[Gllug] Firefox

[Nix]

On 27 Oct 2009, Tethys verbalised:

> Nix writes:
>
>>FF doesn't really do 'minimal' amounts of state. IIRC Ted Ts'o
>>benchmarking it writing about 500Kb to the disk with each link
>>followed. (Blame sqlite and the 'awesome bar').
>
> Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember that. I'm still
> astounded at that level of incompetence, though.

Well, they didn't want to write their own database again. The last time
they tried ('mork') it was an unmitigated disaster:
<http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html>. Before that they used Berkeley
DB, but the awesomebar idea ('show me everything I've typed even vaguely
relevant to this') really *does* require something more than a simple
persistent key/value mapping.

So they used SQLite so they didn't have to write their own or bug the
users with setting up a DB. Unfortunately SQLite's transaction
implementation is... notably expensive even for a database:
<http://www.sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html>. This burns FF because they
don't really need all those guarantees but they can't be turned off
because they're baked into SQLite's design.

>>Welcome to the Brave New World of megaroundtrips where everyone is
>>assumed to have at least a gigabit connection path between client and
>>server :((((( GNOME and KDE are hardly good here either.
>
> Actually, it's not just round trips that are the problem. Half of
> the problem is getting the thing to run at all in the first place.
> My major gripe: Oh, you're already running a Firefox instance on
> that X server, so I'll just open a new tab/window on that rather
> than running Firefox on the remote box and displaying it on your
> X server like you asked me to.

YES ARGH HATE THE STUPID IT BURNS

>                                Vaguely related is that fact that
> Firefox is entirely single user. It simply isn't set up to allow
> you to run multiple instances concurrently (apparently the idea
> of a shared home directory is alien to the Firefox developers).

Shared home directories strike me as somewhere between demented and
insanely dangerous. *Lots* of software expects to have ownership of
its own dotfiles.

But expecting to be able to write complex state without considering
concurrency (except to drop lockfiles and regularly forget to clean them
up) is just appalling. FF's target system is Windows and it shows.

I prefer Konqueror. Sod the extensions stuff that FF gives, the
*architecture* of Konqi is nice, and at work (where I use FF) I hardly
use any extensions anyway. :)
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