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Comment by ryanvm | Hacker News Reader

A bit sad how Firefox is now chasing IE and Chrome for features and speed. Oh well, were it not for Firefox we'd all still be running IE6.

The King is dead. Love live the King.

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Exactly. The situation today is exactly what freaked Microsoft out back in the 90s, so much that they went all-out to murder Netscape: Continuously improving standards-based browsers. We've got Firefox to thank for that.

Say what you will about the Mozilla project, over the past decade it's been the single largest force for making our lives as web developers better. It's good to see that they're keeping up the tradition, and pushing forward. The feature list for 3.5 is damned exciting.

It is definitely not chasing IE for speed. AFAIK firefox is faster than IE in JS and rendering and is also more standards compliant

Glad to see I'm not the only that finds it ironic how Firefox only took 2 versions to abandon the original reasoning (lightweight, fast, better UI) that made them so much better than anything else. It's not like in the last few years people have suddenly wanted heavier, slower, harder.

I never thought they did such a great job of that anyway. For example, the early versions of Firefox were about twice as big as Opera (in download size) and had a fraction of the features.

Yeah, they basically switched off a bunch of stuff in the full Mozilla suite (now Seamonkey) but it was only later (for certain things much later) that they actually removed unused code and focused on speed and memory.

So anyone who thinks that Firefox had "Features", "Speed" or "Lightweight" as original killer features is deluded.

They did on the other hand have a fairly stripped down and therefore non-threatening usable UI (now leapfrogged in that regard by Chrome and Safari), extensions, being both open source and free of cost (without being ad supported), faking native Windows UI reasonably well, and not being IE6 in their favor.

Right, and maybe you're right that I was deluded, but my recollection is that the original motivation for Firefox was "Mozilla (and IE) are bloated and slow, let's fix that"

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