

Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So - edw519
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/future-of-firefox/

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RyanMcGreal
>Certainly, Google Chrome is now growing at a much faster pace than Firefox
is.

I get tired of seeing this repeated ad nauseam. It's _easy_ to grow fast from
zero; _Firefox_ grew fast from zero. It's a lot harder to grow fast from
double-digit penetration.

~~~
wavesplash
While you're technically correct, the difference here is that the growth
Google sees could easily be sustained. Google can expose more users in a few
hours to Chrome(for free via a well placed link on their search homepage) than
Mozilla could ever hope to reach in half a year without a massive advertising
budget.

Combine that with the positive 'word of mouth' I've encountered so far from
non-technical types and it's possible we haven't seen the knee of the curve
yet in adoption growth.

~~~
jerf
Right now, Chrome is visibly faster for me. I keep hearing about fantastic new
improvements to the Firefox JS engine and other components but in practice
they don't seem to have amounted to much.

... (Hmm, before making that assertion I'd better test it, test test test)...

Well, perhaps I should amend that to "up until very recently, Chrome was
visibly faster". As it happens I just went from Firefox 3.5 to 3.6 on this
machine yesterday, and a deliberately-subjective performance test I just ran
has Chrome and Firefox a lot closer to indistinguishable difference. (As an
end user, I don't care about 10% differences on this or that benchmark.) I had
been using Chrome for the last two weeks, but I have very badly missed
NoScript and right click -> "Block images from this server". (Stupid flabby
stomach ads.) Now I think I'm headed back.

But I suppose I can salvage my thesis by saying that at least until recently
Chrome had a significant advantage over Firefox. If Firefox's performance
catches up, that may staunch the bleeding, because if Chrome isn't much
faster, why switch? Firefox definitely has more features, and nobody really
cares about HTML5 right now; by the time they do FF will be there.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
On both my home Ubuntu system and my work Windows XP system, Firefox and
Chrome are about the same speed and the same memory footprint. However, I
can't deny that Chrome subjectively _feels_ snappier to use.

~~~
extension
_Chrome subjectively feels snappier_

Right, and why would anything else matter for a web browser?

~~~
dhimes
Being able to parse the whole web, not just a subset.

~~~
extension
Sorry, I meant why would any other kind of _speed_ matter?

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metamemetics
Opera is the best of Firefox\Chrome in one IMO. The builtin Dragonfly
developer tool is basically a copy of Firebug and at least as powerful. The
widgets system can basically host full fledged desktop applications. It's
JavaScript implementation is as fast as Chrome's, and it's newest interface is
possibly more minimal than Chrome's with greater functionality. Running custom
JavaScript on every page is as easy as specifying a user script's folder and
dropping your file in it.

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gnarr
We'll now within 10 minutes of installing 4. If it's not drastically faster
than the current version, then the story is over and we're starting a dull,
pointless addendum.

~~~
noarchy
I want to see its memory management. Chrome destroys FF in this area, in my
experience. It is even worse when you're running add-ons(which I can forgive,
to an extent), but even when disabling those, it is still a hog.

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ksdsh
I want to switch to Chrome but I can't live without a Firefox addon - tree
style tab.

~~~
kristofferR
Wow, I have the EXACT same issue. Tree Style Tab is so incredibly valuable, I
simply can't use a browser without it for any serious work.

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WilliamLP
How can they not point out the elephant in the room? Not having H.264 support
is a deal-killer for some users, and this is going to increase. As a user,
this means I either see HTML5 video as broken, or I get noticeably worse
quality at the same bit-rate.

This is symbolic of internal forces in the product leading to decisions that
no users actually want.

~~~
mclin
Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash. Probably most
will choose flash over ogg. You think any site wouldn't include a flash
fallback when IE has 60% of the market? Anyone with flash installed won't
notice a thing.

~~~
WilliamLP
> Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash.

For now. When IE9 comes out it will start to become a viable business solution
to develop for H.264 / HTML5 with no Flash. This may be a sweet spot for
development effort versus benefit as it may be more costly to ignore legacy IE
and Firefox users than to ignore iPhone and iPad.

Users don't care about a proprietary web, they care about web sites working.
It's already alarming to try Youtube in experimental mode in Firefox and have
it not work at all for most videos. This is supposed to be a modern cutting
edge browser, right?

~~~
mclin
I haven't tried this, but it looks pretty easy to do both. At least for using
flash for the the video features provided by html5

<http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody>

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emilis_info
Did you see the screenshot? Article is based on the 20 votes that the
competing answers got.

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javanix
Many talented developers are getting paid by Google to solely hack on Chrome -
to add new features, to make it blazing fast, and to make sure it is well
supported. The fact that it is open source is kind of a nice little bonus -
Google-sponsored development is going to dwarf the community development, as
long as Google is paying. Not only that, but any major community development
runs the risk of being forked off into a less visible product if it doesn't
conform to Google's direction. Google, after all, is not going to spend ad
money on convincing people to download an offshoot of Chrome.

Mozilla does not pay a vast number of developers to head in one direction on
Firefox - it asks the community nicely if it will head in one direction
(because of Chrome's performance advantages, 4.0 will heavily emphasize that
direction). By nature, this means that the Firefox codebase is going to be
more fragmented than Chrome's. Things like comprehensive performance
enhancements will be correspondingly tougher to do. The advantage of this is
that there is a much less rigid steering committee - community developers on
Firefox are free to go do whatever they want. The results are a slower, but
more customizable browser.

I suspect that Chrome will probably end up with a bigger market share within 5
years, just because of Google's financial clout, but I doubt that Firefox will
disappear completely.

~~~
whopa
Don't fall for the Mozilla marketing. Mozilla has >200 people on staff, and
the vast majority of actual browser development is done by Mozilla staff.
Getting Mozilla to actually respond to any external development community
questions and feedback is like pulling teeth. There's a reason you hardly see
anyone building on top of Mozilla anymore.

Mozilla's problems stem from their management simply being over their heads,
and not having the chops to run a development project of that scale. A good
chunk of Chrome developers used to be Mozilla developers, who probably weren't
exactly thrilled with how Mozilla was being run. And talk to any third party
who has tried to work with Mozilla building on the code base, and you'll hear
all sorts of frustrations.

Mozilla has enough money in the bank to not disappear for a while, but they'll
likely fade into irrelevance sooner, because it doesn't look like they can
escape their institutional problems.

~~~
celticjames
Mozilla Corporation employs 200+ people, but the community contribution,
measured in commits, is substantial. But what you say about management is
true. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand does. Communication
between the corporation and the foundation is very poor.

~~~
whopa
In the past few years, the vast majority of commits to core browser code is by
Mozilla paid staff. They mostly ignore outside contributors at that level.

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Detrus
It's typical of older teams or companies to fall behind and new people to
outdo them. Firefox, inspired by idealism and being open source is no
exception.

Their code and mindset is solving old problems. Firefox didn't need standards
bodies' agreement to think of threads for tabs, but they didn't. That's
because they think of a browser as something between an app and an OS, they're
not sure. Google made no apologies, said the browser is the OS, hence many
decisions to make it into one.

Now Google is making a huge leap to erase distinctions between the web and the
desktop. Their Go language compiles so quickly it's comparable to JS
compilation, but performance is comparable to C++

Talk and demo here <http://blog.golang.org/2010/05/new-talk-and-
tutorials.html> [http://stanford-
online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/100428-ee3...](http://stanford-
online.stanford.edu/courses/ee380/100428-ee380-300.asx)

Google NativeClient is what will run this code on the frontend.

Maybe Firefox's motivations are old news now? It will be interesting to see
how they react to these new developments, whether they'll add good support for
NativeClient or view it as another plugin. Will they welcome desktop app
capability or insist that the web just needs a few tweaks?

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bonecandy
Two things hold me back from using Chrome on OS X:

1) Chrome's many non-standard (and ugly) UI elements. Especially the dropdown
menus in the bookmarks bar.

2) Firebug - Webkit's web inspector still isn't quite there yet.

Otherwise I would switch to Chrome in a heartbeat :D

~~~
danieldon
I sincerely hope with #1 you are comparing Chrome to Safari and not Firefox.

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MikeCapone
I don't know about massive decline, but they are definitely not setting the
pace anymore, and they have lost a lot of their "geek halo".

I bet a lot of technical people are now recommending/installing Chrome on non-
techy people's computers, and over time that adds up.

~~~
dhimes
Can chrome handle mathml yet?

Edit: I just downloaded gc beta for linux, and the answer is: NO. And SVG is
downright ugly (but it animates ok with javascript).

It was wicked fast, though.

~~~
omaranto
It's sad not having MathML support in WebKit. It means that I still need
Firefox on my Win7 and Ubuntu machines and that I'm screwed on the iPod Touch.

~~~
dhimes
It looks like they are working on it. I thought Safari rendered mathml; I
wonder what I was looking at?

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jonknee
If Firefox Mobile doesn't catch on they are doomed... That's where the world
is going.

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joelhaus
I find myself using Chrome more for content consumption and Firefox more for
content creation; but that's slowly been shifting towards Chrome for both.

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kmfrk
Just to wrap my head around Firefox---and please don't take this the wrong way
---why are you choosing Firefox over Chrome, if not for the extensions and
debuggers?

I use Opera, so don't construe any snarkiness; I just honestly struggle to
remember Firefox's redeeming qualities. And the boot time, oh God the boot
time.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
One good reason is because they are committed to an open web for it's own
sake, not because it happens to currently align with their advertising
business, or because it helped them out from under the shadow of a competing
monopoly, or because if they don't deliver then they will accelerate the
irrelevance of their desktop platform. (This is also a good reason to use
Opera.)

Mozilla have also built an incredible marketing machine which speaks to normal
folk which seems to be missed by the geeks who are switching to Chrome. You
don't get 1/3rd global market share with just geeks, certainly not the 2/3rds
they've got in Germany. Apparently people think you can do this with a few
advertisments and a popular brand. I wish Google luck (particularly as I think
they're stealing share from IE) but I think it takes as much, if not more,
support to sell a browser as it does to sell a mobile phone.

(If you'd allowed extensions as a reason, then Vimperator is nice too)

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zppx
Everyone that I know are using Chrome right now, except guys like me that like
to tweak their browsers (something that Chrome fails miserably) and some
extensions that sadly does not fit well into Chrome architecture. The other
major problem (a search bar) was partly solved by Duck Duck Go.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
Why do you need a search bar in Chrome? Just type what you want into the
"address" bar, and it will search your default search engine.

~~~
papachito
You don't need a search bar in chrome, just type the address of the site you
want to search with and hit TAB. Example:

youtu+TAB and then enter your keyword. Works with every site that support
opensearch. en.wiki+TAB will search wikipedia etc.

~~~
omaranto
Slight correction: works with sites that support opensearch and that you
previously have visited.

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koenigdavidmj
Plus, Mozilla's business model is basically done for. With Google providing a
Firefox competitor, how long do you really think it will be before Google
pulls their deal with Mozilla to give them money per search via the search
box?

~~~
zppx
hardly, I do not see why google would prefer that a large chunk of the web
users do not use its service, google still gets more money on adwords and
adsense, I dare say google would pay MS to be the defalt engine on IE if this
was possible, for me chrome is much more a vision of how google thinks a
browser should be, lean, stable, fast and extensible

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RabidChihuahua
+1 Chrome. But Firefox will always be entrenched.

