I think that the Firefox codebase is a lot of things. It's been around for a while, for sure. There's cruft - definitely. It's also being actively stripped of i

I think that the Firefox codebase is a lot of things. It's been around for a while, for sure. There's cruft - definitely. It's also being actively stripped of its cruft and being actively improved. I think a lot of people are coming to discover just how much 'oompf' the Firefox codebase has. For example, all of these huge JavaScript performance improvements (TraceMonkey) are a layer of additions on top of the existing JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey). So yeah, there's some really smart people at Mozilla who are making the code base quite fast - just as there are at Apple, Opera, and Google. It's a great time to be a web developers - this performance battle is just awesome on so many levels.