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Chrome Won

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Re: Chrome Won

#51

Post by gkoberger »

I agree with this blog post. But I don't think Mozilla lost.

I worked for Mozilla for a few years, after seeing John Lily (CEO at the time) speak. It was right after Chrome started getting popular, and a smug person in the crowd asked him about how he felt about Chrome.

John's response was awesome. "This is the web that we wanted. We exist not because we want everyone to use Firefox, but because we wanted people to have a choice" Firefox was a response to a world of "best viewed in IE" badges, and it changed the browser landscape.

Now, we have options. Chrome is great, but so are Safari, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox. There's a lot of options out there, and they're all standards compliment. And that's thanks to Mozilla.

So, in my mind, Mozilla won. It's a non-profit, and it forced us into an open web. We got the world they wanted. Maybe the world is a bit Chrome-heavy currently, but at least it's a standards compliment world.

I hope Mozilla sees that. I hope they take credit, and move on to what's next: privacy and net neutrality. Our privacy is under attack, and Mozilla is one of the few companies that can (and would want to) help. I know, I know. Nobody cares about privacy. Nobody cared about web standards, either, but Mozilla bundled it into an attractive package and it worked. It's time for Mozilla to declare victory, high five the Chrome team, and move on to the next big challenge.

We really need someone to fight for our privacy and neutrality. And I really believe that this could be Mozilla's swan song.

-----

EDIT: Hey cbeard - My email is in my profile; I'd love to talk.

Re: Chrome Won

#52

Post by Chromus »

dkural wrote: post #23
aerovistae wrote: post #4

> I started Firefox OS in 2011 because already back then I was convinced that desktops and browsers were dead. Not immediately–here we are 6 years later and both are still around–but both are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential going forward. I don't understand this perspective. Browsers are legacy technologies that are not particularly influential? What? I feel like the web dominates our lives…

You read hackernews, which alone suggests you are in the far, far tail of average developed country consumer. Most people hate, and always hated computers. Most people don't even have college degrees, and don't need heavy utility computing to do their jobs. Compare PC sales vs. Mobile.

This made me curious on the percentage of college educated people in the US. Turns out, among people 25 and older, less than 32% have a Bachelor's degree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

Re: Chrome Won

#53

Post by mnm1 »

"All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users."

Faster browsing and less memory use is the only reason I've ever heard anyone switch browsers outside of privacy issues. If Servo is significantly faster and uses less memory, and if it can keep that up for years like Chrome did, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this flipping in a few years. Thankfully, he's no longer CTO at Mozilla so this actually has a chance of happening.

Re: Chrome Won

#54

Post by tedajax »

I finally switched to Chrome from Firefox just last week. I just couldn't take the hang ups anymore. Here I am with an absurdly beefy game development workstation and it's hitching switching tabs and scrolling pages. Absolutely unacceptable. Moving everything over to Chrome took about 2 minutes since the importer pretty much grabbed everything and it wasn't hard to get the extensions I needed. The only thing that annoys me is that clicking on links/bookmarks while on a pinned tab opens the link/bookmark on the pinned tab and not in a new tab like Firefox does. Makes pinned tabs less permanent and I have to remember to middle click these things but it's a minor inconvenience compared to just how slow and unresponsive Firefox had gotten.

Re: Chrome Won

#55

Post by 467568985476 »

utku_karatas2 wrote: post #31

Mozilla the foundation did deserve this. This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.

I don't buy it. Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone. And in a market for engineers that currently favors labor, do you really want to be on the wrong side of the social issues that your staff generally care about? Maybe they would have left to work on Chrome if Eich had stayed. That doesn't even speak to the myriad technical and resource issues that Mozilla faced prior to that particular incident.

Re: Chrome Won

#56

Post by ttoinou »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #24

> exponential trend They're market shares & hence bounded by 0 and 1, so exponential seems pretty unrealistic. The logistic curve is a better starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_economics...

+ the fact that the sum of shares shouldn't be over 1

Re: Chrome Won

#58

Post by km3k »

Crisco wrote: post #49
brian-armstrong wrote: post #29

I use firefox for entirely idealistic reasons, but it's hard to ignore the fact that it is slower. There are times when it just feels so bloated, though thankfully a quick restart gets it running smoothly again. I know firefox team has had passes of perf improvements in the past, but it seems like it still isn't a high priority. When it comes to browsers, speed is the #1 feature.

Honestly, recently I've consistently noticed Firefox running faster than Chrome for my usage scenario. It might be bias, but I find browsing on Firefox a more enjoyable experience and uses a lot less of my system resources. I stuck with Firefox through the times where it was much slower than Chrome for idealistic reasons as well, but now I feel like speed is less of an issue because they are both pretty even.

It might be a placebo effect, but I find that I switch back and forth between Chrome and Firefox every 6-12 months after the one I'm using feels slow and the other feels faster. Maybe they're actually leapfrogging each other in performance, maybe not. I'm currently on my Chrome phase.

Re: Chrome Won

#59

Post by yellowapple »

richdougherty wrote: post #15

Here are two ways that Mozilla could have a lot of impact: - If it is indeed too challenging for Firefox to compete against Chrome with a separate browser, there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome. This would allow Mozilla to borrow the good bits of Chrome for relatively low effort, and focus development effort on the the things that Google might not value so much (e.g privacy). It wo…

"there might be value in Mozilla maintaining an open-source fork of Chrome."

Then that would mark the day when I no longer use Mozilla's software. There'd be no point.

The world doesn't need yet another Chromium-based browser. Firefox's continued development of Gecko and new development of Servo are among the main forces (alongside Safari, maybe) preventing Chrome from becoming the next Internet Explorer.

Re: Chrome Won

#60

Post by reedlaw »

467568985476 wrote: post #55
utku_karatas2 wrote: post #31

Mozilla the foundation did deserve this. This is what you get when you force a perfectly technical CEO out and let the MBA types steer the ship. A browser is a forever bleeding edge tech; you need engineers all the way to the top. They chose political correctness over technical prowess and the product has lost the edge.

I don't buy it. Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone. And in a market for engineers that currently favors labor, do you really want to be on the wrong side of the social issues that your staff generally care about? Maybe they would have left to work on Chrome if Eich had stayed. That doesn't even speak to the myriad technical and resource issues that Mozilla faced prior to…

> Eich was hardly a wunderkind capable of carrying a browser on his shoulders alone.

How about Brave [1]?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

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