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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

#61

Post by ZeroGravitas »

corruption wrote: post #20
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.

Certainly it was easy for firefox to grow fast as netscape had died and ie, well, it's ie. They were right time right place. For chrome to come along and take a large fraction of firefox users is an entirely different situation. If your claim is that it's easy to grow fast from zero as a proportion of the global internet users then the data from other browsers adoption rates does not support that conclusion.

How was it easy for Firefox to grow? When I first started using Mozilla and Pheonix then some of the most pressing bugs involved top 100 sites that simply didn't work, often not because of anything that Mozilla did wrong, just sites that actively ignored them. Chrome doesn't face anything like that now because of what Mozilla have achieved, both in the marketplace and in the standards bodies.

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

#62

Post by WilliamLP »

mclin wrote: post #31
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.

> Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash.

For now. When IE9 comes out it will start to become a viable business solution to develop for H.264 / HTML5 with no Flash. This may be a sweet spot for development effort versus benefit as it may be more costly to ignore legacy IE and Firefox users than to ignore iPhone and iPad.

Users don't care about a proprietary web, they care about web sites working. It's already alarming to try Youtube in experimental mode in Firefox and have it not work at all for most videos. This is supposed to be a modern cutting edge browser, right?

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

#63

Post by celticjames »

whopa wrote: post #33
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…

Mozilla Corporation employs 200+ people, but the community contribution, measured in commits, is substantial. But what you say about management is true. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand does. Communication between the corporation and the foundation is very poor.

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

#64

Post by extension »

dhimes wrote: post #58
extension wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, I meant why would any other kind of speed matter?

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

#65

Post by mclin »

WilliamLP wrote: post #62
mclin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Except that the default will still be to fall back to flash. For now. When IE9 comes out it will start to become a viable business solution to develop for H.264 / HTML5 with no Flash. This may be a sweet spot for development effort versus benefit as it may be more costly to ignore legacy IE and Firefox users than to ignore iPhone and iPad. Users don't care about a proprietary web, they care about web sites working.…

I haven't tried this, but it looks pretty easy to do both. At least for using flash for the the video features provided by html5

http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

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

#66

Post by jokermatt999 »

DrSprout wrote: post #17
stanleydrew wrote: post #6

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…

Have you tried Autopager? It automatically loads the next/previous pages and shows them in line. It's pretty good in my experience with it.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925/

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

#67

Post by whopa »

celticjames wrote: post #63
whopa wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Mozilla Corporation employs 200+ people, but the community contribution, measured in commits, is substantial. But what you say about management is true. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand does. Communication between the corporation and the foundation is very poor.

In the past few years, the vast majority of commits to core browser code is by Mozilla paid staff. They mostly ignore outside contributors at that level.
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