

Firefox fades in popularity - duck
http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2010/0301/Firefox-sees-popularity-fade

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gchucky
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but I'm going to keep using
Firefox. If nothing else, my paranoia senses are tingling with regard to
Google. These days I'm heavily invested in Google - their software runs my
phone, handles my email, and is my main way of searching. If nothing else, I'd
rather not put all my eggs in one basket, and would rather diversify a little.

~~~
tvon
Why would you think you'd be down-voted for that?

~~~
JeremyBanks
I'd cynically say that it's because any post starting with "I'm sure I'll be
downvoted, but..." tends to get a much better score than it otherwise would,
even if it's not particularly applicable.

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ZeroGravitas
I often wonder if the network effects in our profession leads to this desire
for one product we use to win, or if our natural tribalism exacerbates the
network effects.

I don't really care if one particular browser is going up or down, I just want
a competitive market based on open standards so that I can use whatever the
hell browser I like and not be locked out of anything.

At the moment that means I'm rooting for IE6 to die, and IE in total to fall
to around a third or less globally so that they're forced to compete.

Chrome stealing alpha-geek users from Firefox doesn't matter to me as a)
there's not that many of them, and b) it doesn't reduce IE usage (nor IE6 in
particular).

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nirai
Mozilla should get their act together before its too late. Once they loose
their mind share it will be over. Firefox on Linux is freezing and sluggish.

~~~
robotron
It really is about speed - both load time and rendering. Sadly, I can start
Firefox and while it's loading I can start Chrome, IE and Opera and they all
finish before Firefox (not an accurate metric, I realise). I love Firefox but
speed rules sometimes.

~~~
giu
The only reason I'm keeping Firefox installed on my machine is Firebug.
Although, I have to mention that during my last _small_ JS project I only used
Google Chrome's built-in developer tools, and I liked what I saw. Maybe FF 4.0
will be a game changer, but for the moment the actual FF is just too darn slow
for a daily usage.

~~~
gnosis
You might want to look at Dragonfly (Opera's competitor to Firebug):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117798>

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sunkencity
The beauty of Firefox is the openness of the XUL platform. It's an amazing
idea to make it possible for anyone who can hack HTML/CSS and javascript to be
able to tweak the browser, bootstrapping web viewer with web tech. The webkit
browsers doesn't have this, but most users doesn't care, and they don't care
about the level of data google gets from chrome either.

But yeah, this firefox instance I am running now is pretty laggy. Something
needs to be done about that.

~~~
nailer
How many popular XUL apps are there really?

Songbird? Flock?

Are they really popular or game changing?

The engineering effort for XUL slowed down Netscape 6 and Mozilla browser for
years until it was of decent quality. No real apps have come out of it.

In 2010. Apps belong inside the browser. Browsers don't belong in apps.

~~~
sunkencity
not the apps, the firefox plugins. basically any web developer with enough
perseverance can hack theorin own browser.

~~~
gnosis
Opera uses the same open plugin interface as Firefox.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI>

[http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-opera-plug-in-
interfa...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/the-opera-plug-in-interface/)

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mgrouchy
The main issue with firefox currently is that its not webkit. Webkit is faster
and thats what people care about mostly. That and the fact that firefox
itself(the application) is slow or at least I find it to be in comparison to
chrome and safari.

~~~
ilitirit
> Webkit is faster and thats what people care about mostly.

Not really. It really depends on the end-user. I'm sure there are lots of
people like me who prefer Firefox because of the addons.

~~~
mgrouchy
Chrome has plugins too, not as many, but I am sure it will grow as the number
of users grows as well.

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Roridge
I use FireFox for work and Chrome for surfing function/speed respectively.

FireFox keeps all my tabs nicely open, I can have all the helpful plugins
installed on it. Chrome is completely fresh install, with only xMarks plugin
to remain fast.

~~~
duck
I noticed the other day how I was using Chrome basically all the time at home
even though I have Firefox setup with some very useful plugins that work well.
I think it all comes down to speed. Anyone know of any good metrics on
performance of chrome vs. firefox?

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scotty79
For me it's all about speed. Funny thing is that the same thing made me to
switch from IE to Firefox.

Only things that may keep me with Firefox are now Firebug and FirePHP.

~~~
Groxx
I've been the same way. I switched to using Firefox first because it was _way_
faster than IE. Since then, it sped up a bit, and has since been bogged down
by the same things that bogged down the Mozilla browser to begin with... which
is why Firefox was made...

Full circle, anyone? And people are surprised they're having trouble compared
to their booming, speed-oriented days? For me, Firefox is around for
compatibility tests and the Web Developer toolbar (Web Inspector in Safari
works better for a number of things, though, so it rarely gets used).

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bmunro
The address bar in Chrome works so much better than the separate address and
search fields in Firefox. This is the main reason that I switched to Chrome.

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sireat
At work I test on Chrome and Opera(and on IE in VirtualBox), but my main
workhorse is still Firefox (on Ubuntu 9.10).

Why? The wide choice of extensions. I do try to disable most of the ones I am
not using at the moment, some tend to crash things.

Still, one has to admit Firefox has bloated quite a bit since early days pre
1.0.

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bdfh42
I stopped using FireFox recently as I was getting a bit fed up with it
freezing and/or running at very high CPU utilisation and memory levels.

I will miss the "add in" support infrastructure but for the moment it is
Google Chrome for general browsing.

~~~
tseabrooks
Ultimately, I had to stop using FireFox because of these types of issues. I'd
leave a few tabs open for a couple hours and find firefox at over a gig of
memory use making everything run extremely slow. I don't have this problem
with Chrome so I use Chrome.

~~~
robin_reala
Trouble is, it’s usually add-ons in the first place that are causing these
issues. I recently uninstalled Invisible Hand and noticed an immediate
improvement in speed for example.

~~~
tseabrooks
That's what I thought. I tried removing various plug-ins to figure out which
one was the problem. I got down to only having ad-block enabled and I didn't
want to disable it.

~~~
robin_reala
Fair enough. At that point I usually recommend trying a new profile, but
honestly a jump to Chrome is probably going to be more of a performance
benefit at the moment.

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jbellis
It's worth pointing out that almost all of Chrome's share has come at IE's
expense, not FF's.

~~~
k0n2ad
It's like saying that voting for Nader was taking votes away from John Kerry
:P

~~~
Groxx
Or from Mickey Mouse.

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Groxx
What's wrong with Firefox?

Their biggest innovation for a long time has been Greasemonkey (was that done
by Mozilla, or a plugin? Dunno, doesn't really matter). And it can't even run
JS before the page loads.

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arnorhs
I'm a bit skeptical on the source for those numbers.

"according to a new set of data crunched by NetApplications" - At least he
mentions the source, even though he doesn't link it.

He also doesn't mention what those statistics are based on. The number of
users, on which websites they were measured, etc.

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wedesoft
Does the statistic include Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer?

~~~
robin_reala
Honestly, who uses that?

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duck
And Chrome will keep gaining with things like Google Chrome Beta Browser Adds
Translation, Privacy Features - <http://bit.ly/baCeoV>

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samd
Another advantage of Chrome: extremely fast JavaScript engine. That puts them
at a distinct advantage for the coming deluge of web apps.

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gte910h
Chrome was catching up.

The h.264 idealism was the last straw.

