mozilla moves to police the firefox ecosystem
4/04/2011
sources: DownloadSquad, Mozilla Slow Performing Add-Ons
After using Chrome pretty exclusively since they started releasing stable Betas for Mac, I’ve recently switched to Firefox 4 for my standard browsing. I made the switch primarily out of convenience — the CMS for nature.org only works on Firefox and it was a pain to have two browsers open all the time. However, since making the switch back to Firefox, I’ve been very happy with the new Firefox layout, which used Chrome’s tabs-on-top structure, and the speed increases they’ve made.
Add-ons have always been a great advantage (and disadvantage) of Firefox for me. They’re great because they (obviously) add functionality, they’re a curse because the wrong add-on can bog your system down and turn your nice browser into a total time suck. That’s why I really like the idea that Firefox is now listing slow performing apps. The list helps users make informed decisions about the add-ons they install and should spur developers to do better.
What’s on the list of add-on bog downs might surprise you. It’s not just random spammy stuff you’ve never heard of. Rather it includes popular extensions like Firebug, FoxyTunes and XMarks (one of the five add-ons I have on my own system).
The list, and a promise to start identifying slow-performance warnings to the gallery and block third-party installations is a nice step in the right direction for Firefox. While I’m sure some developers will immediately cry foul over these policing efforts (I can hear the “open police” already) they’re necessary to keep Firefox moving forward at this point. Firefox is not some niche product for techies who should no better. It’s a mass consumer product being used by people at all ends of the tech-savvy spectrum. When it doesn’t work they way they want it to, they’re not going to go into their list of add-ons and start tinkering. They’re going to abandon ship for Internet Explorer. And that doesn’t do anyone any good.
