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Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

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Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#21

Post by 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...

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?

Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#22

Post by wavesplash »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #4

>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.

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.

Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#24

Post by 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.

Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#25

Post by pbhjpbhj »

wavesplash wrote: post #22
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #4

>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.

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…

Google then is not going to be taking most of it's users from FF but from those swayed most by ads on Google, probably IE users?

At least I'm sure that Google Chrome's increase in market share doesn't necessitate a reduction for FF (though some reduction is almost certain).

Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#26

Post by 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.

Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#27

Post by 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.

Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#28

Post by pbhjpbhj »

grt wrote: post #13
TeHCrAzY wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, you can easily add custom keyword searches under Preferences. For example: Name: Youtube Keyword: y URL: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s Then just type "y civilization v" and shazam, you're on Youtube, looking at a list of trailers and previews for Civilization V. Firefox has the same feature; I believe it's called "Keyword Search" and can be accessed through Bookmark Manager. I always found Fire…

>Firefox has the same feature; I believe it's called "Keyword Search" and can be accessed through Bookmark Manager. I always found Firefox's separate search box redundant for this reason.

I actually use both. I've about 20 keywords - I use the search box when I think I'll need to search across multiple engines (though I usually copy paste the words, I guess I use them as a short scratch pad) and use keywords when I expect I won't have to re-enter the search elsewhere.

Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#29

Post by 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.

Re: Is Firefox Headed Towards A Massive Decline? Its Co-Founder Thinks So

#30

Post by seabee »

wavesplash wrote: post #22
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #4

>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.

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…

Don't forget that Google actively advertises Chrome (e.g. on the London Underground), so there's even more exposure than Firefox could dream of.
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