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Why Firefox's Future Lies In Google's Hands
Barence writes "Firefox has just turned five, and it now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications. 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. Google is the default homepage when Firefox first opens, and the default search engine when users type something into the 'awesome bar.' The deal, which runs until 2011, was worth $66 million to Mozilla in 2007, accounting for 88% of the foundation's revenues that year (the last year for which it had published accounts). But now that Google is a competitor as well as a partner, is it really wise for Mozilla to be so dependent on Google?"
Their revenues are the only thing that lets them stand out from most of the rest of the OSS crowd as a truly professional piece of software.
Yes, the money grubbing does connect Mozilla to "true professionalism". But there is also the code bloat, feature creep.
The only thing that really marks Mozilla os "Open Source" these days is the total lack of interest in what the users want or think...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The developers of FireFox are in a state of denial; that rarely lends itself to dealing with reality-based threats very well.
Take the memory management issue -- the developers routinely say "There's no such thing." Or "you're using too many plug-ins and extensions." Or any number of excuses. I can hit the same pages with Opera as with FireFox, with less memory usage. And I'm not using plug-ins. The reflex nerd answer is "well, stop browsing that way!" That is a foolish thing to say, as it will cause me to switch to a browser where I do not have to alter my habits.
You can see that Internet Explorer's market share continues to drop, but as of late, it is not through growth in FireFox. It's from the adoption of other competing browsers. As long as the Mozilla Foundation is operating with the THERE ARE NO BAD PROBLEMS, JUST BAD USERS mindset, they'll continue to make more and more strategic blunders. Reliance on Google is one of them. Google has no friends, only temporary allies which may be either dispatched or eaten when it is convenient.
Nice rant, but totally and fundamentally wrong. Still, it's fun to declare that everyone who uses Firefox are basically teenagers. The funny thing about that is that a whole lot of that crowd uses their cellphones to surf the web, and judging by you and the GP, apparently that means they're probably all Opera users as well...well, maybe not. If smartphone sales numbers are any indicator, they're probably using Safari or some other webkit browser.
I stopped using Opera because major features never seemed to work, even though I forked out cash for it back in the day. Sure, I could have hacked the ads out, but I believed in Opera at that time, and paid for the thing. However, even with 128 bit security, it couldn't properly id itself as IE or Mozilla. Which meant I couldn't check my bank account with anything but IE6, no matter how much back and forth I had with my bank. Which meant that I crumpled up Opera and threw it in the trash for the early beta of Firefox, aka Phoenix. I started out with Lynx. I still use Firefox because it works, I'm a developer and like to tweak things, and believe me, I can tweak the hell out of Firefox to my hearts content. To get me back, Opera would have to hand me a freaking refund AND prove to me that it can do the job better than Firefox...and from the times I've done browser compatibility tests, I've seen nothing glaringly better about Opera that would really make me want to switch back, just like I haven't seen what I want in Chrome or IE8, either. A little more speed optimization at memory expense isn't going to cut it for me. And it doesn't for most of the developers I've worked with that prefer Firefox for web development, for personal surfing, and generally for just about anything (unless, of course, you're a Mac person...though I've never been fond of Safari's UI on a larger screen...though I kind of dig the webkit browser on my phone).
You know why they deserve it? Because CEO 1 is on the board of company 2, so he says that CEO 2 should have a ridiculous salary. CEO 2 is on the board of company 1, so he says that CEO 1 should have a ridiculous salary.
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