Chrome Overtakes Firefox Globally for First Time
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This may sound too political for a software choice decision but hey, I LIKE MOZILLA FOUNDATION and their products.
So I'm glad Chrome exists and I hope it continues to do so, but they're not moving in a direction that remotely interests me.
You can certainly do business with companies, while showing preference for an organization that shares your values whenever such an organization exists.
but thinking Mozilla values privacy because it is a non profit is not a great reason.
I think it is more that some people (including me) think Mozilla values privacy because they flat out say they do and then they have a consistent track record of supporting privacy. The fact they are non-profit does make it slightly easier to take their statements at face value, but it is their track record that really demonstrates it.
Mozilla's entire business model isn't based around getting to know you or you habits better. Google has an inherent and fundamental financial interest in being able to follow what you do browsing day to day.
http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-d...
“We develop our product and technical direction as part of an open process unrelated to the search relationship with Google. We talk to Google about the parts of the product that offer Google services (i.e., the Firefox Start Page) and the services they provide, like anti-phishing. Otherwise Google does not have any special relationship to Mozilla project activities.”
In any case competition is good. I don't think we'd benefit from a purely trident or webkit or gecko world.
I'm also a bit perturbed by the fact that Mozilla has always touted extensions as a key feature of Firefox... only to say you should disable them all if you want good performance.
Addons are loading arbitrary code into your browser though, so there is a potential for perf impact. We're looking at that too, with out-of-process addons (see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/docs/sdk/1.3/dev...).
Addons don't in general hurt perf, but it is definitely possible for them to. Firebug, in particular, disables the JIT so it can debug it, making Javascript execution painfully slow, and thus the browser is slow too, since large parts are written in JS. Firebug isn't to blame though; we just haven't provided them with APIs to do better yet.
Firefox 8.0.1 is really fast now it's 8.0.1 that's the best update they have done.
And Firefox isn't that slow in its latest incarnations.
I'm also not sure what you mean by "not being self-contained." Chrome relies on OS subsystems where appropriate because it simplifies management and provides a consistent user experience--that's why we use the OS certificate store and proxy configuration settings. We've also seen quite a bit of enterprise uptake because Chrome is the only browser that provides full centralized management on all supported platforms (via Windows group policy, Puppet, etc.).
these things are awesome! firefox just doesn't work with most sites on my company's intranet (particularly with authentication), but when i use chrome, everything just works.
I don't run an IT department, but the self-updating browser seems like a pretty good win. Doubly so when it's very secure.
Chrome extensions are limited to modifying the current page and displaying an extension icon. They can't modify the browser itself. (Although no extension system will ever compete with Emacs for fully modifying the host application, Firefox does a decent job.)
I have a few thousand bookmarks in Delicious, but I've nearly stopped bookmarking altogether. I noticed that I almost never look up bookmarks later, so I've started keeping really important urls in org-mode and discarding everything else. Google is good enough for most recall. For everything else, org-mode reminds me that the bookmarks exist which I tended to forget with Delicious.
Google is fine for most recall, as long as what you're looking for isn't in the darkweb (like my dozens of achive.org bookmarks), but why bother with Google, extra steps, extra friction.
Side effect of the awesome bar and compulsive bookmarking though: I rarely have more than a dozen tabs open because picking up where I left off has so little burden.
And yeah I do end up with thousands of bookmarks I probably won't even use again, but it doesn't interfere with anything.
Me too. I will never understand people who complain about Firefox (or any other browser) getting slow when they have 50 tabs open. If you had 50 physical documents on your desk, wouldn't you put away at least 40 of them in a neat stack elsewhere? Just having them all spread out in front of me would give me a headache.
And yes, I also end up with thousands of bookmarks in a very complicated hierarchy. Sometimes this makes the Bookmark manager crawl to a halt.
This article inspired me to try Opera again. But now 10 seconds spent in the Pentadactyl quick-start guide have made it clear that I'll be back on Firefox after being a dedicated Chrome user for at least four years.
I also surf a lot more than the average user and i use the default Chrome settings. Middle click and Tabs are everything i need.
What you are talking about, doesn't sound like a lot. I don't download much and everything get's straight to my download folder. But you are right about this one, not very customizable. Is there no api for an extension?
Plus after closing a tab, the "tabs don't resize until you move the mouse away" thing. And tabs living in the titlebar, so they get Fitts' Law infinite width targets in full screen. So good.
One set of users finds that Chrome "looks better". (Although, personally, I not infrequently differ from these opinions.)
Another set of users find that Firefox "behaves better" and/or is "more customizable".
I find myself more in the latter camp. While I greatly appreciate some of Chrome/Chromium's technical points, I find that both with its UI and with Google web properties, the designers are running amok. Unituitive and minimally discoverable widgets and behaviors. Common "power user" functionality disabled (anyone juggling several items/contexts should, in my opinion, rather value most recently used (MRU) ordering in tab cycling).
(As a comparative example, the "breaking" of Alt-Tab in Ubuntu Unity is somewhat analogous; I want a one keystroke (or key-pair-stroke) step to get back to my last context, whatever fricking program was running it.)
To the specific point in the parent, minimal tab size can be adjusted in Firefox (Google up the relevant setting accessible via about:config .)
More generally, Firefox lets me control how I used web resources. Chrome, less so, and Google seems to be moving in the direction of further and further slotting the user into their desired experience. (Sound familiar?)
As for extensions, the Firefox extension ecosphere I still find navigable (although it does appear to be suffering; making and maintaining an extension does not appear to be a particularly rewarding experience). The Google ecosphere I've mostly given up on, but when I take the occasional glimpse it still appears to be, viewed in the large, opaque and poorly organized and/or presented.
So... I keep my Chrome installation clean and use it for "secure browsing" to a limited set of properties.
I use an extended Firefox for tackling the larger, hairy web.
(And Opera to further segregate a few other items.)
By the way, Firefox also has the "tab doesn't resize or move until you move the mouse away", and it's pretty useful indeed...
Chrome has the best "Incognito" mode, though... after Opera's "Private tab" feature, of course :-).
(It used to be an about:config setting, but apparently it's now handled by UI CSS, so you could use a CSS file instead of the addon if you wanted)
As a power user I don't know (I don't even consider it), but as a developer I see my colleagues struggling with Chrome's over-aggressive cache every day, and it truly boggle's my mind that Google's developers, with their roots in the web, still provide no way for chrome to be sane cache-wise. The bloody thing caches more aggressively than Internet Explorer, getting it to release cached files is an exercise in frustration and you can not trust that it's done so without checking the actual code it's downloaded in the devtools.
While I'm writing this, I should also point out that browser sync is a great example of how Mozilla and Google take a different approach to solving the same problem. Firefox's sync encrypts all data locally using a cryptographically secure randomly-generated key then uploads it to Mozilla's servers. Chrome's sync, by contrast, only encrypts passwords locally by default, leaving bits like your browsing history unencrypted on Google's servers. Chrome does have an option to encrypt everything, but you have to enable it in the preferences. (Firefox has no option to disable client-side encryption.) Even when you enable client-side encryption in Chrome, your data is encrypted with your Google password. This is less secure than Mozilla's approach because 1) your password likely isn't sufficiently complex or random 2) Google sees your password periodically (e.g. when you log in to Google services), meaning they possess the key to unlock your data. With Firefox Sync, Mozilla never sees your private key, so there is no way for them to see your data. Ever.
Google's business model means they have an inherent interest in your synced/private data. Mozilla has no such interest in it. Therefore, Mozilla locks the door and throws away the key.
Personally, I'll be using Firefox with its fantastic tweakability and addons, but anything which causes there to be multiple major browsers is good, because it means people have more incentive to create standards and stick to them.
I'm not sure. I think it's the opposite. Most end-users won't really know or care what browser they are using, but they do care what their hobbyist/technical friends/colleagues/kids use, because those are "the experts" so they know what's best.
Chrome had very significant uptake among those, and one of the reasons for the very steep growth in its market-share is that this "trickles down" to lesser experienced users. It's also the biggest problem for Firefox, because it gained its market-share in exactly the same manner.
And for the users that were impervious to this, bundling deals like with Skype and Flash are also obvious big wins over IE and Firefox.
I'd be curious what features of Chrome make you believe its a more slick experience for the end user as compared to Firefox.
Firefox gives you a lot more power, but everything you can do in it beyond the basics gives you the possibility of things going wrong.
So you can install Tabmix Plus, but that gives you a wall of tab options that can leave you wondering how to find things. You can install NoScript, and be left wondering why half of your web pages don't work any more.
When it comes to "plain Firefox with nothing installed" and "plain Chrome, with nothing installed" I suspect they're about as easy to use.
http://www.salsitasoft.com/blog/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome...
On a side note, I'm tired of having to design and develop around IE. All versions have the promise of adhering to modern web standards, but with each release, they tend to fall short of those promises.
IE10 is pretty solid, but you're right, we'll have to develop and design for older versions for a long time.
The fact that Chrome developer tools are built-in and seamlessly integrated is what makes it my primary.
I'm not sure if that's still a problem, or if that's a problem on other platforms, but now I use Chromium on Linux and I've never had any major issues. (Except sometimes when Flash is involved, but this is Hacker News).
IE 53% Firefox 22% Chrome 18% Safari 5% Opera 2%
--------- Stats Counter: Stats are based on aggregate data collected by StatCounter on a sample exceeding 4 billion pageviews per month collected from across the StatCounter network of more than 3 million websites. Stats are updated and made available every 4 hours, however are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 7 days from publication.
Net Applications: Accumulates data from 160 million monthly visitors to its network of hosted websites that collect statistics. The average traffic for a HitsLink customer is just over 1000 page views per day ------
On sample size Net Apps are not nearly as good nor do they have many foreign market users to give a true global picture. It was not until 2010 that Net apps weighted by country population figures which skewed their results heavily to the US market share. And it has been alleged their stats are for sale.
IE: 50% Firefox: 20% Chrome: 17%
Another good source are wikipedia stats which are pretty global too and closer to statcounter than netmarket, here are the stats for October 2011:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/Squ...
I'll say that Firefox isn't perfect and there are quirks & oddities with bits of the interface. I'm sure there are bugs for most of them though.
(note: I work at Mozilla on Firefox, so while I'd normally be curious, I'm invested in fixing problems!)
I am glad to see how far we've come.
E.g. it had okayish system integration while other browsers have it awful. It displayed site favicons in task panel, instead of boasting its own. It was a birthplace of webkit.
More importantly they did something right which is in most other browsers, their renderer!
http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa
"Sorry, you are running an old version of Internet Explorer which is not supported. For more information please visit here "
Both browsers are good, however I use Firefox since I have all the add-ons I need, and the awesome Awesome Bar, which lets me access my favorite sites or sites I visited recently with a few keystrokes or keywords (I remember a word or two in the URL/title and I can always go back).
I had no luck finding something like that for Chrome, and that's my biggest annoyance - every time I have to bookmark a site (which I always forget), or I have to search for it again through Google. I type a damn keyword and it searches instead of showing me the URL... I have a suspicion that is on purpose, since it leads me to Google.com :-)...
"In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining market share at 50.66%"
I am very surprised to see that IE is so much stronger in the US. I always thought IE was strong in Asia and that that lead to its high market share. Does anyone have a theory as to why IE is stronger in the US than in the rest of the world?
Every time I read news like this I go back and actually measure rendering times for the pages I frequent together with overall memory consumption.
Every time Firefox comes out on top, but yet somebody everybody thinks it is faster and consumes less memory.
(And I am still using Firefox 3.6.*, and Chromium 14)
Maybe I'm different in my browsing habits, but I find that hard to believe.
I suggest comparing the latest Firefox (8) with the latest Chrome (15).
(Disclosure: I get paid for working on the engine of Firefox.)
What I meant to say is that in all tests on web sites that I frequent Firefox 3.6 is better (both in terms of speed and memory) than Chromium 14 (which is why I do not understand that everybody says it's faster).
Webkit has won on smartphone browser war(arm), same is being repeated on Desktop