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Firefox's closest competition, feature-wise, in early versions was Opera, which was adware with a pay-to-remove-ads option and already did pretty much everythin

Firefox's closest competition, feature-wise, in early versions was Opera, which was adware with a pay-to-remove-ads option and already did pretty much everything that Firefox brought to the table, and then some. I loved Phoenix/Firebird/early-Firefox, but it's hard to make the case it was better than Opera for ordinary users at the time—except that it didn't have ads, and was a little smaller/leaner. Firefox became far more successful than Opera, at least outside the embedded market. Maybe the adware browser model can make a comeback and be super-successful this time because things have changed, but it didn't work very well the first time. ("But these aren't ads, they're optional themes" true, but you wanna bet they won't advertise it with one or more pop-ups and/or focus-stealing-to-new-advertising-tab thingies, like they do with everything else? Which is funny because one of their big selling points originally was automatically blocking pop-up ads)

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I used phoenix/firebird/early-firefox too. It was never really smaller than the mozilla suite, they just simplified the UI. This is not intended as an insult, it was exactly what was needed and worked out really well for everybody, it's just amazing how much the reality got lost. In particular, Opera while going the opposite way with their "everything and the kitchen sink" interface for the power user market were legendary for small, fast and nimble code, which is how they ended up running on the Wii and Nintendo DS around this time. I'd be very suprised if they weren't always a smaller download, even with bitorrent, email, ftp clients and whatever other crazy nonsense they had built in. I'm going to check though, just in case it's me that's mistaken. Pheonix 0.1 was double the size of the Opera download at the time.
- brimble 5y ago
  0.5's installer is a little over half the size of Mozilla 1.0 (~6Mb vs. ~11Mb, for the Win32 versions, both from 2002) which fits with my recollection that it was noticeably faster to download than Mozilla (on, say, Dial Up). I wanna say the on-disk install footprint saw an even bigger difference, but I don't have a great way to test that out quickly. I think we'd definitely class a browser [edit: a modern browser, that is, I'm making the comparison to illustrate that 5Mb wasn't a small difference back in 2002] with an install size a little over half that of Chrome's as notably lighter-weight—though, sure, they did get there largely by just cutting stuff out. You're probably[1 EDIT] right that I'm mis-remembering Opera's download size. I recall it feeling heavier in use, but that was probably something to do with the feel of its particular (non-native) UI, and maybe the extra system resource strain from loading and displaying banner ads for the ad-supported version (there were still some really weak computers in wide use in 2002). [1] I only wrote "probably", originally, because I didn't bother to verify it—not because I don't believe you on that point. I didn't express that very well.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I used phoenix/firebird/early-firefox too. It was never really smaller than the mozilla suite, they just simplified the UI. This is not intended as an insult, it was exactly what was needed and worked out really well for everybody, it's just amazing how much the reality got lost. In particular, Opera while going the opposite way with their "everything and the kitchen sink" interface for the power user market were legendary for small, fast and nimble code, which is how they ended up running on the Wii and Nintendo DS around this time. I'd be very suprised if they weren't always a smaller download, even with bitorrent, email, ftp clients and whatever other crazy nonsense they had built in. I'm going to check though, just in case it's me that's mistaken. Pheonix 0.1 was double the size of the Opera download at the time.

brimble 5y ago
0.5's installer is a little over half the size of Mozilla 1.0 (~6Mb vs. ~11Mb, for the Win32 versions, both from 2002) which fits with my recollection that it was noticeably faster to download than Mozilla (on, say, Dial Up). I wanna say the on-disk install footprint saw an even bigger difference, but I don't have a great way to test that out quickly. I think we'd definitely class a browser [edit: a modern browser, that is, I'm making the comparison to illustrate that 5Mb wasn't a small difference back in 2002] with an install size a little over half that of Chrome's as notably lighter-weight—though, sure, they did get there largely by just cutting stuff out. You're probably[1 EDIT] right that I'm mis-remembering Opera's download size. I recall it feeling heavier in use, but that was probably something to do with the feel of its particular (non-native) UI, and maybe the extra system resource strain from loading and displaying banner ads for the ad-supported version (there were still some really weak computers in wide use in 2002). [1] I only wrote "probably", originally, because I didn't bother to verify it—not because I don't believe you on that point. I didn't express that very well.