Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

51–60 of 67 posts

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

#51

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.

[deleted]

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

#52

Plus, Mozilla's business model is basically done for. With Google providing a Firefox competitor, how long do you really think it will be before Google pulls their deal with Mozilla to give them money per search via the search box?

hardly, I do not see why google would prefer that a large chunk of the web users do not use its service, google still gets more money on adwords and adsense, I dare say google would pay MS to be the defalt engine on IE if this was possible, for me chrome is much more a vision of how google thinks a browser should be, lean, stable, fast and extensible

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

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome subjectively feels snappier Right, and why would anything else matter for a web browser?

Addons.

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say Chrome fails miserably at browser tweaking, but maybe I don't do enough tweaking myself. What exactly are you trying to do that Chrome won't let you do?

Things I can't live without: Link Widgets: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2933/ Basically, it studies the source for links like "next" and "previous," and lets you page forward and backward with alt+pageup/down. Works great on xkcd, New York Times, and many others. --- Noscript/Flashblock: 'nuff said. --- Colorzilla: http://www.colorzilla.com/firefox/ Color picker. Combined with Firebug, great for web…

I can speak to some of those:

noscript: built-in, although configuration isn't that robust

flashblock: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepj... https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gofhjkjmkpinhpoi...

color picker: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/egmjgagjcamhcilh...

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

#55
post #2

Everyone that I know are using Chrome right now, except guys like me that like to tweak their browsers (something that Chrome fails miserably) and some extensions that sadly does not fit well into Chrome architecture. The other major problem (a search bar) was partly solved by Duck Duck Go.

I wouldn't say Chrome fails miserably at browser tweaking, but maybe I don't do enough tweaking myself. What exactly are you trying to do that Chrome won't let you do?

Tab Mix Plus.

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

#56

Plus, Mozilla's business model is basically done for. With Google providing a Firefox competitor, how long do you really think it will be before Google pulls their deal with Mozilla to give them money per search via the search box?

It's not a charity donation, they give Firefox money because they give something in return, user eyeballs. There will be a market rate for those eyeballs and indeed I believe they already sell those eyeballs to other search engines in certain locations (Yandex in Russia maybe?).

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

#57
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's sad not having MathML support in WebKit. It means that I still need Firefox on my Win7 and Ubuntu machines and that I'm screwed on the iPod Touch.

It looks like they are working on it. I thought Safari rendered mathml; I wonder what I was looking at?

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

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome subjectively feels snappier Right, and why would anything else matter for a web browser?

Being able to parse the whole web, not just a subset.

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

#59

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.

So the users want a web built on proprietary standards? If Mozilla had internal forces that listened to those users when it started then it wouldn't have the several hundred million users, and multi-million yearly income that it currently has.

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

#60
post #27

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.

One good reason is because they are committed to an open web for it's own sake, not because it happens to currently align with their advertising business, or because it helped them out from under the shadow of a competing monopoly, or because if they don't deliver then they will accelerate the irrelevance of their desktop platform. (This is also a good reason to use Opera.)

Mozilla have also built an incredible marketing machine which speaks to normal folk which seems to be missed by the geeks who are switching to Chrome. You don't get 1/3rd global market share with just geeks, certainly not the 2/3rds they've got in Germany. Apparently people think you can do this with a few advertisments and a popular brand. I wish Google luck (particularly as I think they're stealing share from IE) but I think it takes as much, if not more, support to sell a browser as it does to sell a mobile phone.

(If you'd allowed extensions as a reason, then Vimperator is nice too)

Post reply on HN