Why Mozilla Needs To Go Into Survival Mode

Crazzaper writes "I have been using Firefox for many years, and the war of the browsers has been around for longer than that. It just so happens that now we have a lot of options out there: IE, FF, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and others. People are always talking about how one browser is going to take down another, but maybe that's not the issue at all. It seems very possible that one browser, like Firefox, can be taken down by multiple browsers at once, whether or not there was any intention to compete specifically with Firefox. I hadn't seen it this way, but I do now."

Comments

Firefox lite.

[0100010001010011]

What they need to do is remember why the project started and get back to that.

Themes in 3.6? WTF were they thinking?

Chrome and Safari both have excellent built in Web dev/javascript tools, I don't even miss Web Developer Toolbar.

Re:Firefox lite.

[uberjack]

I love Firefox because of its plugins (Firebug alone is the bee's knees), but it's an absolute memory hog. On both my Windows and Linux machines, I have to restart the application every few days - it's not shy about eating up 4-5 GB of RAM easily. In many cases (and if I leave the system running long enough, as I often do) it consumes all of the available memory until the system slows to a crawl. It especially annoys me that it's been this way for the last 2-3 years, and still nothing is being done.

Not buying it

[Mr. Spontaneous]

Yes, Firefox has some issues. Yes, the Mozilla team needs to fix them. However, I think this article is being overly sensationalistic (surprise, surprise). In a wonderful bout of irony, the same forces that made long-standing IE users jump to FF are keeping them using FF. Some are averse to learning a new UI/control scheme, others needs certain extensions to remain productive. Then there are a few, like me, who don't see the performance/crashing issues that others report. I'm not saying that they don't exist, just that I haven't experienced them.

Additionally, FF has been approved for use in many businesses, as well as the DoD/DHS to run on their networks. Chrome, AFAIK, hasn't.

With these forces slowing down non-Firefox adoption, the Mozilla team has bought themselves some crucial time in the quest to right some of their browser's weaknesses. Hopefully they'll be able to meet that challenge, and, from reading the various blogs published to Planet Mozilla, I'm fairly confident that they will.