6 ms·

Why you (probably) won’t be using Firefox a while from now

8 points by emontero1 17y ago

semiquaver 17y ago
This assertion is made almost entirely without support. 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)
- buugs 17y ago
  h.264 will probably just be a plugin away and just like that firefox is supported until the user reformats or gets a new computer 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.
  - zimbabwe 17y ago
    You put too much of a focus on developers. Most people don't care about development within the browser, they care about development within web sites. The philosophy that the browser ought to merely be a window to other sites with as little chrome as possible has been advocated by Chrome's (and Safari's with the advent of Snow Leopard) multithreaded processes. To date, I have still seen no good reason to use extensions, and the majority of people I discuss web browsing with agree. (The biggest sticking points are Greasemonkey and Adblocker, and they're very minority points, particularly when projects like GlimmerBlocker work cross-browser and allow both extensibility and blocking.)
    - jonny_noog 17y ago
      For the average user, I totally agree. But for myself (a web developer/designer and power user), I won't be considering a wholesale switch from Firefox until there are viable alternatives for such Firefox add-ons as the Web Developer toolbar, Firebug, All-in-One Gestures, ColorZilla, MeasureIt and Tab Mix Plus to name a few that I find useful.
      - zimbabwe 17y ago
        That makes perfect sense. I love that Firefox is and always will be an option. I just don't think it'll stay the top (or #2) browser for long.
        jonny_noog 17y ago
        Yeah well I guess there's always going to be a lot more average users than there are power users. 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.
        zimbabwe 17y ago
        His work for Opera's been fun to watch, certainly. The logo's no different (I'm not really a fan of any of the current browsing logos, TBH), but the latest beta has made the first step towards not being entirely painful to look at on the Mac. Not perfect, but leagues better than the bland tripe it was just half a version ago.
        jonny_noog 17y ago
        So he's doing more UI type work for them then?
        zimbabwe 17y ago
        Yep! Check out the beta to see his latest work in action.
        jonny_noog 17y ago
        Can't say I've ever been a huge Opera fan but I just made the big switch to Mac, so I just might check out the beta and experience the not entirely painful appearance :P. Thanks.
- zimbabwe 17y ago
  http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp 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.
  - calvin 17y ago
    These statistics do not show Firefox is the most popular browser as they are specific only to W3Schools which is primarily a developer/designer-trafficked site. The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files I'd recommend looking at StatCounter's chart of current browser stats (for the US) as of July 2009 (found this earlier today via TechCrunch): http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-US-monthly-200807-200907 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-US-monthly-200807...
    - zimbabwe 17y ago
      Thank you very much for the link! I'd just Google'd "web browser usage" and took the w3 link.
timcederman 17y ago
I think Chrome and Safari have both got a long way to go until they get the right mix of usability. I just switched back from Chrome to Firefox 3.5 and it's like putting on an old pair of very comfortable shoes. Chrome and Safari are definitely "designer" browsers, while IE is still slow as buggery. 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.
- zimbabwe 17y ago
  I've had the opposite experience: Many frustrated friends have abandoned Firefox for Safari and Chrome. Very few of my friends ever use add-ons, either, and that's the only thing Firefox is good for anymore, what with its shitty UI and relatively mediocre speeds.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
jakewolf 17y ago
After upgrading to 3.5 I thought the article was going to be about how memory problems are getting worse with firefox. It was using over 1gb today!
- semiquaver 17y ago
  Crazy. My instance has been running for days, with dozens of tabs open at once and I am currently at 89Mb with 4 tabs open at the moment i.e. it scales back the memory like it should. I've found that memory usage has improved significantly in recent builds. 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.
rythie 17y ago
Last time I checked neither Safari, Chrome or IE ran on Linux. Opera is not in the Ubuntu repositories. Also I couldn't do without FireBug or AdBlock+. I am only qualified to speak for myself, but I expect I'll be using Firefox for a while still.
- jmtulloss 17y ago
  Chrome is in alpha for Linux.
  - dflock 17y ago
    And it's excellent and rock solid too. They've started talking about a beta and marking blocking issues in the public bug tracker: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxWeeklyNotes http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxWeeklyNotes
- elcron 17y ago
  I've been running the chrome alpha on linux for a few days and haven't had any major problems. (Although it would be nice if it could import bookmarks.)
yangyang 17y ago
It does seem to be rather fashionable to slate Firefox at the moment. 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.
- emontero1 17y ago
  Allow me to suggest Glims. I've been using it for a while now. I can't understand why Safari doesn't come with Glim's extras by default (e.g. full screen mode and better tab handling). Anyhow, here's the link: http://www.machangout.com/ http://www.machangout.com/ Hope it helps.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
evdawg 17y ago
I'm sorry, but the author is misinformed. His "points" are based on the common (mistaken) belief that Firefox isn't commercially backed. Firefox is commercially backed, just like Chrome. And he seems to think/imply Chrome isn't open source. Chrome is open source. Chrome development is very transparent too. So this article and the points he's trying to make don't hold up.
- dflock 17y ago
  Correct. Also, a fair bit a the Mozilla Corporations funding comes from their search box referral kickbacks from Google, ironically.
Oompa 17y ago
I already stopped. Firefox was just too slow after using Safari for a little bit. Now with Safari 4, it's even speedier, and the web development tools make a decent replacement for Firebug.
dflock 17y ago
Ok, I read the 'article' but I'm not sure I agree with the apparent conclusion, not for the reasons given, anyway. 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.

8 points by emontero1 17y ago

This assertion is made almost entirely without support. 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)

buugs 17y ago
h.264 will probably just be a plugin away and just like that firefox is supported until the user reformats or gets a new computer 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.
- zimbabwe 17y ago
  You put too much of a focus on developers. Most people don't care about development within the browser, they care about development within web sites. The philosophy that the browser ought to merely be a window to other sites with as little chrome as possible has been advocated by Chrome's (and Safari's with the advent of Snow Leopard) multithreaded processes. To date, I have still seen no good reason to use extensions, and the majority of people I discuss web browsing with agree. (The biggest sticking points are Greasemonkey and Adblocker, and they're very minority points, particularly when projects like GlimmerBlocker work cross-browser and allow both extensibility and blocking.)
  - jonny_noog 17y ago
    For the average user, I totally agree. But for myself (a web developer/designer and power user), I won't be considering a wholesale switch from Firefox until there are viable alternatives for such Firefox add-ons as the Web Developer toolbar, Firebug, All-in-One Gestures, ColorZilla, MeasureIt and Tab Mix Plus to name a few that I find useful.
    - zimbabwe 17y ago
      That makes perfect sense. I love that Firefox is and always will be an option. I just don't think it'll stay the top (or #2) browser for long.
      - jonny_noog 17y ago
        Yeah well I guess there's always going to be a lot more average users than there are power users. 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.
        zimbabwe 17y ago
        His work for Opera's been fun to watch, certainly. The logo's no different (I'm not really a fan of any of the current browsing logos, TBH), but the latest beta has made the first step towards not being entirely painful to look at on the Mac. Not perfect, but leagues better than the bland tripe it was just half a version ago.
        jonny_noog 17y ago
        So he's doing more UI type work for them then?
        zimbabwe 17y ago
        Yep! Check out the beta to see his latest work in action.
        jonny_noog 17y ago
        Can't say I've ever been a huge Opera fan but I just made the big switch to Mac, so I just might check out the beta and experience the not entirely painful appearance :P. Thanks.
zimbabwe 17y ago
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp 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.
- calvin 17y ago
  These statistics do not show Firefox is the most popular browser as they are specific only to W3Schools which is primarily a developer/designer-trafficked site. The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files I'd recommend looking at StatCounter's chart of current browser stats (for the US) as of July 2009 (found this earlier today via TechCrunch): http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-US-monthly-200807-200907 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-US-monthly-200807...
  - zimbabwe 17y ago
    Thank you very much for the link! I'd just Google'd "web browser usage" and took the w3 link.

timcederman 17y ago

I think Chrome and Safari have both got a long way to go until they get the right mix of usability. I just switched back from Chrome to Firefox 3.5 and it's like putting on an old pair of very comfortable shoes. Chrome and Safari are definitely "designer" browsers, while IE is still slow as buggery. 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.

zimbabwe 17y ago
I've had the opposite experience: Many frustrated friends have abandoned Firefox for Safari and Chrome. Very few of my friends ever use add-ons, either, and that's the only thing Firefox is good for anymore, what with its shitty UI and relatively mediocre speeds.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

jakewolf 17y ago

After upgrading to 3.5 I thought the article was going to be about how memory problems are getting worse with firefox. It was using over 1gb today!

semiquaver 17y ago
Crazy. My instance has been running for days, with dozens of tabs open at once and I am currently at 89Mb with 4 tabs open at the moment i.e. it scales back the memory like it should. I've found that memory usage has improved significantly in recent builds. 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.

rythie 17y ago

Last time I checked neither Safari, Chrome or IE ran on Linux. Opera is not in the Ubuntu repositories. Also I couldn't do without FireBug or AdBlock+. I am only qualified to speak for myself, but I expect I'll be using Firefox for a while still.

jmtulloss 17y ago
Chrome is in alpha for Linux.
- dflock 17y ago
  And it's excellent and rock solid too. They've started talking about a beta and marking blocking issues in the public bug tracker: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxWeeklyNotes http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxWeeklyNotes
elcron 17y ago
I've been running the chrome alpha on linux for a few days and haven't had any major problems. (Although it would be nice if it could import bookmarks.)

yangyang 17y ago

It does seem to be rather fashionable to slate Firefox at the moment. 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.

emontero1 17y ago
Allow me to suggest Glims. I've been using it for a while now. I can't understand why Safari doesn't come with Glim's extras by default (e.g. full screen mode and better tab handling). Anyhow, here's the link: http://www.machangout.com/ http://www.machangout.com/ Hope it helps.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

evdawg 17y ago

I'm sorry, but the author is misinformed. His "points" are based on the common (mistaken) belief that Firefox isn't commercially backed. Firefox is commercially backed, just like Chrome. And he seems to think/imply Chrome isn't open source. Chrome is open source. Chrome development is very transparent too. So this article and the points he's trying to make don't hold up.

dflock 17y ago
Correct. Also, a fair bit a the Mozilla Corporations funding comes from their search box referral kickbacks from Google, ironically.

Oompa 17y ago

I already stopped. Firefox was just too slow after using Safari for a little bit. Now with Safari 4, it's even speedier, and the web development tools make a decent replacement for Firebug.

dflock 17y ago

Ok, I read the 'article' but I'm not sure I agree with the apparent conclusion, not for the reasons given, anyway. 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.