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

http://www.rahulgaitonde.org/2009/07/06/why-you-probably-wont-be-using-firefox-a-while-from-now/

by emontero1 • 17 years ago

8 30 17 years ago

semiquaver2• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

zimbabwe8• 17 years 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.)

zimbabwe8• 17 years ago

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• 17 years 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...

scott_s2• 17 years ago

That Firefox's market share will soon slip isn't a point, it's a prediction. His prediction has an argument behind it, but it's an argument with many assumptions; it's based on belief and prejudice.

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.

timcederman• 17 years 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.

zimbabwe8• 17 years 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.

jakewolf• 17 years 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!

semiquaver2• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

Chrome is in alpha for Linux.

dflock3• 17 years 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

elcron• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years 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/

Hope it helps.

evdawg• 17 years 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.

dflock3• 17 years ago

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

Oompa• 17 years 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.

dflock3• 17 years 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.

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

Related Stories