I don't think the difference between the Chrome he's talking about (2.0 alpha linux?) and its Firefox counterpart (minefield builds) are as big as he makes them out to be.
The title should probably say: Firefox may already be dead... for Linux users who care strictly about rendering speed.
He may be right in the end (once Chrome gets extensions, it might see wider distribution), but not just because it's faster in Linux. I'm pretty sure that's a narrow market for now.
Perhaps speed is (subconsciously) a more influential factor than we think. I think it is on that basis that Google is rather obsessed with page load times - see eg. https://adwords.google.co.uk/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87... - and presumably they have empirical data backing their obsession.
One thing I don't understand: given that Chromium is under a BSD license, can't Mozilla just incorporate its Javascript engine into Firefox? I'm sure they can pull that off long before losing their huge market share...
As we all know, there are two states in the world: "Fresh", and "dead".
Sheesh. Maybe you could at least wait to bury Firefox until after you try 3.1, currently in beta3 (beta3 for goodness sake!) and benchmarking competitively with other current browers? (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html)
I haven't tried Chrome and I haven't tried Firefox 3.1, but I bet the difference isn't so big as Firefox 3.0 (or 2.x) and Chrome. Mozilla in fact has realized they need to speed up Firefox and have been yanking out useless abstraction layers and other speed problems for the next version, along with a lot of Javascript work.
But no, gotta generate those page views with overblown claims.
You know, I'm flagging this. This link is terrible, just internet grandstanding disconnected from the facts.
The only way the situation can be altered is for Mozilla
to slam on the brakes, lean out of the window of the
truck, apologize for going the wrong way, and turn
around. But that's unimaginable.
That's funny, because the Mozilla project has done exactly that in the past. The result was Firefox!
I've been using the Firefox 3.5 beta (Shiretoko) as my primary browser for a few months now. Despite the occasional crashes its the best browser I've ever used.
Chrome runs circles around Firefox 3, but its no faster than Shiretoko. Combined with the extra ads I have to pull down because Chrome has no extensions its not even a contest.
But even comparing Chrome to Firefox 3, I still don't see Chrome taking a lot of marketshare away from Firefox. Asking a user to change browsers is an extremely hard sell. When Firefox arrived the current offering (IE6) was so bad that browsers were a hair-on-fire problem. I don't think that case can't be made now.
Furthermore, Google's track record for software doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. I'm pretty sure Mozilla will continue to pump most of their resources and focus into Firefox for the foreseeable future. I don't have that feeling about Google.
I've been using Chrome as my primary browser for about .5 years now. Apart from a few crashes, it has been the best browser I've ever used. I don't see any ads after I click my Readability bookmarklet either. When I shut down my computer a few nights ago, I had 92 Chrome windows open, each with 6-12 tabs. Firefox probably would have died had I tried this. Two things annoyed me about Firefox. When it crashed, all open windows were shut down. Since Chrome spawns separate processes for each window, it doesn't have this problem. Secondly, Firefox took 5-10 seconds to open, and frequently lagged. Chrome opens instantly and has no performance problems on my machine.
Also, could we please stop killing every somewhat-questionable link? The HN conversation surrounding them is typically very interesting. (Until people start complaining about the quality of the articles, that is.)
Regarding ads, the big advantage of AdBlock is that the request is never made to the ad server. Ad includes can get pretty bulky so it makes a difference.
Regarding Chrome, I agree that having one process per window is a great idea. I have to ask though, what are you doing that is best accomplished with 92 browser windows open?
Heh. I just don't close browser windows, most of the time. I use alt-tab as a form of 'daily history', meaning when I press alt-tab, I can view all of what I've been looking at / doing for the day. So if I was reading about Numpy earlier in the day, then went to read something else, I'd open a new Chrome window. That way I can tab back and finish reading at some later point.
92 windows is of course extreme. My laptop had been on for a couple days at that point.
Why is this on top of HN? The dude compares apples to oranges and glosses over one of the most important aspects of FF, which is the extensions.
By the time Chrome makes the extension architecture available to the general public and developers start writing useful ones, Mozilla will release a version of Firefox that greatly improves performance of both Javascript and the browser in general.
Why did it get killed? It is certainly more interesting than a lot of the stuff that gets posted from TechCrunch. Poorly written or not, it's an interesting opinion.
I'd tend to agree. Firefox served its purpose well, and forced Microsoft to release IE7.
But it never really improved on its first effort, and now, 5 years later it's arguably a little bit better than IE7, but it just can't hang with the latest releases from any of its competition.
So now we have Firefox sitting in 4th place behind Chrome, IE, and Safari. I fire it up a couple times a day for testing purposes, but if it were to go away completely, I certainly wouldn't miss it.
I think he has a point. I switched from Firefox to Chrome about a month ago; I think Chrome's interface is much nicer, and it is faster than Firefox. The two major drawbacks of Chrome for me were:
- no extensions for Chrome (I miss Adblock and Flashblock)
- Linux edition not available (I'm waiting for the beta to come out)
If it weren't for Google's promises to come out with extensions and a Linux version, I wouldn't have switched.
The main advantage Firefox previously had was that it's so much better than IE. Now it has to be better than IE and Chrome; this is a pretty high barrier to dominance.
Google is evil, Firefox is dead, Windows 7 is going to revolutionise the operating system world. None of them are true, yet they keep on getting sensationalist coverage in online media. When will the madness stop? Can't we have choice without trying kill off the incumbents all the time?
Considering I run XP, am diving into ASP.NET MVC with abandon and recently forsake OS X for all of this, I am definitely in a minority of one. I've always figured that you pick the tool for the job. At this point, the tool needs to be focused on Windows. Instead of feeding the boring product vs product, tool vs tool or tech vs tech war, online journos should grow a pair and start assessing stuff on individual merit. Maybe then, this industry would look less like a pack of squabbling pre-teens, and more like a cadre of professionals.
I'm not sure why the media loves to take the reactionary approach to everything (My favorite was a CNN article yesterday claiming we shouldn't move to "Smart" power grids because hackers can get in. It's as if we should stop the march of progress because of a few misguided people).
Obviously, these people seem to miss the fact that "Better" almost never wins.
Plenty of people still run Windows when there are plenty of arguments that OS X is "Better" (Faster, performs better,etc).
And thankfully Internet Explorer died a horrible, painful death as soon as Firefox shipped. I mean, it was faster & better than Internet Explorer - so of course IE died.
21 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 44.9 ms ] threadI'd call it loyalty for all they've done to the community and the web in general, and I am grateful for that.
Rock on, foxy, rock on.
He may be right in the end (once Chrome gets extensions, it might see wider distribution), but not just because it's faster in Linux. I'm pretty sure that's a narrow market for now.
One thing I don't understand: given that Chromium is under a BSD license, can't Mozilla just incorporate its Javascript engine into Firefox? I'm sure they can pull that off long before losing their huge market share...
Sheesh. Maybe you could at least wait to bury Firefox until after you try 3.1, currently in beta3 (beta3 for goodness sake!) and benchmarking competitively with other current browers? (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html)
I haven't tried Chrome and I haven't tried Firefox 3.1, but I bet the difference isn't so big as Firefox 3.0 (or 2.x) and Chrome. Mozilla in fact has realized they need to speed up Firefox and have been yanking out useless abstraction layers and other speed problems for the next version, along with a lot of Javascript work.
But no, gotta generate those page views with overblown claims.
You know, I'm flagging this. This link is terrible, just internet grandstanding disconnected from the facts.
Agreed. I flagged it too... this certainly doesn't deserve the top slot on HN.
Chrome runs circles around Firefox 3, but its no faster than Shiretoko. Combined with the extra ads I have to pull down because Chrome has no extensions its not even a contest.
But even comparing Chrome to Firefox 3, I still don't see Chrome taking a lot of marketshare away from Firefox. Asking a user to change browsers is an extremely hard sell. When Firefox arrived the current offering (IE6) was so bad that browsers were a hair-on-fire problem. I don't think that case can't be made now.
Furthermore, Google's track record for software doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. I'm pretty sure Mozilla will continue to pump most of their resources and focus into Firefox for the foreseeable future. I don't have that feeling about Google.
Also, could we please stop killing every somewhat-questionable link? The HN conversation surrounding them is typically very interesting. (Until people start complaining about the quality of the articles, that is.)
Regarding Chrome, I agree that having one process per window is a great idea. I have to ask though, what are you doing that is best accomplished with 92 browser windows open?
92 windows is of course extreme. My laptop had been on for a couple days at that point.
By the time Chrome makes the extension architecture available to the general public and developers start writing useful ones, Mozilla will release a version of Firefox that greatly improves performance of both Javascript and the browser in general.
This is FUD at its best.
I think WebKit is going to kill Gecko.
But it never really improved on its first effort, and now, 5 years later it's arguably a little bit better than IE7, but it just can't hang with the latest releases from any of its competition.
So now we have Firefox sitting in 4th place behind Chrome, IE, and Safari. I fire it up a couple times a day for testing purposes, but if it were to go away completely, I certainly wouldn't miss it.
- no extensions for Chrome (I miss Adblock and Flashblock)
- Linux edition not available (I'm waiting for the beta to come out)
If it weren't for Google's promises to come out with extensions and a Linux version, I wouldn't have switched.
The main advantage Firefox previously had was that it's so much better than IE. Now it has to be better than IE and Chrome; this is a pretty high barrier to dominance.
See a pattern here?
Obviously, these people seem to miss the fact that "Better" almost never wins.
Plenty of people still run Windows when there are plenty of arguments that OS X is "Better" (Faster, performs better,etc).
And thankfully Internet Explorer died a horrible, painful death as soon as Firefox shipped. I mean, it was faster & better than Internet Explorer - so of course IE died.