
FireFox heading for 15% market share? - hncj
http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/WebDev/WebDesignGraphicsStyling/firefox-heading-for-15-market
======
bwarp
I hope the market share stays.

It's the only browser which isn't a corporate puppet, respects the user's
requests and has a truly open development model.

It's the only real browser if you ask me.

~~~
lmm
If you look at their financial statements firefox is pretty much a google
puppet. Try konqueror for something more like what you're describing.

~~~
azakai
> If you look at their financial statements firefox is pretty much a google
> puppet.

Firefox does get most of its funding from Google currently, but there are
alternatives. I'm pretty sure Microsoft would also be happy to fund Firefox in
return for putting Bing by default there.

> Try konqueror for something more like what you're describing.

onqueror uses WebKit, and Google is the main contributor to WebKit, so you
aren't getting away from Google that way.

------
TheCoreh
The problem I have with Firefox is Mozilla's inability to fix problems or
adopt new technologies in a timely manner. Take OS X Lion's new scrollbars,
for instace. Lion has been around since July last year, and Mozilla has yet to
offer support for the new auto-hiding scrollbars and for rubberband scrolling.
It only took Chrome around one month to fix that. Same for native full screen
support.

Then there are bugs that have been around for years now, like pressing
Cmd+Left or Cmd+Right on a textarea does nothing. (Windows users: These are
the OS X equivalents of Home and End) They say that there's a conflict with
another set of key bindings, and that this is an issue with XUL, but I
strongly believe that the Firefox UX should dictate how XUL works, and not the
contrary.

The last time I looked, they were still struggling to make each tab an
independent process. Chrome first shipped more than three years ago with such
a feature. Since then, both Safari and Internet Explorer have adopted a
similar model.

Their new, rapid release cycle is a great improvement. But updating Firefox is
still annoying and slow. You have to check for extension compatibility. You
have to wait for a progress bar to fill. They should have nailed this when 4.0
first shipped.

I wonder if Mozilla is suffering from finantial/funding issues right now,
already, since their main source of revenue, ads on Google results in Firefox,
is constantly decreasing. How long can they keep mantaining Firefox? Should
they switch to a crowdfunding model?

It's really a shame this is hapenning, since they have great intentions: To
keep the Web open and innovative. In terms of philosophy, they are also on a
much higher ground than Apple, Microsoft and Google.

~~~
azakai
> The problem I have with Firefox is Mozilla's inability to fix problems or
> adopt new technologies in a timely manner.

It sounds like your priorities - UI features like scrollbars - are not
identical to the FF developers. That's fine - it's why it's good we have
several good browsers to choose from.

Generally though, Firefox has definitely been inventing and adopting plenty of
new and exciting technologies, some random examples: TypeInference in the JS
engine (still unique to Firefox), Layers graphics system with support for
hardware acceleration/Direct2D/etc., WebGL (together with Chrome, lots before
Safari or Opera), Audio Data API, new JS features like Proxies and WeakMaps
(which Chrome yesterday blogged about finally implementing), etc.

> But updating Firefox is still annoying and slow. You have to check for
> extension compatibility. You have to wait for a progress bar to fill. They
> should have nailed this when 4.0 first shipped.

FF 10 defaults addons to compatible, and FF 11 and 12 will add things like
update in the background (no progress bar, no prompt). It would have been good
to have had this with 4.0 of course, but it does take time to do - waiting to
release 4.0 until now would have meant not shipping all the other great
features mentioned before.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
This.

Firefox is the only browser shipping a fully standards-compliant
implementation of IndexedDB. IndexedDB is one of the most important features
of HTML5. Clearly Mozilla is moving fast enough, their priorities are simply
different than the grandparents.

~~~
unconed
Remember when Opera and WebKit were racing for 100% compliance on the ACID3
test, while Mozilla was whining that the test wasn't valid? Remember when
Apple published a gallery of beautiful 3D CSS effects, and Mozilla was whining
that "it wasn't real CSS 3"? They ended up implementing both specs years later
anyhow.

Mozilla has had their priorities wrong for ages. They still coast on the glory
days of the 2000s when they were the good guys, even though they're now just
another browser maker with millions in the bank and a giant legacy platform to
take care of.

Bugzilla is full of code-centric developers who seem more interested in
theoretical feature sets than actually making features that are useful to end-
users.

Take for example the differing approach to sub pixel rounding. WebKit's
approach recognizes that rounding errors cannot be viewed in isolation, but
can result in visually disruptive artifacts in group. Mozilla still prefers
mathematical purity over reducing disruptive artifacts, with e.g. text
drifting perceptibly against a container when it is being moved slowly.

But the best example was border-radius: Moz implemented it for years, but
didn't anti-alias rounded corners. There wasn't even a guarantee that
identical corners on the same box would be rendered the same, due to rounding
errors. When WebKit implemented it, they had anti-aliasing from day one, and
suddenly everyone was using it. Big surprise.

The web has always been a visual medium, and the stick of platform APIs needs
to be sold with the carrot of attractive design and seamless rendering. In
their marketing materials, Moz gets it, but in their development strategies,
they are still way behind.

~~~
azakai
> Remember when Opera and WebKit were racing for 100% compliance on the ACID3
> test, while Mozilla was whining that the test wasn't valid? Remember when
> Apple published a gallery of beautiful 3D CSS effects, and Mozilla was
> whining that "it wasn't real CSS 3"? They ended up implementing both specs
> years later anyhow.

About ACID3, the main issue was SVG fonts. They are an unneeded standard,
because Web Fonts exist, and Firefox has therefore not implemented them (so
saying they eventually did is incorrect). The right thing to do was to fix the
ACID3 test, which has been done, see more details here:

<http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3>

About 3D CSS, sure, there were disagreements and eventually Apple got it's
way, that's a normal part of the standards process, you can't predict how
things will work out. You can't expect every browser maker to be right from
the beginning on every topic.

~~~
unconed
According to Wikipedia, SVG fonts were 3 out of a 100 tests. If you ignore
those, Firefox 4 passed ACID3 about 2 years after Opera and WebKit, and that's
only counting the actual released versions rather than nighties. But it's not
even about the specific tests, it's about the crappy and holier than thou
attitude that Mozilla demonstrated in those years, with very little to back it
up.

For example this post, which has been removed by the author but is still
referenced elsewhere: [http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-
basica...](http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basically-
worthless/)

The gist of it was that ACID3 didn't test things that were relevant to 'real'
web developers. Which is a dubious criticism at best, seeing as ACID3 was an
excellent weathervane for sorting the wheat from the chaff.

But it's hypocrisy in hindsight given that all the great features that web
developers flocked to came from the other engines. And now Mozilla is
complaining that there are -webkit prefixes everywhere.

As for 3D CSS, it's not just about 'disagreements' or 'the spec'. The work
Apple has done on iOS and desktop has made WebKit2 a seriously impressive
engine. I made this site recently: <http://acko.net/>. It's butter smooth in
Safari, choppy and ugly as hell in Firefox 10 (if I enable the 3D effect
there). And yet Mozilla goes around proclaiming Firefox now supports CSS 3D
and is on par with WebKit.

~~~
azakai
> But it's hypocrisy in hindsight given that all the great features that web
> developers flocked to came from the other engines. And now Mozilla is
> complaining that there are -webkit prefixes everywhere.

? It isn't Mozilla saying this. It's every browser but WebKit. It's Microsoft,
Mozilla and Opera, and non-browser people too.

The mobile web is broken because it's full of WebKit-specific stuff that other
browsers can't render. That's a fact. Mobile version of IE, Firefox and Opera
can't render the mobile web properly because of that, even though they are
standards-compliant browsers.

> As for 3D CSS, it's not just about 'disagreements' or 'the spec'. The work
> Apple has done on iOS and desktop has made WebKit2 a seriously impressive
> engine. I made this site recently: <http://acko.net/>. It's butter smooth in
> Safari, choppy and ugly as hell in Firefox 10 (if I enable the 3D effect
> there). And yet Mozilla goes around proclaiming Firefox now supports CSS 3D
> and is on par with WebKit.

Link? All I've seen is that Firefox was announced to support 3D CSS stuff,
which it does. There might be bugs where it doesn't render as fast as it
should, you might want to file one about your website (which is cool, btw).

Side note: WebKit2 is a new embedding API for WebKit that is multiprocess-
enabled, not a new version of WebKit. Chrome, for example, doesn't use WebKit2
- Chrome has its own multiprocess code. The 3D CSS stuff is in WebKit, and not
related to the WebKit2 API (which, btw, has some performance problems
currently that Safari is suffering from, but not Chrome).

~~~
unconed
I don't have a link, it was a Mozilla evangelist at a live event who was
showing off the 'new' 3D abilities. And I did file a bug. The first reply was:
"this should be split up into multiple bugs" with no further information.
Apparently, submitting a simple use case from the end-user's perspective is
frowned upon and we should all know the internals of Firefox so we can file
code-oriented bugs appropriately. Further commenters were more helpful, but I
can't say I was one bit surprised.

As for the mobile web... even my WebKit Android browser fails often, even on
this very text field. There is no single 'webkit for mobile', and it's all the
non- _iPhone_ users that are treated as second class citizens, webkit prefixes
or not. That's IMO a very different problem.

As for WebKit2, you're right, that was badly worded. What I meant was "the
Safari engine since they switched to WebKit2" (i.e. Lion). It came with a
noticeable improvement in rendering performance, which Chrome has not been
able to match on any system I've tried.

Ultimately it all comes down to opinion and perception. But I have a hard time
finding people who are still excited about Firefox who aren't Mozillians.

~~~
azakai
> As for the mobile web... even my WebKit Android browser fails often, even on
> this very text field. There is no single 'webkit for mobile', and it's all
> the non-iPhone users that are treated as second class citizens, webkit
> prefixes or not. That's IMO a very different problem.

It's the same problem, and it's just as bad: If there is one dominant
implementation, and other browsers can't render the actual web even when they
implement the relevant standards - then the web is broken. If it's WebKit vs
the rest or iOS vs the rest, it's just as bad.

Regarding your frustration on the Mozilla bug tracker, I've definitely felt
that both there and basically on every other major bug tracker. The other day
I filed a bug on Node.js, and in 15 minutes there were three responses, saying
things like "why is this a bug in node?", "don't file bugs on node like this",
and soon after the bug was closed. A few days later, it was confirmed as
valid... that's how it goes in big bug trackers ;)

> Ultimately it all comes down to opinion and perception. But I have a hard
> time finding people who are still excited about Firefox who aren't
> Mozillians.

I have very much the opposite impression, we probably just visit different
websites and communities.

------
crikli
I bailed on Firefox about 12 months ago after several years of being a very
evangelistic user. It took forever to load and the JS engine leaked like a
sieve. Of course it didn't help that I was using Firebug, but then Firebug was
the whole reason I used Firefox instead of Safari or Chrome. Without Firebug
there was not a compelling reason to use Firefox.

So I switched to Chrome and got used to their Inspector. I missed padding and
margin being shaded in different colors, but then I didn't have to restart the
browser after every 5 page loads when doing heavy JS UI development.

The newer builds of Firefox _are_ fantastic. It loads instantly and the JS
engine has been patched up. But it's too late.

~~~
firefoxman1
Would it be wrong for Mozilla to swallow their pride and adopt V8 as their JS
engine? I've gotten really sick of mem leaks slowing down my netbook to be
completely unusable if I happen to visit certain sites. It's not that there's
a ton of JS on the page; it's just that Firefox's engine doesn't handle leaks
as well.

~~~
khyryk
Could you give some examples? I have 2 HN, 3 YouTube, 1 Google Search, 1
python.org, 2 eBay, and 1 Gmail tabs open and memory usage is 300,000 kb. No
one (who is reasonable) would have 30 tabs open on a netbook, so I'm not even
considering that.

Funnily enough, I have FF on my older laptop (dual core 1.2 gHz, 1.5 GB RAM)
for blocking a bunch of useless scripts that slow me down and drain my
battery.

------
khyryk
Until something can match FF with ABP and NoScript, I don't think I'll be
switching. It was mentioned somewhere that Chrome, at least for now, cannot
allow the exact functionality that FF + ABP allows. ABP for Chrome != ABP for
FF.

------
ChrisNorstrom
Not surprising. I adopted Firefox back when it literally first came out. (I
was a Netscape user) And it's NOT that Firefox has gotten bad, its UX and UI
just didn't evolve fast enough to keep up with other browsers.

I think Firefox power-users will stay because of its flexibility and advanced
options and all those things they like but normal users don't care about. But
if you look at it from an average, every day consumer's point of view, Firefox
fails to provide an experience as smooth and nice as Chrome's.

Stability wise, Firefox is way behind. At least in my situation. I have a
custom PC, Windows 7, no bloatware, extremely stable, my computer is ON for
months without being restarted. I've got Chrome up and running for weeks and
weeks at a time without it being shut down and reopened with over 80+ tabs
open at all times. I kid you not. 80+ tabs. I keep them up because if I file
them away as bookmarks I'll never see them again, so they just kind of stick
around. I can still photoshop, and illustrate without having to close Chrome.
When I try that with Firefox the poor browser falls flat on its face. After a
few hours of having all that open my system starts to get sluggish. Most of
the time the Firefox crashes due to an unresponsive script or flash. In Chrome
only 1 window crashes and I can just refresh it, in Firefox the whole browser
crashes. -_-

So little by little I migrated to Chrome, so did the rest of the family. It's
easier to work with, less dialog boxes, silent updates, extensions don't break
when you upgrade, etc...

MORAL OF THE STORY: UI & UX matter, a lot.

~~~
vaksel
yeah my firefox experience have been pretty subpar...it's just not stable.

It crashes all the time with like 30 tabs open...freezes up...and it uses
900mb of ram just by simply browsing....and can spike up to 2.3-2.4 GB ram if
you do visit any intensive site.

The only reason I don't switch to Chrome, is because it doesn't support a lot
of plugins that I use.

~~~
steffan
I'm running a Firefox Aurora build on OS X and have a window with 456 tabs
open. It seems to run just fine, although the CPU usage spikes up when
restarting the browser. With the other 4 windows, I probably have close to 500
tabs and it's using 887MB of memory.

~~~
kibwen
I'm generally forced to purge my accumulated tabs (using Aurora on XP) once I
get to around 400 or so. Glad to see people who are just as tab-happy as me.
:)

------
mmuro
There are two big reason why I stick with Firefox, despite it lacking in many
areas of other browsers:

1) The Awesome Bar is really just that. I have not found any other browser
that works as well in this area as does Firefox. 2) Firebug is one of those
tools I've been using so long that it just seems like part of the browser.
Safari's Inspector is pretty dang close but still not what I'm accustom to.

I'd love to switch to something lighter. I just don't see that happening as a
permanent switch anytime soon.

------
tete
I think with Firefox 10, which doesn't have the extension problem when
updating anymore the market share could rise again. It even has no-restart-
required extensions now. This is really nice, I hope people who switched
because of the changed release cycle come back now. A lot of problems that
came into existence with FF4 have been fixed now and most of the problems
disappeared or disappear soon.

In my opinion it would have been better to wait with things like the rapid
release cycle until now, but well... at least that's fixed now.

Also I use Aurora (Firefox 12) and it feels really nice. Quick, nice features
not feeling bloaty at all. If that direction remains I am sure many users
switching to Chrome could come back. It's also doing pretty well when it comes
to web standards. The only problem I still see on the web is that developers
sense for UserAgent strings instead of features, which is just plain stupid
and incompetent.

------
waitwhat
What is really hitting Firefox _hard_ is the lack of a viable (or at least
popular) mobile browser.

As the mobile web explodes, and Mozilla is barely even competing in that
market, then their overall market share will fall.

~~~
azakai
> What is really hitting Firefox hard is the lack of a viable (or at least
> popular) mobile browser.

The new Firefox Mobile, currently in beta, is quite good - it uses a native
Android UI and is very fast and smooth. The older version, which used XUL, was
indeed sluggish.

But, to be fair, none of this really matters. iOS and Android are by far the
top mobile OSes, and hardly anyone replaces the default browser on them, which
makes it extremely hard for alternative browsers (Firefox, Opera) to make any
headway. Tech people like HN readers might, but 95% of people just use the
default browser on their phone.

~~~
eurleif
So if it doesn't use XUL, does that mean extensions can't alter the UI? And if
so, what's the point? :/

~~~
azakai
Partly. You can still write addons, and they still have a lot of flexibility
to change stuff - including the UI - but it is more limited than with XUL.

The performance cost of XUL, though, is just too much for mobile.

------
RKearney
I can't take an article seriously that refers to Mozilla's web browser as
FireFox. What's next? SaFari? InterNet Explorer?

What what it's worth, I've long stopped using Firefox since the release of
Chrome. The constant dealing with extensions not even trying to run after an
upgrade and the need to constantly change settings in about:config to get
extensions to function has caused me to abandon ship.

It also seems like Mozilla is frantically trying to be more and more like
Google Chrome with the rapid release cycles and plethora of other features
ported over.

~~~
steve-howard
FireFox is a reasonable mistake to make; it's a compound word.

I sorta like Chrome, but I have found Tree Style Tabs for Firefox to be
indispensable so I'll stick with it. Firefox's extension method is both very
powerful (gives access to browser internals) and very brittle (gives access to
browser internals). That, to me, means more-useful extensions that might
break, which I'm okay with.

------
mrchess
I stopped using Firefox after the 3.x period. I personally believe 3.x series
was the best Firefox, and that going forward it has only been downhill. On the
consumer level, I think their biggest mistake was giving each release a new
major number (4,5,6,7,8,9) when only minor things were changing. We went from
Firefox 4 to Firefox 10 in less than a year. Why would a consumer like so much
implied change so fast?

~~~
RKearney
Because that's what Chrome does and Google was sucking market share away from
Mozilla. The only difference is Chrome silently updates in the background and
applies updates when the browser is closed. Firefox still throws up a modal
dialog when it's time to update, followed by the breaking of every extension
you have because it's not for the new version of Firefox.

~~~
chaud
Automatic add-on compatibility went in with Firefox 10 and Silent updates will
be here in the next few versions. Memshrink and Snappy and making significant
progress towards the leaking. Work is being done to make it easier to identify
which add-ons are leaking (Firebug is!).

I am using Aurora now and Netbeans and my IM client are using more memory than
Firefox. Many of the problems from the past are gone now.

------
rbranson
I'm sure Google can justify Chrome development purely on cost savings from the
ad rev sharing they do with Mozilla.

