Chrome For Mac Drops 32-bit Build

jones_supa writes Google has revealed that it's launching the finished 64-bit version of Chrome 39 for OS X this November, which already brought benefits in speed, security and stability on Windows. However at this point the 32-bit build for Mac will cease to exist. Just to make it clear, this decision does not apply to Windows and Linux builds, at least for now. As a side effect, 32-bit NPAPI plugins will not work on Chrome on Mac version 39 onwards. The affected hardware are only the very first x86-based Macs with Intel Core Duo processors. An interesting question remains, whether the open source version of Chrome, which is of course Chromium, could still be compiled for x86-32 on OS X.

Comments

It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I hate Chrome, and although I refuse to use Google's offerings (including their search engine), I can't blame them for doing what they're doing. Everyone should expect them to act in a way that will further their interests.

If anyone is to blame, I think it should be Mozilla. Firefox had 35% of the market a few years ago. They provided real competition to IE and the other browsers. But then once Chrome started making some inroads, mostly by drawing away IE 6 users, the Mozilla devs went stupid and decided to clone Chrome in every respect.

We now live with the outcome that resulted from these awful decisions. Firefox is now just a poor imitation of Chrome, offering almost no original functionality. Firefox has become unusable for many people, especially those of us who dislike Chrome's philosophy of how a browser should act and behave. None of these changes have brought any new users to Firefox. Firefox is still slower and more bloated than its competitors. And because of all of these factors, users have had to leave Firefox for a better browsing experience elsewhere. Even IE 11 is providing people a better browsing experience than Firefox is for many people these days, as awful as that sounds.

Now that Firefox has less than 10% of the browser market, it has basically no influence over how the other more dominant browser developers have to act. Google, Microsoft and Apple don't have to give a fuck what Mozilla and its users want, because there are comparatively so few of them.

It didn't have to be this way. A few years ago, Mozilla could have kept developing Firefox with an independent mindset. Instead of cloning Chrome, Firefox could have continually improved the browsing experience. Its performance could have been improved, and its memory usage decreased, instead of its UI being trashed. It could have been a browser that perhaps 30% to 40% of users use. Chrome, rather than getting all of these Firefox refugees, would itself only have perhaps 30% to 40% of the market, instead of almost totally dominating it like it does today. IE would be less significant of a player than it is today.

Nobody forced Mozilla to make the stupid decisions that they did. In fact, a lot of Firefox users very vocally said, "No! We don't like that!" time and time again, release after release. But Mozilla didn't want to listen. Mozilla did everything in their power to ruin the Firefox experience. And now the entire web has to suffer.

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep hearing that Firefox is supposedly "faster" than Chrome, but any time I've tried the latest version of the two on the same system Firefox is always obviously slower. It doesn't matter if it's Windows or OS X or Linux. Chrome feels zippy and fast and light. Firefox lags and makes me wait and wastes my computer's memory. Show me cockamamie microbenchmarks if you must, but for real world usage I do not think that Firefox is anywhere comparable to Chrome. I know it, the market knows it, and that's why Chrome is widely used while Firefox flounders in the shitter.

And I don't think that Google is acting anti-competitively at all. They're throwing millions upon millions upon millions of dollars at Mozilla each year, for Pete's sake! Oh, malicious mockery, Google are directly funding their most ardent enemy! If Mozilla can't put this ample funding to good use developing a competitive browser, then it is, as the GP indicated, purely Mozilla's fault.

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is "doing a great job with Firefox"? Huh?

Let's look at the facts:

- The Firefox UI changes are far more than just "minor cosmetic changes". They totally ruin the user experience for many users. For others, they just make Firefox harder to use efficiently.

- Firefox is still slower than Chrome and even IE these days.

- Firefox still uses more memory than Chrome and even IE these days.

- Firefox on Android is rather bad, and has very few users.

- Firefox on iOS isn't even an option.

- Firefox OS is crippled and useless. It consistently gets horrible reviews. It doesn't run any useful apps. It limits developers to only using JavaScript.

- Firefox's share of the market is under 10% now, and it's still dropping.

When I look at those facts, it's one failure after another. And this is with Google throwing huge sums of money at them!

Failing like that time and time again, while having almost endless financial resources provided by a third-party who gets comparatively little in return, is not what I'd consider "doing a great job".

Re:It's not Google's fault. It's Mozilla's.

[nashv]

His argument is that Chrome comes pre-installed and therefore requires less effort to use. Since it doesn't give the average user a reason to complain, nobody bothers looking for a browser.

It's the same 'How IE preinstalls killed Netscape' argument.