Firefox may already be

#1

Post by marketer » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:02 PM UTC

Firefox may already be
pcworld.com

Re: Firefox may already be

#2

Post by TweedHeads » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:46 PM UTC

I've tried chrome and it is ok, the new safari rocks my socks, but I still use firefox dunno why.

I'd call it loyalty for all they've done to the community and the web in general, and I am grateful for that.

Rock on, foxy, rock on.

Re: Firefox may already be

#3

Post by martythemaniak » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:50 PM UTC

I don't think the difference between the Chrome he's talking about (2.0 alpha linux?) and its Firefox counterpart (minefield builds) are as big as he makes them out to be.

Re: Firefox may already be

#4

Post by treyp » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:52 PM UTC

The title should probably say: Firefox may already be dead... for Linux users who care strictly about rendering speed.

He may be right in the end (once Chrome gets extensions, it might see wider distribution), but not just because it's faster in Linux. I'm pretty sure that's a narrow market for now.

Re: Firefox may already be

#5

Post by jerf » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:52 PM UTC

As we all know, there are two states in the world: "Fresh", and "dead".

Sheesh. Maybe you could at least wait to bury Firefox until after you try 3.1, currently in beta3 (beta3 for goodness sake!) and benchmarking competitively with other current browers? (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html)

I haven't tried Chrome and I haven't tried Firefox 3.1, but I bet the difference isn't so big as Firefox 3.0 (or 2.x) and Chrome. Mozilla in fact has realized they need to speed up Firefox and have been yanking out useless abstraction layers and other speed problems for the next version, along with a lot of Javascript work.

But no, gotta generate those page views with overblown claims.

You know, I'm flagging this. This link is terrible, just internet grandstanding disconnected from the facts.

Re: Firefox may already be

#6

Post by batasrki » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:53 PM UTC

Why is this on top of HN? The dude compares apples to oranges and glosses over one of the most important aspects of FF, which is the extensions.

By the time Chrome makes the extension architecture available to the general public and developers start writing useful ones, Mozilla will release a version of Firefox that greatly improves performance of both Javascript and the browser in general.

This is FUD at its best.

Re: Firefox may already be

#7

Post by jasonkester » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:53 PM UTC

I'd tend to agree. Firefox served its purpose well, and forced Microsoft to release IE7.

But it never really improved on its first effort, and now, 5 years later it's arguably a little bit better than IE7, but it just can't hang with the latest releases from any of its competition.

So now we have Firefox sitting in 4th place behind Chrome, IE, and Safari. I fire it up a couple times a day for testing purposes, but if it were to go away completely, I certainly wouldn't miss it.

Re: Firefox may already be

#8

Post by jfornear » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:54 PM UTC

The author isn't risking much on this article, and the title is straight up linkbait. No real data given to back these claims either, of course.

Re: Firefox may already be

#9

Post by bioengineer » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 8:59 PM UTC

I think he has a point. I switched from Firefox to Chrome about a month ago; I think Chrome's interface is much nicer, and it is faster than Firefox. The two major drawbacks of Chrome for me were:

- no extensions for Chrome (I miss Adblock and Flashblock)

- Linux edition not available (I'm waiting for the beta to come out)

If it weren't for Google's promises to come out with extensions and a Linux version, I wouldn't have switched.

The main advantage Firefox previously had was that it's so much better than IE. Now it has to be better than IE and Chrome; this is a pretty high barrier to dominance.

Re: Firefox may already be

#10

Post by stcredzero » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 9:00 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #5

As we all know, there are two states in the world: "Fresh", and "dead". Sheesh. Maybe you could at least wait to bury Firefox until after you try 3.1, currently in beta3 (beta3 for goodness sake!) and benchmarking competitively with other current browers? ( http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html ) I haven't tried Chrome and I haven't tried Firefox 3.1, but I bet the difference isn't so big as Firefox 3.0…

From the article:

    The only way the situation can be altered is for Mozilla 
    to slam on the brakes, lean out of the window of the 
    truck, apologize for going the wrong way, and turn 
    around. But that's unimaginable.

That's funny, because the Mozilla project has done exactly that in the past. The result was Firefox!