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Firefox's Effect On Other Browsers

Posted by Soulskill on Mon Jul 21, 2008 08:59 PM
from the driving-the-market dept.
Mozilla The Internet News
An anonymous reader points out an interview with Mozilla's "evangelist," Christopher Blizzard, regarding the future of Firefox and how it affects other browsers. It's an Austrian site, so forgive the comma abuse. From derStandard: "It's sort of interesting though, part of our strategy is to make sure, that we continue making change and the indirect effect of this is that Microsoft continues to have to do releases, because if we get so far ahead that we're able to drive the platform they are not able to keep up and keep their users. I mean, we have this joke which says 'Internet Explorer 7 is the best release we ever did,' because they would not have done it, if we would have not built Firefox. And the same is true for Apple, they are doing a lot to keep up with us. Safari 3.1 is a good example, as far as we see it, the only reason they did this release was that Firefox 3 would come out and have Javascript speed which would be twice as fast as theirs, cause that's how it was before. So by pushing other people to make releases we can go on our mission to make sure the web stays healthy."
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  • What astonishes me... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TomRK1089 (1270906) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:03PM (#24283401)
    What astonishes me is more that this latest release has gotten even my totally non-tech-savvy friends to download it and acknowledge its superiority to Internet Explorer 7. The Firefox team has not only improved the browser for those of us who already used it, but managed to convert another large segment of the market. It's sort of like the Nintendo Wii effect -- they realized it made more sense not to enlarge their slice of the tech-savvy pie, but to expand the pie to include casual users as well. Or at least that's how I see it, feel free to correct me with your own interpretation.

    • Re:What astonishes me... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by liquidpele (663430) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:10PM (#24283467) Homepage Journal
      It's gotten a lot better for non-techie users due to more websites testing against them though. I remember using Firebird 0.7 and about 1 out of every 20 sites would not render very well. For non-techie users, having to then start IE for more than 2 sites is a reason to not even try anything but IE.

      • Re:What astonishes me... (Score:5, Informative)

        by ben2umbc (1090351) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:49PM (#24283817)

        It's gotten a lot better for non-techie users due to more websites testing against them though. I remember using Firebird 0.7 and about 1 out of every 20 sites would not render very well. For non-techie users, having to then start IE for more than 2 sites is a reason to not even try anything but IE.

        That's absolutely true. About a year and a half ago I started using my mac exclusively, and with that I lost the IE Tab extension for Firefox. Initially I missed it every day, having to use Safari to try to render pages correctly. Now it is a complete non-issue.

    • Re:What astonishes me... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Onyma (1018104) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:17PM (#24283523)
      I can sum much of this up with one example.

      My mother is a typical late 60's web user... she has a handful of site she likes to visit and not much more. She has memorized the basic functions I taught her years ago and she's happy with that.

      Recently I upgraded her FF2 to FF3 and taught her how to use the new address bar and bookmarking / search functionality. She nailed it in 2-3 minutes and was looking up sites in her history with ease. I was back there a couple days ago and sure enough she has already bookmarked a dozen new sites and raves about how much easier she finds the internet now. (you'd think they had redesigned the entire internet... which in essence is what a browser upgrade can do for you)

      To me that right there outlines one of the reasons FF3 is going to produce another large spike in new users. Get what you want easily and with less hassle.

    • Re:What astonishes me... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by zappepcs (820751) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:39PM (#24283735) Journal

      One of the great things that FF team did was to allow huge volumes of customization. It can be both a blessing and a curse, but allowing the add-ons and creating an environment where they could be created made FF much more than a web browser. For that, other browsers will constantly have to keep up. FF took bleeding edge and made it cool and functional. It takes a big stick to beat that. Being able to bolt on functions like ABP, foxmarks, FireFTP mean that much of my work is browser based now, and I'd not switch from FF without a great deal of effort by other broswers. I can switch back and forth from Linux to Windows and not really notice any difference in how I'm working.

      Better than that, FF makes is so that joe public can experience the same functionality, and with little effort, realize that Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora et al can be just as useful, if not more so, than MS products and OS. Most of the computer user's experience is a web browser these days. If that part works right, most people don't give a damn what OS is working underneath it. I've converted quite a few people, FF first, then OS, like falling dominos.

      From my vantage point, FF has done far more than they are taking credit for. FAR MORE.

  • Safari 3.1 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2008, @09:06PM (#24283441)

    Or maybe they did it because they were pushing javascript apps for the iPhone, and working on the javascript-based SproutCore frameworks and the associated MobileMe apps.

    Not everything revolves around Firefox.

  • wow; Big pair on him. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WindBourne (631190) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:09PM (#24283457) Journal
    Apple did not release Safari because of Firefox. After all, Firefox was on Apple. They released it because they wanted to be in control of their future. As it was, MS had announced that they were going to pull MSIE from them. What amazes me, is that Apple has not pushed OO to be on there. They would be smart to add a few coders to the project just to ensure that it can compete against Office on their platform.

  • competition breeds improvement (Score:5, Funny)

    by jollyreaper (513215) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:12PM (#24283487)

    I always maintained that Win2K was such a good OS specifically because of the competition Microsoft was getting from open source, they didn't want to be caught napping and wake up to find Linux as a good desktop solution. This theory kind of fell apart with Vista, I have no idea what that steaming pile is in response to.

    • Re:competition breeds improvement (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RobertM1968 (951074) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:21PM (#24283559) Homepage Journal

      You are indeed correct - but there was more to it than that. Keep in mind that at the time they put Win2K into the planning stages, OS/2 had the server market (due to all the vertical market businesses that IBM catered to). MS needed something that competed, and was decent.

      Of course, the other added factor was continually breaking and changing networking implementations and such to ensure that since "your" workstations (mostly) ran Windows, the server had to as well.

      Before that, you could manage a Windows domain from OS/2 simply by drag-n-drop. Since MS couldnt beat that (and still doesnt have anything remotely close), they had to make another release (both for competitive reasons and to break compatibility with LanMan).

      The key thing (competition) is what died in those areas... fortunately in the browser market, MS can no longer leverage their monopoly to create a similar situation, leaving everyone having to either play catch-up to stay in the game or fighting to stay ahead. We all benefit...

  • Safari not trailing Firefox (Score:5, Informative)

    by MobyTurbo (537363) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:14PM (#24283503)
    Safari is not trailing Firefox as it is being developed in all ways, especially JavaScript performance. I actually prefer to use Firefox 3 on the Mac (much better array of plug-ins, and better security), but the latest WebKit nightlies, on http://www.webkit.org/ [webkit.org] since the implementation of Squirelfish (see blog there) are quite a bit faster in JavaScript performance than Firefox. If anything, Firefox is going to have some catching up to do in that department.

      • Re:Safari not trailing Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MobyTurbo (537363) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:47PM (#24283795)

        Firefox will eventually use tamarin, which should be on par with Squirelfish.

        Yes, but Squirelfish was developed first. Hence proving my point, Firefox is not the only leader in innovation; as this "evangelist" seems to be implying.

        • Re:Safari not trailing Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

          by BZ (40346) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:57PM (#24283889) Homepage

          I suggest taking a look at the commit history of both Gecko and Webkit in the last year or so where JS perf is concerned.

          You'll find that they've basically been pushing each other, in almost perfect alternation: one checks in a patch that makes it faster, the other responds with changes that make it faster, etc.

          Seriously, go read the checkin logs.

  • Opera (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rui del-Negro (531098) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:20PM (#24283549) Homepage

    And Opera is feeling so pressured by Firefox that it is systematically forced to copy Firefox's features months and even years before Firefox releases them... ^_^

    • Re:Opera (Score:5, Funny)

      by smussman (1160103) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:24PM (#24283577)
      And they won't even tell us how they do the time travel thing ... that's why open source is so much better.

    • Re:Opera (Score:4, Insightful)

      by enoz (1181117) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:35PM (#24283685)

      Except Opera lagged behind with the most significant feature: being free.

      According to the wiki timeline it wasn't until around 2000 when a 'free' version became available (supported by inbuilt ads), and then as recent as 2005 when finally the ads were removed.

      • Re:Opera (Score:4, Interesting)

        by RAMMS+EIN (578166) on Monday July 21 2008, @10:32PM (#24284103) Homepage Journal

        Before the ad-supported Opera, however, people just used the evaluation version.

        Money was never what stopped Opera's adoption.

        What did stop its adoption is an interesting question, though. It has been a great browser for as long as I can remember - which I think goes back to version 3.something. I used it to test my websites, because Opera was much more picky and standards-compliant than the others. I also used it for my own browsing, because Opera was faster and offered a slew of useful features that other browsers lacked (tons of keyboard shortcuts and tabs being the main ones). Yet, I have never seen Opera at far above 1% in global browser market share stats.

        Part of it is undoubtedly inertia. A lot of people will just use what comes with their system, which is probably some version of Internet Explorer or Safari, and perhaps Firefox (and, back in the day, Netscape). Part of it may also be explained by the multitude of websites that have been broken in ways that made them not work with Opera. If you use a lot of such websites, having to switch browsers constantly quickly gets old.

        Myself, I stopped using Opera because of stability issues on Linux. Those might have been resolved now, but, nowadays, I run only open-source software on my main system. I am not about to make an exception for Opera; I am satisfied with Konqueror.

  • What will Firefox copy next? (what? troll?)

  • It Cuts Both Ways (Score:5, Interesting)

    by magixman (883752) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:28PM (#24283629)
    While Firefox may have inspired the release of IE 7 and pushed Apple to jump into the fray with a Windows release of Safari, it is also true that FF 2 was not all that it should have been and just maybe IE 7 and Safari pushed Mozilla hard enough to really ace FF 3 which it seems that they have done.

    As a software developer who once loathed the idea of having to code for multiple browsers, I have now accepted that there will be differences and have learned to deal with it and promise to stop whining.

    I applaud the browser race and hope that they continue to leapfrog each other for a long time to come.

  • Ow, my commas (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rinisari (521266) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:37PM (#24283709) Homepage Journal

    I never knew, that German, was quite so, comma-happy.

  • OT: Pop-under windows - FF3 issue? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by harmonica (29841) on Monday July 21 2008, @11:26PM (#24284495)

    I have a problem with pop-under windows. They "reappeared" recently, and I'm using FF exclusively. Unfortunately I can't tell if my switch from FF2 to FF3 was the reason, but it was around the time. Is this a known bug? I know I can try to figure out the domains of the sites appearing in those unwanted windows, but I'd be more interested in a general solution. BTW, I have "block pop up windows" activated in the settings, with a few exceptions.

  • Meanwhile, you're keeping up with Opera. :-) (Score:4, Informative)

    by sudog (101964) on Tuesday July 22 2008, @12:33AM (#24284983) Homepage

    Tabbed browsing, clean mouse gestures, two-handed browsing, single-click image disabling, single-click user CSS mode.. heck, most of the user-friendly advances have been standard features on Opera for many, many years. And half of the really good stuff *still* isn't stock and standard on any other browser.

    But, Opera did open its doors to the free download hype as a result of Firefox. So I owe you that much. :)

    But.. catch up already would you?

      • Re:Way to go FF! (Score:5, Funny)

        by beav007 (746004) on Monday July 21 2008, @09:25PM (#24283597) Journal

        middle-click-to-close on tabs comes to mind

        It's hard to tell between a left-click, middle-click, and right-click on a one button mouse...

                • Re:Way to go FF! (Score:4, Informative)

                  by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Monday July 21 2008, @11:59PM (#24284725)

                  Yes, because holding two fingers on the trackpad and then clicking is so much easier than just clicking the other button...err, wait...

                  Actually it is. According to the usability tests I've seen, it is faster and has a lower failure rate because to hit the second button you have to either stretch your hand over or use your other hand, neither of which is ideal. For mice, where one hand is already off the keyboard, multiple buttons are a usability win for experts, but for trackpad users it is a loss for novice users and expert users and more usable but less learnable for middle of the road users.

      • Apple does very little of the core work for Safari. They just take the open-source WebKit engine and slap their own UI over it

        You are incredibly misinformed. A quick glance at recent WebKit changes [webkit.org] readily shows how blatantly false your claim is.

      • Re:Way to go FF! (Score:5, Informative)

        by mr_matticus (928346) on Monday July 21 2008, @10:45PM (#24284171)

        They just take the open-source WebKit engine and slap their own UI over it

        WebKit was developed by Apple, originally as a fork of KHTML for their Safari browser. Apple open-sourced WebKit and it was so good that many of its improvements were copied back into KHTML. It's also being used by a number of mobile phones because of its strengths relative to e.g, Gecko, including Android.

        Without Apple, there would be no WebKit. But don't let reality get in your way.

        • Re:Way to go FF! (Score:4, Informative)

          by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Monday July 21 2008, @11:49PM (#24284665)

          Apple open-sourced WebKit and it was so good that many of its improvements were copied back into KHTML.

          Umm, KHTML was licensed as LGPL, which means Apple had to open source their fork if they distributed it. As for improvements being copied back, well that happened to some extent, but the Konquerer team seems to have pretty much given up on KHTML and are contributing to Webkit now.

            • Re:Way to go FF! (Score:5, Informative)

              by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Tuesday July 22 2008, @12:07AM (#24284787)

              No, you're thinking of GPL. The LGPL would have allowed them to use KHTML libraries without giving anything back.

              They can link to it without giving anything back, but the LGPL does not allow them to make changes to it and distribute them without giving the source back. Since Apple had to make significant changes to make it work modularly and the way they wanted, they had to give all those changes back. They don't have to open source the code for Safari, which links to Webkit, and in fact they don't.

              WebCore's "improvements" are largely Apple's own doing, apart from those changes which were shared upstream before KDE developers abandoned KHTML.

              Apple has done significant work to make Webkit better than KHTML was, but they are certainly building on a lot of work that was done before they entered the game. Apple has played nice with the Konqueror folks and gone out of their way to help them integrate changes and revise the way the shared code base was developed such that improvements from multiple groups including Konqueror, Apple, and Nokia can all be included. That said, to claim Apple had a choice about how Webkit would be licensed or if their changes to it would be open source is simply not true.

              • Re:Way to go FF! (Score:4, Informative)

                by mr_matticus (928346) on Tuesday July 22 2008, @12:18AM (#24284885)

                the LGPL does not allow them to make changes to it and distribute them without giving the source back. Since Apple had to make significant changes to make it work modularly and the way they wanted, they had to give all those changes back.

                You are still being imprecise. The LGPL does allow them to make whatever changes they like, so long as the KHTML libraries they are using are used intact. I do not disagree that any modified libraries had to be shared back upstream, but those changes are portions of WebCore, itself a portion of WebKit. There was no requirement that compartmentalized changes, improvements, and additions be shared if they extended beyond the four corners of the KHTML libraries.

                WebCore is much more than rewritten KHTML libraries. WebKit is much more than WebCore.

                That said, to claim Apple had a choice about how Webkit would be licensed or if their changes to it would be open source is simply not true.

                It absolutely is true. There was no obligation to open-source WebKit. There wasn't even an obligation to open-source the entirety of WebCore and JSCore. There was an obligation to share changes to modified libraries.

                What's simply not true is that Apple had no alternative. Apple provided WebKit tactically, not out of obligation to disclose it in its entirety and certainly not out of the goodness of their "hearts".

          • Re:Way to go FF! (Score:4, Insightful)

            by mr_matticus (928346) on Monday July 21 2008, @11:49PM (#24284669)

            KDE open-sourced KHTML. Apple didn't have a choice in the matter.

            Nonsense. KHTML is LGPL. Apple could have used the libraries without contributing anything back.

            Moreover, the DOM is Apple's, not KHTML's. WebCore, the basic component of WebKit, has very little relationship to KHTML.

            It was so divergent that the KDE folks pretty much had to accept WebKit as the new KHTML if they wanted to accept the improvements.

            That's not at all true. Most of the improvements shared back upstream, including KHTML's ability to pass Acid2, were adapted prior to the merger. KDE adopted WebKit by choice. There was nothing stopping them from continuing development of KHTML separately, nor was their any requirement that the KDE people actually adopt any of Apple's improvements.

            Sour grapes that KHTML was largely abandoned in favor of something better doesn't explain why it's WebKit, and not KHTML, that is being adopted by other platforms.

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