“Firefox has just turned five, and it’s doubtful anybody outside of Redmond begrudges Mozilla’s celebrations. The open-source browser now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications, and has brought a radical rethink in what we expect from a browser. However, as Mozilla blows out the birthday cake candles, it might also be reflecting on the curse of getting what you wish for. Its success has forced rivals to raise their game, and the past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple and Opera close the features gap significantly.”
IE will never take away marketshare from Firefox. Everybody knows how much it sucks.
Chrome might, but Google won’t let Mozilla die. The few millions Mozilla needs to survive are peanuts for Google.
And although I am writing this with Chrome I wish Firefox 4.0 was already finished.
Chrome has architectural issues. For example adblockers in Chrome work very differently in Chrome than in Firefox. Firefox can just exclude a lot of stuff and don’t even download doubleclick ads etc. In Chrome everything is downloaded (so you can be tracked) and then it is filtered (bad for CPU and memory)
I have found Chrome to be a little better and faster than Firefox, but once FF gets process separation I am switching back.
Hmmm that is what people said about IE when it was an underdog to Netscape. Remember that MS doesn’t have to build an amazingly better browser, they just have to build one that is good enough for people to not download Firefox. Don’t underestimate their ability to spend hundreds of millions on r&d out of spite.
That’s the main reason why I use Chrome as well. Rendering differences between browsers are rather exaggerated. Bandwidth speed is the major bottleneck.
The Chrome team however has advantage over Firefox in that they have a cleaner codebase which makes it easier to optimize.
If Microsoft spend hundreds of millions on IE, and finally get it to the point where it can meet the web standards (such as SVG and DOM2) that have been in place now for over a decade, then good luck to them. That would be great.
Because Firefox can selectively block unwanted parts of pages from even downloading, it can actually win here over Chrome. Chrome downloads the entire page content every time, even if some of it is not going to be displayed.
That is true, but OTOH the Firefox team has the advantage over the Chrome team in that, unlike the Chrome team or the Opera team or the IE team, the Firefox team are writing their browser with the best interests of browser users in mind, as opposed to the best interests of browser sponsors.
Edited 2010-01-20 22:50 UTC
All browser companies have to build a browser that appeals to users or they’ll switch to something else.
I’ll also still bet on a clean codebase over the best of intentions any day.
That’s why the EU imposed a browser ballot.
IE will never take away marketshare from Firefox. Everybody knows how much it sucks.
Im the prove that it can, I was a hardcore FF user but I only use IE8 now.
No you are the exception that proves the rule :p
I think rather … Big deal who cares what browser has market share as long as mine and other peoples browsers are able to load the same pages
so.. do you think MS is pro standards?
and mozilla/opera/webkit are they? I say the latter group is much more prostandards while MS leaves the “stadards” vague and subject to implementation differences… just to throw the other guys off
Chrome isn’t just “a little faster” than Firefox on Linux, it’s an order of magnitude faster.
(On non-Windows platforms, Firefox is generally avoided as the default browser whenever a viable alternative is present because of GUI latency issues… even on modern systems)
The process separation should help a lot, but what I’m really hoping for is the fixing of various long-standing bugs in how the GUI handles input events. (It took until Firefox 3 for it to not drop keypresses when the GUI was lagging and the context menu is still unpredictable if you don’t use mac-style click-drag-release menu item selection)
It may be for you and in benchmarks. But from my totally unscientific experience (running it with heavy adblocking over wifi on a netbook) it isn’t.
Adblocking introduces a lot of lag in Chrome and the downloading of all the ad crap over wifi is really noticable on Chrome, whereas Firefox loads pages much faster because it doesn’t connect to doubleclick and whatever for every webpage.
With heavy adblocking Firefox page load times are faster for _ME_. Chrome just wins overall because of other stuff like process seperation.
I don’t get how process isolation can speedup the GUI. Could you point to the bugs in bugzilla for fixing those various long-standing bugs?
Huh? Quite sure I’ve never seen dismissing to such a degree all the features Opera brought to the table…
They sure brought a lot of features but they also insisted upon charging $40 for a new copy in the days when IE6 had zero competition.
Or how about when their free version had an additional banner ad on the top?
Their CEO made too many mistakes and now even nanny government can’t save them. They deserve to lose.
But that has NOTHING to do with features. Simply the realities of the market at that time for a small company with the browser as its main product.
You show your ignorance if you think Opera is tanking now due to those decisions (made, again, in hugely different reality). They’ve found their niche that allows them to offer Opera desktop browser for free – mobile and otherwise embedded devices, where they are quite successful.
FYI, there are countries in Europe where Opera is the number one browser, ahead of IE; or number one alternative browser. And quite a few where it has noticeable share of between 5 and 10%. Heck, even some where Opera Mini (the j2me, relying-on-proxy one) is ahead of, say, Safari.
But then again, in the same region there are places where FF is the number one browser. Where alternatives to IE are quite readily embraced.
Edited 2010-01-20 21:48 UTC
Those were decisions made by the CEO who took too long to switch to the ad revenue model. You can find old reviews of opera where people clearly liked it but found the pricing model to be unrealistic when IE was free.
To be ignorant is to lack knowledge. Opinion on the reasons behind the failure of Opera is a subjective matter.
It’s my opinion that Opera has lost because it insisted upon charging for too long. Opera was first released in 1996 but it didn’t release an ad-free version until 2005 which was a year after Firefox was released. People forget that Firefox not only provided competition for IE but also Opera.
Yes I’m quite aware of countries like Ukraine that have a majority Opera share. I’ve posted on this before in fact. Here’s a link you can use next time you bring this point up:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-UA-monthly-200812-201001
However that doesn’t change the fact that globally they have lost share and now have more competition with Chrome and Safari. Their future is dim on the desktop. They still have a good mobile browser though.
Those decisions were being made in times when the sustainability of supporting a browser through ad revenue wasn’t yet established. Since Opera is the only independent commercial browser that managed to survive since then (and is actually growing), it’s unreasonable to look at them as a failure. Or that they “lost”.
They are _growing_, they are a healthy company, with healthy financial results. You implying that they are tanking (in “they deserve to lose”) hovers pretty close to ignorance.
Search engine kickbacks were around in 2001 and maybe even earlier but that still doesn’t excuse the CEO from thinking that it was a good idea to charge $40 a new copy of Opera. The vast majority of shareware then wasn’t more than $30. He tried a using high price / low volume strategy for years even though growth was minimal and people were complaining about the price. He later switched to a ridiculous ad plan that involved having an additional banner ad in the browser while you surf. Wow sign me up for that.
If he had priced his browser properly in the beginning then IE6 would have had some competition a lot earlier. He seemed to be in denial that people were not going to pay $40 for tabbed browsing.
I never said they were unsuccessful as a company. I said their browser has been a failure and that is my opinion. I consider it to be a failure given how long it has been around and how poorly it has done compared to its competitors.
Such as? Because AFAIK Firefox is much more widespread than Firefox in every European country. Ok maybe in Norway there is some kind of brand loyalty but I still can’t see Firefox being used less.
I think I know one person in Norway who uses Opera, everybody else uses firefox (except my dad still uses IE). Most people probably don’t even know Opera a Norwegian company.
Think a bit further east.
IIRC Russia (and some of the smaller nations around east Europe / west asia) favour Opera.
There used to be some excellent stats on Wikipedia but I can’t find the article now.
Yes, that struck me too. So many of the features in Firefox, or available as Firefox extensions, were in Opera years earlier.
A copy of Opera from several years ago still has a number of great features that aren’t available in Firefox, yet somehow there’s a “features gap”?
Not sure what you meant by features, but afaik Firefox is still playing catchup to Opera/Webkit when it comes to standards support!
It might have been paving the way for alternative browsers, but unless it picks up in speed, it wont be long before IE/Chrome/Safari is leaving Firefox in the dust. I know it only has to be done once like the os bootup, but the startup time is appaling!
Can’t say it takes too long to start up on my Linux boxes, about a second or so which is about the same as it takes Safari on the Mac to load up. On Windows though it did take quite a while to load the last time I used it. I don’t use Windows anymore so that may have changed.
It is not as clear-cut as that. Firefox is slightly behind in standards support compared to Opera and Webkit, but only just.
When it comes to performance, Firefox 3.6 makes up some ground, to the point where Chrome is actually slower in completing the display of most pages because Chrome must download the entire page content (even if some of it is not shown to the users screen), while Firefox is able to selectively block unwanted parts of the content from even being downloaded.
When it comes to startup, Firefox is indeed slower than Chrome/Chromium or Arora on my machine, but with a pre-loader daemon such as SuperFetch or preload running it is only a matter of a couple of seconds versus one. Firefox includes XULrunner, which gives Firefox its fantastic configurability and extendability, and because of that I can put up with having to wait an extra second for it to load.
Where Crome wins is in process-per-tab. Firefox is working on this feature also, although it will be some time coming. Having said that, Firefox may be considering ditching XUL in order to become a bit leaner, and replacing the functionality with Jetpack and personas.
This will all be an interesting contest to see which browser comes out the best in the end between Firefox and Chrome. Firefox is still ahead (because it loads pages faster and uses less bandwidth, and because of its extendability), but only just. Firefox has its work cut out trying to stay ahead of Chrome.
The competition is all good, though.
> When it comes to performance, Firefox 3.6 makes up some ground, to the point where Chrome is actually slower in completing the display of most pages
Web page rendering speed matters, UI rendering speed matters as much (you feel it every time you right click, you open a tab or a new window, you launch the app).
Firefox’s UI on the Mac is slow as molasses (let alone not integrated enough), no matter how neat its JavaScript or HTML/CSS rendering performance scores may be. Chrome is going to take all of its Mac users (and then some of Safari too)
I did some side-by-side testing of Chromium 4.0.249.64 (35722), Shiretoko (Firefox) 3.5.7 and Arora 0.10.2 on my ArchLinux KDE installation. I set them all to show a blank page on start-up, and I had them all set to a basic level of ad-blocking, and I tested them all to display the very OSNews page on which your comment (partly quoted above) appeared.
1. Arora was the fastest to load, then Chromium, then Firefox.
2. Arora was the fastest to open a new tab, then Firefox, then Chromium.
3. Firefox was the fastest to load and render the page from OSNews, then Arora, then Chromium.
4. Arora was the fastest to display a context menu after right click, then Chromium, then Firefox.
For the first and second test there was a noticeable difference, but not enough to be a concern.
The third test showed the most appreciable differences of them all.
The last test there was almost nothing in it, and I had to repeat it several times over in all three browsers in order to come up with the ranking.
On my rough and ready test for GUI and browser overall speed and responsiveness, on the same machine, Arora wins, Firefox second, Chromium third.
PS: On Acid3 tests, Chromium scored 100, Arora scored 99, and Firefox Shiretoko scored 93.
Firefox is the most extendible by far, then Chromium, and Arora not at all.
In terms of maturity, Firefox is the most mature, then Chromium which is not too bad at all, and unfortunately Arora still needs some work and polish.
Edited 2010-01-21 09:23 UTC
I for one won’t be switching to Chrome.
I use a Mac and I use Firefox. I also use Windows & Linux. I’ve been using FF since the 1.0 days and can easily move all my bookmarks etc from one platform to another.
Ease of Use & portability is what does it for me. Life is not all about speed.
Slow down, put your feet up, have a beer or three. Then who cares if a page loads in 1.5secs or 1.6secs.
Well, I prefer Ease of Use & portability & speed to just Ease of Use & portability.
Chrome syncs bookmarks across platforms too (and there’s even xmarks.com for syncing across browsers).
You do understand that Jetpack is just an easier way to extend Firefox. It is not a magical solution that makes an extensible program as fast as a small compact program. And personas is just a way to put a png on the background of Firefox’s interface.
disable session saving and also use a simple theme… those slow firefox down also you may want to raise the number of simultaneous connections that can be made if you have a broadband connection
about:config is your friend (its not like firefox comes with a warranty anyway lol)
Feature-wise, I think Opera has been leading the market for quite some time. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it has every feature of every other browser, but I don’t think it has been trying for years simply to catchup to Firefox.
I do think Firefox, with its greater market share, has pushed IE into improving, though I would attribute a healthy amount of the pressure not from FF directly, but from the security issues, and consequent headlines, that also lead to many improvements to Windows [XP] itself.
Verging back to Opera, a leader in one set of features doesn’t mean you can let it rest. For example, I doubt they would have quite the same drive for increasing JS performance if it weren’t for Chrome.
Even though I don’t buy the premise that Opera has been lagging FF in features all this time, it does show that competition among all the players tends to promote progress in all the players. Ie, the introduction of one new, good feature forces all browsers to adopt it eventually.
That competition happens on a more equal playing field than one would at first suspect, since getting browsers into people’s hands is so simple, even the major players (MS) have to respond to challenges by the minor ones (Mozilla, Opera) and vice versa.
I love greasemonkey too much to give up Firefox. Maybe I’ll try the port to Safari sometime, but until it exists on a browser I ain’t switching.
I never really understood the appeal of greasemonkey.
Well, if you like to customize your browser and the browsing experience, Greasemonkey is very good as it makes it relatively easy to write scripts to extent the browser functionality. Thousands of ready made scripts already available too, for all sorts of uses: http://userscripts.org/ I’ve personally used a few of handy scripts from there.
Firefox Team: If you retire your sponsorship we will enable adblock plus by default in the next version.
Google: All right, you win.
How come everyone connects Google’s main income with ads? Are there ads attached to anything google offers for free? Some search results on google.com don’t even have ads. Search for “osnews” and see what comes up on the right hand side. What ads are there specifically tied to the chrome broswer? Android? Google Desktop? Google Earth? Picasa? Have you ever clicked a google ad? Can you remember the pitch of the last ad you glanced at in GMail?
Ads in blogger, youtube and any website that have google ads would be affected.
Here are Google’s last quarterly results:
http://investor.google.com/documents/20090930_google_10Q.html
(The ones for the most recent quarter will be available tomorrow at 1:30 PM Pacific Time.)
There’s a lot to take in there, but unless I’m reading this wrong, here are the key points:
97% of their overall revenue came from advertising. (Now *that’s* a cash cow.)
Of that, 69% came from advertising on Google’s own properties, the rest came from 3rd party websites.
Also, just as a point of interest, 60% of their overall revenue came from the US and UK. Revenue from all other countries is grouped together and referred to quaintly as the “rest of the word”.
Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I intentionally clicked on an ad, or even found one that thought was compelling enough to consider, but apparently I’m a minority.
To this very day I prefer the speed of a simple light browser such as NetPositive ( BeOS ).
Of course, NetPositive was seriously lacking in many ways, and can’t show much of any page correctly anymore.
So, my solution is Firefox with NoScript installed 🙂
I only enable javascript when I absolutely need it.
I also use AdBlock Plus and a myriad of other add-ons to limit bandwidth utilization.
Why do I do all this?
Because I live in the middle of nowhere and I use a satellite dish and three signal amplifiers to capture wireless from the nearest point ( about 15 miles ). On a good day I’ll see a full 250 KB/s, but most of the time I’m happy to see 10 KB/s, or even 5 KB/s.
But, at least it is free…
–The loon
I’d like to point out a few things:
– Mozilla (Firefox) is the only “company” that is doing a browser FOR the users and thus for the good of all of us. Even if the browser wasn’t as good, it should be one of the first choice for this reason: our future.
* its an organization, not a corporation
* browse their main page: “We believe that the internet should be public, open and accessible.” and they actually believe so
– Per tab process is a BAD idea. You’ve seen chrome slides, great, and then? The only thing that should be per process are PLUGINS, as they’re the external code that may crash without the browser being able to do anything about it.
* per plugin process only reload the plugin container, not whole page
* threaded browser uses a lot less memory (see how firefox uses way less memory than chrome)
* threaded browser is faster due to faster communication (chrome has some advantage in speed that have nothing to do with “per process”. See how quick Safari with webkit has always been. Firefox has to speed up this area and multiprocess will change nothing to it.
I’ll just conclude with that:
competition is good, zealotrie is not. zealots are blindly opening the gates to a darker future in many areas, not just software browsers (which aren’t all that important afterall).
Wake up. Don’t be a zealot.