Firefox May Already Be Dead | Hacker News Reader

Firefox May Already Be Dead

pcworld.com

46 pointsvaksel64 comments

Ad Block Plus. Once Chrome has it, I'm switching full time. I realize there's other ways to block ads with chrome, but they don't seem as efficient as ABP

.. that and NoScript.

There are plenty of FireFox plugins I use (primarily FireBug, but Chrome has good debugging tools and it's only a matter of time before someone builds an equivalent of FireBug for Chrome).

AdBlock Plus and NoScript give me not only less junk but block an awful lot of attack vectors. I feel kinda vulnerable without NoScript.

Oh, and a full linux-build, please. I've tested Chrome on Windows and am impressed, but as long as there's not linux build I can't use it. OSX people probably feel the same way.

Agree. I have a alot of fun add-ons, but I need my AdBlock. The internet just looks funny with all those adds.

How hard is it to engineer scripts like that? Won't those come pretty quickly to Chrome?

The OS X battlefield will be interesting because Safari is so prominent. If Apple/Webkit decide they want to compete with Chrome, they're in an excellent position to do so - and they already have Javascript disabling, ad blocking, and GreaseMonkey support in Safari, not to mention a browser that's incredibly fast.

CreamMonkey support is provided by an Input Manager hack; they may go away in a future release of OS X and would need to be redone completely. A better alternative is to make a WebKit plugin with WebKit's API, see ClickToFlash.

I wasn't talking about CreamMonkey. I was talking about GreaseKit.

GreaseKit used to be CreamMonkey. Its still an Input Manager.

GlimmerBlocker is a nice ad-blocker for OS X that works across browsers. I'll let the website do the explaining: http://glimmerblocker.org/

IMHO, these guys need to do some more marketing.

That's the one I was talking about, yeah. On OS X ad blocking isn't such a big necessity since GlimmerBlocker does all of it no matter what browser.

How will Google make money if they roll out ABP for Chrome? It is same as Microsoft trying to make money by rolling out a Linux distro.

You're in the small minority. Even amongst Firefox users last time I measured only 6% or so used ad block plus.

SRWare's Iron is Chrome with all the privacy-compromising stuff turned off. It also has adblocking similar to ABP via an adblock.ini file in the installation directory.

khm ad muncher khm. Basic procedures: download, install, open configuration, options -> filter targets -> add chrome, now you have an adless lightspeed web. Happy surfing!

I'm actually looking for somehing a lot simpler: vi/Emacs keybindings and a better mouseless browsing experience in general.

EDIT: Sorry, I'm looking for such features in Chrome.

I use the Mouseless Browsing add-on in Firefox. It basically adds a number next to all the links on a page, for example you press ctrl + 21 and the link opens. It also can be turned on/off with a shortcut.

I could never get myself to use that; it's possibly because I refuse to remap one control key to the caps lock.

I usually navigate by searching for some substring of the link.

Have you tried the Firemacs extension for Firefox? I use it with Emacs bindings, but I think it should be able to do an approximation of vi bindings as well.

I'm really sorry for not making myself clear: I meant that I would start using Chrome if it had such a feature.

And yeah, Firemacs is awesome. As a matter of fact, it does allow for navigation using some vi bindings by default. Even though I'm an Emacs guy, I find using hjkl a lot more comfortable than C-b C-n C-p C-f. I've heard great thing about vimperator, too.

Pfft. I can (and do) easily cope without Ad Block Plus, but until there's a Vimperator alike Chrome won't get a look in for me..

ditto, the lack of Ad Block is the only reason why I haven't opened Chrome since trying it out.

I get by with http://www.privoxy.org/

Adblock is better but privoxy helped me to change. Only open Firefox(which in comparison takes like ages) for development.

Sensationalism. If you're looking for a faster Firefox look towards the 3.1 betas. If you're willing to use unstable software (alpha Chrome), there's no reason not to check out 3.1. The new Javascript engine is just as fast as Chrome's.

The article links to another article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b2, with Chrome still coming out ahead on performance. The JS engine is only one part of the equation. Chrome is faster than Firefox in a host of other things, like DOM manipulation and startup time, as well as the process-per-tab design makes it scale to multiple cores far more effectively.

Mozilla's lagging pretty hard on the innovation front. Everyone (except IE) has fast JS engines now. It's not really a differentiator. They aren't really doing anything notable long term, they're just gliding on their inertia. At least Google is actively working on Mac and Linux ports and extensions for Chrome, which are their two big catchup areas. Mozilla isn't even thinking about process-per-tab.

The faster JS is attractive if you use a lot of JS heavy sites,. I do not - in fact I mostly browse with JS off. Start up time is a once a day issue, it is not significant given all the other apps usually in my session, and will be even less so once I solve an issue with suspending to RAM.

I would like process per tab, but I like my Firefox extensions more (Scrapbook, Clear fields, No Script, Its All Text, Errorzilla, Download Helper, Add to Search Bar, Web Developer, No Squint, Search Status).

It'd be more interesting to see an article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b3, which recently came out. See https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/03/12/f.... You'll notice that one of the improvements in b3 is performance increase in the javascript engine.

You're right, though, when you say that it isn't just about the javascript engine's speed. So maybe we should wait until Chrome becomes a full-featured browser before we start touting its unbelievable performance. Remember when Firefox went 2.0 and one of the biggest complaints (that I remember) was how it had become bloated and wasn't as fast? Guaranteed the same will eventually happen to Chrome.

The b3 improvements are incremental, I doubt you'll see that big a difference in benchmarks.

There wasn't a whole lot of change from Firefox 1.5->2.0, Firefox 3.0 was the big refresh. I don't actually remember that much complaining about poor performance in Firefox 2.0 relative to 1.x.

What do you feel are missing features in Chrome that actually matter to people that you feel with materially impact performance significantly?

Yeah, and Chrome is ... well, it's a reasonable 80% solution for an alpha product from what people keep saying, but I still can't actually try the damn thing on my usual machine.

Because, once again, a bunch of software developers have forgotten to obey the %*&(ing theme. Chrome's URL bar successfully takes my foreground colours and completely ignores the background colour setting - so I get a white hostname and a light green path on a white background.

And Firefox 3's awesomebar and the way it handles self-signed SSL certs both make me incredibly happy - maybe chrome does these just as well, as I say I can't tell yet (FVO "can't" meaning "choose not to fill the prerequisites in order to be able to", of course :).

But it strikes me that there are probably a lot of issues like the one I'm complaining about that don't matter to most people but are a showstopper for -somebody- - and firefox has probably nailed almost all of those by now, either in core or in an addon.

Seems to me that the key point of chrome is to provide a decent amount of testing for the tech that's going to go into site-specific browsers for various google applications - really, truly going head to head with firefox doesn't really seem to me to achieve anything for google when -somebody- crushing IE is likely more important to them than specifically them doing it and firefox already has a head start.

Ugh, really? Perhaps the author hasn't checked the latest market share statistics for Internet Explorer? If FireFox couldn't kill IE when it was the technologically superior browser, then why would Chrome kill Firefox?

I'll tell you why: Google has lot's o' cash and just might start paying OEMs to install Chrome in place of IE. That's something that Mozilla can't do (at least, not on the same scale as Google), and most people use the browser that's installed for them anyway. So what should Mozilla do?

Well, here's a thought: once Google starts paying OEMs to install Chrome, Microsoft is going to have to take a long, hard look at what they're doing in the browser space. Once they do that, they'll find there's no compelling reason to keep draining resources into the black hole that is Trident. That leaves them two choices: WebKit or Gecko. WebKit might be the obvious choice, since it would bring them close to feature parity with Chrome, and isn't controlled by an ex-arch-nemesis.

On the other hand, the Mozilla foundation could write a couple of nice, soothing, "I'm sorry for that whole anti-trust litigation deal" letters to Ballmer. That way they could swap one sugar-daddy (Google) for another (Microsoft), give Microsoft the rendering engine they so desperately need, and continue to develop XUL and Firefox off on their own.

> Once they do that, they'll find there's no compelling reason to keep draining resources into the black hole that is Trident. That leaves them two choices: WebKit or Gecko.

That is totally never going to happen. Gecko and WebKit are both totally useless to Microsoft, because they're good for nothing except browsing public internet sites. The last time Microsoft upgraded Trident's standards support (with IE7), they got bitten badly by all their business customers' intranet sites breaking. With IE8, they've pretty much promised to include the IE7 revision of Trident with every future release, so that none of their paying customers ever have to upgrade their intranet apps ever again.

As for pouring money into the black hole of Trident, they've already stopped that - I believe the new 'standards mode' engine of IE8 is a wholly new contraption, unfettered by all the legacy quirks that bog down WebKit and Gecko.

It's not just about the browser by itself. Don't forget all the great extensions built on top of Firefox. Until Chrome has attracted developers to build great extensions on it, Firefox is going to stay as my main browser.

Yes, firefox is a platform. The total value is higher than the thing itself, and that makes it hard to displace. Like DOS and Windows. Adblock is very popular, and although I use Greasemonkey (and scripts accumulated for that platform) and others, I doubt that many of the userbase do. And so for them, this isn't a factor.

It's worth remembering that Google doesn't care to win this war - they just want faster browsers to drive web and webapp usage.

The latest builds of Chrome support greasemonkey scripts: http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/18/google-chrome-adds-greasemo...

There is also greasemonkey support in safari (with greasekit) and opera (no extension needed).

Do GM scripts from Firefox work without modification?

Thinking further, most GM scripts only operate on the html received, and are independent of the browser. So all one needs is the GreaseMonkey platform to act as a holder, and existing GM scripts can run straight off, without modification. (maybe some use special Firefox functions, or their job is to interact with firefox specifics, but I think most wouldn't).

I don't know about Chrome, but last I tried with Safari (greasekit) and opera, they did not have 100% GreaseMonkey compatibility yet, unfortunately.

But doesn't that give Google an even better chance of succeeding? Unlike Firefox, they're not blinded by competition - all they want is a superfast browser. And that's what most users want.

As for Adblock and Greasemonkey, neither plugin is particularly complex. Once plugins for Chrome get big, I'd give it 3 weeks before we see a working version of each.

I'm confused by your first paragraph, because you seem to be agreeing with me semantically, but disagreeing syntactically. I think if you expand a little it will become clear to me. :-) BTW: Most users want features more than speed (otherwise it doesn't do what you want, but fast).

In your second paragraph, I think you're underestimating the power of a platform (which enables MS to make so much money BTW). It's an incredibly powerful competitive advantage. Remember monkeyboy: "developers, developers, developers".

I agree Adblock and Greasemonkey can be duplicated in negligible time (it took 7 iterations to get the latter's security model right, but that work is now already done) - but that's only 2 addons. How many man-hours to duplicate a comparable eco-system of addons? Secondly, Greasemonkey is itself a platform - how many man-hours to duplicate all the add-ons for that?

It's not enough that there's the ability to create the addons - they also have to be created, and that takes time, during which more addons are created and refined for Firefox... I'm not saying it's impossible to catch up, just that it an established platform is a powerful factor. BTW: Chrome isn't even released for Linux yet. It's fast, yes, but...

An exception is if Google can make Chrome plug-compatible with Firefox plugs-ins; and if a Chrome Greasemonkey can be made that is plug-compatible with Firefox Greasemonkey. From my fiddling around with these technologies, they both seem to be to be horrendously tied to Firefox specifics. They don't need to be, but they are. IMO, anyway. :-) NB: even firefox 2 and 3 aren't plug-compatible! :D

However, perhaps none of this matters, because (I think) few people use many add-ons beyond adblock. But I really don't know. Maybe they do? I guess Firefox's extensions page has stats, so it would be easily estimated. Oh well, why not some data? It's so much more fun to argue with facts to throw:

Adblock: 627,380 downloads weekly. That's well over 25 million pa. mmmm... the currently most popular plug-in is actually "Video DownloadHelper", at 701,065 weekly downloads. Here's the 20 most popular add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=&cat=a...

I think this guy is right, because unlike the IE -> Firefox switch that is slow, Firefox -> Chrome switch can be really fast. And this is just the start. From the user point of view Firefox is almost unchanged since 1.0, I wonder what they really did in all this time: stability, new parts of the standard implemented, better page rendering, and so on, but this is not a DNS server or an SMTP server, it's a browser. You need to go forward in a way that the user can touch, and improve the user life. Just what Chrome is doing.

Firefox has changed lots since 1.0, you probably just don't realise it because it's taken a while. Off the top of my head:

* Major look and feel changes in 3.0

* Spell checking in 3.0

* Performance improvements throughout the browser.

* Improved support for adding/removing plugins

* Allow searching of addons from within Firefox

* Improved Mac OS X integration.

* The Awesomebar.

* Completely revamped everything to do with bookmarks.

* Improved options window

* Revamped Downloads window, with download progress in the bottom right.

Coming soon in 3.5: Private browsing, dragging tabs into new windows. For a lightweight browser, this adds up.

I can accept the fact that Firefox is a little bit slower than Chrome. After all, the Internet connection is already very slow, why bother saving some extra seconds waiting then? Plus I always start Firefox when system boots and have it wait in the background, and I seldom shut down the system (I just put it to sleep), so startup time of Firefox is not really an issue for me.

But I cannot accept that Firefox eats up 2g memory after some time and stops responding all together once in a week and kills all my tabs with it. What Mozilla should really steal from Chrome is the one-process-per-tab and sandboxing ...

The one reason why Firefox is so slow: XUL.

Has anyone noticed that other browsers using Gecko as their rendering engine (Epiphany, Galeon, etc.) are much faster than Firefox? AFAIK, these browsers are built using native toolkits (GTK+ for both Epiphany and Galeon) of whatever platform they work on. Also, has anyone noticed how slow Songbird is? That's XUL for you.

I don't care about extensions. IMO, a web browser is supposed to let you view and interact with webpages, nothing more, nothing less. Leave the ad blocking, note taking, email checking, photo uploading, iTunes controlling to separate applications. How difficult is it for Mozilla to just wrap up Gecko in a Cocoa shell for the Mac, GTK+/Qt shell for Linux and whatever toolkit is used these days on Windows? Why build the UI using XUL?

I'm an Opera user, but I hate the way they've been piling on feature after feature into the browser. BitTorrent? Speed Dial? If they don't stop now, I'll switch to something leaner.

BitTorrent is only a few kb, and speed dial has propagated to most other browsers.

And why does XUL have to be slow? Couldn't it be sped up instead of throwing it away?

I would love to use Chrome as my primary browser, but until it supports an addon equivalent to and as feature-rich as Firebug, and is available for OSX, I don't have much choice but to stick with Firefox.

Have you ever seen WebKit's Web Inspector? Its very comparable to Firebug. Check it out in Safari 4 on Mac/Windows (Enable Develop menu in the preferences) or Chrome on Windows.

I was despairing about the lack of web devs here (is there one out there that doesn't depend on firebug?). Thanks for redeeming my faith.

Mozilla makes over $100,000,000 a year from affiliate Google searches.

What happens when Google doesn't need that?

100 Million? Really? Got a source for that? If it was something more like 10 Million, I would find it much more believable.

Not quite 100mil, but fairly close: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2007/10/the-future-i...

$66.8 Million isn't in the neighborhood of $100 million. Yes, they're both huge sums of money, but not close enough to go "meh, close enough." Thanks for the link though - I'm somewhat surprised Mozilla made as much money from a non-Google source as they did.

That $67 million dollar figure was from 2006, and that was up 26% from 2005. I can only assume 2 more years of continued growth and more market share have brought that number up substantially.

I was going from memory, and perhaps I meant total over time, not annual.

But the point remains - It's a lot of money.

I'd bet that Microsoft would pay a lot more than that, but Mozilla wouldn't accept it (at least not for the moment) since Google's is perceived to be the best search engine. So they do the right thing and have Google search being the default.

"<well known company/product> is dead. You read it first here!"

but firefox has so many addons like: QuickNote, FlashBlock and Mycroft Project to add any search for your search bar. While we are comparing speed of browser here there are other considerations you are not taking into account

How many Firefox users care about plugins versus the ones that only care about tabs and speed? In my department in college, the number of people using plugin'd Firefox is pretty slim - and we're a department of hackers and designers.

On my resource limited laptop, 512 ram, I will move over to chrome if its resource utilisation ends up being similar to chromium's current utilisation: firefox often takes up 50% of my ram - chromium takes up 8%.

I'll stick with firefox if it really does reduce resource usage in its next iteration. But I've heard those kinds of claims before, and nothing has come from them.

I like Chrome too and will start using it as default browser when..

- All my FF extensions are available in Chrome & - The ability to change what sites it's saves in my landing page. I don't want to be reminded I got RickRolled.

Yeah, I'll switch to Chrome when Chrome gets a VI mode.

Indeed. Also 64-bit, which probably won't happen any time soon. JIT is hard enough on x86's awful, awful ISA.

I don't get any popups in Firefox ever.

The author seems to imply we will all switch to Chrome because of speed, and speed alone. You know what? My PC is faster than it ever was, CPU never hits 100% and Firefox runs fast enough for my needs. With my new i7 system I expect this to be truer than ever before.

I switched from Opera to Firefox, despite Firefox being noticeably slower, because of extensions. I love extensions. In fact, right now I'm unable to imagine a web without extensions. It would be like using a OS without the ability to write scripts or code to interact with it. I realize this probably doesn't apply to all Firefox-users, but I seriously suspect it applies to almost all early adopters.

Why would I switch to to Chrome with extensions lacking, when it offers me nothing more than Opera? In fact Opera offers more than Chrome, is just as fast (based on actual machine-to-human metrics, not artificial millisecond wanking) but that didn't stop me from going to another browser.

Speed is only one factor in the equation, and on modern machines it is highly irrelevant. If speed was that important to everyone, why didn't Opera turn out to be the top dog years ago?

What extensions do you use, that are so important to you, if I may ask? Of these, are there any that would not also function as either desktop widgets or filters applied by a proxy server to the incoming/outgoing content? I moved from Firefox on a PC to Safari on a Mac, and I'm missing it much less than I thought I would; I never really used anything other than Adblock. How is thine ride pimped?

My list of essential extensions are as follows:

* Adblock plus (with Filterset.G) * Firebug * Gamil notifier * Greasemonkey * Platypus (reformat and edit webpages live, script it, ready for Greasemonkey) * Rikaichan (Japanese dictionary with lookup directly in your browser with a simple mouse-hover) * Linkification (Create links out of any non-linked address on pages) * Mouse Gestures (Not just navigation, things like image-zooming and whatever you feel like) * Ubiquity (which pretty much has "extensions" on its own) * User agent switcher (Because some sites gives you different content than google)

Some of these things can surely be implemented in Chrome or will be implemented sooner or later. Some can probably be implemented outside the browser, but that means another layer of indirection while working with your data. In other words: A step back.

I don't expect all of these extensions ever to be ported to the core of any browser. In fact that would make very little sense as only a fringe share of the market would need it or want it.

However having the ability to have extensions and go crazy with your customized install is what makes Firefox great. And this is where Chrome fails. It wont let you make your browser yours.

It seems that nearly every post about Chrome results in a multitude of comments like this one, about how extensions are key and Chrome is useless without them. Google realizes this and is working on bringing extensions to Chrome. Mozilla, on the other hand, isn't working on bringing process-per-tab to Firefox at all. It almost seems like willful ignorance.

Firefox may be dead simply due to Mozilla not having any long term strategy vision about how to stay relevant. The issue isn't that Chrome doesn't have extensions now, but what is Mozilla doing now to plan for the future when they no longer have the extension advantage. So far it looks like nothing.

Even Firefox's vaunted new JS engine in 3.5 isn't going to be turned on for extensions, only web content. Meanwhile not only does Chrome's extension code get the V8 love, they also run as a separate process, which means they won't impact performance of browsing as much as Firefox's extension framework does.

I've tried chrome and it is ok, the new safari rocks my socks, but I still use firefox dunno why.

I'd call it loyalty for all they've done to the community and the web in general, and I am grateful for that.

Rock on, foxy, rock on.

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