As a heavy web user I typically use Firefox as my browser of choice. Recently much has been made about Firefox becoming bloated as it continues to evolve and gain market share – I agree with this 100%. I remember the initial releases of Firefox being so sleek and fast; with the latest version I might as well be running IE.

If it weren’t for the plugins, I would have moved on to something else – either Opera or back to exclusive Safari use on the Mac – but some of the plugins I’ve grown so accustomed to using that I’m not sure what I would do without them.

Some say the plugins are the source of the performance issues. While I only actively run 3, I decided to do a complete reinstall of Firefox 2 without the plugins to see if it would help any in the performance department. As far as I could tell, there was no noticeable difference.

I wish it weren’t the case that companies think they need to keep piling on new features with every software iteration. I’d gladly take performance any day of the week over a bunch of things built-in that I simply don’t need. You’d think Firefox would be all about this as they have such a robust plug-in library that allows users to pick and choose what they want to add, but they too keep adding on unnecessary weight to the base browser.

While I use a PC at work and have some Firefox performance problems – my main problem is at home with Firefox for my Mac. Not only is the thing a resource hog, but it has started constantly crashing when I simply try to quit it. To me it just seems like Mac Firefox is simply a port of the Windows Firefox – and runs accordingly.

As such I’ve been trying to use Camino, Mozilla’s Mac-only browser, more for my everyday browsing. It lacks the plug-ins of Firefox (so I keep that minimized) but it allows me greater access to pages then Safari does. It also seems to run much faster then Firefox, likely because it’s simply not so bloated. Camino also looks much nicer on a Mac then Firefox does.

But hope still remains for Firefox on the Mac. Supposedly Mozilla is hard at work on making Firefox 3 – due later this year – for OS X, more Mac-centric.

This should be nice, but only if they are able to significantly improve performance. They simply need to cut off all the fat and make a browser that has a bare-bones base and allows users to add whichever plug-ins they want. Bigger (more features out of the box) isn’t always better.

[UPDATE 5/20]: The New York Times has a new piece on the growing pains of Firefox.