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Firefox's Effect On Other Browsers

Posted by Soulskill on from the driving-the-market dept.

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."

15 of 475 comments (clear)

  1. What astonishes me... by TomRK1089 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What astonishes me is more that this latest release has gotten even my totally non-tech-savvy friends to download it and acknowledge its superiority to Internet Explorer 7. The Firefox team has not only improved the browser for those of us who already used it, but managed to convert another large segment of the market. It's sort of like the Nintendo Wii effect -- they realized it made more sense not to enlarge their slice of the tech-savvy pie, but to expand the pie to include casual users as well. Or at least that's how I see it, feel free to correct me with your own interpretation.

    1. Re:What astonishes me... by Onyma · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I can sum much of this up with one example.

      My mother is a typical late 60's web user... she has a handful of site she likes to visit and not much more. She has memorized the basic functions I taught her years ago and she's happy with that.

      Recently I upgraded her FF2 to FF3 and taught her how to use the new address bar and bookmarking / search functionality. She nailed it in 2-3 minutes and was looking up sites in her history with ease. I was back there a couple days ago and sure enough she has already bookmarked a dozen new sites and raves about how much easier she finds the internet now. (you'd think they had redesigned the entire internet... which in essence is what a browser upgrade can do for you)

      To me that right there outlines one of the reasons FF3 is going to produce another large spike in new users. Get what you want easily and with less hassle.

      --
      Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
    2. Re:What astonishes me... by zappepcs · · Score: 4, Insightful

      One of the great things that FF team did was to allow huge volumes of customization. It can be both a blessing and a curse, but allowing the add-ons and creating an environment where they could be created made FF much more than a web browser. For that, other browsers will constantly have to keep up. FF took bleeding edge and made it cool and functional. It takes a big stick to beat that. Being able to bolt on functions like ABP, foxmarks, FireFTP mean that much of my work is browser based now, and I'd not switch from FF without a great deal of effort by other broswers. I can switch back and forth from Linux to Windows and not really notice any difference in how I'm working.

      Better than that, FF makes is so that joe public can experience the same functionality, and with little effort, realize that Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora et al can be just as useful, if not more so, than MS products and OS. Most of the computer user's experience is a web browser these days. If that part works right, most people don't give a damn what OS is working underneath it. I've converted quite a few people, FF first, then OS, like falling dominos.

      From my vantage point, FF has done far more than they are taking credit for. FAR MORE.

      --
      Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
    3. Re:What astonishes me... by ben2umbc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Security, Add Ons, Speed, Reliability, Open Source, and -10 Microsoft points, I can go on... Seriously, are you still drinking the IE 6 Kool Aid?

    4. Re:What astonishes me... by EdelFactor19 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      probably because A> IE is a gaping security hole. B> it still sucks and has minimal useful plugins. C> you might be using linux D> choice

      tabs were not the main feature; the main feature was the security, lack of popups, lack of exploits and etc.

      --
      "Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
      EdelFactor
    5. Re:What astonishes me... by aussie_a · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because while IE was implementing Firefox's old features, Firefox was implementing new features (some of them from Opera). So IE is still behind.

    6. Re:What astonishes me... by digitig · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And useability. What have Microsoft got against menus nowadays?

      --
      Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
  2. Safari 3.1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or maybe they did it because they were pushing javascript apps for the iPhone, and working on the javascript-based SproutCore frameworks and the associated MobileMe apps.

    Not everything revolves around Firefox.

  3. wow; Big pair on him. by WindBourne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apple did not release Safari because of Firefox. After all, Firefox was on Apple. They released it because they wanted to be in control of their future. As it was, MS had announced that they were going to pull MSIE from them. What amazes me, is that Apple has not pushed OO to be on there. They would be smart to add a few coders to the project just to ensure that it can compete against Office on their platform.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
    1. Re:wow; Big pair on him. by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What amazes me, is that Apple has not pushed OO to be on there. They would be smart to add a few coders to the project just to ensure that it can compete against Office on their platform.

      Apple has Pages, Keynote, and Numbers (I pay for them rather than use OO.). Oh, and Microsoft Office. Apple's interest in open source is more of the system/library part, not the front end user experience.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  5. Re:competition breeds improvement by RobertM1968 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You are indeed correct - but there was more to it than that. Keep in mind that at the time they put Win2K into the planning stages, OS/2 had the server market (due to all the vertical market businesses that IBM catered to). MS needed something that competed, and was decent.

    Of course, the other added factor was continually breaking and changing networking implementations and such to ensure that since "your" workstations (mostly) ran Windows, the server had to as well.

    Before that, you could manage a Windows domain from OS/2 simply by drag-n-drop. Since MS couldnt beat that (and still doesnt have anything remotely close), they had to make another release (both for competitive reasons and to break compatibility with LanMan).

    The key thing (competition) is what died in those areas... fortunately in the browser market, MS can no longer leverage their monopoly to create a similar situation, leaving everyone having to either play catch-up to stay in the game or fighting to stay ahead. We all benefit...

    --
    StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
  6. Re:Opera by enoz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Except Opera lagged behind with the most significant feature: being free.

    According to the wiki timeline it wasn't until around 2000 when a 'free' version became available (supported by inbuilt ads), and then as recent as 2005 when finally the ads were removed.

  7. Re:Safari not trailing Firefox by BZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I suggest taking a look at the commit history of both Gecko and Webkit in the last year or so where JS perf is concerned.

    You'll find that they've basically been pushing each other, in almost perfect alternation: one checks in a patch that makes it faster, the other responds with changes that make it faster, etc.

    Seriously, go read the checkin logs.

  8. Re:Piling on... by PeterBrett · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You obviously didn't deal much with Win 3.x. Registry is much better than config files scattered throughout. I wouldn't mind if it were replaced, but it needs to be a step forward, not back. Linux still has config files scattered in a zillion different places. It would be nice if all configs went into an organized hierarchy.

    Um. All the configs do go into an "organized hierarchy"! It just happens to be a filesystem hierarchy (/etc) rather than an impenetrable binary file.

    XML files located in a couple of standardized locations. As in one location for machine level configs, and one location each for user level configs.

    XML sucks for configuration files, to be honest. Trying to hand-edit XML in a 40x80 nano session in single-user mode... no thanks. Not to mention that XML is decidedly grep-unfriendly.

    I think I'm going to have to assume that you don't have a clue what you're talking about, I'm afraid. Try harder!

    --
    Pirate Party UK