Firefox not so hot.

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Mozilla is reported to be feeling the pinch from the opposition and wants to make its Firefox browser a leaner, meaner runtime environment tool, rather than a simple web rendering device. Ben Galbraith, co-director of developer tools at Mozilla, says that browsers are evolving from page rendering applications into application runtime environments and need to be able to recreate many of the functions of operating systems. No argument from me, but I think I can hear the sound of grinding teeth from Redmond.

The spring board for this, has to be Google'a "Chrome" something which Mozilla acknowledges despite the fact that Chrome is a serious rival for the affections of the user and its business model needs to see people using the embedded Google search engine.

In the past five years or so, Firefox has been ahead of the pack but lost ground rapidly to Chrome, Safari and even IE8. It continues to rely on outdated programming which can lead to memory problems and it exacerbated with badly coded addons. It remains more feature rich, but a year or so down the line could be behind the competition, especially where user value speed.

Galbraith says he wants to have a group which will look at the way memory is used in Firefox. "We plan on the initial implementation of this tool to be simple. For memory usage, we want to introduce the ability to visualize the current set of non-collectible JavaScript objects at any point in time (i.e., the heap) and give you the ability to understand why those objects aren't collectible (i.e., trace any object to a GC root). For the cycle collector, we want to give you a way to understand when a collection starts and when it finishes and thus understand how long it took."

Firefox had 21.77% of the market earlier this year and remains the most customisable browser in the collection. But with efficient memory usage the future of the fox could be in doubt.

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