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A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

computerworld.com

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Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#21

Post by bobajeff »

unknownian wrote: post #2

The comments on that site are sickening. Yes, I do not agree with Eich's views. Mozilla owned up to it. Someone should tell them to disable JS everywhere because of Eich. Plus, Firefox is a community project with more momentum than almost any FOSS project. It won't die. edit: read that in reverse

The article wasn't talking about the browser's development but it's marketshare. To me it doesn't look like they have too much to worry about there. They are still ahead of Safari on the desktop and are still way ahead of Opera.

I don't believe Firefox will ever gain marketshare again but Mozilla still has some time to come up with another bread winner before they've lost relevance. They got some serious technology in the works with Servo and there is still lots room to improve browsing on mobile for those that are paying attention.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#22

Post by corford »

The latest FF builds have been rock solid for me (Win7 x64 with 4 or 5 big name extensions and that's it).

I've currently got about 130 tabs open, FF is using ~ 1.1GB of RAM and has been sitting open & running in this state for 3 or 4 weeks with no problems or slow downs whatsoever. The plugin container also finally works reliably so shitty sites with buggy flash code don't take the browser down when flash decides to blow up. FF's PDF implementation has also gotten better and it's now rare (as in I can't remember the last time) that I need to jump out to Acrobat reader to get a properly rendered view of a PDF.

FF starts faster than Chrome, font rendering is a lot better and it seems most of the "weird" HTML issues I encounter these days doing webdev stuff are with Chrome rather than FF.

I don't understand why Firefox isn't crushing Chrome.

Edit: Latest FF mobile on Android is awesome too.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#25

Post by unknownian »

tatterdemalion wrote: post #3
unknownian wrote: post #2

The comments on that site are sickening. Yes, I do not agree with Eich's views. Mozilla owned up to it. Someone should tell them to disable JS everywhere because of Eich. Plus, Firefox is a community project with more momentum than almost any FOSS project. It won't die. edit: read that in reverse

The comments I read took rather a different position I thought - that they believe people should not use Firefox because Mozilla "fired" Eich. Still a sickening position.

Oh, I guess I read too quickly. Comments on those sites really are terrible.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#26

Post by sarahj »

I am still a firefox user...but I don't want to be.

I will admit the whole Eich thing, when we was promoted I quickly lost my attachment to Mozilla - they clearly were not the organization I thought they were. But aside from that Firefox seems to be the worst of all choices - the only thing keeping me attached to it is the lack of an open source alternative.

Chrome seems to be far ahead in terms of security (XSS protection, Sandboxing etc.) and in many cases appears to be faster - but I don't trust an advertising company with my browser.

I think we need a fresh contender - an open browser, built from the start with an understanding of the security and privacy lessons we have learned over the last 30 years. I'm not sure how realistic that dream is, but I believe it is worth the thought.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#27

Post by batiudrami »

My mum always told me not to extrapolate so I'm not very worried about Computer World's alarmist forecasts of Firefox going the way of the typewriter and Smallpox.

That said, while I'm a fan of Firefox - I have used it since it was called Phoenix and I had unzip it off a CD I got with a magazine - I can't help but think this is partially their own fault. Sure, Google has a massive advertising budget for Chrome, and they do their best to ensure that Google products perform best on Chrome - but Firefox is slow to react, and slow to implement - and perhaps unsure of what people actually want?

We continually get useless features - the social API, the "share" button (no one can look at me with a straight face and tell me that shouldn't be an addon, surely), a redesign which takes away features - while actual useful features that Chrome has had for seven years - like per tab processes and chromeless app windows - are still nowhere to be seen. It took Firefox years to get private browsing, and then years again for it to let us do it at the same time as regular browsing. They really need to be faster moving.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#28

Post by batiudrami »

kaolinite wrote: post #8

The problem I feel with Mozilla is that they mistook why they were successful. They attributed the success of Firefox to the openness of the browser and the company and have doubled-down on that. In reality though, that wasn't why it was successful at all. Firefox was great because it was a great browser at a time when other browsers weren't so good. The fact that it was open-source was a huge plus for people in tech…

I don't think Mozilla is naive enough to think that your average user cares about open source. But it is one of their core philosophies and not something that they will abandon.

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#29

Post by brighteyes »

tatterdemalion wrote: post #3
unknownian wrote: post #2

The comments on that site are sickening. Yes, I do not agree with Eich's views. Mozilla owned up to it. Someone should tell them to disable JS everywhere because of Eich. Plus, Firefox is a community project with more momentum than almost any FOSS project. It won't die. edit: read that in reverse

The comments I read took rather a different position I thought - that they believe people should not use Firefox because Mozilla "fired" Eich. Still a sickening position.

At the time, Mozilla was savaged by both the far left and far right. Both sides called for boycotts.

The comments in this story appear to be from the right in this case. I guess the left lost interest (not surprising since they got what they demanded, for Eich to be removed - or maybe just leftists don't read that website).

Re: A shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status

#30

Post by wtallis »

Firefox is and for the forseeable future will continue to be the best browser for those concerned with privacy. It may be marginalized, but it won't go away. With Electrolysis coming along nicely and Servo on the distant horizon, Firefox can probably also retake the crown as undisputed most secure browser at some point. They're also doing a decent job of keeping performance competitive.

Overall, Firefox seems about as healthy as you could expect given that it's competing against Microsoft, Apple, and Google.

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