I also remember Pheonix. Where do people get the idea that it was fast and lightweight? All they did at first was stop showing the rest of the Mozilla suite, it was all still there in the code and the download.
People forget the userbase was mostly weirdos with strange ideas about an open internet in those days. I'm fairly certain anyone who was focused on speed would have been using IE or Opera. Having said that Firefox has been shrinking and speeding up ever since as success gave them the time to focus on those issues after fixing the basics like getting your bank website and other top100 websites to actually work.
They should have some early versions available to download and use just to shock the people who say stuff like this back to reality.
Firstly, every single screenshot that users have sent me over the past couple of months has been adorned with a persona. You don't like it, but a lot of end users -- where Firefox needs to make inroads do.
As far as speed, well that's just more bullshit. Firefox has never been faster or lighter than it is now. The 3.7 beta includes plug-in isolation which is one of the critical missing features right now. Good on them.
Firefox will do better focusing on end consumers (a better bookmark manager, improvements to the awesome bar, and sadly support for h.264 because it isn't going away), because nerds with nerd rage will always look for some reason to pimp up their own imagined importance by telling you why they lost you.
And BTW - I spend half my day in Chrome, half in Firefox. Many of the recent changes to FF have been great.
People forget the userbase was mostly weirdos with strange ideas about an open internet in those days. I'm fairly certain anyone who was focused on speed would have been using IE or Opera. Having said that Firefox has been shrinking and speeding up ever since as success gave them the time to focus on those issues after fixing the basics like getting your bank website and other top100 websites to actually work.
They should have some early versions available to download and use just to shock the people who say stuff like this back to reality.