Firefox's Effect On Other Browsers 475
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."
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So.... (Score:1, Interesting)
It is fascinating the way browsers have evolved. From little free apps, to the dominance to Netscape, to the crushing anticompetitive dominance of IE to the reemergence of the firebird from the ashes of Netscape... coming back to put down the bloated, lagging malware known as IE.
Oh yeah. Then there's Apple and Konqueror doin' their own little thing. Along with Opera and iCab and Omni and all those folks who seem to never go away.
It Cuts Both Ways (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
And what he's not saying... (Score:4, Interesting)
Credit where credit is due, please.
Re:What astonishes me...FF 3-4 times/day crash? (Score:3, Interesting)
My FF 3.1 never crashes on XP SP2.
Could you provide specific sites that break?
I wonder about your break problems. Is there anything specific that goes wrong?
Is your virus scan up to date?
What is your OS?
Are you Bill Gates perhaps? (sorry for the thought)
Thanks and I hope FF goes better for you,
Jim
Re:What astonishes me...FF 3-4 times/day crash? (Score:3, Interesting)
In Ubuntu 8.04, firefox will crash randomly on pages that have flash video with sound. There is a bug apparently between flash and pulseaudio. There have been a few patches that have been released, and it is better, but still sometimes crashes.
Re:Opera (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Way to go FF! (Score:2, Interesting)
Macbooks still only ship with a 1 button trackpad.
Who needs 2 buttons?
Two fingers and a click gives you the secondary mouse button and dragging 2 fingers around the trackpad gives you scrolling (horizontal and vertical). 3 finger swipes gives you back and forward navigation as well.
2 button trackpads are so last year.
Re:And what he's not saying... (Score:1, Interesting)
Right... I'm sure he loses sleep every night worrying about what Opera and their chronically sub-1% market share are up to next.
They've been around more than twice as long as Firefox and have consistently failed to captivate (they had SIX YEARS in which to show the web and IE users that they were an answer to reigniting innovation, creativity and usability on the web, ffs) all but a few oddballs who have nothing better to do than bitch and moan about how unfair it is that the big guys don't even give them the time of day.
Perhaps if Opera and their community could put just half the effort they spend complaining and sniping into marketing and user experience initiatives, maybe they wouldn't be in the position they are.
Although I bet even that's doomed to mediocrity, most of those who would commit to such an undertaking have likely already abandoned Opera for more open, less "bash the other guys because we're bitter that they've surpassed us" communities like those surrounding WebKit and Firefox.
Opera had more than enough time; they failed, still fail and will likely continue to fail until it results in their death. So don't even bother with the "waah, Opera did it first" crap because the web simply didn't care then, doesn't care now and is moving on without you.
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Too bad too, I really liked FF2.
Awesome! If you really liked it there may be value in continuing to use Firefox. We urge you to try making a fresh FF3 profile; if no crashes are occur you can import your FF2 bookmarks, certificates, and so on, and your browsing experience will be better than ever!
If it still crashes with a fresh profile, you can either investigate further, or go back to Firefox 2. FF2 is much better than IE7, or else you wouldn't have been using FF2 instead of IE7 anyway, right?
Blizzard echoing Behlendorf (Score:3, Interesting)
This reminds me of a comment from Brian Behlendorf concerning the design of the Apache License to allow for modifications of the code for commercial release without accompanying source code, in contrast to the GPL. Behlendorf said that this was deliberate because the Apache Foundation believed that supporting the web protocols was more important than the keeping contributions to the Apache code open source.
Interesting to see this sentiment echoed from the client side a decade later.
OT: Pop-under windows - FF3 issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:wow; Big pair on him. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Safari 3.1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Thankyou for posting. They have a point about IE7, but a very weak line to Safari3. WebKit deserves its due... Apple was innovating with WebKit long before Firefox, or even Safari, existed.
Re:Safari 3.1 (Score:3, Interesting)
His take on Safari might have had an ounce of credibility if Firefox wasn't such a dog on OS X. (What's worse, they shipped Firefox 3 with some ridiculous performance regressions [mozilla.org]). But as it stands, his comment is complete nonsense. I've sensed a little hostility towards WebKit in a few of the Mozilla blogs lately. Perhaps there's still some bitterness over the whole ACID3 fiasco?
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed; and it is the same with Opera, too - it's not just that it's gotten better (which it did), but mostly that most websites these days are not "IE only". Which is also thanks mostly to Firefox, I guess - even if the site is only designed and tested against IE and Firefox, it will usually work fine in Opera, too (well, except when they just make two totally different versions for IE and Firefox with all that AJAX Web 2.0 crap, and do browser detection to switch - Google, I'm looking at you...). So, yay for diversity!
Re:Piling on... (Score:2, Interesting)
ugly data Bastille called the Windows Registry.
You obviously didn't deal much with Win 3.x. Registry is much better than config files scattered throughout. I wouldn't mind if it were replaced, but it needs to be a step forward, not back. Linux still has config files scattered in a zillion different places. It would be nice if all configs went into an organized hierarchy. XML files located in a couple of standardized locations. As in one location for machine level configs, and one location each for user level configs.
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:5, Interesting)
IE7, quicker than Firefox? In every test I've read Firefox is a lot faster both at rendering and executing javascript. And it's really a pain using IE7 as even on a modern computer opening a new tab takes forever (at least compared to firefox).
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:3, Interesting)
First, I almost completely disagree with you. I find that Firefox 3 is roughly equal with Opera memory wise, but has a little more purely subjective "zip". IE, as far as I can tell, is just painful to use, is rather inflexible, underpowered, and is about as safe as a fishnet condom. I do tell everyone to use Firefox (or Opera or Safari, depending).
You know, seeing as I have made it this far into the post... I'm tired of seeing people say "this is the best" or "that is the best" when the reality is the only best out there is what works best for the person using the software
Here, though, you are completely correct. The browser/OS/Editor wars are getting REALLY old, since things have progressed to about the point where all the alternatives are roughly equal. Yes, IE, and Windows even, are just as safe and zippy as OS X or Linux, depending on the users training and smarts. Same for speed, yes, Vista and IE use a TON of memory, but not enough to really hurt anyone using a computer made in the last five years (OS X isn't a lightweight either).
I do, though, think that Linux and Firefox are the only real options on a moral high road, though, but that really is an insignificant consideration after use and user style.
The problem happens when Joe Sixpack sits down on their Windows/IE box, with no knowledge of safety, then recommending is perfectly fine, and even commendable. From the sounds of it, and the environment, you probably know how to keep your boxes from becoming zombies, and hogging bandwidth and my mailbox, but most people don't. Yes, we could teach them how to be nice, but that takes a LOT of time and effort, where just making them use Firefox and a non-Windows OS is damn easy.
Re:Way to go FF! (Score:4, Interesting)
KHTML provided the HTML and XML parsing engine, the DOM tree exports, the CSS parsing engine, the layout engine.
Source? All indications are that Apple wrote their own DOM, and that their CSS parsing is not KHTML's (which was one of the problems in adapting changes back to KHTML years back). They also certainly wrote the SVG support, which KHTML lacked.
That means that WebCore is a derivative of a pair of LGPL'd products.
No. WebCore does not contain KJS code. That's JSCore. WebCore contains LGPL'd libraries from KHTML, but it contains libraries that are not part of KHTML as well. JSCore contains LGPL'd libraries from KJS.
Further, since WebKit is, apparently, a derivative of WebCore
No. WebKit is a wrapper, providing API-level access to WebCore and JSCore, as well as integrating the debugging unit (starts with a D...). It is not a derivative work for the purposes of the LGPL.
Note: IIRC, WebKit and WebCore are parallel products - one isn't built on top of the other, but one was forked from the other.
No. WebCore is a component of WebKit.
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:4, Interesting)
> One of the great things that FF team did was to allow huge volumes of customization...but allowing the add-ons and creating an environment where they could be created made FF much more than a web browser.
Please, give credit where it is due. The concept of UI extensions derives from Netscape's plans for a skinnable Navigator 5, which led to the development of XUL - developed, you will note, by Netscape, not the Mozilla Foundation.
In-window plug-ins are today's implementation of NPAPI, again developed by Netscape.
Nothing is created from a vacuum ( well, except perhaps the entire Universe ).
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:3, Interesting)
When my inlaws got the automatic upgrade to IE7, the new interface confused the hell out of them. I installed Firefox, and they were over the moon about this wonderful new browser I'd introduced them to. Actually I think its really their new home page; at the same time I changed their home page from the generic cluttered Yahoo to a customized Google Desktop with feeds from my wife's blog and our Flickr photos and some local news and weather, but to them, that's the difference between Firefox and IE and I don't mind letting them think that for the cause of spreading some open source goodness.
Re:Piling on... (Score:5, Interesting)
I totally agree that Linux use of plain text files in the "/etc" directory is a far superior solution. However I'd also like to see all the user level config files that currently go into the various "~/.prog_name" folders collected into something like a "~/etc" directory.
Obviously to hide it during "normal" use you could name it "~/.etc" but I do think that it would be more consistent and far tidier to have all the user level config files in their own subdirectory.
Mind you having said that I'd prefer the directories were called "/settings" and ~/.settings" but I suppose 50 years of *NIX cruft precludes this !
Re:Safari 3.1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? Wasn't it the KDE developers that were doing the innovating before Safari came into being?
Re:Ow, my commas (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Opera (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Opera has always piled on the features, but never bothered to make them usable. Tabs are an obvious example... Mozilla, from the start, implemented tabs linearly... Close one, and you go to the next one to the left (later, the right). Simple, intuitive. Opera had tabs, but they dumped the user in a second-window-manager hell, as the cycle based on when they were last viewed. It's an absolute mess, and WORSE than managing multiple windows with a window manager, which was actually designed to do the job reasonably well. Using Opera was like having a window on your destop, running it's own little session of Windows 3.11 in a VM...
IIRC, it wasn't until some time after Mozilla was released with tabs that Opera offered users with the option of handling tabs in a similar manner to Mozilla...
Re:Safari 3.1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:F*** Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, get back to me when Opera fixes this CSS bug that is over five years old [positioniseverything.net].
As such, Opera can't do uneven-width 'sliding doors' tabs that extend to fill a container, which is what we needed recently. Some might call that an isolated bug, but honestly - a CSS1 rendering bug should not survive this long, while they're implementing more advanced and newer features.
My regret is that (both the) Opera users who visit our site think we've failed to use web standards when really it's -- gasp! -- Opera's fault.
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:2, Interesting)
Whilst this is an advantage of open source, I'm not sure how practical forking it is just to fix a bug or add a feature you like, as you now how a separate fork to maintain everytime the main version is updated.
Ideally you submit the patch back into the main source, but then you need that to be accepted by the developers, who could potentially ignore you just as much as MS/Apple/Opera.
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:2, Interesting)
In *my* experience with the new FF I have found the memory leak is still there *but* it appears to be less than before. In prior versions I had issues after just a couple of hours of browsing. Now? It is still eating way more RAM than it should and an undocumented check shows that it steadily increases and doesn't seem to want to let a whole hell of a lot go after closing some tabs.
For me, it's the exact reverse.
Doing the same sort of browsing with Firefox 3 as I did with IE6 (company standard), I find that Firefox uses far less memory. It's using 130MB right now, where before it wasn't unusual to see my "main" IE window using 130MB, with the others taking up another 100MB or so.
I also noticed that every so often IE would start to use the CPU for no reason. Even clicking "Home" (a blank page for me) on all IE windows wouldn't stop it, and it would sit there taking 5-10% of my dual-core 2.8GHz CPU. Only closing the right window (which I couldn't determine in any way other than guessing) would stop the CPU use.
Except for Firefox not playing well with Sharepoint and my virtual credit card number software, and a small bug with an extension, it's been rock solid.
I use IE more than any other browser out there. Yeah... Really. I use it for the add-ons. IE has the add-ons that I want that work how I like them and so I use it.
What add-ons? Part of the reason I wanted to switch to Firefox was the fact that there were so many useful add-ons, but Firefox 2.x just wasn't ready for prime time (at least not for me).
Re:Piling on... (Score:2, Interesting)
ln -s
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Homepage:
http://www.eviljaymz.com/ [eviljaymz.com]
I use IESpell which is handy - I don't want to always have spell checking enabled, a right click > check spelling is ideal for my needs as I spell really poorly but have improved greatly over the years of actually checking it.
I use Super Ad Blocker (crappy name but a great product) to selectively block or allow ads via the right click menu. (There is a FF extension for this, I know.) This also runs as its own program and allows me to selectively save cookies while mass deleting the rest and does a bunch of other things as well.
So, well, hopefully no one will respond (thus missing the point) saying, "Oh, use these, they're free." The truth is that I've already paid for these in both financial costs, dev time, configuration, and learning to properly use them. While I do have a lot of free time I'd rather use that time for things that I want to do as opposed to fixing something that already works just fine for me.
Over the years I've used a variety of other plug-ins. These days those seem to provide me with what I need. I can live without those but they make my day-to-day experience and productivity so much better than it is without them.
Re:What astonishes me... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, that's funny. But according to the statistics linked in this comment IE7 is among the slowest browsers around:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=621353&cid=24285613 [slashdot.org]
I also tried opening 10 tabs in FF3 and IE7 on an Athlon XP 3200+ with 1.5GB ram. In FF3 it took 2 seconds, in IE7 it took 27 seconds.
Funny huh?