Why you (probably) won’t be using Firefox a while from now
rahulgaitonde.org
rahulgaitonde.org
A good counterexample to his argument is Firefox itself.
(edit: although I do see HTML5 as being a potential threat to firefox and open source browsers in general if h.264 becomes the dominant codec for <video>, but this is another matter)
Firefox has good support by developers and I don't see anything changing until another browser becomes just as extensible and achieves the same developer niche. Not to say another browser won't take over the mass market though.
Completely subjective, but I have always loved the Firefox and Thunderbird logos. I've had them somewhere prominent on my desktops for so long now that I almost don't feel right without them. First app that I install on a new machine is Firefox. Maybe Google or Apple should try and snag Jon Hicks, I read he's working with Opera at the moment.
Firefox is currently the most popular, yes, but Chrome's been growing (slightly) faster and it's still in beta, not to mention it has the full support of Google behind it. How profitable would Mozilla be if it wasn't being paid by Google? (That's not snark, that's a genuine question that I don't know the answer to.)
You can't offer Firefox as a counterargument when his point is that soon Firefox will begin to slip. Right now, it's arguably at its peak. It's competing with two browsers that really are seen as experimental among Windows users: Chrome is still in beta and doesn't support several things; Safari really only got production-ready on Windows with its latest version, and Apple hasn't focused much on promoting it yet. Firefox, meanwhile, has 6 years' community behind it, and inertia alone states that it'll spread as Internet Explorer disappears, and IE seems to be quickly dwindling.
The real thing to check is what the early adapters are using: Not the pure experimentalists but the people who are "browser enthusiasts", the people who recommend browsers to other people. Three years ago they were all recommending Firefox, myself included, and now we see Firefox is the dominant browser. Now, however, all the adapters love Chrome, and the elitist Mac snobs have shifted from loving Firefox to praising the much more native Safari 4, and for good reason. If we assume "a while from now" means 5 years, his argument is correct: Mozilla can't afford to compete with a company as talented, merciless, and rich as Google.
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Which is fine, as long as everyone recognizes it as such. His prediction and reasons for it may turn out to be true, but there's no way now to know if that's the case.
So this article and the points he's trying to make don't hold up.
Firefox hits the sweet-spot for me, and just about everyone I know (not just tech-savvy folk either). So long as they keep improving the way they have, I think that plus inertia will carry Mozilla for a while to come.
I'm a linux user and a web developer - and I've already abandoned Firefox for everything except FireBug - after having used every version of Firefox, on several platforms, since it was called Phoenix, I just use it as a vehicle for using Firebug (and occasionally Flash) now.
For everything else, I've switched completely to Chromium (the open source platform which is released as Google Chrome). Even though it's currently pre-beta on linux, and doesn't really support plugins yet, it's just such a vast improvement over FF, I've already completely converted.
Firefox's huge memory issues - regularly sucking up 3Gb+ after a week or two of use - constant CPU usage (even when idle) general slowness and occasional instability, make it such a pain in the ass for professional web development that Chromium coming along was a massive relief. Chromium is _much_ faster than Firefox and it's process-per-tab model is genius, making transparent the direct link between tabs and RAM; it also means that it never bogs down, no matter how many tabs & windows you've got going and closing a tab ends that process and free's that RAM, unlike Firefox.
I'm running Chromium nightlies from the Ubuntu PPA and it's coming along rapidly - they've recently made the webkit developer tools available (right click, Inspect Element), which are nearly as good a firebug, so it won't be long before I completely phase out Firefox altogether.
I've tried using Chrome and Safari 4 but have gone back to Firefox (on mac). It looks fine on a mac with the GrApple themes Fission and the PDF Plugin. The addons I use are few genuinely useful (lasttab, FireGestures).
Safari still doesn't even remember the tabs I had open last time.
I'm all for competition though, I just don't think that it necessarily means that Firefox will disappear. IE still has by far the largest share of the market.
Hope it helps.
If you're using more than a GB under normal conditions there's either something wrong with one of your extensions or your profile is messed up. Try starting a new profile with no extensions and see if the problem remains.