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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."
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.
So does this mean they have to stock up on rice and firearms and survival gear?
Unless, the extensions I use are ported to another browser, I couldn't change from Firefox.
I'm sorry, but unless and until every browser has the "extensions" feature that FF has (Specifically including Adblock Plus and No Script) then NO browser will EVER be a true "Firefox Killer".
Chrome is OK, but without extensions it's nothing more than a runner-up. The same for Opera and IE#. Safari is nothing more than a side-show.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
One browser can be taken down by others? I thought they should have been competing on technical excellence instead of name recognition. Nobody was complaining when it was IE being taken down by Firefox! Falling into the trap that I like it so everyone should is just weakening yourself in the long-term. If something better than Firefox appears then the logical choice is bu-bye Firefox! But people are rarely logical and tend to just do what others are doing.
Shh.
They really just need to go on a diet.
Hey guys; remember how it was supposed to be a fast browser?
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
What does Adblock give you that NoScript doesn't? "filter subscriptions"? Why should I have to worry about a blacklist when NoScript allows me to decide if my "web experience" is less than it should be and THEN unblock something?
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
They should develop another browser, Firefaux, and make it appear to be the biggest threat in the browser wars. Firefox can then team up with Chrome and Opera to take down Firefaux, all the while distracting everyone from the need to take down Firefox instead. Just re-animate Firefaux as needed to keep up the distraction. No one will ever catch on to the connection between Firefox and Firefaux, and world domination will only be inevitable.
My webcomic
Survivor 10: Internet Edition. Web-browsers battle it our in the toughest of surfing environments: hundreds of tabs, incompatible add-ons, swamps of malware, installs on wristwatches! (Spoiler: In the finale, FireFox and IE team up (gasp!) in a last ditch effort to defeat young upstarts Safari and Chrome!)
You mean I can stop using Mosaic now?
to be.
Back in the early 1990s, it was seen as a threat by Microsoft to usurp the OS paradigm. They thought whoever controlled the browser market controlls the internet and what it can do -- the tail wagging the dog and it seemed like the future of computing was at stake. And for a while, it succeeded when IE took over and had ridiculously large marketshare.
But now that the ecosystem is more varied, the browser simply does not have this power. Until a browser become so dominant again that they can embrace, extend, extinguish standards, it really doesn't matter that much anymore. Now, the best browser is almost as impotent to change computing as the best picture viewing software (except for maybe data gathering and ad revenue) -- if everything is correctly specced JPGs, PNGs, etcetera -- the picture viewer doesn't matter that much and can be readily interchange with regards to personal preference.
Mobile phones is one exception but also because you can't swap out browsers/rendering engines.
I was a die hard Firefox fan for so long putting it on the computers of everyone I know. I just got bogged down with its sluggishness. I miss some extensions like Read It Later, but new extensions in Chrome like Google Voice blow me away.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Its all fun and games until someone loses an eye... then its just fun.
I can't manage it in a corporate/enterprise environment. Push out updates? Not as a limited user. Push out configuration? Not simply. Push out plugins, or plugin updates? Not simple.
That, more than anything else, will keep firefox out of the enterprise/corporate markets. If that even matters to them, seeing how this is still an issue.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I know my girlfriend only uses Firefox, but on my desktop running Ubunto 8.10 I can't use Firefox for my flash, and Opera doesn't keep the visit history the way I like it. I bounce back between Chrome, Opera, and Firefox on my Eee, too, and that runs Windows XP.
If one of these browsers worked well enough, I'd be happy to only use the one at a time.
FTA: "It is believed that Google’s royalties account for about 80-90% of Mozilla’s entire revenues. The royalty contract will end in 2011."
So they can kill FF soon. Although they're already doing a pretty good job feature-wise.
This has been discussed on /. before. Will "don't be evil" be enough to stop them killing a strategic competitor?
Anyways, as shown by the article, for the moment IE, (in all its versions) remains the one to catch.
How many corporations, (some still stuck with ActiveX shitware and IE6, remember), would accept Google's 'forced upgrade' policy for Chrome?
All observations made by the submitter notwithstanding, I really think there is no reason to drag concepts like "survival mode" in here. What Mozilla needs to do for Firefox to survive is to make it compelling. Compelling enough that people will want to use it in preference to other browsers. I don't think there is much more to it than that.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
They are actually working on a mind controlled version of Firefox. Unfortunately it only works if you think in Russian.
Veramocor
The thing that concerns me the most is the issue with HTML5 video codecs. Microsoft, Google and Apple all want Flash to die. Apple's latest licensing change with iPhone OS 4.0 is a full-out declaration of war against Adobe.
HTML5, SVG, hyper-optimized Javascript and the embedded video tag will make Flash redundant. If Firefox cannot stay on the bleeding edge of these advancements then it does not stand a chance.
So I suggest less bells and whistles (skinning / themes, for example), and more concentration on HTML5 - especially the video codec licensing / patent issue.
Better known as 318230.
Mozilla/FF should focus on making it the best place to develop plugins and making the browser fast and stable. I don't care about anything else really.
Me and my colleague were using the spreadsheet app on google docs last night whilst on the phone. I made a remark that we should probably be using chrome instead of firefox due to the faster javascript. He decides to go with it then suddenly says to me "In the time it takes firefox to load, I've installed chrome, launched it and I'm back on google docs."
Firefox needs to get it's act together to keep up basically.
What I find interesting is that Chrome is built on Webkit as is Safari and Google promised full Safari compatibility. Since Safari (iPhone) accounts for 64% of mobile web traffic it is in a great position. Android is probably its most viable competitor at the moment and it runs Chrome. Together they (webkit-based browsers) may achieve market shares equal to IE's in its heyday. Is there a place for Firefox? What about the fact that the PC market is relatively stagnant growth wise relative to the new mobile device markets?
If all the standards were fully supported in the same way be everyone, then maybe this wouldn't be an issue, but that's not happening yet.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
I hope Mozilla gets a clue about their video tag implementation while they still have a chance. It is quite obvious that sites want HTML5 but they also want to stream h264. If Mozilla doesn't provide a way to do this, the browser is going to get sidelined.
For browsing general webpages Firefox seems to work quite well, however a lot of the webpages I browse for work, low volume behind corporate firewall type pages FF dies a horrible death constantly. IE seems to be the only browser that works reliably on some companies private pages probably because they were initially designed with and for the IE hegemony. Because of this I tend to switch between IE and FF fairly frequently and I really have to say while FF does tend to be faster, IE is by far more stable. Also what happen to FF not being a memory resource hog. My FF browser, just viewing slashdot consume near 300MB of memory while IE consume about 30MB, I know memory consumption numbers from task manager need to be taken with a grain of salt, especially when MSFT is involved but it's a big diff. I have pretty much the same plugins on each, nothing special. It almost seems that from some standpoints IE and FF have flopped.
Chrome is the future because what could go wrong with giving one company complete domination of the Internet?
I don't have anything against Google, but the thought of them having the browser market share that IE currently has scares me. It is not unreasonable to think that it might happen. Google is already the overwhelmingly dominant search engine. They have been fairly successful at most of the things they have worked at.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Both Plug-ins are useful, Firebug can be quite cumbersome to load, even GMail detects it and give you a warning.
In other words, it's far better for users than it used to be.
So long as there's a significant portion of the browser market not using the most dominant browser, web developers have to follow the actual standards, rather than the pseudo-standards of the dominant browser. This is an improvement, because it means that there's a relatively low barrier to entry for new browsers.
End result: browsers compete by offering speed improvements, new features, and better user experience than their competitors. Since the going rate for a web browser license if $0, users win. Since browsers are all standards-compliant, web developers win, because they don't need to write their pages for 15 different browsers. About the only party that doesn't win is one that would like to maintain a dominant browser position without having a better browser.
I am officially gone from
How do you get these ideas? Firefox has never been as popular as it is now. And except chrome all the alternatives you named have been around for ages. And besides Chrome is just another webkit browser like Safari.
Funny you should mention NoScript. The daily builds for Chrome just got regexp support in the per-site preferences for JavaScript, cookie and pop-up permissions.
In other words: You can now run with scripting and cookies off, and turn them on for all servers at the specific domains you trust. So CookieSafe and NoScript are built in to Chrome, or will be next time the code from the daily builds makes it into a full release. All it needs is for someone to write the friendly front-end to stick it in a button on the UI now, instead of your having to go to the options.
As someone else already pointed out, AdBlock equivalents are available too.
I suggested to the Firefox devs that this core functionality was needed in Firefox, but they weren't interested. Too busy implementing useless crap like address books. Same story with calling the OS for video rendering; that would have allowed me to play MPEG-4/h.264 video like every other browser. Far too sensible, so they refused to implement it and shoved Ogg Theora into the browser instead.
In addition, I was tired of the bloat, tired of the daily crashes, tired of the refusal to build basic browser functionality into the browser. So I'm one of the people who just ditched Firefox. (I'm really enjoying the Chrome developer tools, which work much better than Firebug ever did.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Please dont describe obscure brands like Firefox without providing an introduction.
For those of you that haven't heard, please see more at http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Firefox
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
I have multiple browsers on my systems always. When FF (my favorite) fails, I use Opera or Chrome as backups. Opera is particularly robust, working in conditions where the others don't.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Survival mode is how good software dies. In survival mode companies often forget what good software really is, and people on stop start throwing around big words on differentiating from the competition and longer and longer bullet point feature lists.
This is how we got the much dreaded "personas" (copied from Chrome Themes) and why Firefox'es 4.0 UI drafts looks like an exercise of how the offspring of Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 would look like.
Mozilla has been in survival mode ever since Google announced Chrome. Or didn't you notice they *solely* depend on the handouts from a company that now has their own browser (and a good browser!).
That's a tough spot to be on, if Firefox loses market share, they'll fade into oblivion, and if they aggressively compete, even if they gain 99% market share, Google could easily pull their plug on a whim. Oh, there's Bind and Yahoo you say, they'll pay to be in the search bar! Because... of course the savvy techies who helped the cousin install Firefox won't restore Google as the search engine, when said cousin calls them and asks for it. Right.
Mozilla is dumb. I can have Hawaiian flower patterns, but I cannot control when patches are released in my enterprise.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Most people are crazy for ad block, flashblock, etc. For me, Chrome's biggest lack is no Tab Mix Plus-like add-on. Once I have that, Chrome will be much more usable. Without something like Tab Mix Plus, tab handling is ridiculously crude. At least there is a light version of Web Developer Toolbar for Chrome now. Once that's full-featured, and I have Tab Mix Plus, Chrome will almost certainly be my browser of choice.
Still, FF plugins are about to be run in a separate process with an upcoming version, so that'll help a lot of problems, I bet.
Mobile phones is one exception but also because you can't swap out browsers/rendering engines.
Maybe you can't, but my Android device would beg to differ.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Well said. I think this is even true with speed too (to some extent). Sometimes I wonder how much people really care about a 20% speed increase here and there when browsers can load and render lots of sites in 1-2 seconds. Obviously this doesnt include mobile platforms.
meep
Battle of the Browsers simply isn't what it used to be.
You say this as if that's a bad thing.... I think.
Browsers should be competing on user satisfaction and Internet freedom, not on attempting to be as intrusive in the user experience as possible, simply for the sake of being able to do so and get away with it.
Much as other browsers may eat into FF at the moment, my main fear is more that the patent issues around h.264 and supporting the codec in HTML5 are more likely to have an impact. I like and use both chrome and FF for different reasons but have faith that while the startup times and javascript engine of FF are playing catchup they are likely to, you know - catch up. Also I'd agree with the earlier poster who said that Mozilla really need to sort out corporate rollout and user lockdown as soon as possible.
I think a great deal of the community of FireFox and Mozilla, In many ways the growth reminds me of how google slipped into mainstream usage/consciousness from the highly technically literate down to the casual user but in many ways more admirable. However when push comes to shove, whilst I'll support FireFox and ogg the many people I've turned onto FireFox are likely to turn to chrome for an open source/standards savvy browser that just works, as big content providers push h.264 onto the web.
Okay, fine. I'll rewrite the subject... ahem.
Not that this matters to most users, but Firefox is incredibly annoying to manage in an enterprise environment when compared to other browsers. This single factor turned me off to Firefox entirely over the past few years (i.e. as other competitive browsers became available).
I just don't get... eh, ugh... never mind. This post wasn't worth the research I put into it.
I've never had this happen.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
If Battle of the Browsers simply isn't what it use[d], then what did it use? Did it use the Convention of the Browsers? Trial of the Browsers? Your subject just isn't making sense.
Fireforx' marketshare has been stagnating since summer of 2009, while Chrome has been increasing it - albeit by a very little bit - every month, monotonically.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Speed delta between chrome/FF have shrunk to irrelevant.
Firefox is rock solid for me on Windows 7.
Those seem to be the two main Chrome "advantages" I see touted as the reason why people should switch to chrome.
In reality those reason are hugely exaggerated.
OTOH Firefox has a huge advantage in available extensions and the effectiveness of those extensions. Flashblock on Chrome doesn't work on all flash, only some. Naturally the flash it doesn't work on are annoying flash adverts.
Google also runs annoying call home process even when Chrome isn't running (that alone was enough to ditch chrome for Iron).
Overall I think the reports of Firefox death are greatly exaggerated.
Personas are silly and superfluous, yes, but they do add some enjoyable colour to my screen. (As long as the theme itself is tasteful, which 95% are not.) I'm not one of those guys who has "Windows Classic" set as their desktop environment.
If this is just a minor addition to the browser, one that didn't absorb a huge amount of development resources from the overall project, I see no problem with adding it.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
There seems to be a lot of momentum heading in that general direction nowadays, though. IE has released a massive CSS test suite, Google and Apple both have published JS test suites, etc. etc. Especially with the general push towards HTML5 compliance in all the major browsers. Maybe just maybe interoperability is closer to reality than we think.
Normally the reasoning may apply. If we compare it to the auto industry where having way too many brands available makes it too difficult for auto makers to survive it would be a false comparison. We pay for cars directly. But most browsers are either free or come with a distro where no cost is obvious. It may be possible for numerous browsers to survive with only a small user base. We are in an new area in which conventional economics may have less meaning.
Thats news to me. I have three browsers installed on my phone.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Maybe I overlooked it or I'm just slow, but I didn't really see anything talking about what platform the browsers were on. With more and more people using smart-phones, it seems like that might be an important piece of info, especially if ff is not a cinch to install.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
However, it's worth noting why I switched to Chrome:
Now, I know that Firefox added the ability to drag tabs into new Windows; but the multi-process system is what got me to switch to Chrome the day it was released openly for Mac. I like the fact that if a Flash plugin starts gobbling my CPU, I can kill the Flash process and keep all my pages open. Firefox just doesn't do this; but if it did, I'd consider switching back.
No, I will not work for your startup
Now, the best browser is almost as impotent
You calling my Firefox flaccid?
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Mozilla DOM Inspector wins over Firebug.
Gmail detecting Firebug? I don't actually use Gmail regularly but it detected it for me just now. Big red block of text at the top of the window: "Firebug is known to make Gmail slow unless it is configured correctly. Fix this." Firebug slows things down a lot when there is DOM manipulation going on. I accept that as the price of such an awesome web dev tool, however.
"Early 1990s," huh? IE wasn't even *released* until 1995.
Browser wars were more 97 on.
"The Road Ahead" (November 1995) was Bill Gates figuring out that this whole Internet thing might catch on.
IceCat (www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla) exists because "they distribute and recommend non-free software as plug-ins and addons".
Actually, I like to think of IceCat as the software version of Locutus. Oh, it's the least GNU-piece of GNU software so far, it still looks, smells and tastes like Firefox /for now/... But how long before the GNU nano-bloats^H^H^H^H^Hots activate and begin replacing the Javascript engine with an Emacs API?
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
What the fuck are you talking about? I've only got 4 GB of physical RAM. Yeah, that's right, Firefox is currently using all of my physical RAM, and then some of my swap.
MEMORY LEAKS ARE NOT FEATURES, you fucking idiot.
I recently installed Fedora 12 onto my Dell Mini 10v replacing the 7 starter that was preloaded. While the OS generally feels snappier than 7 did, the default Firefox was just soo slow to launch - it literally took ~10 seconds. Per a friend's suggestion, I got Chrome and it launches instantly and just feels faster once it is open. I havn't used Firefox since.
I don't know what has happened with Firefox but the difference between it and Chrome on a netbook is night and day...
FF 3.6.something has been running for 3 weeks here.
22 tabs open, 210 megs consumed.
Despite your claim either it is a pluggin issue, you're a liar, or you have some strange browsing habits.
email me the bookmark for all your current tabs (which cause 5664 MB of consumption) to SlashdotChallenge@cleansoap.org
that no other browser has, that I know of - you can over ride the fonts a page specifies. Which is fantastic, as I don't ever want to look at a serif font on my screen. I like chrome and safari, but until I can do this I will never use them as my main browser.
Here's a screenshot of the config setting: http://imgur.com/RvBBO.jpg
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
Its fairly fast & stable IMO. The primary reason I switched to Chrome was because of the isolated-tab architecture of Chrome. For whatever reason FF always locked up for a few seconds when I loaded a slashdot page with > 500 comments. I've tried IE8 but on more than one occasino a crashing tab has taken down the entire browser, something which hasn't yet happened on Chrome.
I left Firefox for Chrome because they are no longer user-focussed. Despite their millions of Google dollars, they choose to fritter time and money away on playing with things that don't really matter while leaving their most important products (Firefox, Thunderbird) largely unattended.
To me, those millions should go to funding developers to fix all the nasty problems and design issues that free contributors don't want to work on, NOT to playing with cool new tech that free contributors would love to play with and will do anyway.
Specifically, they are still much slower to startup, the awesome bar is still slow and clunky, there are still basic bugs that aren't fixed (not crashing ones, but things like printing fixed position pages). Chrome also uses screen space more efficiently, which matters to me on a netbook.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
The biggest problem I've been having with firefox is each of the last few releases seems to have become less stable then the one before it as well as taking a big performance hit. I think this may be the biggest challenge to firefox.
I think they need to take a break on adding/developing new features and take some time to do some serious bug stomping.
I'm starting to think about trying opera and/or chrome due to the crashing problems and sometimes erratic performance issues.
Technically, it's not a memory leak until the application no longer knows that it's holding on to the memory. So long as it's still holding the pointer that points to the memory, it's just bloat.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
One idea would be for them to turn their attention to enabling, encouraging, and protecting civil disobedience against the software patents that make h.264 bad in the first place.
I believe that's called "inducing infringement" in the case law of Mozilla's home country: MPAA v. Grokster.
Give us the software, focus on making it available offshore where it can't be censored and litigated against
Do you understand how much it would cost to move Mozilla's entire operation outside the United States?