Did you read the article?

The vision is "users, not the device phone vendor, should be able to control what apps they can install and run".

Note that's what being built is not an OS. What's being built is a set of APIs to allow web apps to do more of the things that only native apps can do right now, so that you're not stuck using native apps that the device vendor has a stranglehold on.

What is your definition of bloat - size of download, application startup times, number of features, speed while being used, memory usage?

Firefox 5 without addons does not seem to be bloated to me by any of the above definitions. In terms of featuresets just for reference - Netscape communicator used to ship with a mail client, browser, news client, html editor and a calendar.

not so much the size of the download, but all of the rest, yes.

I feel that Firefox is nearly at the point Netscape was at the point Phoenix (the original name of Firefox) came into being.

5.0 does seem a little faster.

For what it's worth, I still run Firefox (5.0) on a regular basis, including as I post this comment.

How can "Firefox be nearly at the phone of Netscape" when it doesn't ship with a mail client, irc client or any of the other related stuff that no one needed? People hear words like bloat and jump on the bandwagon. That's disappointing for a site such at this. I personally see more memory usage for the same workload (number of tabs) on Chrome over Firefox. However Chrome's memory is distributed across more processes so it's easier to hide in plain sight.

That said, I'm starting to come round to the train of thought about a user being able to control what they install. Not all users require the developer tools, in the same way that not all users require the ability to read news feeds and in the very same way that some users want enhanced share options in their browsers.