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Firefox's Effect On Other Browsers
An anonymous reader points out an interview with Mozilla's "evangelist," Christopher Blizzard, regarding the future of Firefox and how it affects other browsers. It's an Austrian site, so forgive the comma abuse. From derStandard:
"It's sort of interesting though, part of our strategy is to make sure, that we continue making change and the indirect effect of this is that Microsoft continues to have to do releases, because if we get so far ahead that we're able to drive the platform they are not able to keep up and keep their users. I mean, we have this joke which says 'Internet Explorer 7 is the best release we ever did,' because they would not have done it, if we would have not built Firefox. And the same is true for Apple, they are doing a lot to keep up with us. Safari 3.1 is a good example, as far as we see it, the only reason they did this release was that Firefox 3 would come out and have Javascript speed which would be twice as fast as theirs, cause that's how it was before. So by pushing other people to make releases we can go on our mission to make sure the web stays healthy."
Safari is not trailing Firefox as it is being developed in all ways, especially JavaScript performance. I actually prefer to use Firefox 3 on the Mac (much better array of plug-ins, and better security), but the latest WebKit nightlies, on http://www.webkit.org/ since the implementation of Squirelfish (see blog there) are quite a bit faster in JavaScript performance than Firefox. If anything, Firefox is going to have some catching up to do in that department.
It's gotten a lot better for non-techie users due to more websites testing against them though. I remember using Firebird 0.7 and about 1 out of every 20 sites would not render very well. For non-techie users, having to then start IE for more than 2 sites is a reason to not even try anything but IE.
That's absolutely true. About a year and a half ago I started using my mac exclusively, and with that I lost the IE Tab extension for Firefox. Initially I missed it every day, having to use Safari to try to render pages correctly. Now it is a complete non-issue.
Opera, although it is excellent, has never had enough market share to look like a threat. Competition from Safari, and of course IE, is the major competitive driver for us.
Apple does very little of the core work for Safari. They just take the open-source WebKit engine and slap their own UI over it
You are incredibly misinformed. A quick glance at recent WebKit changes readily shows how blatantly false your claim is.
And what annoys me the most is that WHEN Safari crashes (which are within a day more often, ranging from an hour to 2 days.) all my tabs are lost for all eternity with all the information I was waiting to look at.
Select History -> Reopen All Windows From Last Session after relaunching Safari. If you'd like to see that mechanism improved, head over to http://bugreport.apple.com/ and provide your feedback.
They just take the open-source WebKit engine and slap their own UI over it
WebKit was developed by Apple, originally as a fork of KHTML for their Safari browser. Apple open-sourced WebKit and it was so good that many of its improvements were copied back into KHTML. It's also being used by a number of mobile phones because of its strengths relative to e.g, Gecko, including Android.
Without Apple, there would be no WebKit. But don't let reality get in your way.
What version of Firefox are you running? Supposedly the memory leakage was fixed in v3.
Apple open-sourced WebKit and it was so good that many of its improvements were copied back into KHTML.
Umm, KHTML was licensed as LGPL, which means Apple had to open source their fork if they distributed it. As for improvements being copied back, well that happened to some extent, but the Konquerer team seems to have pretty much given up on KHTML and are contributing to Webkit now.
Yes, because holding two fingers on the trackpad and then clicking is so much easier than just clicking the other button...err, wait...
Actually it is. According to the usability tests I've seen, it is faster and has a lower failure rate because to hit the second button you have to either stretch your hand over or use your other hand, neither of which is ideal. For mice, where one hand is already off the keyboard, multiple buttons are a usability win for experts, but for trackpad users it is a loss for novice users and expert users and more usable but less learnable for middle of the road users.
No, you're thinking of GPL. The LGPL would have allowed them to use KHTML libraries without giving anything back.
They can link to it without giving anything back, but the LGPL does not allow them to make changes to it and distribute them without giving the source back. Since Apple had to make significant changes to make it work modularly and the way they wanted, they had to give all those changes back. They don't have to open source the code for Safari, which links to Webkit, and in fact they don't.
WebCore's "improvements" are largely Apple's own doing, apart from those changes which were shared upstream before KDE developers abandoned KHTML.
Apple has done significant work to make Webkit better than KHTML was, but they are certainly building on a lot of work that was done before they entered the game. Apple has played nice with the Konqueror folks and gone out of their way to help them integrate changes and revise the way the shared code base was developed such that improvements from multiple groups including Konqueror, Apple, and Nokia can all be included. That said, to claim Apple had a choice about how Webkit would be licensed or if their changes to it would be open source is simply not true.
the LGPL does not allow them to make changes to it and distribute them without giving the source back. Since Apple had to make significant changes to make it work modularly and the way they wanted, they had to give all those changes back.
You are still being imprecise. The LGPL does allow them to make whatever changes they like, so long as the KHTML libraries they are using are used intact. I do not disagree that any modified libraries had to be shared back upstream, but those changes are portions of WebCore, itself a portion of WebKit. There was no requirement that compartmentalized changes, improvements, and additions be shared if they extended beyond the four corners of the KHTML libraries.
WebCore is much more than rewritten KHTML libraries. WebKit is much more than WebCore.
That said, to claim Apple had a choice about how Webkit would be licensed or if their changes to it would be open source is simply not true.
It absolutely is true. There was no obligation to open-source WebKit. There wasn't even an obligation to open-source the entirety of WebCore and JSCore. There was an obligation to share changes to modified libraries.
What's simply not true is that Apple had no alternative. Apple provided WebKit tactically, not out of obligation to disclose it in its entirety and certainly not out of the goodness of their "hearts".
That's incorrect. Changes made internal to LGPL software must be released, it's only external software that links to LGPL that has the right to stay closed.
For what you're saying to be true KHTML would need to be generic enough to be modified by Apple via linking rather than changing any of the internal KHTML code. The changes Apple have made did involve digging into and changing the guts of KHTML. Again, for what you're saying to be true then KHTML would have to be little more than a canvas for Apple to draw upon.
However we know it's not, and that the changes for progress were internal to the software and therefore Apple did not choose to open source it -- it was open source due to the KHTML license.
This is true, other than that Apple approached it as a fork. They didn't take the time to join the KHTML team and win over the developers with strong arguments and robust debate. It certainly wasn't that kind of software development.
Instead what Apple did was divergent, it was effectively a fork, and KDE chose to go with the fork (probably due to the quality of the code). I personally think that what Apple did was acceptable -- it's permitted by the licence. They could have managed the community in a smarter way but then they like being secretive. It's resulted in some great contributions. Overall I think it was a positive thing.
Tabbed browsing, clean mouse gestures, two-handed browsing, single-click image disabling, single-click user CSS mode.. heck, most of the user-friendly advances have been standard features on Opera for many, many years. And half of the really good stuff *still* isn't stock and standard on any other browser.
But, Opera did open its doors to the free download hype as a result of Firefox. So I owe you that much. :)
But.. catch up already would you?
A workaround for this is to run Flash inside nspluginwrapper, even if you're on a 32-bit system.
This way, when Flash crashes, it won't bring down the whole browser with it, and all you have to do it reload the page.
This bug is on Ubuntu's bugtracker.
If everything you use renders ok in IE, why not just use IE? Especially as it now has tabs, which was the main feature where Firefox was beating it.
Ummm, "tabs" was not the "main feature where Firefox was beating [IE]"
As a non-inclusive list, it is more efficient, is essentially more secure, it's OpenSource (which is a big deal for a lot of people), and allows for more customization.
*I* moved to Firefox (on something like version 0.6) primarily because of extensions.
I use IE 7 at work because I'm forced to do so, and I'm regularly running into situations where I get all irritated because something I do within Firefox simply cannot be done in IE. IE also crashes on me fairly regularly at work. (To be fair, the crash factor on Firefox isn't stellar, but it has improved, for me, with 3.0.)
Opera had tabs before this. The tabs weren't enough to make me want to switch. It's not just the tabs. Never has been.
Tons of reasons:
-IE actually DOESN'T render things quite right, IE 8 (beta) is the closest thing they have now that's anywhere close to "standard compliant", at least in terms of CSS support. In a LOT of cases, pages only render OK in IE because of numerous CSS hacks used to make it display like every other browser, or a IE-only stylesheet is fed to it
-IE is a great way to load your system full of spyware (ActiveX junk, BHO's, toolbars and what not)
-Firefox has tons of very useful addons, like Adblock Plus, DownThemAll, Firebug, etc
-Far better standard support using other browsers, see this page for a quick overview
-IE7 is the worst memory hog of them all, look here and from what I've seen IE8 is only worse
-IE7 has the worst interface of them all, with the home button to the extreme right, the standard "toolbar" hidden by default (File/Edit/View/...), and everything else
-No session saver (when IE crashes, kiss all your tabs goodbye)
etc
There's NOTHING good to be said about IE. It's the worst POS to ever come out of Redmond (worse than WinME + Bob + Clippy combined). The only reason to still use it is for apps (like some banks) that require it, because they use ActiveX components or such.
///<sig
And the memory leaks are ridiculous, even as system with lots of Ram will be brought to its knees by FF given enough time.
Except IE7 does "leak" memory like sieve, (it's hard to tell exactly what it's doing) at least in comparison to Firefox.
Consider the following link. It is by a well-known Mozilla developer, so while he may be biased you can be sure that a result that cannot be reproduced would set the tubes on fire some time ago.
http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/
I'm not saying that Firefox is the leanest application ever, but some of the charges against it here are incredibly overblown and of dubious veracity.
you mean like /home/user/.someprogram/config.conf for user level configs and /etc/someprogram/config.conf for machine level configs?
FF loads pages faster than opera or IE. And it doesnt have a memory leak. Some addons might i dont know. Take this, I leave my computer on for several months at a time including FF open. I often use multiple windows (currently have 2FF windows up) and always a decent number of tabs (8 and 4). This computer has 256MB of ram and has never brought the system to its knees. Also I use 6 addons. If there were a memory leak i'd have noticed. That and a nice variety of tests, in speed and ram usage have shown FF to beat Opera and IE (last i checked, opera has likely improved lately to keep up). Please don't slander without showing your information.
http://avencius.nl/content/firefox-3-vs-opera-950-memory-usage
http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/internet/soa/Browser-faceoff-IE-vs-Firefox-vs-Opera-vs-Safari/0,139023437,339289417-1,00.htm
http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-13626-0.html?forumID=102&threadID=266786&messageID=2542057
For the love of fuck.... the memory leak that most people seem to think plagues Firefox is in fact a caching feature and not a memory leak.
Firefox stores a cache of pages in memory. This can be turned of in about:config if it's that much of a problem for you, but will dramatically reduce the speed that you can click back and forwards through pages.
Ctrl-Z
You've clearly never used IE before.
False as well.
While it's true that FF2 leaked memory (a lot more than any other browser), the team has overhauled that in FF3 and it now uses less memory per loaded page than any of the other browsers. The remaining memory holes are still mostly in the plugins (Flash is a good example, google browser sync does a nasty job of it too). However, "quicker than firefox" is an outright lie. Firefox process HTML faster than IE, runs Javascript faster, cleaner, and better than IE, and loads images faster, cleaner, and closer to the standard than IE.
Furthermore I don't call the gaping activex holes in IE "Security and reliability", unless getting hit with loads of spyware and having the odd practice of locking up all the freaking time is your definition of "reliability"
Sorry if your troll wooshed over my head, you seem wrong enough that it may very well have been such.
+5, Truth
The biggest reason why Opera never got "traction" among Windows and MacOS users was that up until 2005, you couldn't get a full-featured version that was truly "free" (and that meant no ads either!). Meanwhile, IE came as part of Windows since Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2, and of course Firefox has always been free to download (the "free as bheer" thing is really enticing in this case).
Sure, Opera invented a lot of the features we take on IE 7.0 and Firefox 3.0.x for granted, but because of the price issue Opera was never really taken seriously as a competitor to IE and Firefox.