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Well, bloat is somewhat subjective, so "evidence" is hard to come by. I don't know about the other poster's reasons, but I agree, so here are mine. That xulru

Well, bloat is somewhat subjective, so "evidence" is hard to come by. I don't know about the other poster's reasons, but I agree, so here are mine. That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc. are built from the same tree is the first indicator. Then there are the multitude of build options, a few pages' worth. The output of these two commands is somewhat telling: ~/src/mozilla-1.9.2$ find -name \.c -o -name \.cpp -o -name \.h -o -name \.idl -o -name \.js -o -name \.xml | grep -v /tests/ | wc -l 11740 ~/src/mozilla-1.9.2$ find -name \.c -o -name \.cpp -o -name \.h -o -name \.idl -o -name \.js -o -name \.xml | grep -v /tests/ | xargs cat | wc -l 4386362 (Painful to construct command lines like that on a phone, and that is a somewhat old version of the tree, but unless FF4 is significantly smaller than 4m lines and doesn't require building xulrunner and FF, the point stands.) The large number of dependencies is another indicator. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that FF is still my "workhorse" browser, and I like it a lot, despite the flaws and the bloat. (I've been using Arora for a long time, but it has some stability issues still. I like Luakit, which is small and hackable, but it's kind of a niche browser. I'm not at all a fan of Chrome.)

1337p337 16y ago
There ought to be asterisks before the dots in those two find commands, which have instead turned into italics. My apologies.
andhow 16y ago
> That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc are built form the same tree > ... running wc -l on the codebase These are your "bloat" indicators? That's about as primitive as using SLOC as an indicator for programmer productivity.
- 1337p337 16y ago
  It's not a scientific metric; I did preface this by saying that "bloat" is a subjective term. But LOC of the codebase is a pretty good rule-of-thumb metric; I'm not pretending any more credibility than that. It's not hard evidence, but it is an indicator (and I chose the word carefully) that the codebase may be trying to do more than it ought to. It is an indicator in the same way that fatigue and a rash around your joints are indicators that you have strep throat, but the evidence would be the presence of some strain of streptococcus in your blood. There's no line of code that one can point to and say "Hey, that conclusively proves bloat."
ootachi 16y ago
WebKit is essentially equal: http://www.ohloh.net/p/WebKit/analyses/latest http://www.ohloh.net/p/WebKit/analyses/latest
bzbarsky 16y ago
> That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc. are built from the same tree xulrunner and Firefox are (since Firefox is a strict superset of xulrunner). Thunderbird pulls in the core code and has a separate tree for the mail-specific stuff. The line of code count is what it is, but what makes that "bloated"? Have you compared that to any other reasonably full-featured web browser (e.g. not links)? Have you compared the dependencies to any other web browser? I think you're just severely underestimating how much stuff a web browser is expected to do nowadays... Most of the build options are dead, in fact (as in, if you try to use them, they won't build). There's ongoing work to remove them from the configure script so as not to confuse people.

1337p337 16y ago

There ought to be asterisks before the dots in those two find commands, which have instead turned into italics. My apologies.

andhow 16y ago

> That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc are built form the same tree > ... running wc -l on the codebase These are your "bloat" indicators? That's about as primitive as using SLOC as an indicator for programmer productivity.

1337p337 16y ago
It's not a scientific metric; I did preface this by saying that "bloat" is a subjective term. But LOC of the codebase is a pretty good rule-of-thumb metric; I'm not pretending any more credibility than that. It's not hard evidence, but it is an indicator (and I chose the word carefully) that the codebase may be trying to do more than it ought to. It is an indicator in the same way that fatigue and a rash around your joints are indicators that you have strep throat, but the evidence would be the presence of some strain of streptococcus in your blood. There's no line of code that one can point to and say "Hey, that conclusively proves bloat."

ootachi 16y ago

WebKit is essentially equal: http://www.ohloh.net/p/WebKit/analyses/latest http://www.ohloh.net/p/WebKit/analyses/latest

bzbarsky 16y ago

> That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc. are built from the same tree xulrunner and Firefox are (since Firefox is a strict superset of xulrunner). Thunderbird pulls in the core code and has a separate tree for the mail-specific stuff. The line of code count is what it is, but what makes that "bloated"? Have you compared that to any other reasonably full-featured web browser (e.g. not links)? Have you compared the dependencies to any other web browser? I think you're just severely underestimating how much stuff a web browser is expected to do nowadays... Most of the build options are dead, in fact (as in, if you try to use them, they won't build). There's ongoing work to remove them from the configure script so as not to confuse people.