[rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Caleb Shay]

On Wed, 2004-04-21 at 18:41, Dave McGuire wrote:
>    In the case of Mozilla, its entire user interface is built from 
> compiled-in, run-time-interpreted JavaScript.  It's like some kid 
> decided he wanted to show off how "clever" he was.  Fucking morons.

If you think about it, Motif is practically the same thing.  You've got
a bunch of defined widgets and you can customize the hell out of them
with config files.  Of course, that's why motif is such a bloated piece
of crap as well, since it has to be not just a toolkit, but a scripting
language interpreter.

I actually DON'T think that mozilla is too large considering what it
is.  Remember, browsers are NOT built to a unix philosophy, they don't
do just one thing and do it well, they have to do a crapload of things
because that is what the average user demands.  So a browser has to be
at least the following things:

An HTML parser/renderer (and keep in mind people use DHTML, so you can't
render a page and be done with it, it may be animated depending on the
end users actions)
An image renderer (for at least 3 different image formats)
A scripting language interpreter (EcmaScript)
An Xresources style parser (CSS)
A PostScript generator (for printing)
An FTP client
A gopher client (no, really.  When people discovered that mozilla had
dropped gopher:// they raised such a fuss that the developers added it
back in)
An IMAP mail client
A POP3 mail client
A local mail spool client
A debugger
A WYSIWYG HTML editor
An address book (with LDAP support)
A fucking IRC client!
Oh, and it all has to be in a point-and-drool interface

Given that laundry list, it's really no surprise that they decided to
build an application platform instead of just a web browser.

I just don't see fitting all of that in 32MB.  It would be easy to blame
mozilla for putting in all this crap, but remember, it's the end-users
that ask for these things.  Now, if I go into my mozilla directory and
run TestGtkEmbed which basically strips out everything except for the
first 7 items on my list I get an ugly, but totally functional browser
in 27MB.


Caleb