By popularizing tabbed browsing, and allowing functionality extensions via add-ons, it’s easy to see why only Mozilla Firefox legitimately threatens Internet Explorer’s stranglehold on the browser market.

Firefox 3 on Windows 7

Yet Firefox’s developers have never made the browser more memory-friendly. Understandably, keeping multiple windows with multiple tabs open is very demanding. But Mozilla should’ve realized that a long time, as people started keeping tabs (pun intended) on things, and opening multiple windows to ensure they wouldn’t miss out on apparently compelling content. Users installing myriad add-ons probably didn’t help too.

It’s good that the Firefox 3.5 preview shows support for open source video. But I hope Mozilla takes steps to make their flagship browser less demanding on computers. It can demand a performance rating system for adds-on and help users stay away from unnecessary yet demanding plug-ins (non web-designers would find no need for Firebug for example), while concentrating on making the code do more for less.

That’s how I’d change Mozilla Firefox. What about you?

Amazingly, for all the web design nightmares it causes, Internet Explorer 6 has proven pretty resilient. Despite being the oldest version of Microsoft’s maligned web browser, over 40% of web users used it, according to web analytics firm Omniture (as of December 2007).

It’s as if those pesky customers refused to update to a more advanced browser (heck, even IE7 would’ve provided a better and more secure browsing environment). Thus, it seemed that companies like 37signals and Google had to take the lead, having to publicly announce that they would no longer bother making future and current projects work properly on IE6, an application that was released way back in 2001. Read more