The popularity of Firefox is definitely waning!

>> The last thing I remember hearing Eich "produce"...

>Not a big fan of Javascript, I take it?

That was far from the "last" thing he produced. How long ago did he do that? (I'm pretty sure he didn't do it at Mozilla, either). Point is, he didn't SEEM to be "producing" much at Mozilla (though I can't tell if this is because he wasn't, or because Mozilla doesn't communicate with "outsiders" anymore so we never found out).

>> Besides this, I know of nobody else that has resigned (or been "purged"), nor of any ongoing campaigns to do so.

>Would you expect to? Things like CEO's being forced out make the news. Normal level folks don't.

Again, you are implying that there is some ongoing campaign to "purge itself of politically incorrect views" (and previously, not only that but that it is taking up so much of their attention that they can't get anything else done). Do you have some inside knowledge of such a ridiculous thing going on, or are you just extrapolating based on the one CEO-for-a-day (or whatever it was) badly fumbling and resigning?

I maintain that (to the extent that it's possible to tell from outside Mozilla's concrete shell of corporate accretion) Eich was one of the overly-comfortable insider executives steering the foundation off into "just-another-company"-land, and was a terrible choice for CEO for that reason. It just bugs me that people keep skipping right over that practical matter to complain that the only reason he didn't stay CEO was "political correctness".

(Supposedly, his anti-gay political donations had actually come out [ ha! no pun intended...] previously, but it really wasn't such a big deal when he wasn't supposed to be the public face of the whole foundation. For me personally, the specific cause he was donating to wasn't the important part but rather the fact that he was so out of touch that he felt thousands of dollars [supposedly there was more than one $1000 donation, can't recall if they were to different organizations or what] was pocket change small enough to be thrown down a hole for mere political spite. That's not the kind of person that is likely to appreciate how much of a barrier to entry the "poll-taxes" of proprietary patents and copyrights are to normal people to use the "open web", which explains why he seemed so unconcerned about proprietary codecs and disinterested in promoting legally-free media ["Google won't do it for me, I give up"]).

Yeah, I know, I get a little worked up over this one - Mozilla is the last major browser project that still seriously tries to care about that participatory-web stuff, and they have a serious cultural problem undermining them in that department...and it's not "political correctness". If they can't figure out what it really is and do something about it, they're going to wither and die, and the "open web" will merely be "whatever Google feels like bothering with in Chromium and doesn't feel like making a proprietary component of Chrome instead", aside from comparatively tiny projects like konqueror/rekonq. I hope most of us would agree that this would be a bad outcome.

Meanwhile, gus3, it's not that much of a derailment - we're still discussing causes of Firefox's apparent decline of popularity, but the "it's because everyone was a meanie to Eich!" red herring thing DOES seem to dominate these discussions when they come up anywhere. :-)

krisum wrote:This is incorrect. Firefox and nearly all other browsers use multiple threads which will in turn use all cores where required. Single or multiple process doesn't matter. In fact single process is better to conserve resources and generally one finds firefox in newer versions uses less resources than chrome. The only reason for going to multiple process is to avoid taking down or affecting the entire process due to a misbehaving plugin/addon/page. Other smaller advantage is that closing a page will clear all process related artifacts for multi-process but with threads some may remain if coding is not done carefully enough (memory leaks etc).

This is all mostly incorrect. Firstly, only plugins in Firefox may be able to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. I see Flash do it quite often, as well as Java. Everything else in Firefox, from the rendering engine to the JavaScript engine are limited to the power of a single CPU core.

To showcase it, here is a page that will cause 100% CPU usage:

Quoting:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
	<head>
		<meta charset="utf-8">
		<title>JavaScript CPU Eater</title>

		<script type="text/javascript">
			while (loop = true) {
				loop = true;
			}
		</script>
	</head>
</html>

Copy and paste that in a new HTML file and open it in Chrome. Then check your system monitor / top. You will see one CPU core at 100%. Chrome will still be responsive, allowing you to open more tabs and load webpages and everything. If you open the same file again in a new tab, you will see two CPU cores at 100% and Chrome will remain responsive (assuming you have more than two cores).

Now open the same file in Firefox. Same thing, you will see one CPU core at 100%. However, Firefox will not respond to any clicks or keyboard input, nothing. Firefox will eventually have nothing else to do but ask you to kill the script.

If you load up that Dead Trigger game in Firefox and check your system monitor / top, you will notice it too does not cause more than one CPU core to peak.

krisum wrote:Multiple cores/processors will be made use by both Firefox and Chrome across pages.

This is wrong. Again I'll provide a code example...

Quoting:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
	<head>
		<meta charset="utf-8">
		<title>JavaScript CPU Eater</title>

		<script type="text/javascript">
			var lines = 1, char = 1;

			window.onload = function() {
				document.body.innerHTML = '<b>' + lines + ':</b> ';
				lines++;

				setInterval(function() {
					if (lines > 10) {
						lines = 1, char = 1;
						document.body.innerHTML = '<b>' + lines + ':</b> ';
					} else {
						if (char > 20) {
							document.body.innerHTML += '<br><b>' + lines + ':</b> ';
							char = 1;
							lines++;
						} else {
							document.body.innerHTML += '0';
							char++;
						}
					}
				}, 0);
			};
		</script>
	</head>

	<body></body>
</html>

Copy and paste that in a new HTML file and open it in Firefox, it should use a good bit of CPU. Now open as many new windows in Firefox as you like and have them all open the same file. You will see the CPU usage for Firefox go up but only ever take 100% of a single core. What I've noticed is that Firefox will switch which core it uses multiple times, but I think that is mainly handled by the OS.

Likewise, open the same file in Chrome, and again open many new windows at the same file. You will see Chrome not only use multiple core usage up to 100% each if enough windows are open, but you will also see Chrome become slower and slower, confirming my early remark on Firefox's single core design out performing Chrome despite Chrome's use of multiple cores.