Is Chrome taking share from Firefox? | Hacker News Reader

Is Chrome taking share from Firefox?

asserttrue.blogspot.com

13 pointstechdog23 comments

I wish Mozilla folks woke up.

I'm on Mac and, to be honest, once you get used to Chrome, Firefox is completely unusable. It is slow, cluttered interface, w/o any major advantages over other browsers.

I use Chrome on daily basis and it is pleasure to browse the web. Folks, do not underestimate speed. It is one of the most important UI features.

Ironically, Flash is the main reason I'm using Chrome. Firefox is plenty fast, but tab isolation means that my browser crashes less often.

My one nitpick with Flash under Chrome is that for some reason, in fullscreen streaming video (from e.g. Hulu) the mouse cursor never disappears, whereas it does under Firefox.

I'm using vice-versa for the same case. Reason being Chrome takes up 50% cpu on an average when I'm watching youtube videos.

Out-of-process-plugins are slated for release soon. May not even require bumping the version number to 3.7 – instead we might see it shipped as 3.6.2. Here is the Mozilla project page for separate processes: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

It might be useful for the FF team to put their tools down for a while and just use Chrome (and/or Safari). Then, upon returning to FF, they might see more clearly what needs to be done to make FF better. Eating your own dogfood is good, but so is thorough study of the competition.

Eat the other guy's dogfood!

I doubt the Mozilla folks can do much about it. It's, like, 7 billion line of C++. How nimble can they be about turning that into a lean, mean, browsing machine? If they haven't done it in 10 years, they probably can't.

They're actually doing some interesting work in this space:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Dehydra

Dehydra is a lightweight, scriptable, general purpose static analysis tool capable of application-specific analyses of C++ code. In the simplest sense, Dehydra can be thought of as a semantic grep tool. It presents a wealth of semantic information that can be queried with concise JavaScripts. It is also useful to find bugs in source code as it allows for much more error checking than C++ is capable of by itself. Dehydra is built as a GCC plugin, thus it is easy to use for projects that already support GCC. Dehydra is also useful for generating language bindings and is used to bootstrap Treehydra, a heavy-duty static analysis GCC plugin.

A big cleanup of the code was announced back in 2006: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2006/10/mozi...

They've been working on it since, although I think it has evolved over the past three-and-a-half years. They've got a bunch of automated tools and subprojects to help move things forward.

I wish people paid more attention to developments.

#1: Direct2D is in Fx nightlies: http://www.tapper-ware.net/files/stresstest.comparison.ogg

#2: Jaeger Monkey: http://www.bailopan.net/blog/?p=683

#3: 64bit builds are builds are planned for 4.0 if not sooner

#4 multi-processes: http://blog.mozilla.com/cjones/2009/06/21/multi-process-fire...

Not unexpected; for a lot of us Chrome was a refreshing reboot of the browser after Firefox became a little on the bloated side.

Incidentally I suspect Firefox has gotten as high a market share as any browser other than IE will ever get.

I fully suspect that over time IE's share (the high %age of which is mostly down to the "monopoly" aspect) will continue to be eroded to level off in the 30-40 range whilst other browsers, rather than just one, will fill the gap.

Also; is the increased safari explained by iPhone usage? are they counting Mobile safari in the overall Safari stats?

On Kongregate at least the Safari growth is from the Mac, not iPhone.

And Chrome has taken share from both IE and Firefox on our site, but mostly from IE.

Safari Mac - 6.4%, up from 3.8% a year ago

Safari Win - 0.9%, up from 0.5%

Mac - 9.3%, up from 6.6%

iPhone - 0.4%, up from 0.3%

Wicked, actual data. Looks like I could be wrong then. (that's a huge jump for safari mac!)

I still use Firefox for my web development because I like Firebug much better than Web Inspector, but that's about it.

I use Chrome for everything else, and love it even more now that it supports extensions. My favorite thing about Chrome is the fusion of the search/address bar - you can just fire up a new tab and enter your search, rather than open tab, tab over to search, enter search.

It was a smart move adding that to chrome; I am completely unable to function in another browser now because of it.

Especially the auto-complete - type 2 letters and hit enter... :)

Agreed. With Firefox's auto-complete you still have to click on the list of links for it to navigate to that page, and if you enter a search term into the address bar it seems like it either does a regular Google (or default provider) search or a "I'm feeling lucky" search. The reduced number of clicks/keypresses in Chrome really make a difference for me.

Same here. I use Firefox for development with Firebug at work, but I use Chrome at home.

Makes sense. If you haven't decided to upgrade from IE to Firefox, you sure as hell aren't going to be finding Chrome on your own.

Well, a lot of EU citizens have over the past few weeks. It'll be interesting to see where each browser's market share winds up in a couple months.

I moved from Safari to Chrome. But before that, I moved from Firefox to Safari because FF is too bloated and slow on the Mac.

Still waiting for a proper AdBlock on Chrome/Mac (ie. one that doesn't just hide the ads) and I'll switch.

"GWT developer plugin" for Chrome/Mac would also be nice although it's not that essential.

Does anyone else have issues with text-selection being finnicky in Chrome, or is just my install (on Ubuntu 9.04)?

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