Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So | Hacker News Reader

Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

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44 pointsedw51965 comments

>Certainly, Google Chrome is now growing at a much faster pace than Firefox is.

I get tired of seeing this repeated ad nauseam. It's easy to grow fast from zero; Firefox grew fast from zero. It's a lot harder to grow fast from double-digit penetration.

While you're technically correct, the difference here is that the growth Google sees could easily be sustained. Google can expose more users in a few hours to Chrome(for free via a well placed link on their search homepage) than Mozilla could ever hope to reach in half a year without a massive advertising budget.

Combine that with the positive 'word of mouth' I've encountered so far from non-technical types and it's possible we haven't seen the knee of the curve yet in adoption growth.

Right now, Chrome is visibly faster for me. I keep hearing about fantastic new improvements to the Firefox JS engine and other components but in practice they don't seem to have amounted to much.

... (Hmm, before making that assertion I'd better test it, test test test)...

Well, perhaps I should amend that to "up until very recently, Chrome was visibly faster". As it happens I just went from Firefox 3.5 to 3.6 on this machine yesterday, and a deliberately-subjective performance test I just ran has Chrome and Firefox a lot closer to indistinguishable difference. (As an end user, I don't care about 10% differences on this or that benchmark.) I had been using Chrome for the last two weeks, but I have very badly missed NoScript and right click -> "Block images from this server". (Stupid flabby stomach ads.) Now I think I'm headed back.

But I suppose I can salvage my thesis by saying that at least until recently Chrome had a significant advantage over Firefox. If Firefox's performance catches up, that may staunch the bleeding, because if Chrome isn't much faster, why switch? Firefox definitely has more features, and nobody really cares about HTML5 right now; by the time they do FF will be there.

On both my home Ubuntu system and my work Windows XP system, Firefox and Chrome are about the same speed and the same memory footprint. However, I can't deny that Chrome subjectively feels snappier to use.

Chrome subjectively feels snappier

Right, and why would anything else matter for a web browser?

Being able to parse the whole web, not just a subset.

Sorry, I meant why would any other kind of speed matter?

Addons.

Google then is not going to be taking most of it's users from FF but from those swayed most by ads on Google, probably IE users?

At least I'm sure that Google Chrome's increase in market share doesn't necessitate a reduction for FF (though some reduction is almost certain).

Don't forget that Google actively advertises Chrome (e.g. on the London Underground), so there's even more exposure than Firefox could dream of.

Certainly it was easy for firefox to grow fast as netscape had died and ie, well, it's ie. They were right time right place.

For chrome to come along and take a large fraction of firefox users is an entirely different situation. If your claim is that it's easy to grow fast from zero as a proportion of the global internet users then the data from other browsers adoption rates does not support that conclusion.

How was it easy for Firefox to grow? When I first started using Mozilla and Pheonix then some of the most pressing bugs involved top 100 sites that simply didn't work, often not because of anything that Mozilla did wrong, just sites that actively ignored them. Chrome doesn't face anything like that now because of what Mozilla have achieved, both in the marketplace and in the standards bodies.

Opera is the best of Firefox\Chrome in one IMO. The builtin Dragonfly developer tool is basically a copy of Firebug and at least as powerful. The widgets system can basically host full fledged desktop applications. It's JavaScript implementation is as fast as Chrome's, and it's newest interface is possibly more minimal than Chrome's with greater functionality. Running custom JavaScript on every page is as easy as specifying a user script's folder and dropping your file in it.

We'll now within 10 minutes of installing 4. If it's not drastically faster than the current version, then the story is over and we're starting a dull, pointless addendum.

I want to see its memory management. Chrome destroys FF in this area, in my experience. It is even worse when you're running add-ons(which I can forgive, to an extent), but even when disabling those, it is still a hog.

I want to switch to Chrome but I can't live without a Firefox addon - tree style tab.

Wow, I have the EXACT same issue. Tree Style Tab is so incredibly valuable, I simply can't use a browser without it for any serious work.

Agreed. Tree-style tabs is just too dreamy. Though I do find myself bringing up Chrome for things like Wave, so I have Firefox up for day-to-day research/etc, and Chrome for quick things and high-JS web apps.

There's a few that are just as valuable - autopager, firegestures, swifttabs.

How can they not point out the elephant in the room? Not having H.264 support is a deal-killer for some users, and this is going to increase. As a user, this means I either see HTML5 video as broken, or I get noticeably worse quality at the same bit-rate.

This is symbolic of internal forces in the product leading to decisions that no users actually want.

Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash. Probably most will choose flash over ogg. You think any site wouldn't include a flash fallback when IE has 60% of the market? Anyone with flash installed won't notice a thing.

> Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash.

For now. When IE9 comes out it will start to become a viable business solution to develop for H.264 / HTML5 with no Flash. This may be a sweet spot for development effort versus benefit as it may be more costly to ignore legacy IE and Firefox users than to ignore iPhone and iPad.

Users don't care about a proprietary web, they care about web sites working. It's already alarming to try Youtube in experimental mode in Firefox and have it not work at all for most videos. This is supposed to be a modern cutting edge browser, right?

I haven't tried this, but it looks pretty easy to do both. At least for using flash for the the video features provided by html5

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

I think that external forces (patent restrictions) are as much an issue as internal forces. Choosing to adhere to Free software principles and avoid legally risky (for Firefox), patented technology is just as valid a strategy as licensing the codec and using closed source bits (Chrome).

I don't think H.264 is dealbreaker yet. Too few people even know (or care) about coming video standards - the only people I know who even think about such matters are geeks (aka people like you and me).

Your point on this being symbolic of internal forces in the product, on the other hand, sounds largely correct.

So the users want a web built on proprietary standards? If Mozilla had internal forces that listened to those users when it started then it wouldn't have the several hundred million users, and multi-million yearly income that it currently has.

Did you see the screenshot? Article is based on the 20 votes that the competing answers got.

Many talented developers are getting paid by Google to solely hack on Chrome - to add new features, to make it blazing fast, and to make sure it is well supported. The fact that it is open source is kind of a nice little bonus - Google-sponsored development is going to dwarf the community development, as long as Google is paying. Not only that, but any major community development runs the risk of being forked off into a less visible product if it doesn't conform to Google's direction. Google, after all, is not going to spend ad money on convincing people to download an offshoot of Chrome.

Mozilla does not pay a vast number of developers to head in one direction on Firefox - it asks the community nicely if it will head in one direction (because of Chrome's performance advantages, 4.0 will heavily emphasize that direction). By nature, this means that the Firefox codebase is going to be more fragmented than Chrome's. Things like comprehensive performance enhancements will be correspondingly tougher to do. The advantage of this is that there is a much less rigid steering committee - community developers on Firefox are free to go do whatever they want. The results are a slower, but more customizable browser.

I suspect that Chrome will probably end up with a bigger market share within 5 years, just because of Google's financial clout, but I doubt that Firefox will disappear completely.

Don't fall for the Mozilla marketing. Mozilla has >200 people on staff, and the vast majority of actual browser development is done by Mozilla staff. Getting Mozilla to actually respond to any external development community questions and feedback is like pulling teeth. There's a reason you hardly see anyone building on top of Mozilla anymore.

Mozilla's problems stem from their management simply being over their heads, and not having the chops to run a development project of that scale. A good chunk of Chrome developers used to be Mozilla developers, who probably weren't exactly thrilled with how Mozilla was being run. And talk to any third party who has tried to work with Mozilla building on the code base, and you'll hear all sorts of frustrations.

Mozilla has enough money in the bank to not disappear for a while, but they'll likely fade into irrelevance sooner, because it doesn't look like they can escape their institutional problems.

Mozilla Corporation employs 200+ people, but the community contribution, measured in commits, is substantial. But what you say about management is true. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand does. Communication between the corporation and the foundation is very poor.

In the past few years, the vast majority of commits to core browser code is by Mozilla paid staff. They mostly ignore outside contributors at that level.

It's typical of older teams or companies to fall behind and new people to outdo them. Firefox, inspired by idealism and being open source is no exception.

Their code and mindset is solving old problems. Firefox didn't need standards bodies' agreement to think of threads for tabs, but they didn't. That's because they think of a browser as something between an app and an OS, they're not sure. Google made no apologies, said the browser is the OS, hence many decisions to make it into one.

Now Google is making a huge leap to erase distinctions between the web and the desktop. Their Go language compiles so quickly it's comparable to JS compilation, but performance is comparable to C++

Talk and demo here http://blog.golang.org/2010/05/new-talk-and-tutorials.html http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/100428-ee3...

Google NativeClient is what will run this code on the frontend.

Maybe Firefox's motivations are old news now? It will be interesting to see how they react to these new developments, whether they'll add good support for NativeClient or view it as another plugin. Will they welcome desktop app capability or insist that the web just needs a few tweaks?

Two things hold me back from using Chrome on OS X:

1) Chrome's many non-standard (and ugly) UI elements. Especially the dropdown menus in the bookmarks bar.

2) Firebug - Webkit's web inspector still isn't quite there yet.

Otherwise I would switch to Chrome in a heartbeat :D

I sincerely hope with #1 you are comparing Chrome to Safari and not Firefox.

I don't know about massive decline, but they are definitely not setting the pace anymore, and they have lost a lot of their "geek halo".

I bet a lot of technical people are now recommending/installing Chrome on non-techy people's computers, and over time that adds up.

Can chrome handle mathml yet?

Edit: I just downloaded gc beta for linux, and the answer is: NO. And SVG is downright ugly (but it animates ok with javascript).

It was wicked fast, though.

It's sad not having MathML support in WebKit. It means that I still need Firefox on my Win7 and Ubuntu machines and that I'm screwed on the iPod Touch.

It looks like they are working on it. I thought Safari rendered mathml; I wonder what I was looking at?

If Firefox Mobile doesn't catch on they are doomed... That's where the world is going.

I find myself using Chrome more for content consumption and Firefox more for content creation; but that's slowly been shifting towards Chrome for both.

Just to wrap my head around Firefox---and please don't take this the wrong way---why are you choosing Firefox over Chrome, if not for the extensions and debuggers?

I use Opera, so don't construe any snarkiness; I just honestly struggle to remember Firefox's redeeming qualities. And the boot time, oh God the boot time.

One good reason is because they are committed to an open web for it's own sake, not because it happens to currently align with their advertising business, or because it helped them out from under the shadow of a competing monopoly, or because if they don't deliver then they will accelerate the irrelevance of their desktop platform. (This is also a good reason to use Opera.)

Mozilla have also built an incredible marketing machine which speaks to normal folk which seems to be missed by the geeks who are switching to Chrome. You don't get 1/3rd global market share with just geeks, certainly not the 2/3rds they've got in Germany. Apparently people think you can do this with a few advertisments and a popular brand. I wish Google luck (particularly as I think they're stealing share from IE) but I think it takes as much, if not more, support to sell a browser as it does to sell a mobile phone.

(If you'd allowed extensions as a reason, then Vimperator is nice too)

Everyone that I know are using Chrome right now, except guys like me that like to tweak their browsers (something that Chrome fails miserably) and some extensions that sadly does not fit well into Chrome architecture. The other major problem (a search bar) was partly solved by Duck Duck Go.

Why do you need a search bar in Chrome? Just type what you want into the "address" bar, and it will search your default search engine.

Also, you can easily add custom keyword searches under Preferences. For example:

Name: Youtube Keyword: y URL: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s

Then just type "y civilization v" and shazam, you're on Youtube, looking at a list of trailers and previews for Civilization V.

Firefox has the same feature; I believe it's called "Keyword Search" and can be accessed through Bookmark Manager. I always found Firefox's separate search box redundant for this reason.

>Firefox has the same feature; I believe it's called "Keyword Search" and can be accessed through Bookmark Manager. I always found Firefox's separate search box redundant for this reason.

I actually use both. I've about 20 keywords - I use the search box when I think I'll need to search across multiple engines (though I usually copy paste the words, I guess I use them as a short scratch pad) and use keywords when I expect I won't have to re-enter the search elsewhere.

ctrl+L gets you to the address bar. "?" + your query forces a default search (so you can do ?http://www.cnn.com and it will actually search for cnn.com, not take you to the site). If you add keywords, then you just ctrl+l then type, say "php in_array" and your query gets submitted directly to php.net's search engine (if you've pre-programmed it). This is actually very much like Firefox's implementation.

> ctrl+L gets you to the address bar. "?" + your query forces a default search

And for the keystroke-obsessed, Ctrl+K clears the location bar and puts in the question mark for you. :)

I really hate to not search directly on the service that I need, such as gamefaqs, jstor or arxiv

You don't need a search bar in chrome, just type the address of the site you want to search with and hit TAB. Example:

youtu+TAB and then enter your keyword. Works with every site that support opensearch. en.wiki+TAB will search wikipedia etc.

Slight correction: works with sites that support opensearch and that you previously have visited.

thanks, but now I use Duck Duck Go and bangs for the same functionality, and I love it, I also use it as my main search engine

I wouldn't say Chrome fails miserably at browser tweaking, but maybe I don't do enough tweaking myself. What exactly are you trying to do that Chrome won't let you do?

Things I can't live without:

Link Widgets: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2933/

Basically, it studies the source for links like "next" and "previous," and lets you page forward and backward with alt+pageup/down. Works great on xkcd, New York Times, and many others.

---

Noscript/Flashblock: 'nuff said.

---

Colorzilla: http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/

Color picker. Combined with Firebug, great for web dev.

---

Leet key: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/770/

Okay, this one I could live without, but the ability to rot13/hex/morse/octal/binary encode text at will is nice.

---

Facepad: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8442/

I don't really use this one that often, but it's a good example of Firefox's superiority.

I can speak to some of those:

noscript: built-in, although configuration isn't that robust

flashblock: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepj... https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gofhjkjmkpinhpoi...

color picker: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/egmjgagjcamhcilh...

Have you tried Autopager? It automatically loads the next/previous pages and shows them in line. It's pretty good in my experience with it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925/

Google Chrome's extensions are purely based on HTML, CSS and some custom Javascript. That's incredibly limiting, especially when you're talking about UI manipulation. When you're creating Firefox extensions, you're writing the same native language (XUL) that the Firefox developers use to add features to Firefox itself.

Chrome's extensions only have similar capabilities as Mozilla JetPacks have.

But it also makes developing extensions more accessible to more developers.

cache size, something close to about:config would be nice

Tab Mix Plus.

Plus, Mozilla's business model is basically done for. With Google providing a Firefox competitor, how long do you really think it will be before Google pulls their deal with Mozilla to give them money per search via the search box?

hardly, I do not see why google would prefer that a large chunk of the web users do not use its service, google still gets more money on adwords and adsense, I dare say google would pay MS to be the defalt engine on IE if this was possible, for me chrome is much more a vision of how google thinks a browser should be, lean, stable, fast and extensible

It's not a charity donation, they give Firefox money because they give something in return, user eyeballs. There will be a market rate for those eyeballs and indeed I believe they already sell those eyeballs to other search engines in certain locations (Yandex in Russia maybe?).

Yahoo?

+1 Chrome. But Firefox will always be entrenched.

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