I am very happy that the Firefox team has finally managed to lick this issue. When at every occasion I used to raise this issue, the typical Mozilla Evangelist would answer:
"It is because of the add-ons".
My counter to this was that the whole Raison d'être for Firefox is its add-ons community. You cannot claim that there are great benefits to this approach while simultaneously ignoring the problems caused by it.
Better late than never. It is critical to have a popular browser alternative to Either IE or Chrome.
One is closed source and the other is produced by a company whose entire revenue model is built around showing you the most targeted ads possible in the maximum number of ways possible.
I agree. It was extremely frustrating to see the argument "Firefox is awesome because of the add-ons. Oh, you have problems? Why are you using add-ons?".
You can't have it both ways! (Also: users don't care what subsystem is causing the problem, it's your brand which suffers)
That said, I'm happy for them and I'll start giving FireFox a shot again.
If someone says "don't use add-ons", they are stupid.
If someone says "you might want to be careful enabling 20 add-ons because the chances of them all being well-written and interacting nicely is low, in which case you might need to do some experimentation to see if one or two of them are causing undue problems", they are a realist.
Having said that, it is nice that we are killing off an entire class of memory leaks in one fell swoop.
That list appears to be incomplete. For example, there is a windows-specific closed source software renderer for WebGL that is in Chrome and not Chromium.
Good lord those comments gave me a headache. How do people manage to find that page if they can't manage to figure out what Chrome or Chromium are in the first place?
My counter to this was that the whole Raison d'être for Firefox is its add-ons community. You cannot claim that there are great benefits to this approach while simultaneously ignoring the problems caused by it. Better late than never. It is critical to have a popular browser alternative to Either IE or Chrome.
One is closed source and the other is produced by a company whose entire revenue model is built around showing you the most targeted ads possible in the maximum number of ways possible.