Between Google, Microsoft, Apple, Opera, and Mozilla, I definitely do trust Mozilla the most. They seem to value my privacy and freedom more than their competition. And it helps that Firefox has been a consistently good browser for a very long time (much longer project history than Chrome, and a much higher quality than IE).
Mozilla has a track record that demonstrates their intentions of making a more open web. We are still guessing about the future of Google, Microsoft, etc.
Absolutely. Time and time again they've shown that they'll do the right thing. Like with firefox sync, where data is encrypted on the client.
And its not like they're lacking in features or speed. Firefox for Android (while buggy) could view the same bookmarks/history/open tabs as my desktop browser and this is a great feature which only recently came to chrome.
And if Firefox goes, we'll only have WebKit browsers. And so you can forget about web standards and we'll be back at the best viewed with Internet Explorer era. Competing implementations are a good thing for standards, and standards are good for all of us.
I gave up on any sanity in web standards when the people responsible for HTML5 seriously suggested making it some sort of living document that would evolve rapidly over time. That demonstrates such a spectacular misunderstanding of why reference standards are important in general and the need for long-term stability in many web-based projects in particular that I lost all hope. The glacial pace of W3C standardisation has rendered them mostly irrelevant, but a standard that can change as fast as new browser versions ship isn't much use for anything either.
The problem isn't backward compatibility with previous standards as defined today. That has, as you suggest, generally been excellent.
The problem is that if you decide your standard is going to be a "living" document that changes rapidly as the industry evolves, backward compatibility ceases to have any meaning because there is nothing stable to be backward compatible with.
What happens when one browser pioneers a new feature, the living HTML5 standard quickly adopts it, developers start writing to that standard, but then two other browsers decide on another way to do the same thing that they think is better and someone changes the living HTML5 standard to reflect the new "standard" instead? One possibility is that the developers' existing code breaks. Another is that browser makers are stuck with supporting both once-standard interpretations for a long time.
Alternatively, but almost as bad, what happens when the living HTML5 standard quickly adopts a new feature that is becoming popular, other browsers find a better way to do the same thing shortly afterwards, and the standard doesn't change to match? Now the standard sucks, because it rushed into formalising something before enough consensus had built.
Formal standards don't mean anything unless they are robust, stable, citable references that everyone concerned can agree on. A living document that rapidly changes in the face of a fast-evolving industry is exactly zero of those things, and its value will be similarly small and round. It's merely a reference non-implementation, and since we're talking about browsers, we already have several candidates for being an actual reference implementation, just as we did in the old IE vs. Netscape days, when we learned for the first time why formal standards matter.
Alas, as George Santayana observed a century ago, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I can't think of any instances where this happened. The closest I can think of is Web SQL, but that was still in a working group when it was canned. Developers who work on in-progress browser features are aware of the risk, or at least should be.
Do we need standards if eveybody is using Microsof Office? ;-)
Indeed, open source helps a lot. It is amazing how far KHTML has gotten. But still, no standards would mean no Opera, no Mozilla, no any other entrants to the game.
Anyway, this article prompted me to switch from Chrome to Aurora on my Android tablet. Feels good so far...
* Indeed, open source helps a lot. It is amazing how far KHTML has gotten. But still, no standards would mean no Opera, no Mozilla, no any other entrants to the game.*
Not necessarily, it would still be possible for them to embed webkit or even to re-implement it.
Webkit would simply become the reference implementation.
Reimplementing it would not be an option. Making WebKit the reference implementation would give Google and Apple such an enormous advantage in development cycles that any browser that didn't use it would be unable to compete. You'd be expelling everyone but Google and Apple from the W3C.
If WebKit becomes the standard, every user from now until forever will be using the same pile of C++ to browse. That may be fine to you; I personally don't think that WebKit is so good as to make it the gold standard for the Web. Imagine if that had happened with NCSA Mosaic...
> Do we need web standards if everyone is using webkit?
Given the increasing trend to browse using tablets, phones, TVs, and other "non-traditional" devices, I suspect we're about to find out.
WebKit is already dominant to the point that no other browser engine matters in the mobile space. It's possible that Microsoft will shake the tree a bit if tablets based on Windows 8 make a rapid impact and IE 10 becomes a serious player. However, for all practical purposes Gecko is already irrelevant on mobile devices.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am not arguing that such a browser monoculture is necessarily in users' best interests, nor that the trend to lock down many modern consumer devices so use of alternative browsers is less likely is any better. I'm merely commenting on the reality of the market today.)
Exactly. WebKit is open source. Microsoft could easily drop Trident and package a version of IE running WebKit. Everyone running the same HTML engine? Sounds like a web developer's dream… In this world, who needs standards?
I think the author undervalues the power of Google in advertising. Seriously, every time I see the Google homepage, or a google property, there's an ad for Chrome. And, even better, the ad focuses on speed. That's what drove Chrome use up primarily (IMO, of course), though I can't doubt that word of mouth also had a large impact.
For a while, Chrome was bundled with Adobe's Flash Player installer. Chrome bundled Flash and Flash bundled Chrome. People downloading the Flash installer for Windows would also get Chrome, if they didn't opt out:
Firefox still has a great chance. They've sped up their dev cycle to try to keep pace with Chrome. As soon as they finally end the ridiculous memory usage problems that persist to this day and enable silent auto-updates (auto-updates are coming soon, I think), they'll be back in the game.
I only recommend Chrome because it auto-updates. If one of my users starts using Chrome, I always know they'll have the latest and greatest. That's not yet the case with FF, but I'll recommend FF again as soon as the auto-updates land.
Messing around with updates every few weeks is the single biggest thing pushing me away from Firefox as my default browser. (I do a lot of web development, so I routinely have four or five different ones installed. It's just a question of where I keep my serious bookmarks etc.)
As a web developer, I'm fed up of the moving targets and unreliability. When Firefox pushes an update to everyone and breaks something fundamental, it's not the Firefox support desk that gets complained at when the web apps stop working.
As a user, I see little real advantage from the breakneck pace of development anyway. Inevitably only a few sites use bleeding edge features within weeks of their appearance, and most of them seem to be web design/web development blogs showing off about bleeding edge features that might one day be useful to real web sites.
Moving to silent updates, as done by Chrome, might reduce the hassle, but then we'll also see endless minor UI tweaks happening at apparently random times like Chrome, which is really annoying in itself. And of course if a major bug gets pushed out and breaks a site I care about as a visitor, it's just as annoying whether I manually updated (not that there's much choice if security patches stop for anything more than five minutes old) or it happened silently in the background.
I never recommend Chrome or Firefox with the auto-updates. In fact, we explicitly don't provide customer support for them any more on several projects I work with, that conclusion being reached independently by several different development teams after experiencing all-too-similar problems. If anyone asks, I think the official recommendation in most cases is currently IE9.
I like firefox. I really do. I've donated to Mozilla, and wear my resulting FF t-shirt with pride.
That said, it's not just auto-update that makes Chrome more attractive. The omnibox, polarizing though it may be, sets Chrome apart from every other browser as far as U[I|X] goes. Oddly enough, that one feature alone is enough to make it my default browser. Were FF as fast as Chrome, I'd still use the latter because I just like using it more. Chrome's sandboxing, V8, and other intelligent features are just icing on the cake.
This, ultimately, confuses me more than anything about the other browser vendors' reaction to Chrome. They've copied or are copying just about everything about it: short release cycles, better JS engines, sandboxing... but not the one definitive UI feature that has made it so attractive to so many people. This surprises me. I would have though Apple, at least, with its commitment to minimalistic UIs, would have been quick to hop on that train, but no dice.
I've had a look at Google's docs[1], and it's really not clear to me what Chrome's omnibox offers that Firefox's address bar (or whatever they call it) doesn't.
I've got Aurora installed for Tor and flash-based apps that don't play nicely with Chrome, but I still use Chrome for my daily surfing and so have not really noticed any of the changes Mozilla has made. If the address bar really is reproducing the functionality of the omnibox, why not kill the search box all together? It seems like duplicated functionality and a waste of screen real estate.
I think the only use for the search box now is to give people easy access to multiple (or a secondary) search engine. Sure, it's ugly, but it does give users a clear and simple way to search wikipedia for "widgets".
Chrome, on the other hand, only exposes non-Google search engines through the search engine keyword thingy, which means a user has to actually type "en.wikipedia.org widgets" into the omnibox. Sure, tab-completion will do half the work, but the user still has to remember to start typing "en." rather than, say, "wikipedia".
I know that Chrome (and, indeed, Firefox) allow you to edit those search engine keywords, but that is power-user territory, and power-users can edit their Firefox UI as well. http://i.imgur.com/mS5Ot.png
Minor quibble, but Chrome makes it pretty easy to change your default search engine to anything you want, including non-Google search engines. It's not that you need to use a keyword to search a non-Google search engine, it's that you need to use a keyword to search a non-default search engine. :)
Also, the UI in Firefox for changing the address bar search engine is awful -- about:config, click through the warning, then find and edit keyword.URL (which is in a different format to everything else)
Some of us actually like distinguishing between URLs/bookmarks/history and an autocomplete-with-search-engine-spying search facility. I don't view the trend of combining them into a single text box as a positive one, whichever browser is doing it.
I'm not entirely familiar with what omnibox does, but there're a few search bar addons, and quickly testing on 11, typing "whuh" in the navigation bar goes to a Google search too.
Personally, I just use vimperator (the clones of which on Chrome are…abysmal?) so I can o[pen]/t[abopen] and then type a search term (w/ customizable engine) or a URL.
…
Memorywise, the recent FFs are much better. Usually problems are caused by extensions.
I have have better luck with awesomebar personally. My searches tend to hit words in URLs and titles of history before I actually want to duckduckgo. Omnibox also breaks my usage pattern for intranet (no tld) URLs.
I continue to insist on experiencing the web the way I want to. Firefox -- together with its extensions -- continues to do the best job of this. (Although I have not been pleased with its GUI "Chromification".)
Chrome's memory usage is[1] (and always has been[2]) very high and has been steadily getting worse where Firefox has been getting better and better thanks to the memshrink project[3]
I don't care about memory, i have 8GB and i am not somebody who has 500 tabs open. What i care about is independent processes. When a site freezes the rest is unaffected. The same with Icognito Mode, this is a total joke on Firefox.
What counts in the end is speed, security and api's.
Anecdotal evidence, but over the last month I've seen Chrome not work on a few websites (broken js) and have seen the crashes due to flash a few times too. Recent changes have not been for the better.
I've recently switched back to FF and found that it worked in the places that Chrome didn't.
The problem with FireFox is that it wasn't fast enough to catch with the innovation in the browsers market. Google Chrome was getting fast and pretty good at rendering. Its minimalistic interface has also helped a lot.
By the time FireFox figured that out, it was already a little late. But the problem is that they approached it the wrong way. Instead of focusing on what made Google Chrome successful (simple interface, auto-updates, speed...) they even made it worse (I still find the interface not easy and friendly as chrome, multiple confusing versions, and not that fast)
Seeing that Statcounter shot, I was taken aback at the graph, as I recently looked at some regional data myself: the picture in Europe is vastly different. See for yourself, e.g NA[0] vs EU[1]
What I actually find interesting is that the Firefox trend already seems to be turning around again... Over the past few months, the decline has been slowed, and the latest data point has Firefox actually gaining share.
I use both. (Especially since Google started only allowing you to login to one gmail session at once, but I used both before that.) Currently there are about three things that keep me from using Chrome entirely, because I do think it's a better overall browser but not better for my particular use case.
The first is lack of the Tree Style Tabs extension (in general lack of extensions was my biggest problem with Chrome until recently; now they have NoScript and AdBlock and ctrl+shift+j is about as good as FireBug which were the deal-breakers for me before), the second is not eating up huge amounts of memory if I have 593 tabs loaded into it (which is currently what I have on this Firefox), the third is I don't like their URL box. Firefox's AwesomeBar is almost perfect, I just wish it had better coverage of my history+favorites (I'm sure there's an about:config option somewhere that tunes it).
Firefox forced me to learn how SVG works to do clipping and masking, which turned out to be pretty awesome, so I owe that to them.
This article was completely without any substance beyond a graph of browser share stats. That's not necessarily evidence of Firefox "dying", rather than of the market simply expanding outside of its target demographic. In any case, as a web developer, Firefox will remain a critical browser to support for the foreseeable future, and as a user, I still haven't found a better overall option to use in Windows or Linux (I've stuck with Safari in OS X mainly due to the increased performance, stability and vastly superior font rendering).
I don't know what it is exactly they need to do, but strategically, Firefox needs to attract browser power-users once again. Firefox is losing because most of them have already switched to Chrome. And when that happens, it's only a matter of time before the mainstream does it, too, under their recommendation.
What features does Firefox need to retain power users or even win back Chrome switchers?
This is a tough problem. Google's money and manpower enabled Chrome to quickly reached feature parity with Firefox. Google undoubtedly spends more developing and advertising Chrome than they pay Mozilla.
Short of some Google privacy scare, there may not be enough technical reasons for someone to switch back.
I completely agree. The biggest difference I have noticed, ironically, is while loading _google+_ (try it, firefox 10/11 is faster). The only reason I would use chrome over firefox is because of the incognito mode. I like randomly opening a page in incognito mode without losing my current session.
I do use FF every once in a few days, I just find its start up time irritating (the difference is on the order of seconds). I will say that it definitely has improved though, and I do like the way FF manages tabs over Chrome, but Chrome just feels more pleasant to use
Things might be different but the last time I checked I could not find chrome addons that are equivalent to NoScript, RequestPolicy and AdBlock. These three addons are keeping me firmly in the firefox camp...
Just about every developer I know has Firefox on their machine, but that's just because our automated tests tend to be written for Firefox. Almost none of the teams I have been a part of use Firefox for development, and even fewer for personal browsing. Chrome's market share grab has been quite impressive.
My most recent experience was with a client who was locked into IE for years, made the switch to Google Apps, and subsequently discovered the speed of Chrome. Phrased as "lots of our users skipped Firefox," it sounded like Firefox was in no-man's land.
I personally still use FF as my main development browser, it may be familiarity but I like the development tools in FF more than the ones offered in Chrome. Chrome may have the slight edge in features as far as development tools go, but I find that FF's tools have a better workflow. As well, the new 3D view of the DOM is in and of itself a big reason to use it as a development browser. As the DOM has become more complicated we have desperately needed such a tool to visualize the layering of elements on the page.
I've been using it since Firebird and tried to stick with for as long as I could on my Mac, but after trying Chrome recently, annoyed by performance issues (memory management, flash video, etc.) the difference was so big that it was impossible to justify to keep using FF. Been really happy with Chrome since. Incredibly fast browser in comparison.
The article seems to assume that a declining market share means that Firefox is going to "die" and that you should start switching. This might make sense for a company, but not that much for an open source project. Firefox could stay very healthy with a much lower market share as long as the right people are still using it (and developing it).
Chromium is open source, which Chrome is based on. I don't understand what everyone is complaining about. Chromium will always be around, so if you're paranoid about Google sneaking in some stuff into Chrome to steal your info, then use Chromium. I like Mozilla, but they haven't been able to keep up in my book.
I still use FF for daily browsing. I have Chrome installed and use it for webdev but there are some annoyances (like adblock not working very well) which keep it from being my everyday browser.
I anticipate problems in the future, however, when I won't have access to Flash unless I use Chrome (I'm on Linux).
I'm at the point where I keep both Chrome and FF open. Chrome for work and FF for browsing, where I find Treestyle Tabs too valuable to lose. I've pretty much given up on there being a true Chrome equivalent at this point, but I would probably switch if there was one.
Stop versioning Firefox so rapidly and people will come back. Firefox 5 - Firefox 11 in 1 year. Come on Mozilla... switch back to minor version numbers. I don't think they realize how this perception negatively effects the regular consumer.
Actually, the "regular consumer" has no idea that Firefox even had version numbers to begin with. Iterating quickly with nearly automatic updates was a huge step in the right direction.
I have to wonder if that isn't actually going to be a problem from now on, not a technical one but a marketing problem. Major version upgrades used to be a big deal and brought lots of publicity even outside narrow tech circles. Now they aren't going to get that for free. Google pushes Chrome a lot in ads, Firefox don't have that. So what are they going to do to spread the word?
I disagree. There are plenty of people who actually really pay attention to version numbers. Maybe they aren't in the majority, but I've encountered plenty of people who proudly tell me that they have 'the latest version x' before telling me off for sticking with the older version.
I've stopped explaining the memory management and other issues to these kinds of people.
You know, lots of software have updates like that. They just don't tell you. Chrome came out in 2008 and it's already at version 17. Firefox came out in 2004 and it's only version 11. Mozilla just needs to make updating more seamless, which I believe they are working on.
So the complaint is that Firefox tells you what version it is as opposed to Firefox having new versions on a timely basis? That doesn't make any sense.
Regular consumers really don't care about version numbers. They probably don't even know which version of Office they have installed, let alone their web browser.
I'd switch to Chrome because it is speedier, but Chrome doesn't provide me bookmarks tags for all of my local bookmarks. So Firefox is holding just because of that.
It still disgusts me that Internet Explorer has users at all. Even IE9 is still unbearably bad, especially from the web developer point of view. I wish the rest of the world would have realized this and ousted Microsoft from a business it has no place in.
IE9 is light years ahead of anything else Microsoft has put out and IE10 will be amazing in comparison as well.
That said, a large percentage of IE9 users are corporations which don't want to support non-Microsoft browsers, new end-users who don't have a clue about anything that's not Microsoft, and the millions of foreigners who just use what's provided.
Supporting IE9 isn't that bad as it used to be to support older IE browsers.
_the millions of foreigners who just use what's provided._
Funny thing to say after seeing the statcounter shown in the comments show that >40% of north americans use internet explorer compared to ~30% in europe 35% in asia, 30% in south america and 30% in africa. Infact North america is the only place where internet explorer has >5% lead over their next biggest rival!
I don't get IE9. It's not compatible with the legacy IE6 rubbish, and yet not conformant enough with HTML5 etc so it requires much extra work to support compared to FF, Chrome, Safari. Thank goodness for Chrome Frame.
It's not a standard, but I can tell you that tech innovators do not stand around and wait for some committee to decide "Oh yea, uhh lets make HTML5 the standard now". No matter what the standards say, any respectable web browser should be making their best effort to "conform" to the latest technology.
It may disgust you, but Microsoft deserves its place at the table, Microsoft were there right at the start competing with Netscape, and that was a good thing healthy competition in browser development. And didn't Microsoft win their battle with Netscape. In turn hasn't that inspired Mozilla to come back fighting with Firefox and didn't that lead to chrome et al, not forgetting opera and safari and others. I rest my case for big softie.
If you take "competing with Netscape" to mean "buying another browser and bundling it with another product they had a monopoly position on", maybe.
Perhaps they didn't "win" the battle fairly, but back when IE market share was in the 90%+ range, I think it was fair to say Netscape had unequivocally lost.
Mozilla/Firefox was a "Hail Mary" plan that only succeeded because a lot of smart people and a lot of money showed up at just the right time. I shudder to think what the web would be like had they failed.
IE actually did win on the merits back then, IE 3 was a far better browser than Netscape at the time and Netscape was having a tough time competing due to the shape the codebase was in. IE was quicker and lighter, so people started using it. The bundling was certainly a factor, but the fact that IE was the better browser for a time cannot be ignored.
I may have my version numbers mixed up, it's been a while and I was relying on memory so it very well could have been 4. The point though was there was a point in which IE was clearly out in front of Netscape.
Google decided to kill Firefox. Not by lack of financial support, but by giving their own browser radically more financial support (the homepage marketing alone is worth an astronomical sum). There was never going to be enough room in the market for four or five major browsers, each with a lot of market share - markets consolidate naturally. Once Chrome gained traction, Firefox was destined to fall down to Opera's levels.
It's been a bit harder to kill off NCSA Mosaic/MCOM/Netscape/Mozilla Foundation than people had imagined; and people have been imaging killing them off for 16 years or so.
The likes of Clark, Andreesen & jwz built an idea in 1995 that will not die. it just wont. they can lose their nsf funding, aol can buy up the remains and then discard it; google can use it as advertising space and then go elsewhere, they can take 5 years between netscape 4.0 and mozilla 1.0, but they will not die.
