Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 67 posts

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

#31

Post by mclin »

WilliamLP wrote: post #26

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.

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.

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

#32

Post by jerf »

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…

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.

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

#33

Post by whopa »

javanix wrote: post #24

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 int…

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.

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

#34

Post by 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.

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

#35

Post by shadowsun7 »

WilliamLP wrote: post #26

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.

I don't think H.264 is dealbreaker yet. Too few people even know (or care) about coming video standards - the only people I know who even think about such matters are geeks (aka people like you and me).

Your point on this being symbolic of internal forces in the product, on the other hand, sounds largely correct.

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

#36

Post by dhimes »

MikeCapone wrote: post #34

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.

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.

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

#38

Post by RyanMcGreal »

jerf wrote: post #32
wavesplash wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 thi…

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.

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

#39

Post by 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

Post reply on HN