Chrome Engineer: Firefox Is A Partner, Not A Competitor | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Engineer: Firefox Is A Partner, Not A Competitor

readwriteweb.com

164 pointseror93256 comments

Firefox isn't quite on par with Chrome anymore. It still has a lot of benefits from its legacy advantage in the plugin area.

But I don't think this really matters to the consumer. Firefox has improved rapidly, mostly as a result of chromes competition. It stagnated for years until chrome came along.

It's like Android vs iPhone. Competition creates better products.

If there wasn't a good competitor to keep innovation going, it would be just like Windows in early 2000s.

I can't speak for the average user, but I would argue that until Chrome gets the ability to add a separate search bar, it will never be on par with Firefox. Albeit, Chrome is much faster than Firefox, but without that search bar I just can't use it fluidly.

If you tend to use a lot of tabs (I have anywhere from 50 to 150 open at any given time), Chrome certainly isn't faster than Firefox (or Opera).

Is it really that noticeably faster? Cause I always have like about ~100 tabs open at a time too, but I've been using chrome exclusively for so long, that I don't even install firefox anymore. I would definitely be interested in giving it another shot if it handles multiple tabs better though.

Chrome also has abysmal support for managing those 50-100 tabs.

Chrome is never going to get a dedicated search bar, the address bar in Chrome is designed to get you where you need to go. If you know the direct url that's awesome; but if you don't that's no problem as a Google search will take you where you need to go.

I feel this is much better than the Safari/Firefox way of handling things, where you essentially switch between two modes (usually by tabing) of either trying to find something or trying to hit a direct URL. Users don't want to operate in modes, they just want to find things.

I actually disable the google bar in my Firefox because the awesomebar takes care of whatever I need. It's pretty much the same as google's search bar. I'm not sure why anyone feels the need to use the separate bar.

The reason there are two seperate bars is the privacy implication of having autocomplete from a search engine for every url you type in. If I want to go to example.com, that'll get sent to Google for autocomplete if I type it on the Chrome address bar or the Firefox search bar. Depending on what example.com is, I may not want Google knowing I went there. On the other hand, if I type it on the Firefox address bar, it doesn't get sent for search autocomplete (just history, bookmarks etc.), so Google doesn't know which site I'm going to.

That's the official purpose of having two bars anyway, but I can't find the article where I remember this being stated.

You can disable network completion in Preferences> Under the hood > Privacy

Yes, but then you miss out on auto-completion for searches. Hence, why I prefer the separate bars. If I know the URL or title of the page (for FF's Awesomebar), cmd+L (URL bar). If I want to search, cmd+K (search box).

It's all personal preference, and there's no universally correct answer.

I'm really surprised this is an issue for people.

For as long as I can remember, the first thing I've done when installing a new browser is remove the search bar and all of the toolbar buttons. Searching from the address bar is no more or less convenient than from the dedicated search field, and all of the other actions can be done faster using keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures or, in my case, extra mouse buttons.

What's the appeal of having a separate search bar taking up space?

I have added several other search for which the search bar is quite handy. But again its just upto person to person. Most of the times "I'm feeling Lucky" works however.

You probably know about this, or maybe this isn't in Firefox, but most of the other browsers use 'keyword' searches from the address bar, which give access to every search engine you have configured.

"g whatever" - Google "whatever"

"w whatever" - Wikipedia search for "whatever"

"a whatever" - Amazon search for "whatever"

...

New shortcuts can be added and the existing ones can be changed. For example, when I type "g whatever", it searches Duck Duck Go.

This exists in both Chrome and Firefox. I've used it for years and loved it.

and in Chrome it's populated completely automatically based on your habits! It identifies site search fields in the pages you visit, and associates them with the domain itself and whatever terms you use to get to that domain.

In Firefox it has to be manually configured for each site, with a user-specified prefix. When the fuck is a normal user going to do that?

> What's the appeal

Not having every url I type in sent to Google is the main appeal.

Only if you use Google as your main search.

And you can turn it off in any case.

The point is that the typical Chrome user is ending up sending all their URLs to Google, probably without even realizing it.

What fraction of them do you think would be OK with this if it were pointed out to them? My anecdotal sample suggests about 50% or so.

Violating the privacy of 50% of their users in a way they do not desire by default is not something Mozilla is likely to do. Google of course considers this perfectly ok, as expected. They don't believe in this antiquated "privacy" thing to start with.

As far as "turn it off", you can also switch to using a single combined search bar in Firefox if you want to mess with the settings. This discussion is about defaults.

Google isn't even Chrome's default browser, technically. They had a ballot selection box on the first use for awhile.

Interesting. That wasn't there last I checked!

But the point remains: they send what you type in the url bar to your default search engine. This is not behavior many users are OK with once they realize it's happening.

The omnibox is a huge improvement over the traditional model. Rather than dismiss your opinion, I'd like to ask what you think is superior about the separate boxes.

The fact that it doesn't send everything you type in your URL bar to Google.

That's funny, I couldn't stand to use Firefox (which I only do rarely for development) until I found out about a plugin that combines the address and search bar.

My favorite feature in Firefox (aside from deeper extensions) is keyword searching.

I can right-click a search field, bookmark it with a simple title e.g. wiki, g, i, imdb and then search from the address bar by typing the keyword and then the query.

I like this method because it is reliable and doesn't change the look of the address bar. I use Chrome about 25% of the time on Windows and the thing with searching different sites from a blank tab is that it is unreliable for me.

Preferences > Manage Search Engines... will do the same thing in Chrome (though it doesn't have the wonderful right-click-to-add ability; you have to enter the URL yourself).

They get added automatically as soon as you use a search box, just change the keyword to something shorter than the domain name (which is the default keyword).

Actually, Chrome does have the right-click to add ability. At least Chrome 17 (dev channel) does.

I used to do this in Firefox (before Chrome came out), and I thought it was great. Then, I switched to Chrome (simply because it was significantly snappier) and quickly realized that just Googling everything directly from the Chrome bar was almost always as good as all those specific shortcuts I had setup in Firefox.

I respectfully disagree. I actually stopped using Firefox because my experience with Chrome's Omnibar convinced me to switch full time.

With how the Omnibar works, I no longer need to type in a full URL. It either searched for the site I wanted via Google, via my favourites or via my history and it would get it right almost 100% of the time.

The average user has spoken. They voted with their feet. Chrome surpasses Firefox.

http://m.zdnet.com/blog/btl/statcounter-chrome-overtakes-fir...

> They voted with their feet

Or had Chrome set up as their default browser without their consent when they installed Skype and don't know how to change to a different browser. Hard to tell, obviously.

It's more likely that the vast majority of Chrome users are upgraded to the latest version automatically while IE users are fragmented across multiple versions.

Oh, that's certainly true, but I'm talking about overall install base, not per-version install base.

I'd love to see a credible estimate of how much of Chrome's install base is due to the "install it and make it default" bundling deals.

I'd like to be able to get rid of the search bar in firefox et al and just have a single point of entry like chrome.

You really think Firefox was ever going to be in a similar position to Windows? The two situations aren't even remotely comparable.

For the longest time Firefox was the only easy option in town.

Opera has always been a bit fringe like linux (while still being good). IE.. well enough said. Safari was a decent choice on mac for a couple years before Chrome.

Thats where my comparison to windows resides. It was the only decent option. It took OSX a big part of the 00s to reach mainstream dominance over Windows XP.

But Firefox never had a monopoly like Windows did. It always had lower market share than IE.

Also OS X has never reached mainstream dominance over Windows.

Perhaps Firefox never had a monopoly, but they did reach a point where they likely felt overly secure and could do whatever they wanted because they would always be the open source browser gave users a warm and fuzzy feeling when they install it.

The funny thing is that nowadays IE is more secure than Firefox and has many features similar to Chrome, such as multi-process!

Would you care to tell us why IE is more secure?

OSX dominance over windows? Sorry, but what were you trying to say?

I would guess he meant:

demographic = 'the HN crowd'

mainstream_OSes = ['windows', 'mac']

sorted = sort_by_popularity_within_demographic(mainstream_OSes, demographic)

dominant = sorted[0]

I'd be really interested to see what proportion of the hn crowd is running Linux as their primary os.

The difference is MS stopped having people work on IE once Netscape was out of the picture. It's not like Firefox would just stop being developed. It's an open source project, after all.

>The difference is MS stopped having people work on IE once Netscape was out of the picture.

IE's rendering engine and JS/CSS, to be more precise. (Look at the IE6 in Longhorn pre-releases and IE6 in XP SP2)

Why is this on the front page when the original Google+ post that this article summarizes is also on the front page?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3389972

> the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That's it.

ok what does that even mean? they are trying to make the "web advance" because if they won't, the desktop will come back and advance instead? or do they mean advancing new web standards and features to replace older non-standard technologies (say like flash)? ( i am not trying to be sarcastic just wondering the meaning is ).

Google's business is built on the open web, so they need the open web to flourish. This requires new standards to compete with Flash and other proprietary technologies and platforms.

Pushing Chrome is a way for them to advance the state of the art. By building a genuinely better browser that has enough users it can't be ignored, it puts pressure on other browser vendors to catch up.

It's like a reverse IE strategy. You'll see Google (and Firefox) pushing for more technology built into the browser (e.g., BrowserID, canvas, etc.), but based on open standards.

Anyhow, I think that's what they mean.

They are trying to advance the state of next generation web standards support as well as rendering and javascript performance.

Google is in the web application business. Their platform is essentially every browser in the world. It behooves them to push browser technology.

And so far they have succeeded. They have spurred Firefox and IE to advance faster than they would have otherwise.

It's very simple: google makes money when people use the Internet. When more people use the Internet, google makes more money. Hence, google wants to make the Internet as good as possible so more people will use it.

Google guys are all with very high IQs, so they think the rest people with common sense are fools. Chrome vs Firefox, it's obvious the former eats the latter's lunch, which is fine to me, I use both.

Firefox has become absolute bloatware. Opera is the only browser that is doing any kind of new innovation.

I would say Chrome is doing some pretty innovative stuff with V8 (and open sourcing it to spawn amazing things like NodeJS) as well as Native Client & VP8/WebM.

I use Firefox for development because of Firebug

I use FF for casual browsing because of Adblock plus

The plugins make the browsing experience for me

Yes the same here, Firefox is my main development machine and chrome is secondary.

I wish a world where firefox+chrome+open source derivatives have >80% usage share globally.

I don't subscribe to the dogma about tools. You should use what ever gets the job done. I personally use Firefox for debugging (I love FireBug). I use Safari for general browsing, mostly because of the integration of Bookmarks and Reading Lists over iCloud. And I dabble in Chrome when I'm using a non-apple machine. I think all tools are good and bad, and picking one side just limits your options for productivity. My 2 cents.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com