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.

Comments

Subverted from the inside

[TWX]

Maybe Chrome is winning because Mozilla/Firefox is basically chromified now. I use it basically for a combination of historical reasons and because it feels like I have more control more easily over the privacy and security settings, but I am very dissatisfied with a lot of things that have come into Firefox, including this rapid-versioning system that they adopted. It's friggin' stupid that they've been copying Chrome so much, and there's not a lot of reason to continue to using Firefox except that I'm used to it.

Not with all that resource hogging it hasn't

[EkriirkE]

I used to be all over Chrome a few years ago until its (lack of) resource management prevented me from using several tabs at once. Then I rediscovered Firefox and am still quite happy with it. No plans to go back or have another look anytime soon...

I use firefox to browse, chrome only for Hangouts

[Maxo-Texas]

And Chrome slows down my fairly beefy machine when it loads and spawns off a half dozen processes that I have to kill manually at least once a week when performance gets really bad.

Firefox also runs out of control every 2-3 days and starts to thrash disk, cpu and memory but at least it's easy to kill. Lately, it screws up on youtube videos and they get stuttery but keep playing after it dies.

I'd like a browser that didn't impact performance so badly.

I prefer the noscript plugins on firefox. Does chrome have something similar to no-script? I hate intrusive and popup ads.

Stuck using unsupported versions of Chrome

[Kazoo the Clown]

Several of my systems are using Windows versions no longer supported by Chrome. It nags about it, which is annoying but it isn't going to make me update my OS. Firefox doesn't have that problem, you can still run old versions of Firefox that don't nag you about stuff that's not going to change. Try installing an old version of Chrome-- not quite so easy...

Duh

[ArchieBunker]

It won because you became Chrome Junior with the "australis" interface. That and you cared more about adding video chat than stability or speed.

Re:Didn't Like Eich

[cayenne8]

This is interesting.

I could probably count the number of times I"ve used chrome on one hand.

I don't really know any of my friends that use it either....

Where I work, IE is still the browser of choice for the company....you have to actually get special dispensation for them to allow you to install FF or chrome (usually for testing web apps).

So, in light of my anecdotal experience with it, might I ask those many of you that *do* use chrome as your primary browser.....why?

What benefits does it give over other browsers? I primarily use FF on my windows and Linux boxes...and mostly safari on my OS X boxes.

Chrome hasn't "Won"

[mykepredko]

Chrome is number one right now.

There was a point where
- Lynx was the most popular browser
- Then it was Netscape
- IE was the most popular browser for a while
- I believe Mozilla was the most popular browser for a year or so
- Now we have Chrome as the most used browser

What is the most popular browser going forwards hasn't been determined yet. Saying "Chrome has won" means that you've given up trying to compete.

Give us a reason to go to Firefox rather than Chrome and then you'll "win", for a while, at least.

Plugin author here

[rsilvergun]

a lot of those useful features were culled to make way for the multi-process stuff that's required for them to compete with Chrome on performance. Not actual performance (FF is close enough in that it doesn't matter) but perceived. FF's single threaded model means small responsiveness delays in the UI.

Plugins make that worse by occasionally holding up the UI to do their stuff. It's all very minimal, but if you install 2, 3, 5+ plugins it quickly gets to be a problem.

Chrome handles this by preempting your plugin all the time. That means your plugin's written from the ground up to deal with that and it makes plugin development a real pain. FF is doing that now and just about anything more complicated than a theme is gonna need full re-writes to work. I've been putting off that re-write because work life kinda kicked me in the rear for a while but eventually I'll need to do it.

Servo

[magical liopleurodon]

If Servo becomes the main engine, I could see firefox reclaiming the throne