Firefox: Can this Web browser be saved?
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I'm speaking as an individual / developer user though. For enterprise use, I haven't stayed up to date on what their response was to the brouhaha over the rapid release cycle stuff. Perhaps that is still a concern for organizational use.
It's always been faster for me, especially with a nontrivial number of tabs and on start-up.
> the extensions situation is as good or better.
Much better, especially for the things I care about, such as themes. I can't find out how to theme Chrome; if you don't like the default, you're apparently still stuck with it.
More to the point, Firefox respects me. I can turn off the speed dial feature in Firefox. I can't in Chrome. I can theme Firefox to a level unheard-of in Chrome. Firefox extensions seem to be able to dig deeper into Firefox than Chrome extensions can into Chrome.
It's about respect: Firefox allows me to shape it the way I want to, whereas Chrome constantly demands to shape me.
A variety of themes are available in the web store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/themes
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ThemeCreationGuide
(searching for "create chrome theme" gives many more tutorials, online tools, whatnots)
You are the only one choosing to frame software design decisions as lack of respect for the user.
The existence of the Free Software Foundation means this is factually incorrect.
It's not just that Chrome on Linux doesn't behave how I want it to, it's that the behavior of Chrome on Linux doesn't conform with the principles of Linux as I understand them. Even as the devs swear up and down that Chrome on Linux behaves like a true Linux browser, it's really just paying lip service, making a superficial attempt at pretending it's down with the Penguin while really behaving more like Apple. It acts like standard Linux, but it doesn't let you alter a single damn setting that actually matters.
Plus with Firefox on Linux, the normal painless Ubuntu updates take care of the browser updates automatically. So there's one point of Firefox consternation out of the way.
The overwhelming majority of Firefox's market share is on Windows. Judging by the trajectory of Microsoft's intentions with Windows RT, a browser targeting Windows desktop users may not be viable for much longer (contingent on whether or not things play out as Microsoft expects, of course). In this brave new world of sandboxed apps, he who controls the platform controls the universe. If Mozilla hadn't announced their intention to create a platform of their own, I'd have jumped ship by now, with a heavy heart, to Chrome. As it stands, I'm enamored by their audacity. "And my axe!", etc.
Chrome isn't bad, and it has a huge amount of marketing dollars behind it, and it gains market share because of it. But does Firefox need a 100% market share, 50%, 30? Firefox exists, it makes the web better and it is probably the best browser out there on quite a few platforms.
Chrome might be the new IE in many ways, but I don't think that Firefox needs to be saved. If Mozilla wants more market share, they probably need better marketing, not a significantly better browser.
For example, when my smartphone broke, I spent $50 on a (used) feature phone a few weeks ago to use for the last month and a half of my contract. I found that it had a Webkit based browser, why wasn't that Gecko/Mozilla?
Chromium is going in a similar direction, they used to have a very clean "WebKit" implementation (the bit which every port does itself, sits on top of WebCore) but over the years they've added a lot of policy to it and now it's hard to do anything which uses Chromium WebKit that isn't "Chromium". And the code outside of WebKit is very very hard to disentangle (they did some work on that for Chrome on Android, breaking out "content" which is a minimal embeddable browser, but it's hard to do any work on "content" and I have no faith that they'd want to merge anything they're not directly using).
Chrome for Android is closed source, too, so it's not like they have any real commitment to OSS at all (and I think this hobbles Android as a platform -- maybe it's just a reaction to the Kindle Fire, but the Android team do still seem to be working on WebView as well).
WebKit recently (2010?) started on WebKit2, which is a peer to Chromium's WebKit and is very straightforward to hack. WebKit2 supports multiple platforms and the WebKit project accepts contributions that aren't used by Apple, etc.
So I would say that if there's a big hole that Mozilla drove into, then Google Chrome is diligently driving into it too. WebKit is on good track, though, and benefits from a lot of the Google contributions (though V8 WebCore integration is a point of contention).
And now with Firefox OS, we can experience the same amount of openness and freedom with a mobile OS as we do with Firefox (Firefox OS will also be built to run on lower-end phones that iOS or Android can't handle, opening up new markets in other countries).
The reasoning behind "why don't they focus on Firefox" is ridiculous, as if throwing engineers at one product will inherently improve it. We all know that one product only needs a few core developers with several other supporting devs, and Mozilla is big enough to support several projects.
So no, I don't think it needs saving. Not having 90% market share doesn't make it a failure, especially for a not-for-profit organisation like Mozilla.
Was, maybe; not anymore.
It's the little star icon at the right inside the address textbox. If it's yellow it means the url is already bookmarked.
It's the star on the right of the address bar.