An article published on Wired last week, followed by a long trail of blog posts, questioned whether Mozilla is falling in the trap of featuritis or throwing every single feature under the sun into the Firefox code to cater the most wide user base. Of course it doesn’t come for free: This approach in turn would lead (or already leads according to some of these points of views) to a heavier application demanding more system resources (mainly memory and CPU cycles) and providing lower performance.

This situation, some arguments follow, resembles the venerable Mozilla Application Suite which in its time was accused of featuring everything but the kitchen sink and serving a user interface overloaded with preferences and mail, chat, and web page authoring modules that did nothing for a better web experience, supposedly, the core of the Mozilla suite. Firefox came in response to this situation proposing a browser only application, trimming all the fat, keeping its greatest talents and adding new features all users could benefit from.

The forgotten ware

I’d like to start demystifying the Mozilla suite, which seems to have become an example of what should be feared and avoided at all cost.

My perception of the fall of the Mozilla suite and the rise of Firefox is somewhat different. For the time I used the Mozilla suite as my main web browser (from late 2001 to very early 2003 if I recall correctly) I never really felt it as the resource hog it seems to be remembered as nowadays. Or at least not to the point to make me go back to Netcaptor or Internet Explorer or keep Opera for more than a few days. What bothered me was that even after choosing the Browser only installation mode, I was sure some code was unnecessarily loaded for a module that would never use it.

This was the main attractive for me when Phoenix (Firefox’s former name) entered the scene: it was developed as a browser only from the start so I believed I could safely assume no chat, mail or composing code could exist. Today I am not that sure since, after all, it was not a complete rewrite, but still sounds to me as a better option considering this fact alone.

The success of Firefox is in no small part due to the product itself, but no small part is due to the Mozilla Foundation’s decision of reaching end users with this new product as well. Before Firefox, Mozilla’s approach was to deliver a platform for Internet applications targeted to developers. The Mozilla Application Suite was nothing but a working example of what that platform could deliver, and its success, while limited, an unexpected consequence.

Firefox instead came accompanied with a strong grassroots marketing effort, first seen for an open source product. One of these efforts resulted in the creation of the Mozilla Links newsletter back in September 2003, which morphed into this blog on 2005.

Mozilla couldn’t be called a bloated browser because it wasn’t a browser but an application suite to begin. It was as bloated as a Swiss Army knife can be called a bloated knife: if you just need to cut or browse perhaps the problem is your selection and not the knife or suite.

Coming next: So what’s bloatware anyway?