bloatism: a disease-like process of software getting bigger and bigger all the time and losing the focus on KISS
Many people know that problem, especially older ones. Software you get used to over the years and that is in a constant development process grows bigger and bigger, gets new features with every major version number step. The point is: when does the developer thinks the software is feature complete and should it be feature complete at one point in time at all? And what is with new features because of new requirements from outside?
At the moment the software I’m referring to is opera, the browser. I use it since many years and it was my favorite browser all the time. And it is still yet. I had a discussion with friends about it. They stopped using opera because they mostly don’t like many new features, some of them they hate (despite that the fact that one can disable many of them). On such feature is that there is only the domain part of an address displayed in the address bar. If that option is disabled you’ll see the full address but the non-domain part in lighter gray. Not a big deal in my eyes. I’m annoyed by things like bittorrent or mail client in the browser and the fact, that you don’t have to use it but it’s in the software (in the code) anyway. And every tiny little feature adds up to a big extra chunk of code that bloats the whole program and makes it slow. Sure, opera is one of the fastest. But it could be the fastest. I would love a slimmed down version, without mail/bittorrent/rss/chat and all that things that are better handled with a extra program. I would love a insanely fast browser with low memory usage.
(And: nope, firefox failed. It’s to slow even out of the box, without any add-on)