Firefox never fails to disappoint

Don't get me wrong, since the first days of Netscape (and I mean when the icon was still an M instead of an N) I've been using it as my main browser (between it and Mosaic, it was an easy choice). But boy I cannot take it anymore, the Mozilla franchaise is just all hypes.

The fact is, Mozilla is slow. "Oh, because of the seperate Gecko Rendering Engine... which we will integrate into the browser binary..." With an integrated GRE and ridding of its HTML editor and mail reader, Firefox 1.0 promised to be the slimmer nimbler new born of the Mozilla browser. But it wasn't really any faster... especially on slower machines (version 2.0 takes 8 seconds to come up on my Pentium II, versus 3 seconds for my IE 6). Firefox 3.0 promised a memory trim down, numerous editorials hailed the triumph... sorry, still slower than its counterparts in all 5 of my PCs. Ironically version 3.5's tagline is speed... it takes a whopping 9 seconds to start (in safe mode!) on my C2D 1.6 Lenovo x61s. Pathetic (this article blames a bug, yeah, we'll see).

Disappointingly, Firefox lags in features, in every sort of ways. I've talked about its feature sets before. Version 3.5 introduces Private Browsing, a moderately good idea, but Chrome and IE have already done it. Look under the hood, you realize it's still about copying other people's work. For example, it's messaging infrastructure - XPCOM - is really a copy cat of Microsoft's DCOM, just download the source and see for yourself.

I do like Firefox's ability to let me customize it; which is not found in any other browsers. But with its sluggish performance and incompatibility of many web pages out there (authors of those pages to blame), I am seriously considering switching...