On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, Martin Bochnig wrote: > More Firefox Bloat? Say It Ain't So, Mozilla > http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2007/05/firefox_bloat
A number of years ago, Firefox killed the MNG format (a form of multi-frame PNG) which was the open source world's answer to Compuserv's GIF. It was declared that a hundred or two kilobytes was way too much cost in Firefox. While MNG had successfully been in Mozilla for several years, it would not be in Firefox. In one fell swoop the Firefox maintainers essentially killed a highly viable and useful multi-frame media format, giving preference to whatever features they could duplicate from Internet Explorer, and excluding independent innovation. Instead of an integrated open source solution, this requirement is now satisified by the closed-source Flash plugin from Adobe. Without any compunction at all, these several Firefox maintainers laid to waste tens of years of development and contribution by a number of the most dedicated open source developers, and all in the name of controlling "bloat". Some of these developers are now well into their retirement with much of their life's work shelved by an obstinate Firefox developer. Where is that Firefox now? I recommend no mercy for these Firefox maintainers who have now allowed massive bloat while previously using it as an excuse to destroy the life's work of others. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
