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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."

22 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 ben2umbc · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:What astonishes me... by ben2umbc · · Score: 5, Funny

      Can you please come over and teach my mom. And while you're at it can you work on getting rid of AOL? I feel like she's stuck in the 90s.

    4. Re:What astonishes me... by bdash · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    5. 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?

    6. 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
    7. Re:What astonishes me... by Mhtsos · · Score: 5, Funny

      yeap: Spiderman...

    8. 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.

    9. Re:What astonishes me... by Dan+Farina · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    10. Re:What astonishes me... by mike_c999 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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
    11. 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. competition breeds improvement by jollyreaper · · Score: 5, Funny

    I always maintained that Win2K was such a good OS specifically because of the competition Microsoft was getting from open source, they didn't want to be caught napping and wake up to find Linux as a good desktop solution. This theory kind of fell apart with Vista, I have no idea what that steaming pile is in response to.

    --
    Kwisatz Haderach
    Sell the spice to CHOAM
    This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
  6. Opera by Rui+del-Negro · · Score: 5, Funny

    And Opera is feeling so pressured by Firefox that it is systematically forced to copy Firefox's features months and even years before Firefox releases them... ^_^

    1. Re:Opera by smussman · · Score: 5, Funny

      And they won't even tell us how they do the time travel thing ... that's why open source is so much better.

  7. Re:Way to go FF! by beav007 · · Score: 5, Funny

    middle-click-to-close on tabs comes to mind

    It's hard to tell between a left-click, middle-click, and right-click on a one button mouse...

  8. It Cuts Both Ways by magixman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While Firefox may have inspired the release of IE 7 and pushed Apple to jump into the fray with a Windows release of Safari, it is also true that FF 2 was not all that it should have been and just maybe IE 7 and Safari pushed Mozilla hard enough to really ace FF 3 which it seems that they have done.

    As a software developer who once loathed the idea of having to code for multiple browsers, I have now accepted that there will be differences and have learned to deal with it and promise to stop whining.

    I applaud the browser race and hope that they continue to leapfrog each other for a long time to come.

  9. Re:Way to go FF! by mr_matticus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.