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Mozilla: Following In Sun's Faltering Footsteps?

Posted by Soulskill on from the don't-let-the-sun-go-down-on-them dept.

snydeq writes: The trajectory of Mozilla, from the trail-blazing technologies to the travails of being left in the dust, may be seen as paralleling that of the now-defunct Unix systems giant Sun. The article claims, "Mozilla has become the modern-day Sun Microsystems: While known for churning out showstopping innovation, its bread-and-butter technology now struggles." It goes on to mention Firefox's waning market share, questions over tooling for the platform, Firefox's absence on mobile devices, developers' lack of standard tools (e.g., 'Gecko-flavored JavaScript'), and relatively slow development of Firefox OS, in comparison with mobile incumbents.

4 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Damn for that absence on mobile devices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    except that I have it installed on my Android right now. By "mobile devices" did you mean crApple by any chance, fanboi?

  2. FF is my primary browser by ugen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you care about privacy, ability to remove tracking, block ads and customize your web experience - Firefox is unbeatable. No other browser has ability to allow extensions to do so much (quite by design, I am sure - as the other 3 major browser makers are driven specifically by desire to mine information and sell your clicks to advertisers). As such, I don't see a viable replacement to Firefox in foreseeable future.

    I suspect that the "big 3" would very much like Firefox to become a failure, if only because it would make their click-tracking ad-inserting behavior-recording job so much easier.

    Thank you, FF, Ghostery, AdBlock Edge, Cookie Controller, Ref Control, UA Control and, of course, Greasemonkey, (without whom Google would be still tracking my ever click :) )

  3. Re:A serious question by DrXym · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Yes of course it would be bad. Google is the new Microsoft and Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. Without competition or choice they would be just as inclined to throw half baked standards as Microsoft. They've already done it a multiple times with SPDY, WebM, NaCl etc. and without competition to reject, criticise, formalize or standardize these things would have been a fait acompli.

    It is better for everyone to have strong competing implementations of web standards. Firefox is still a great browser (better IMO than Chrome) and takes privacy far more seriously. I have no inclination to switch browser at this time.

  4. Re:A serious question by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The standard answer is Chrome.

    I used to use Chromium (the open-source version) because for a while Firefox was really crashy, but I finally switched because Chrome is such a memory hog and Firefox seems to be working quite well these days.

    This article seems to basically be saying "if you aren't continuously growing, you're dying". It's hogwash. That's like saying that the bash shell is "dying" because it isn't adding tons of new functionality, including a built-in text editor and a web browser. Notice that one of the complaints is slow development of Firefox OS. Who cares? I use Firefox because I want a solid web browser; I don't need a new OS. Web browsers are a fairly mature product these days, thanks to HTML5 and modern Javascript engines. Where else is there for them to go? And for Firefox's supposed absence on mobile devices, it seems to work great on my Android phone, so I have no idea what they're talking about there.

    In summary, this article is bullshit.