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Former Mozilla CTO: 'Chrome Won' (andreasgal.com)
Responding to Firefox marketing head Eric Petitt's blog post from earlier this week, Andreas Gal, former chief technology officer of Mozilla (who spent seven years at the company) offers his insights. Citing latest market share figures, Gal says "it's safe to say that Chrome is eating the browser market, and everyone else except Safari is getting obliterated." From his blog post (edited and condensed for length): With a CEO transition about 3 years ago there was a major strategic shift at Mozilla to re-focus efforts on Firefox and thus the Desktop. Prior to 2014 Mozilla heavily invested in building a Mobile OS to compete with Android: Firefox OS. I started the Firefox OS project and brought it to scale. While we made quite a splash and sold several million devices, in the end we were a bit too late and we didn't manage to catch up with Android's explosive growth. Mozilla's strategic rationale for building Firefox OS was often misunderstood. Mozilla's founding mission was to build the Web by building a browser. [...] Browsers are a commodity product. They all pretty much look the same and feel the same. All browsers work pretty well, and being slightly faster or using slightly less memory is unlikely to sway users. If even Eric -- who heads Mozilla's marketing team -- uses Chrome every day as he mentioned in the first sentence, it's not surprising that almost 65% of desktop users are doing the same. [...] I don't think there will be a new browser war where Firefox or some other competitor re-captures market share from Chrome. It's like launching a new and improved horse in the year 2017. We all drive cars now. Some people still use horses, and there is value to horses, but technology has moved on when it comes to transportation. Does this mean Google owns the Web if they own Chrome? No. Absolutely not. Browsers are what the Web looked like in the first decades of the Internet. Mobile disrupted the Web, but the Web embraced mobile and at the heart of most apps beats a lot of JavaScript and HTTPS and REST these days. The future Web will look yet again completely different. Much will survive, and some parts of it will get disrupted.
The other big three were slow by comparison. On speed alone, Chrome won.
Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.
Culling legitimately useful, unique features and attempting to emulate the user interface design of your competition... great plan. Written using Firefox 45 ESR, which will probably be my last normal-use Firefox version. It was nice while it lasted. Off to PaleMoon land for plugin support, I guess.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I've used Chrome since version 4. At the time it was lightweight, fast and conformant to standards. Now, even on a brand new i7 laptop, it feels sluggish. I don't install many plugins, just adblock and ghostery, so I doubt that has any bearing on performance.
I tried the Vivaldi browser last week and I have to say that I am enjoying it more than Chrome. It's Blink based so it uses the same engine as Chrome as well as the same extensions. What I notice is that it starts faster and pages load faster. I've also wondered if Google spied on my web usage and by using Vivaldi I no longer worry about that.
As for Firefox, I still use it when I want to test my work against many browsers but I don't use it directly for anything more than that. It's a venerable browser but its day as passed.
Yup. Firefox management is clearly clueless. They have no idea at all why people were using FireFox in the first place, so thay started stripping away the things that attracted people to it.
Here's a hint: if you start making your browser look like your competitor's (which until recently was their main sponsor; no conflict of interest there) then obviously all browsers start to look te same.
Here's what we want in a browser:
- Lean: make it modular, allow the user to install extra plugins at install time
- Mean: i.e. reasonably fast (10% slower than Chrome in some dumb benchmark doesn't mean a thing and is totally OK), and with reasonable memory consumption.
- Safe: make sure your sandbox works. It's 2017 and some sites still manage to hijack my pages and redirect to web shit. Flash is still allowed to popup extra pages.
- Private: don't collect or send out anything without permission.
- Customizable: put the user back in control. We want to be able to put our buttons where we like them, have our tabs above or below, have square tabs our round ones. One UI (Chrome) does not fit all.
- Extensible: decent plugins support is a must. OK if the current plugin system is problematic, overhaul it. But it should be powerful enough, not this watered down crap that has been proposed.
- User in control: we want to control whether videos auto-play when we open a page, or even if the video can start preloading (which is currently decided by the web page, meaning GBs of traffic whenever you open certain sites). Add in a decent script blocker, add blocker from the start.
Task a small core team with a 10M/y budget to make that, and people will come back to FF in droves. Code name Phoenix.
Port support for current HTML and CSS standards, the current javascript engine, and any security fixes back to FF 3.4, leaving behind all of the added bullshit that has accumulated over the years that nobody wanted. Boom, Chrome market share will shrink.
After that, work on nothing but bugfixes, performance improvement and, most importantly, proper multi-process support and Chrome will soon become that quaint browser that ships with Chromebooks (before Crouton and Firefox are installed) and Android devices (before Firefox is installed).
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Pretty much. What's happening with Firefox is what has been happening with the rest of the tech industry (albeit with a different 'leaders'). Who has been leading design for hardware for quite some time, to the great annoyance of many? Apple. Apple takes away the 3.5mm audio jack, and everyone else thinks it's a grand idea. Same here with browser design -> Google simplifies their design, and Firefox decides "Yeah, let's pitch {popular feature} overboard."
Someone needs to hold a group session at Mozilla, and ask them why Firefox (the browser) was created. Then take a snapshot of the blank stares, and upload it to their front page.
The other big three were slow by comparison. On speed alone, Chrome won.
They all keep saying this. I use all the major browsers (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari) with some regularity and I cannot see any meaningful difference in speed between them. I'm sure there are some measurable differences but as an end user they are inconsequential. I use Firefox as my primary go to browser because it's cross platform (rules out Safari and Edge) and it's work flow and options suit me better than Chrome. I don't dislike Chrome but there is no reason for me to switch to it either for every day browsing because it doesn't offer me anything I need that I don't already have with Firefox.
Mozilla didn't help themselves by firing their employees for not being PC enough.
That has little to do with Chrome's dominance. Heck the only reason Chrome managed to displace Microsoft's offerings is that Microsoft got greedy and stopped improving their product. They had the market share and could have kept it if they hadn't been so short sighted.
If ANY part of your being grateful has to do with Eich's anti-gay-marriage views and his support of Prop 8 in CA, then you're an over-reactionary idiot. Just like Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal), who recently pushed out a governing board member for his sexual fetish and got punched in the face by the Drupal "community" for being too corporate and concerned about image.
Those kinds of potentially company-altering decisions should never be made over hurt feelings of some random group.
It depends. On a system with low ram amount, firefox is better and chrome will make the whole system go nuts due to memory pressure.
On a system with plenty of ram, chrome will fly relative to firefox, as firefox will bottleneck itself a lot.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This. I ditched Firefox for SeaMonkey and PM when they fucked up the interface. Chrome didn't win, they shot their users in the face.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
You do realize that was the point of Firefox in the first place, right? Firefox exists as an attempt to pitch all the junk out of Netscape Navigator/Mozilla Seamonkey.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Firefox was once far larger than Chrome, at one point they had a third of the market.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
Than Firefox decided to get on a rapid release calendar. Users and businesses asked them to go back to a standard release cycle. People told Mozilla that the rapid release cycle made maintenance too cumbersome. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead! The switch to a rapid release cycle started in May of 2011.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Rapid...
You can actually see the impact this decision had by looking at historical browser trends. The previous slow decline in browser share transitioned into a 1% loss in one month - their quickest loss ever. Within 6 months Chrome overtook Firefox in browser share and never looked back.
The result of the rapid release cycle was a disastrous impact, if you updated it you broke something, if you didn't update other things broke. Packaging, deploying, extensions, patching and testing became a nightmare for the enterprise. Requests for support for the enterprise were blown off by offering extended support release - which completely missed the point. The result was IT departments chose to use browsers that were willing to offer real enterprise support.
The cries of users fell on deaf ears - all that mattered was making developers happy. Chrome didn't win, Firefox committed suicide through hubris.
I wonder how many plugins are installed to replace stuff that used to be there until some Uxtard removed them?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."