Hacker News Reader

Comment by catshirt | Hacker News Reader

seeing all this energy wasted trying to convince people firefox 4 is better than ie 9 sort of solidifies my belief that chrome reigns supreme

View on HN

Given how instructive the source code is, I think it serves as a nice demo. Even moreso when you consider that this is (by all appearances, anyway) a personal project and not an orchestrated marketing campaign.

IE 9 is a valid contender, especially outside of the tech crowd. It's also about to be released, so it makes sense for marketing to focus on it.

True, but it's not the contender they should be focusing on.

It's like Apple comparing iOS to Symbian and lauding how great iOS is, when really they should be watching Android.

I work for Mozilla, and we are watching Chrome. It's just not the right time to campaign against Chrome. Chrome is only eating away from IE's market share, and IE 9 could attract a lot of non-techie users.

Adopting a process-per-tab model is currently being implemented (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis), and I imagine once that's done we will be discussing Chrome a lot more.

I switched from Mozilla to Chrome... Mozilla is just waaay too slow. The only thing I missed were the extensions, but Chrome is getting better on those as well.

Based on my experience, Mozilla has a lot of reasons to be afraid of Chrome.

Have you tried Firefox 4 Beta?

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/beta/

We are nearing the end of our Firefox 3 cycle (Firefox 4 is going to be released next month), and that's where our significant speed improvements have been implemented in the last 2 years. It's about even with Chrome speed-wise.

"Chrome is only eating away from IE's market share" Really? I'd love to see some sources on that, because I know of dozens of people who've switched from Firefox to Chrome.

Obviously I wasn't suggesting you weren't watching Chrome at all, but it's good to hear you're making the right decisions in competing with Chrome (primarily the reduction of Firefox's inherent clunkiness and slowness).

Firefox has stayed around the 30% mark of browser share, and there's an obvious connection between the steady IE drop and Chrome gain.

http://gs.statcounter.com/

There's been several articles about this:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=egsisas&xhr=t...

I've been using it for the last week or so and its a huge step forward, if you are an IE8 user, 9 is huge step forward...

Its actually good enough to never have to worry about moving to a different browser (If its what you are using).

Not saying I agree or disagree, merely: "consider the following"

Chrome: 10.0.648.45 dev

  HTML5 score: 293  FF4: 255

Compatibility differences from [1]:

( "-" == in other category )

         Chrome 10          FF 4
  Partial:
     CSS Text-Overflow
     Datalist Element        - 
     WAI-ARIA                - 
     SVG for HTML            -
     SVG filters             -
       -                    h264 video
       -                    Web notifications
       -                    SVG fonts
       -                    Web SQL
       -                    WebSocket
       -                    HTML5 Form
  Complete:
      Server-sent DOM events
      CSS Text-Stroke
      Progress & Meter
      h264 video             -
      CSS masks
      Web notifications      -
      SVG fonts              -
      Web SQL                -
      CSS Animation
      WebSocket              -
      HTML5 Form             -
                            Form Validation
       -                    Datalist Element
                            calc() in CSS
                            Animated PNG
       -                    WAI-ARIA
       -                    SVG for HTML
       -                    SVG filters
  Summary:
        87%                 81%

And WTF are they doing with that table[2] (disable "detailed tables")? It doesn't render correctly on anything I've got (OSX).

[1]: http://caniuse.com/#agents=firefox,chrome&eras=near,unof... [2]: http://caniuse.com/#agents=firefox,chrome&eras=near,unof...

Not sure why their marketing affects the actual merits of Firefox or Chrome, but. I agree that Firefox is trying a bit too hard (though this appears to simply be one user). Additionally, Chrome is still faster and has less ui-chrome that gets in my way. I also find the extensions to be more cleanly implemented still than Firefox 4's.

I have to agree.

I was an avid FF user for many years. I shied away from Chrome for quite some time, until this December. A fresh FF install with no addons was painfully unresponsive, given 'too many tabs'. Those same tabs in Chrome chugged along.

I hope FF can get back on track(relative to Chrome:P) and reduce some of the bloat.

these are all my thoughts as well. i didn't mean to suggest their marketing affects/suggests anything really. i just can't see who they're targeting with the posts. was there anyone who needed convincing that ie has less features? how does this benefit them?

in my completely unqualified opinion, i'd have guessed they'd be better off persuading the growing wave of users who are switching from firefox to chrome.

The one thing I dislike about Chrome is that I still find it buggy at times on my mac. Buggy in strange ways and especially with the inspector/debugger. That being said, I still use it as my main browser. Going back to FF annoys me when there are two input boxes (address bar and search) and that the tabs don't close under each other (for really convenient tab closing). Other than that I'm sort of indifferent.

I'd love to hear more about those bugs you're getting. Feel free to bug (hah!) me on twitter @paul_irish or report straight to http://new.crbug.com

I get a heck of a lot more bugs (almost 2x) with Firebug on FF4 than with Chrome's inspector, though that still means I have to restart both almost a dozen times (no, really, that many) per day while building a web page.

A recent one: an input field would be spontaneously filled with a "1" if (and only if) Firebug was active. Persisted across application re-starts, but not through a reboot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com