Not trolling, but perhaps I was unclear.

First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010, and it's clear the FF team has moved to improve performance since then. Perhaps my impressions from that time frame are no longer valid, but the issues I checked in Bugzilla while writing my post seemed largely unresolved.

I said "gestalt" to criticize not Firefox's actual development process, but the impression one might get as a longterm user (e.g. me.) Things like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=474718, which stood unresolved for roughly two years. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185236 went unresolved for almost NINE years--was just fixed last week. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=279048: five years.

    "This is an easily-demonstrated bug that "renders" (so to 
    speak) many pages unusable, or forces designers to impose 
    kludgey Javascript 'fixes' for Firefox users. This bug has
    been around for many versions, and has been mentioned many 
    times.

    Please, please someone on the Firefox team -- take on this project."

It's not just FF: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12916 is still unresolved, after eleven years, despite a hundred dollar bounty. Bugzilla is full of wontfix/worksforme legal wrangling where users unable to write the patches themselves (and having dealt some with FF's internals, I understand why) are told that their bugs don't matter.

Meanwhile, FF expanded from its stripped-down, single-purpose origins into a memory-consuming beast. On my Linux machines, it crashed daily. I would much rather see crashes, leaks, and slowdowns addressed before building new systems like the Awesomebar, tabs-in-titlebar, phishing prevention, and so forth.

Every developer I know has switched to Chrome. When I ask about it, I hear common rationales: speed, robustness, parsimony.

Does that clarify my criticism? There's a lot of great code in Firefox, but I don't think we should paper over the holes in the software or its development culture.

Aphyr, every single browser engine has longstanding bugs; it's just a matter of priorities.

WebKit doesn't have load events for stylesheets either, for example. It has buggy CSS selector matching, on purpose (doing the right thing was deemed too slow). There are multi-year-open bugs in V8 and Chrome, and that whole project hasn't even had an open bug database for more than a few years.

So I'm not sure the development culture is any different. You just haven't had a chance yet to file a bug and get it ignored by the WebKit folks for a few years. It happens all the time....

You're absolutely right; I've been bitten by chrome/webkit bugs as well, some of which remain unpatched. And Chrome's relative youth means the browser code hasn't acquired the same level of cruft--so I can't strongly infer a difference in process.

> [WebKit] has buggy CSS selector matching, on purpose (doing the right thing was deemed too slow)

Can you substantiate this? (both the buggy selector(s) and the reasoning)

I have no role in any of this; I'm merely interested in the bugs.

> First, my information is about a year out of date. I only used FF (well, Mozilla Suite/Galeon/Phoenix/FF) from around 2001-2010

Oh, ok. The last year was a big year for FF performance: There have been huge gains in speed and reductions in memory usage. FF4 began that, and FF7, 8 and 9 take it even further.

Given that you are talking about the time period before that, I can understand more where you are coming from - performance was a lesser priority then compared to other features. Thanks for clarifying that.

They now fire `load` events on stylesheet loads? Awesome! Shameful it’s been that way for so long. I’ve seen terrible work-arounds like always just firing a faux-load event 100ms after the stylesheet was added to the page, in the wild.

> I'm not sure if you are just trolling or not.

He made a valid and extended argument, one can read and agree or disagree with.

You isolate just a phrase from it and call him on "trolling"?

In general, internet discussions would be much much better if "troll" and "FUD" weren't used to disqualify arguments we don't like (or, maybe weren't used, period).

To throw around comments like "but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness" - that's textbook flamebait. It's a direct insult to Firefox developers and fans, and its only result will be to start an argument. So it's a natural suspicion that he might be trolling.

In any case, I gave a reasoned response, giving him the benefit of the doubt that he isn't trolling. But if he was, I guess I was wasting my time.

I do agree with you: Internet discussions would be much better if we did not use "troll", "FUD", "flamebait", etc., but also if people did not act in those ways.

> To throw around comments like "but the gestalt of Firefox is of a development process that values press and feature creep over performance and correctness" - that's textbook flamebait.

Sure, but it can also be his honest opinion, that he came to by comparing, say, the minimal changes between Chrome versions and the more evolved FF updates. What I'm saying is, the entirety of his comment matters to see if it's "trolling" or not, not just a juicy quote.

You're right, the rest of the comment was not so bad, and that's in his favor. He could have avoided the flamebait sentence and I would have politely disagreed but had no issue with his comment.