Is Firefox Doomed?
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I prefer it over Chrome because Firefox is a platform, not a product that treats me like a dumb user.
I use it on my Android too. It's a little sluggish and still uses too much memory, however it has a killer feature - it syncs everything with my desktop. It syncs my bookmarks and my saved login data for various websites I use. Saves me from a lot of manual typing and it is so addictive I can't give it up. Plus I'm seeing progress and they've promised a native interface that will be more efficient.
The desktop version is pretty stable these days too - I'm on the Beta channel (version 9) and I don't have problems. Even the versioning problems for the plugins I use have been sorted out.
I still recommend it to people, I would recommend it even to my hypothetical grandma.
If people from Mozilla are reading this - thanks for all your hard work.
I use both Chrome and FF, and I never felt like a browser was "treating me" like anything. They're both tools.
Maybe because I AM a dumb user? ... Oh god.
I feel that Chrome is similar to Apple products in that it feels restrictive when you first use it (especially with regards to its extension system), but that eventually you realize that you didn't really need those features in the first place. For me those were tree style tabs, as well as the "Awesome bar". The only truly killer feature that Chrome lacks is a reliable Adblock plus.
Of course, YMMV, etc.
Is it missing something that's in the Firefox version?
Chrome basically comes with Firebug by default
IMHO, this is an argument for Firefox, not against it.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android#Download_N...
This is completely mistaken.
What Google mainly cares about is search market share. Even 0.1% there is crucial, and worth a lot of money. Google would be willing to throw almost any amount of money at anything that would increase its share in search or keep it at its current height. The same is true of Microsoft with Bing.
Consider what happens if Google drops the deal with Firefox. Google will no longer be the default search engine in Firefox, and a lot of goodwill towards Google from Firefox users will be lost. Those two factors can easily account for far more than %0.1 of search. Worse, it is very likely that Microsoft would step in and pay the same amount to Firefox, so Google would be helping its main competitor in search.
$100M in that context is a laughably tiny amount.
Considering that Google spent $2.11B on traffic acquisition last quarter[0] it seems even less.
[0] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q2_google_earnings....
Google wants people to use their services, and to use browsers that are up to scratch to do so. They also want to influence web standards so that they can build better products. This is why they built Chrome.
Firefox helps them to achieve these goals by being another alternative to IE, and having similar views about evolving web standards.
As far as I know, Mozilla and Google maintain good relations. Even if the deal that provides money from Google to Mozilla isn't renewed, I doubt they will entirely disentangle themselves from each other.
On a technical note each version isn't really getting any better, historical problems have never been addressed, version fragmentation is occurring, on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.
The UI is polarising (its the major complaint I actually here next to 'laggy behavior'), the options to change it rely on 3rd party modules which are often bugging and not supported between versions. It's never nailed OSX, it just doesn't 'feel' the same as the rest of the operating system and is slightly jarring at times.
Personally if you take a base install of Opera 11 it is exactly how I want FF to be set up, everything works smoothly, fast, and 'clicky'. I'd recommend any FF user to try the new version of Opera for a few days, then go back to FF and see just how different it feels even though they are aesthetically quite similar.
The opinion of people calling it a joke isn't my opinion its what I keep encountering now, and opinions aren't truth, but a exaggerated emotions. So taking that onboard theres a feeling out there amongst a lot of people (although exaggerated) that FF has seen its peak.
I see the over the last few minutes my other post has been in the negatives and positives, so I guess its quite contentious probably for that reason. Opinions aren't fact but give an impression of what may be true.
As its not a bundled browser for the big OS's, anyone asking what other browser to use is only going to go off recommendation. Most people probably aren't even aware theres multiple browsers or simply do not care.
So another thing against FF will be the chrome ads on TV are probably a huge boon for its usage here. At a very least it will start conversation, and often lead to a recommendation.
it's about how many tech-savvy people are
recommending it to their mothers and
IT managers
I'll grant you that for a period of time I also started recommending Chrome - it was before Firefox version 4 got released, as for a moment I lost faith in Mozilla's ability to innovate.
However, now I'm back on Firefox because it is much better for me as a developer. And I also recommend it to normal people because I remember quite well what happened during the IExplorer's glory days and I don't want to help another monopoly on mobile browsers.
To me it is irrelevant if Chrome is better right now (although it isn't) - what is relevant is that I have more trust in Mozilla to guard my interests as a user. Google may be one heck of a company that did a lot of good things for our industry, however their interests do not necessarily align with those of the people.
I think the Dev Tools have reached parity, but I often keep groups of tabs open for reference, and Chrome seems to grind to a halt a lot more quickly when used like this.
(To make matters worse, Chrome doesn't seem to "scroll" the list of tabs left and right when the list gets long. It just smooshes them all into one row, leaving you with 10px-wide tabs to click.)
> On a technical note each version isn't really getting any better
That's simply not true. To take a single example, the type inference engine added to the JS engine in FF9 significantly improved performance. With the new high frequency release strategy, it's not guaranteed that there will be huge new features or improvements in any given release, but the features and improvements are coming as fast as ever.
> historical problems have never been addressed
You can find ancient pet bugs for any project that either take a long time to get fixed or are never fixed. Do you have something specific in mind?
> version fragmentation is occurring
That's more-or-less false. There's some adjustment going on due to the switch to the high frequency release schedule, but the fact is the vast majority of Firefox users are on a small number of versions, almost all that have been offered an upgrade are on the latest stable release.
> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.
Can you point to anything specific to back up your claim? If you pick and choose specs, this is true for all browsers. Nobody implements everything completely and correctly. The specs are being developed as fast as ever, and it's common for one browser to be ahead in certain areas. It's also common for competing implementations to differ as the standard develops. This is not confined to Firefox.
The edge it had over IE was that it was a better user experience. It's not compared to Chrome anymore. Even IE is better than FF apart from the weird crash like blank screen glitch when opening a new tab that IE has.
Chrome has an advantage because it's relatively new. It doesn't have to deal with over a decade of add-ons and browser history and cookies.
Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years.
Try vacuuming your Firefox database [1], syncing everything [2] and/or create a new profile [3] with only the extensions you actually use.
Oh, and be careful of Firebug. That's why most developers laugh at Firefox for being so slow; they use Firebug, which slows Firefox down to a grinding halt. We're working on our own dev tools, which are slowly coming together. They're not a Firebug replacement yet, but they're getting there. [4]
1 http://mozillalinks.org/2009/08/vacuum-firefox-databases-for... 2 http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/sync/ 3 http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles 4 http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/developer-tools-in-firefox-...
I think the major reason this myth has stayed in my mind is doing upgrades on startup, testing FF v Chrome just now, on a computer that FF has never been the primary browser, they're very similar in terms of responsiveness (FF still a little slower if I'm honest, but trivially and I think it's a bit psychological in the way it opens the window compared to Chrome). I'm not seeing major differences on disabling/enabling firebug though.
Right now every time I open FF it seems to upgrade, because I do it so rarely. So in my mind it's now become intolerably slow and I only open it when I really, really need 3 different sessions on a single site. I use Chrome as primary, IE secondary (due to it being more likely to have quirks and historically preferring IE dev toolbar to firebug).
As Chrome upgrades in the background and IE does it through windows update you're not playing on a fair playing field I guess.
EDIT: I should add this isn't exactly a modern computer, no SSD, 2.4ghz quad core, 3Gb RAM and my laptop's even more in need of an upgrade.
On this computer I'm using, Firefox 9 starts faster.
Also, this version on my computer upgrades in the background. I just get a "restart" notice when it finishes, then after I restart it checks for addons updates, in case some of them are invalid, but that's pretty fast too. And these upgrades don't happen so ofter.
You'd have a point here if Firefox hadn't started blithely breaking everyone's add-ons by bumping the version number about 5 times per week. Okay, that's hyperbole -- I know it wasn't that often, but the point is that a "rapid release schedule" comes with real costs.
If you have 500MM users, and the mean user time to adapt to a trivial new release is 5 minutes (a gross underestimate if add-ons have broken), you've just wasted 16 million hours of user time. Just because that cost doesn't appear as a line item in the Mozilla Foundation's budget doesn't mean it isn't real.
I used Firefox for years because of the rich add-on community. When it started being more trouble than it was worth to update the add-ons (or find/write new ones, if the old one hadn't been updated), I switched to Chrome. It's unlikely that I'll be back.
In the meantime, sorry it's been a hassle. I wish we hadn't switched to rapid release without fixing add-on compatibility. We honestly didn't realize how hard it would be to get right.
That's part of the problem. I'm a huge fan of Firefox, but I shouldn't have to manage these things in order to keep my browser fluid after six months of regular use.
However, there are still extensions that cause issues, and the odd bug that is an actual issue with how we do things.
The reason he recommends creating a new profile and syncing stuff over is because it's sometimes easier than to figure out what's broken on a particular system that has a pre-Firefox 4 profile.
Here's a step-by-step instruction on how to do it — if your Firefox is slow, this will most likely fix it: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-preferences/
Maybe I'm asking to much, but this seems totally unacceptable to me -- both things seem totally unacceptable to me. And while it may still be just true, Firefox suffers worse from this problem than any OS, software or other browser that I use.
Mozilla can do nothing about you using Firebug, yet still gets blamed for the slowness.
I was responding to YOUR stipulation that browsing experience degrades the more you use Firefox. IF it does, that seems like emergency problem #1 to fix if Firefox wants to stop hemmorrhaging users. But then, I'm speaking completely out of turn, since I haven't been a Firefox user for years.
EDIT: ...since I haven't used Firefox as my primary browser in years. I use it daily; not as a "power user."
This is how things go in real-world. I remember reading about how much work went into each new version of Windows because of bugs and clever code in existing software. Otherwise people who upgraded and found their old software not working anymore would have blamed Windows instead of their buggy software.
You can't boast about Firefox being extensible and then blame plugins because they break it. At least, Firefox should be warning about troublesome plugins. The more people have to deal with Firefox being slow and unstable, the more Firefox will be getting a bad rep. Sorry, but you can't fight human nature, you know. You can't change how most users think. If you want to increase market share, your software must be as much dumb-friendly as possible.
On my Linux box, Firefox is crashing lots of times a day without giving me any clues about what could have gone wrong. What am I expected to do? To become a Firefox developer? Switching to another browser is an easier path.
By saying this, I hope I don't seem unappreciative of Firefox developers' efforts.
And modern versions of Firefox are doing a lot better again. It is much faster these days. They now have a much better release cycle, and their updater is smoother encouraging people to keep on the upgrade treadmill.
I wouldn't write Firefox off. The recent increase in competition in the browser space has done great things for all of the browsers; they have all improved dramatically over the past couple of years.
The vast majority of the population makes decisions based on emotion and opinion. They are determining factors. Facts often don't matter.
You make 3 comments that I think answer themselves. First statement I imply that things aren't getting better, I'll agree that some things are getting better, new features and support etc... but theres a chunk of stuff not getting improved.
You note it yourself in the second point "You can find ancient pet bugs for any project". The fact is there are things not being addressed which have been raised as issues, some of them half a decade ago. Thats a pain point for most OSS projects, but browsers are a competitive space, to remain competitive some of these things need to be addressed.
Version fragmentation may have been the wrong term. What I meant was that lots of plugins aren't being supported between versions. Its not such a problem of the core FF, but without the plugins FF just isn't that great. From a support point of view, new versions every 6 months is painful, especially when I read things like pulling support for HTML 5 features they had previously supported.
It makes its a painful thing to support. I now test my HTML5 applications against IE10 and webkit, I don't consider FF worthwhile currently. I test Opera only because I use it (sorry other opera users).
For the w3c stuff my biggest pet peace is websql. On other points Mozilla have a political and ideological argument for and against like every big player, I can sympathize and support where appropriate. But WebSQL is something that I would like to be ubiquitous.
What things that actually matter aren't being improved?
You're wrong about plugins so I'll assume that you mean addons here, which use a completely different interface. Addon compatibility over the new release schedule has been rough so far, it's being addressed and I expect it to be, largely, a solved problem in the near future.
Pulling support for HTML 5 features? Are you referring to WebSockets, which were exposed again later once the security problems in the spec were resolved?
Web SQL DB is a terrible spec, as it stands. It effectively requires locking a specific version of SQLite (bugs and all) into the web for eternity to ensure interoperability. You'll note that IE has also refused to implement it so far. It's hardly fair to claim it's "in direct conflict with W3C standards". Web SQL DB never made it past a working group stage, and Firefox was not the only browser against implementing it.
And further, Mozilla championed and gained consensus for IndexedDB (http://www.w3.org/TR/IndexedDB/).
It's simply not true that Mozilla is disengaged or actively hostile to popular standards without presenting a plausible alternative and fighting to make that alternative so.
But you don't have to take my word for it, there was a big discussion about it recently: http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/08/29/1454224/Mozilla-Comm...
Also, if such discussions are possible is because Mozilla's development model is in the open, which means all of their dirty underwear is washed in public, although ultimately this is for the greater good. The same thing happens inside companies like Google or Apple, you just never hear about it.
Since you're not interested in "nit picking arguments", this makes me assume you have no interest in making Firefox better, so the other possibility is that Firefox may have caused physical or psychical damage to you or your acquaintances.
I'm sure the devs from Mozilla are sorry about it. It's time to let go.
My original point was Firefox has lost the recommendation status it has previously had. I also noted several technical things people had been complaining about, many of which annoyed me previously as well.
I don' really care if I get down voted, the fact is no amount of technical features is going to solve emotional issues, and Mozilla is loosing its emotional advantage. If you wanna save FF stop being technical and start thinking emotionally.
I personally found Chrome's plugin “API” to be pretty terrible… I use Vimperator on FF, and not only are the Chrome alternatives awfully lacking in functionality, I also need to have enabled JS for them to work. Safe?
Yeah, just like 70% of the modern web, and all of Web 2.0.
"""Safe?"""
Enabling JS? Not to tin-foil-hat standards, but yes. You should also remember that Chrome has a special sandbox security model that FF lacks --and that is often found to be the safest browser in security tests, js and all.
I'd care less about FF addons not working, and more about major functionality (Gmail for example) not working.
Yeah, this is false. Gecko is still arguably the gold, um, standard for page rendering.
That said, I dread using Firefox now, for reasons that are completely emotional. There's too much UI, and web pages have an unfortunate uncanny valley thing happening when compared side-by-side with Webkit-rendered pages. The best way I can a explain it is that it's like when you see a photo of a Russian Buran, and your mind goes, "There's something not quite right about that Space Shuttle."
Ahh the world of cargo cult browser fanboyism. All I can say is that the devs you are hanging out with aren't very good, any dev who would write off and "laugh at" a browser which boasts the widest and the most mature array of development tools is probably not very good to begin with.
I would, however, love to know what the development tools in Firefox are that you find less mature or nonexistent in Chrome. There were some omissions in the first year or so of Chrome's development, but I find myself quite happy with it these days.
I'd gladly switch, though, if there are things I don't know about that could make me more productive.
What exactly do you mean by that? The UI in a browser shouldn't do anything but get out of the way and display the web page's UI.
Personally, I don't even want to see a menu bar unless I hit the ALT key - which is working nicely for me in Firefox right now.
And I don't notice any "laggy behaviour". Although I haven't run any comparison tests so maybe I'm missing out.
However I can assume by the positive comments I read online that myself and my friends probably aren't the standard, and may be unjustly noicsey as people who don't like somethign are generally mroe vocal than people that do.
So what I'm hearing/reading is lots of people who really like it, and around me people who vocally don't. Thats what I consider polarising, its drawing out harsh criticism and favourable reviews.
The modern laggy behaviour complaint I think is unfair and a marketing lie. What I think is that its a combination of historical problems with FF still in peoples memories and comparisons to Chromes 'snappiness'.
Chrome feels like it loads pages faster, so does Opera, and Safari, I doubt that it really does, but thats the bench mark people are expecting now. Like I said its unfair, people are now expecting speed everywhere as thats whats been marketed to them.
Its the little things that count, for a quick test I just fired up an aurora firefox build, it took roughly 15 seconds to load, chrome took 10 seconds (I stopped counting with safari when I got to 30 seconds but its loading probably the last 10 pages I left open at once). Thats the sort of thing people remember and sticks in there minds, and often takes alot for them to unforget.
I agree with the first part of your statement, and partially agree with the second. I personally recommend it to everyone over chrome, because firebug is better than chrome's dev tools...well, chrome's js tool is perhaps as good now, but firebug's better for everything else.
There's no way to replicate that level of customization in Chrome. In fact, it's much worse because of all the tracking functionality Google's included.
[citation needed], because as far as I'm aware of there's no such "tracking functionality" anywhere in Chrome.
"In fact," claims like this without proof are pretty shitty.
Next?
It's a more stable browser but I need Tab Mix Plus!
The article implies that Google is charitably allowing Firefox to exist ("Google doesn't need Firefox anywhere near as much as Firefox needs Google."). I'd like to the think the Google-Mozilla relationship is mutually beneficial.
Firefox may become a viable alternative to Android's built-in browser once the native UI version is complete.
Even if true, that doesn't mean Google doesn't need Firefox.
(screenshot from this Opera report PDF http://media.opera.com/media/finance/2011/3Q11_presentation.... )
I suspect Google's deal with Mozilla hasn't been renewed simply because renewal time hasn't arrived yet.
It's the same reason they still make iOS apps. They don't care about what software you use, just that you're searching with Google.
This doesn't mean we wouldn't be in the old IE monopoly of "nobody downloads browsers"
Plus, you can have a different browser on both the iPhone and android.
As long as Android and iOS both remain strong competitors, neither can really be seen as a smartphone (or tablet) monopoly. This is part of the reason I think Apple going "thermonuclear" on Android is counterproductive for them -- if they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and Android disappeared tomorrow, Apple would essentially be assured of having the government (not just the US, but perhaps even more so in Europe) come in and force them to open up iOS far more than they would be comfortable doing.
Now we have a variety of devices and platforms and I think it's fair to say that there is no comparable conglomeration of power in the industry. Not yet, anyway.
I'm a hardcore Firefox guy, I've been using it and Mozilla since M6 but I changed to Chrome yesterday and, while it's not flexible and customizable as Firefox, it's Good Enough.
I hope it gets better - perhaps focusing on the browser instead of higher version numbers and striving to look like IE or Chrome. Until then, I'm a Chrome guy.
Firefox is as fast or faster than any other browser (assuming you don't load it up with add-ons). [1] So it's not like everyone at Mozilla stopped programming and started focusing all their energy on merely incrementing the version number from 7 to 8.
I don't know why you're so worried -- version is just a number.
[1] http://lifehacker.com/5844150/browser-speed-tests-firefox-7-...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetpack_(Firefox_project)
I don't know much about the search engine partnership issue, but it seems that the author suggested his answer to that. No search service can afford to ignore a browser with over 20% market share.
Would be interesting to see if they've put out an updated statement since then.
1. http://techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/google-makes-up-88-percent-...
i guess the biggest feature ff now lacks compared to chrome is the silent autoupdater. it can be optional, just stop asking me for admin rights every time it wants to update.
It would make no sense for Google to renew this agreement... if Mozilla suddenly changed Firefox's default SE that would not go over well with the users. It seems much more likely that they would form a new deal with less revenue going to Mozilla.
Of course that doesn't mean Firefox is done. That is highly dependent on Mozilla's innovation in the next few years.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/
http://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla%20Foundatio...
As of December 31, 2010, they have assets of $168MM, of which $35MM is in cash and $105MM in investments. In the 12 months they spent $62MM on software development, $10MM on branding and marketing, and $12MM on 'General and administrative'.
There's more granular detail if you're interested.
1. Type "Google" on the search bar 2. Click on the first result 3. Use Google
I've seen that over and over again.
I think that despite Chroke's dominance Firefox isn't going anywhere. The article kind of made it sound like Mozilla was on the ropes which it's pretty far from. There will always be a market for those who want a browser from a company that is on their side and that's Mozilla. Chrome is aweso,e but there are going to be people concerned about the data collection that goes on. Chrome is out there to enrich Google. IE is infamous for being behind the times and just a crappy browser all around for standards, weird toolbars that install the,selves, etc. Then there's Mozilla. What ulterior motives do they have? From all I've ever learned they're just out there trying to build a kick ass browser and move the web forward. No search engine to support, no billion dollar software company to promote, just a humble browser maker in it for the users.
Chrome may overtake them in market share but I don't see Mozilla straying too far behind Google for the foreseeable future. IE share will keep tanking and Safari, while a great browser, will still be kind of a trailing behind cult classic.