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Firefox 4, A Day Later
Yesterday we noted that Firefox 4 is out in the wild. Since then, the popular browser has been downloaded 6 million times, double the numbers reported for MSIE9. Now the development team is talking about a new development process and what to expect for FF 5 and 6. And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while Firefox will die.
People keep saying this, but I just loaded the new Firefox and it feels to me like the interface is much more responsive and flash-intensive pages that used to take forever to load now show up extremely rapidly. I was sticking with FF3 because of the great plugins, but FF4 actually seems to be pretty decent out of the box.
He does however have a point that in the last 3 years chrome went from a brand new, buggy, crashy browser to what is generally regarded as the measuring stick for speed. Its gone from no extension support to support that rivals firefox's (auto-update, GPO deployment, permissions ala andriod). It already has process seperation, plugin separation, and extension process separation. And it appears to have set the standard for browser UI for many of the major browsers. It really is quite impressive how quickly it has matured. Even more impressive is that they now fully support the thing for Active Directory deployments, with both an MSI installer and GPO templates for fully configuring and locking down chrome (including the ability to turn off tracking).
Firefox is great, and I like to use it still; but they HAVE taken some 8 years and STILL no official MSIs, or AD templates. Since chrome fits my needs so well, and Internet Explorer no longer SO awful that i feel obligated to offer a replacement to users, it doesnt seem quite as attractive as it used to be.
Perhaps moving to this new model will help them speed up development and incremental release of features; shipping a lot of versions does mean that you get your product out quicker, and so long as QA is maintained, that can be a good thing. Chrome's model has meant that when they were at version 3, and folks said "but what about extensions", they could have version 4 out with extensions in 3 months; and when folks said "what about adblock functionality", they could add that very quickly.
All the other browsers run on Windows XP, the world's most popular operating system. Not IE 9. IE 9 scores worst on the HTML 5 tests compared to other browsers. IE 9 comes dead last compared to speed and memory use against other browsers. You'll have to point me out to where they're catching up with the other browsers.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
He also works IT and sometimes browses using the "Private Browsing Mode" because of tracking cookies, etc, etc he just can't stand.
Chrome under Windows and Linux will allow you to open an Incognito window while your regular window full of tabs is also open.. as will Opera.
But firefox for some reason won't allow you. If you hit "Start private browsing" or whatever, it gives you a choice to either stick with the open window OR open your private browsing window which closes the other regular window... Yes it saves the tabs so they open back up *after* you close the private browsing mode window, but why in the world can't you have both open at the same time like the other browsers?!
Why anyone would want to use the closed / proprietary version (with Google's late-night secret sauce added), when there's a clean open source version available is beyond me.
By the Chromium team's own admission, there is no such thing as a "stable release" of Chromium. And they don't seem interested in making it so. Basically, you download top-of-tree and build it. Sorry, I don't use stuff like that for daily work.
When I download software, open source or not, I tend to want it in binary form. At least then I have a hope in hell that maybe the thing has been tested somewhat. Open source developers are way too squishy with this kind of thing. "The latest stable is 1.2.3, go get it and build." Uh, no. The latest stable is some particular binary that YOU built and YOU tested and YOU found to be adequate. My compiler might (very well may be) different. My dependencies may be different. My system is certainly different. This is not the definition of "testing" or "stable." Build a binary, test it on a variety of environments, bless it, and put it out there. You CAN be open source and professional at the same time.