The death of Firefox
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Mozilla has a track record that demonstrates their intentions of making a more open web. We are still guessing about the future of Google, Microsoft, etc.
And its not like they're lacking in features or speed. Firefox for Android (while buggy) could view the same bookmarks/history/open tabs as my desktop browser and this is a great feature which only recently came to chrome.
And if Firefox goes, we'll only have WebKit browsers. And so you can forget about web standards and we'll be back at the best viewed with Internet Explorer era. Competing implementations are a good thing for standards, and standards are good for all of us.
At least webkit is open source, unlike IE6
Indeed, open source helps a lot. It is amazing how far KHTML has gotten. But still, no standards would mean no Opera, no Mozilla, no any other entrants to the game.
Anyway, this article prompted me to switch from Chrome to Aurora on my Android tablet. Feels good so far...
Not necessarily, it would still be possible for them to embed webkit or even to re-implement it.
Webkit would simply become the reference implementation.
If WebKit becomes the standard, every user from now until forever will be using the same pile of C++ to browse. That may be fine to you; I personally don't think that WebKit is so good as to make it the gold standard for the Web. Imagine if that had happened with NCSA Mosaic...
Surely anybody else could even fork webkit if they so desired.
Having one pile of C++ to browse beats having multiple piles of C++ all with their own bugs an eccentricities.
Given the increasing trend to browse using tablets, phones, TVs, and other "non-traditional" devices, I suspect we're about to find out.
WebKit is already dominant to the point that no other browser engine matters in the mobile space. It's possible that Microsoft will shake the tree a bit if tablets based on Windows 8 make a rapid impact and IE 10 becomes a serious player. However, for all practical purposes Gecko is already irrelevant on mobile devices.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not arguing that such a browser monoculture is necessarily in users' best interests, nor that the trend to lock down many modern consumer devices so use of alternative browsers is less likely is any better. I'm merely commenting on the reality of the market today.)
The problem is that if you decide your standard is going to be a "living" document that changes rapidly as the industry evolves, backward compatibility ceases to have any meaning because there is nothing stable to be backward compatible with.
What happens when one browser pioneers a new feature, the living HTML5 standard quickly adopts it, developers start writing to that standard, but then two other browsers decide on another way to do the same thing that they think is better and someone changes the living HTML5 standard to reflect the new "standard" instead? One possibility is that the developers' existing code breaks. Another is that browser makers are stuck with supporting both once-standard interpretations for a long time.
Alternatively, but almost as bad, what happens when the living HTML5 standard quickly adopts a new feature that is becoming popular, other browsers find a better way to do the same thing shortly afterwards, and the standard doesn't change to match? Now the standard sucks, because it rushed into formalising something before enough consensus had built.
Formal standards don't mean anything unless they are robust, stable, citable references that everyone concerned can agree on. A living document that rapidly changes in the face of a fast-evolving industry is exactly zero of those things, and its value will be similarly small and round. It's merely a reference non-implementation, and since we're talking about browsers, we already have several candidates for being an actual reference implementation, just as we did in the old IE vs. Netscape days, when we learned for the first time why formal standards matter.
Alas, as George Santayana observed a century ago, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
...what an odd world we live in.
http://www.salsitasoft.com/blog/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome...
I only recommend Chrome because it auto-updates. If one of my users starts using Chrome, I always know they'll have the latest and greatest. That's not yet the case with FF, but I'll recommend FF again as soon as the auto-updates land.
That said, it's not just auto-update that makes Chrome more attractive. The omnibox, polarizing though it may be, sets Chrome apart from every other browser as far as U[I|X] goes. Oddly enough, that one feature alone is enough to make it my default browser. Were FF as fast as Chrome, I'd still use the latter because I just like using it more. Chrome's sandboxing, V8, and other intelligent features are just icing on the cake.
This, ultimately, confuses me more than anything about the other browser vendors' reaction to Chrome. They've copied or are copying just about everything about it: short release cycles, better JS engines, sandboxing... but not the one definitive UI feature that has made it so attractive to so many people. This surprises me. I would have though Apple, at least, with its commitment to minimalistic UIs, would have been quick to hop on that train, but no dice.
Personally, I just use vimperator (the clones of which on Chrome are…abysmal?) so I can o[pen]/t[abopen] and then type a search term (w/ customizable engine) or a URL.
…
Memorywise, the recent FFs are much better. Usually problems are caused by extensions.
Chrome, on the other hand, only exposes non-Google search engines through the search engine keyword thingy, which means a user has to actually type "en.wikipedia.org widgets" into the omnibox. Sure, tab-completion will do half the work, but the user still has to remember to start typing "en." rather than, say, "wikipedia".
I know that Chrome (and, indeed, Firefox) allow you to edit those search engine keywords, but that is power-user territory, and power-users can edit their Firefox UI as well. http://i.imgur.com/mS5Ot.png
The reason to keep the search field is people use it I guess. And there would be some confusion once removed.
Typing it into the Awesomebar will do an "I feel lucky" search.
For firefox, I use the https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/omnibar/ addon, it works quite well for me.
Now if only I could find a way to get firefox tabs into the title bar...
As a web developer, I'm fed up of the moving targets and unreliability. When Firefox pushes an update to everyone and breaks something fundamental, it's not the Firefox support desk that gets complained at when the web apps stop working.
As a user, I see little real advantage from the breakneck pace of development anyway. Inevitably only a few sites use bleeding edge features within weeks of their appearance, and most of them seem to be web design/web development blogs showing off about bleeding edge features that might one day be useful to real web sites.
Moving to silent updates, as done by Chrome, might reduce the hassle, but then we'll also see endless minor UI tweaks happening at apparently random times like Chrome, which is really annoying in itself. And of course if a major bug gets pushed out and breaks a site I care about as a visitor, it's just as annoying whether I manually updated (not that there's much choice if security patches stop for anything more than five minutes old) or it happened silently in the background.
I never recommend Chrome or Firefox with the auto-updates. In fact, we explicitly don't provide customer support for them any more on several projects I work with, that conclusion being reached independently by several different development teams after experiencing all-too-similar problems. If anyone asks, I think the official recommendation in most cases is currently IE9.
I continue to insist on experiencing the web the way I want to. Firefox -- together with its extensions -- continues to do the best job of this. (Although I have not been pleased with its GUI "Chromification".)
[1] https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!...
[2] http://techpp.com/2011/09/28/chrome-14-vs-firefox-7-memory-f...
[3] https://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/ talks about it frequently
What counts in the end is speed, security and api's.
Interestingly, however, when Flash crashes on one tab it crashes on all of them.
In my experience, IE is losing bloat, Chrome started with a bit of bloat but quickly lost it, whilst Firefox has had bloat for a while.
I've recently switched back to FF and found that it worked in the places that Chrome didn't.
By the time FireFox figured that out, it was already a little late. But the problem is that they approached it the wrong way. Instead of focusing on what made Google Chrome successful (simple interface, auto-updates, speed...) they even made it worse (I still find the interface not easy and friendly as chrome, multiple confusing versions, and not that fast)
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-6cqbdjZl7gM/T2eqjPeprhI/A...
In my opinion, there's no reason why you can't run both Firefox and Chrome. They're both free and they're both great.
[0] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-monthly-201102-201202
[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201102-201202
The first is lack of the Tree Style Tabs extension (in general lack of extensions was my biggest problem with Chrome until recently; now they have NoScript and AdBlock and ctrl+shift+j is about as good as FireBug which were the deal-breakers for me before), the second is not eating up huge amounts of memory if I have 593 tabs loaded into it (which is currently what I have on this Firefox), the third is I don't like their URL box. Firefox's AwesomeBar is almost perfect, I just wish it had better coverage of my history+favorites (I'm sure there's an about:config option somewhere that tunes it).
This article was completely without any substance beyond a graph of browser share stats. That's not necessarily evidence of Firefox "dying", rather than of the market simply expanding outside of its target demographic. In any case, as a web developer, Firefox will remain a critical browser to support for the foreseeable future, and as a user, I still haven't found a better overall option to use in Windows or Linux (I've stuck with Safari in OS X mainly due to the increased performance, stability and vastly superior font rendering).
I have around 700 tabs open but at a time only 10 or less are loaded.
Tools/options/General "Don't load tabs until selected"
This is a tough problem. Google's money and manpower enabled Chrome to quickly reached feature parity with Firefox. Google undoubtedly spends more developing and advertising Chrome than they pay Mozilla.
Short of some Google privacy scare, there may not be enough technical reasons for someone to switch back.
If FF had the speed of chrome, I'd consider switching back. I really want to try Pentadactyl for FF, but I can't stand how slow FF is sometimes.
My most recent experience was with a client who was locked into IE for years, made the switch to Google Apps, and subsequently discovered the speed of Chrome. Phrased as "lots of our users skipped Firefox," it sounded like Firefox was in no-man's land.
I anticipate problems in the future, however, when I won't have access to Flash unless I use Chrome (I'm on Linux).
Mozilla has upped it's game and I have started to see that memory usage is now quite competitive to Chrome.
I've stopped explaining the memory management and other issues to these kinds of people.
That said, a large percentage of IE9 users are corporations which don't want to support non-Microsoft browsers, new end-users who don't have a clue about anything that's not Microsoft, and the millions of foreigners who just use what's provided.
Supporting IE9 isn't that bad as it used to be to support older IE browsers.
Funny thing to say after seeing the statcounter shown in the comments show that >40% of north americans use internet explorer compared to ~30% in europe 35% in asia, 30% in south america and 30% in africa. Infact North america is the only place where internet explorer has >5% lead over their next biggest rival!
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-af-monthly-201102-201202
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-as-monthly-201102-201202
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201102-201202
Perhaps they didn't "win" the battle fairly, but back when IE market share was in the 90%+ range, I think it was fair to say Netscape had unequivocally lost.
Mozilla/Firefox was a "Hail Mary" plan that only succeeded because a lot of smart people and a lot of money showed up at just the right time. I shudder to think what the web would be like had they failed.
It was IE4 the one that beat the then bloated Netscape Communicator 4.
The likes of Clark, Andreesen & jwz built an idea in 1995 that will not die. it just wont. they can lose their nsf funding, aol can buy up the remains and then discard it; google can use it as advertising space and then go elsewhere, they can take 5 years between netscape 4.0 and mozilla 1.0, but they will not die.