Firefox fades in popularity | Hacker News Reader

Firefox fades in popularity

csmonitor.com

23 pointsduck63 comments

I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but I'm going to keep using Firefox. If nothing else, my paranoia senses are tingling with regard to Google. These days I'm heavily invested in Google - their software runs my phone, handles my email, and is my main way of searching. If nothing else, I'd rather not put all my eggs in one basket, and would rather diversify a little.

(I was tempted to downvote you just for saying "I'm probably going to get downvoted for this")

That's a reason that is probably shared among a significant group of people. It doesn't address the failings in Firefox's need to keep up with the competition, though.

At least it'll be better to use Firefox with a majority WebKit share than it was to use Seamonkey with a majority IE6 share back in '0X!

It's interesting that out of all the services Google offer you, the one you decide to turn down is their web browser. Is that an indication of the relative importance to you of these services?

I will get scared of Google when I see a Microsoft style "strategy tax" -- e.g. when it gets hard to use GMail from non-Google web browsers.

What about being scared of Google doing semantic analysis of your e-mail? Or Google remembering your search results during several months? Google doesn't tax your money, but it does tax your privacy. To me that sounds just as expensive.

Privacy taxation without representation :)

Sigh, any free email provider might do similar things (now or in the future). If that is critical, admin your own email on an OpenBSD server, or something.

But even hints of that type of behavior would be bad for business; Google is much more sensitive than e.g. Microsoft with Hotmail (sadly, it is easier to replace a search engine than Windows).

It is arguably good business for Google to not be evil.

I do, in fact think this is critical.[1] And I do administer my own mail server (on a virtual server, until I buy a plug computer). I actually think everyone (including my mom) should be able to do the same.

The "type of behaviour" I was speaking of are actual. Google do analyse your email, and they do remember your search requests. this is not outright spying like with Facebook, but this is close.

[1]: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2010/feb/01/freedom-clou...

Yes, Google analyze the email for ad purposes. I thought we were talking about much worse behaviors (e.g. looking for business insider information or things usable for blackmail).

About that, I recall a (French) celebrity whose e-mail where leaked because a Paparazzi bribed an employee of the company which hosted his web-mail. So, even this worst-case scenario can happen (though I suspect they are a bit more careful at Google).

This is more about the many tiny dangers than about the few big ones, however. I don't really know all these dangers, and they add up. In the end, this tends to be a matter of principle: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to see". I just feel safer that way.

No argument. For an example, the email of Chinese dissidents where accessed at the Google break in.

OTOH... certainly, a web email account isn't that safe -- but are you better than Google's security people? I haven't been a sysadmin for over a decade.

No, I'm not. However, if my server is compromised, I alone will be affected. When Google's servers are, many more people are affected. That makes Google an attractive target.

Actually, it's not really enough to simply admin one's own mail server. Virtually all email is sent plain text, so the owners of any of the hops the email goes through (on the TCP/IP level) on the way to the mail server could relatively easily read your email.

Of course, it's even easier to read someone else's email if you own/run their mail server. But the bar is not that much higher if you're and ISP, a colo, or any of the probably dozens of hops your email goes through before it gets delivered.

If you really want privacy, you should use encryption. The even more paranoid should use encryption and mixmaster remailers. And the ultimately paranoid should use encryption, steganography, and some carefully chosen channels for transmission.

Chromium is open source, so if Google does something really bad with it, it can be forked.

For example, possibly, tracking each unique install: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=5d2b...

Why would you think you'd be down-voted for that?

I'd cynically say that it's because any post starting with "I'm sure I'll be downvoted, but..." tends to get a much better score than it otherwise would, even if it's not particularly applicable.

I do not particularly like Google; too much power in one unaccountable entity. Fortunately the sentiment has gained popularity of late.

Chrome might be a really nice and fast browser, but Firefox is - as yet - fast enough and it provides the 4 addons that I find essential to browsing.

I often wonder if the network effects in our profession leads to this desire for one product we use to win, or if our natural tribalism exacerbates the network effects.

I don't really care if one particular browser is going up or down, I just want a competitive market based on open standards so that I can use whatever the hell browser I like and not be locked out of anything.

At the moment that means I'm rooting for IE6 to die, and IE in total to fall to around a third or less globally so that they're forced to compete.

Chrome stealing alpha-geek users from Firefox doesn't matter to me as a) there's not that many of them, and b) it doesn't reduce IE usage (nor IE6 in particular).

Mozilla should get their act together before its too late. Once they loose their mind share it will be over. Firefox on Linux is freezing and sluggish.

I am afraid it already is too late. Google just plainly out-innovated them, and there isn't any quick fix to revert that.

I'd wait until FF 4, FF for Android, Weave, and a few of the other labs innovations are out before writing Firefox off yet.

Agreed, I am a huge fan of Weave and FireFox. While I do agree that Chrome is also an excellent browser, I would hardly say it is evident that Chrome has out innovated FireFox, especially this early in the process.

It really is about speed - both load time and rendering. Sadly, I can start Firefox and while it's loading I can start Chrome, IE and Opera and they all finish before Firefox (not an accurate metric, I realise). I love Firefox but speed rules sometimes.

The only reason I'm keeping Firefox installed on my machine is Firebug. Although, I have to mention that during my last small JS project I only used Google Chrome's built-in developer tools, and I liked what I saw. Maybe FF 4.0 will be a game changer, but for the moment the actual FF is just too darn slow for a daily usage.

You might want to look at Dragonfly (Opera's competitor to Firebug):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117798

I found that turning off addons helps a tremendous amount - on both Windows and Linux. Also, 3.6 appears to be much faster. I don't think Chrome is a safe browser.

It does help, but for me personally FF is pretty worthless without the addons. No firebug? No gestures? What's the difference between it and IE at that point?

It renders correctly?

That's definitely nice for me the developer, but it doesn't really matter much for me the consumer. It's a pretty small handful of sites that haven't been wrangled to work in IE. Maybe we'll see more growth in CSS3, Canvas, etc, in use on sites that care less about IE, but for now in practice, that's not much of a difference.

Definitely a valid point, most websites render fine in IE7 and up (though IE6 is losing ground quickly). However, though most people won't examine it beyond their use, easier development generally means better web experiences, so it is in their best interest to use a (more) compliant browser. If nothing else, it's good to encourage more to use FF over IE for that reason.

And personally, I love CSS3 tricks that JavaScript isn't really ideally suited for, and Canvas is a very welcome addition.

What about Chrome, before it added extensions? What about Safari? There are a vast number of ways that other browsers are better than IE, the extensions are just one component of that.

Some of the other browsers definitely have a feature set that's more compelling without extensions. FF really doesn't for me though. The two things I can think of are a slight increase in speed, and the awesomebar (which actually negates some of the speed advantage because it's so slow).

The beauty of Firefox is the openness of the XUL platform. It's an amazing idea to make it possible for anyone who can hack HTML/CSS and javascript to be able to tweak the browser, bootstrapping web viewer with web tech. The webkit browsers doesn't have this, but most users doesn't care, and they don't care about the level of data google gets from chrome either.

But yeah, this firefox instance I am running now is pretty laggy. Something needs to be done about that.

How many popular XUL apps are there really?

Songbird? Flock?

Are they really popular or game changing?

The engineering effort for XUL slowed down Netscape 6 and Mozilla browser for years until it was of decent quality. No real apps have come out of it.

In 2010. Apps belong inside the browser. Browsers don't belong in apps.

not the apps, the firefox plugins. basically any web developer with enough perseverance can hack theorin own browser.

Opera uses the same open plugin interface as Firefox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-opera-plug-in-interfa...

The main issue with firefox currently is that its not webkit. Webkit is faster and thats what people care about mostly. That and the fact that firefox itself(the application) is slow or at least I find it to be in comparison to chrome and safari.

> Webkit is faster and thats what people care about mostly.

Not really. It really depends on the end-user. I'm sure there are lots of people like me who prefer Firefox because of the addons.

Chrome has plugins too, not as many, but I am sure it will grow as the number of users grows as well.

I use FireFox for work and Chrome for surfing function/speed respectively.

FireFox keeps all my tabs nicely open, I can have all the helpful plugins installed on it. Chrome is completely fresh install, with only xMarks plugin to remain fast.

I noticed the other day how I was using Chrome basically all the time at home even though I have Firefox setup with some very useful plugins that work well. I think it all comes down to speed. Anyone know of any good metrics on performance of chrome vs. firefox?

I just noticed that I'm instinctively using 3-4 browsers too at work and at home on a single machine.

At work I'm using Chrome for everyday browsing, Firefox/Firebug for heavy development and Opera for personal stuff (Gmail).

At home I use Safari for everyday browsing, Chromium for news/social web and Firefox for Google Reader.

i really like the fact that if the browser crashes or wants to update I don't loose everything I'm doing, only a part of it. It also allows me to focus on a task rather than a bunch of unrelated websites.

Is that a general trend ?

For me it's all about speed. Funny thing is that the same thing made me to switch from IE to Firefox.

Only things that may keep me with Firefox are now Firebug and FirePHP.

I've been the same way. I switched to using Firefox first because it was way faster than IE. Since then, it sped up a bit, and has since been bogged down by the same things that bogged down the Mozilla browser to begin with... which is why Firefox was made...

Full circle, anyone? And people are surprised they're having trouble compared to their booming, speed-oriented days? For me, Firefox is around for compatibility tests and the Web Developer toolbar (Web Inspector in Safari works better for a number of things, though, so it rarely gets used).

The address bar in Chrome works so much better than the separate address and search fields in Firefox. This is the main reason that I switched to Chrome.

At work I test on Chrome and Opera(and on IE in VirtualBox), but my main workhorse is still Firefox (on Ubuntu 9.10).

Why? The wide choice of extensions. I do try to disable most of the ones I am not using at the moment, some tend to crash things.

Still, one has to admit Firefox has bloated quite a bit since early days pre 1.0.

I stopped using FireFox recently as I was getting a bit fed up with it freezing and/or running at very high CPU utilisation and memory levels.

I will miss the "add in" support infrastructure but for the moment it is Google Chrome for general browsing.

Ultimately, I had to stop using FireFox because of these types of issues. I'd leave a few tabs open for a couple hours and find firefox at over a gig of memory use making everything run extremely slow. I don't have this problem with Chrome so I use Chrome.

Trouble is, it’s usually add-ons in the first place that are causing these issues. I recently uninstalled Invisible Hand and noticed an immediate improvement in speed for example.

That's what I thought. I tried removing various plug-ins to figure out which one was the problem. I got down to only having ad-block enabled and I didn't want to disable it.

Fair enough. At that point I usually recommend trying a new profile, but honestly a jump to Chrome is probably going to be more of a performance benefit at the moment.

It's worth pointing out that almost all of Chrome's share has come at IE's expense, not FF's.

It's like saying that voting for Nader was taking votes away from John Kerry :P

Or from Mickey Mouse.

What's wrong with Firefox?

Their biggest innovation for a long time has been Greasemonkey (was that done by Mozilla, or a plugin? Dunno, doesn't really matter). And it can't even run JS before the page loads.

I'm a bit skeptical on the source for those numbers.

"according to a new set of data crunched by NetApplications" - At least he mentions the source, even though he doesn't link it.

He also doesn't mention what those statistics are based on. The number of users, on which websites they were measured, etc.

Does the statistic include Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer?

Honestly, who uses that?

And Chrome will keep gaining with things like Google Chrome Beta Browser Adds Translation, Privacy Features - http://bit.ly/baCeoV

Another advantage of Chrome: extremely fast JavaScript engine. That puts them at a distinct advantage for the coming deluge of web apps.

Chrome was catching up.

The h.264 idealism was the last straw.

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