The Future of Firefox

sebFlyte writes "As Firefox moves swiftly towards 1.1 and Internet Explorer keeps trundling towards IE7, ZDNet UK has an interesting set of articles about Mozilla. Among other things, they look at the history of Firefox all the way from the pre-phoenix days, and have an interview with chief evangelist Asa Dotzler looking at what has driven the browsers success and why he thinks the release of IE7 will cause a massive boost in the uptake of Firefox."

Comments

boost leads to more exploits

[rockytriton]

It's quite possible that this boost will lead to more exploits which will lead to a decline...

http://www.dreamsyssoft.com

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

It's quite possible that this boost will lead to more exploits which will lead to a decline...

More likely, the open-source approach, meaning the pride developers take in making good (or at least decent) code, the peer review of said code, and quick fixing when a bug is found, will prevent a decline.

Microsoft bought Spyglass and started flinging shit at Mosaic until they got a working browser in a short time to kill Netscape. Then they flung more shit at it to corner the browser market, then they kept on flinging shit at random, to add this and that feature and eye candy. Since nobody really checks the code outside of Microsoft, and since they don't (didn't?) really care about security as long as nobody finds the flaws, there you have it: IE pisses people off and people switch to the first decent alternative.

That's why I think IE will keep on declining, and Firefox won't.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Leroy_Brown242]

(Score:0, Informative)

Of course, negative feedback from the mods because you spoke ill of FIREFOX even though it was a valid point. Same happens with Linux and Google. Oh well.

Your point is valid though.

The larger Firefox's market share become, the larger a target they become.

Right now, exploiters hit IE because it's the most efficient way to screw over a lot of people with a browser. Exploiting Firefox would effect a whole lot less people, possibly with more effort.

The true strength of Firefox is that the community stands behind it, and can change it to fill hole. So the open source community can put their geek where their mouth is, and make a browser as good as the community can. If it sucks, then it's nobody's fault but our own.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[friedmud]

"And for every OSS trophy project you'll find a thousand half-assed weekend hacks that never make it past Alpha stage because, to the developer, posting it on sourceforge or whatever is more important that making a program usable to more than just himself."

As a _very_ part time open source developer I think this is fine.

I personally have published a couple of my own weekend hacks in Alpha stage... never to touch them again. I still recieved a lot of feedback... most of which was "Thanks!". Why? Because it gave people something to start from, or an example to use for a different implementation. I'm sure no one used anything in a "production" environment but that was never the purpose.

Publishing an open-source project is _never_ a bad idea. The more code and collaboration out there the stronger the community is. I never wanted to be the best at making program X... I just wanted to be helpful.

I think people have a hard time understanding that you don't always have to "win" at everything. Sometimes just being nice, or helpful can be its own reward (both to you and the community).

Friedmud

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

are you implying that for-profit developers don't take pride in their code?

All developers in closed-source companies that I've known would *like* to take pride in their code, but they always have to respect tight schedules, and end up writing "good enough" code (good enough meaning, sure, there are bugs, but no show-stoppers).

I'm quite sure Microsoft developers aren't told to take the time to do things right. They're told to hurry the hell up and make it work. I'm also quite sure most of them would prefer taking the time to do things right, but their employer doesn't pay them to do that.

i'd advise you state your views on your resume. employers will probably want to know about that.

You misunderstood my views. My view is simply that not release the source code makes it easy to hide bad code, and even the best engineers can't go against their management's wishes and constraints.

As for me, I was a developer, so I should know what I'm talking about. Not anymore though: in my new line of job, I can tell the customer to get lost until I'm sure everything's done just right, and he's usually happy with that, because my products cost well over $10k a pop and he prefers waiting than having a botched-up result :-)

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Linus Torvaalds]

Microsoft bought Spyglass

No, they royally fucked over Spyglass. They made a deal with Spyglass so that Spyglass would get a cut of all the profits made from Internet Explorer as it was based upon Spyglass Mosaic. Remember, this was back when web browsers were something you could buy in a box. Getting a cut of all sales for a flagship application sold by Microsoft? Spyglass must have thought they really lucked out!

Then Microsoft illegally dumped Internet Explorer on the market for no cost in order to kill Netscape. 5% of zero profits isn't a lot of money, is it? Spyglass no longer exists.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[syousef]

Publishing an open-source project is _never_ a bad idea. The more code and collaboration out there the stronger the community is. I never wanted to be the best at making program X... I just wanted to be helpful.

A lot of people operate under this assumption. Sadly they're just plain wrong, and here's why: If you have 1000 pieces of software that all claim to do roughly the same sort of thing, and 999 are hacks, finding that 1 good program is going to be an excercise in frustration.

End users are likely to come across one or more of the hacks, curse about open source rubbish and go back to using close rubbish that at least works a little better. More sophisticated users will go and find out what other people are happy with, but it still makes the process much more complex.

It's the same reason having thousands of distros,f ew of which work well, is a bad bad thing. Some diversity is a good thing, but too much diversity is almost as bad as none.

If open source wants to survive, we need more focus on a narrower range of products as well as solid lobbying of politicians to keep open source legal.

To be fair the sorts of software you're talking about writing yourself sound more like code snippets than fully functional programs. That's not so bad since your target audience is generally other developers, and they can be expected to sort through software.

Main advantage

[mfloy]

The main reason I like Firefox is that it pushes innovation. Back when IE was the clearly dominant browser, with no real competition, there were very few sensible inovations for browsers. Sure, a few little things here and there, but for the most part it was monopolized. Firefox's popularity will ultimately lead to a better browser market all around.

Re:Main advantage

[dsginter]

Speaking of innovation, someone should innovate an ActiveX IE plugin that simply changes the IE rendering engine to Gecko.

Then we could all use CSS the way it was meant to be. The drone consumers will never know the difference.

Re:Main advantage

[Zathrus]

q[ I'd be happy if firefox can just fix the CPU hammering/memory leak with Flash by 2.0.]q

Given that the issue in question also occurs in IE, Safari, and any other browser with a flash plugin regardless of OS I'd guess that this is not a browser bug.

My guess is that it's a race condition inside the Flash code itself. It doesn't appear on all systems, even if they are running the same OS/browser/flash revision (and viewing the same content).

At least with Firefox you can install Flashblock and not be annoyed by CPU gobbling flash unless you really want it.

Re:Main advantage

[dpilot]

You underestimate your argument.

When competition disappears from ANY market, that market stagnates. For the moment, I'll follow your example and continue to pick on Microsoft, but it's by no means limited to them. Way back in the early PC days, DOS advanced fairly rapidly to DOS 3.3, driven by hardware introductions. There was also a not widely used or known multitasking version of DOS (4?) as well as IBM's much-maligned DOS4. But basically, DOS stagnated after V3.3.

That is, until DRDOS 5.0 came out, offering much better value. (More features, not sure if it cost less.) Then Microsoft followed, and brought out their own DOS 5.0, and the stakes were upped again with DRDOS 6.0, etc. Somewhere in there, Microsoft slipped the legendary AARD code into Windows 3.1 to chill the DRDOS uptake, and also around that timeframe they "incorporated" disk compression, courtesy of Stac Electronics. (lawsuits followed, on both counts.)

But IMHO, if DRDOS 5 hadn't appeared, it would have stayed DOS 3.3 under Windows until the whole Windows vs OS/2 battle started. Also IMHO, lacking competitive pressure in a given market, a company will invest its development dollars elsewhere, and milk the stagnant market for all it can.

Re:Main advantage

[jlarocco]

Firefox hasn't innovated anything yet.

Innovating is coming up with something new based on something else. Firefox copied almost everything it's popular for from Opera, then zipped past it in userbase, and claimed Opera's innovations for its own. No matter what the fanboys try to tell you, it's still just copying.

and...

[cryptoz]

an article to go nicely with the story http://netscape.com.com/Opera,+Firefox+squabble+ov er+best-browser+claim/2100-1032_3-5740879.html shows another side to the whole FF thing.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your well-reasoned and insightful arguments have convinced me to uninstall Firefox.

Too bad ZDNet sucks

[Gothmolly]

I mean, they were alright and cool back in 93-94, when WfWG was out, and worked pretty well, and Novell was cool, and PC Magazine could review 8 or 10 word processors in a shootout article. But now they're just pundits, like Dvorak, who respin company press releases as insight. Sort of like a glorified, corporate, Roland Piquipaille.

Anyway, nice to see FF get some press, but I wouldn't take it too seriously - PHB doesn't trust it anyway, and Joe 4Pack doesn't read ZDNet.

Dicey logic?

[DrEldarion]

If you look at all of statistics they average out to us being about 10 percent of the Web. There are estimated to be about 1 billion Web users, which means there are about 100 million Firefox users out there. It has only been downloaded about 65 million times, so the other users are people who got it some other way. The most likely place they are likely to have got it from is corporate deployments.

Now, I haven't seen these statistics myself, but they seem a bit off to me - that 10% figure is probably skewed somewhat. Considering that the people with firefox installed on their computer are the people most likely to be on the internet a lot in the first place, usage statistics for it can be misread easily.

Also, they say 65 million downloads of Firefox have been made... how many of those were repeats? I've downloaded the program quite a few times, and considering that each upgrade just requires you to download the full install again, there's no way that 65 million downloads translates into 65 million users.

This just reeks of using statistics in a misleading manner.

Re:Dicey logic?

[QuantumRiff]

Actually, the downloads are only for new installs. The upgrade servers are not counted. There was an article here on slashdot talking about that, but I'm too lazy to look it up. It was when firefox released version 1.0.

Re:Dicey logic?

[rpdillon]

There are a lot of related questions, but going in the opposite direction, like:

Linux that use central repository package management use Firefox versions which were never downloaded from the Firefox site, and were never counted.

Anyone who uses The Open CD, or Knoppix, uses Firefox but hasn't "downloaded" it.

OEM CDs, as well as ISP's CDs contain Firefox, and are not counted.

And lastly, as the post above mentioned, corporate rollout of the browser will never have a number of downloads equal to the number of computer upon which the program is installed.

In others words, your point is perfectly valid, but only serves to show that the whole "counting the number of users" idea is actually quite a challenge.

Women in OSS

[BigZaphod]

This is part of one of the questions in the interview: "The open source community generally has problems encouraging women to participate."

Why is this seen as a problem? The open source community doesn't really try that hard to encourage *anyone* to participate regardless of gender or race or nationality. It just is what it is. Those who participate decide to do so on their own and there's virtually no barriers to doing so. The way that question is phrased it is almost as if there should be some kind of OSS organized effort to specifically attract women to the community. What would be gained by such a movement and why is it even implied to be necessary?

Re:Women in OSS

[jimbolauski]

"What would be gained by such a movement"

You need to think outside the box yong grasshopper! Wet oss t-shirt contests, home cooked meals instead of vending machine meals, the benifits are limitless.

Component Model

[agsharad]

While IE is obviously going to learn a lot from Firefox and improve their browser, there is one thing they are unlikely to provide. And that is the component model that Firefox offers. The basic browser is very small (and fast). Then there are hundreds of add-ons to choose from. Users get to decide what they want and install it. The browser morphs to serve the user rather than the other way around.

Sad, but true

[ehaggis]

I like Firefox, I have deployed Firefox as the defacto browser in my company and it is my primary browser.

That being said, it is sad when only (a questionable) 10% usage rate is viewed as any type of challenge to IE. Have we lowered our standards for what real competition should be?

The Future of Firefox is another 5 MB download...

[Steve_Jobs_HNIC]

Coding misstep forces new Firefox release

http://news.com.com/Coding+misstep+forces+new+Fire fox+release/2100-1002_3-5792635.html?tag=nefd.top


well....at least we have extensions.... here's my list:

TextZoom - because I'm blind as a bat
Adblock - use with Filterset.G from http://www.pierceive.com
Session Saver - saves tab sessions _when_ firefox crashes
Web Developer - lot of web dev options
IE View - click to view in IE
Target Alert - let's me know what I'm clicking on
ForecastFox - show forecast
FindBar Switch - makes the find bar toogle hide/un-hide with CTRL+F
Download Statusbar - much better than the download window/popup
SpellBound - because my spelling sux

IE bundled with Windows

[Hamstij]

As long as IE remains bundled with the windows OS, Firefox will *never* take off and reach a significant install base.

I work as a consultant for many IT firms, and even though they are perfectly aware of IE's limitations and security problems, they do not make the change to an alternate browser simply because it is far easier to stay with the one already installed on the system.

Inertia means that Firefox will always remain a fringe browser until some anti-monopoly law makes MS remove IE. And that will never happen. No matter how awful IE becomes now or in the future, sheer laziness means it will always be the predominant browser.

How does that differ from commercial or in-house?

[SuperKendall]

...And for every OSS trophy project you'll find a thousand half-assed weekend hacks that never make it past Alpha stage...

Yes you will. Just as for every succesful commercial or in-house app you'll see a thousand failures. But at least OSS failures are ones generally based on technical merits, and not so much based on a company running out of money or a project being killed for political reasons eeven though it's quite good.

Not to mention that each of those thousand failures is a learning experience for the next one. Remember Edison saying he didn't mind thousand unsucessful attemps to make a light buld because he now knew a thousand things that didn't work? It can be (not saying it always is) the same with OSS. You can actually see what people pick up and use, and try to understand why.

You do see some simialr bugs cropping up across a lot of different forums, because programmers make simialr mistakes and a lot of software is being written and re-written for a huge range of platforms - like Java or PHP or Ruby. So sharing cannot happen quite as much as would be ideal, but at least sharing can happen in the form of UI sharing - if you like the way a user interacts with some piece of software you can replicate that.