefox too? Maybe it's time to give another browser a chance!

Are you tired of browsers that keep freezing at the most inconvenient times, that become sluggish when running some demanding web-based apps, or that consume unreasonable amounts of system resources?

If you are a Linux user who depends on a browser for getting things done, I guess that you must be quite disappointed with most of them by now.

I switched to Firefox around January 2005, a few months after the 1.0 version was released [see Firefox release history]. Compared to the other alternatives available at that time, I think that Firefox was a very promising product and an excellent choice.

That was four years ago. Release after release, Firefox kept getting bigger and slower, with a seemingly endless hunger for system resources. And now the project that was started to combat the Mozilla Suite’s bloat seems to be getting closer and closer to becoming what it was supposed to eradicate.

The web has changed dramatically since then, and I think that Firefox simply wasn’t able to keep up with recent web trends and usage patterns. And while the people at the Mozilla Foundation were quite busy trying to win a Guinness World Record, some developers at another organization were actually working on developing a product that would suddenly take the browser scene by storm.

Less than three months after Firefox 3 was released, a brand new product came along, showing how a great web browser should be done. By the way, that episode reminded me a lot of something that happened almost 15 years ago, while a well known software company based on Redmond was so obsessed with the release of its flagship product that it almost completely missed a rising phenomenon known as the world-wide web (having then to spend several years in order to outperform its competitor). Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Posted by Marcus Friedman