Is Firefox on the way out?
This article suggests so:
www.maximumpc.com/article/news/firefox%E2%80%99s_future_googles_hands?
No idea how authoritative it is, and I don't pretend to understand Firefox's relationship with Google.
Interpretation welcome.
Last edited by: Iffy on Mon 5 Dec 11 at 17:20
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Essentially Firefox is an open source browser, that means no-one owns the code. Mozilla who package the code and supply fixes has few other sources of income other than tie up deals.
With no money from such tie up deals (and the biggest is Google, who want to dump them because they have chrome) they may not survive
The browser base used in firefox is available under gazzilions of other names and flavours,.
Yup firefox will go the way of Netscape. Browsers is not a business..
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>> Yup firefox will go the way of Netscape. Browsers is not a business
Zero's right as usual :-) Netscape became Mozilla and the product we know best using this is Firefox.
Personally I use IE or Chrome on Windows, Safari on Mac and occasionally Chrome on Mac too. I don't like Firefox.
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I reckon that nice Mr Zuckerberg of Facebook might save Mozilla.
He's in competition with Google via the Plus social network, so he might be attracted by having a browser of his very own.
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facebook is not a search engine. Unless you want 5 gazillion friends added to you that you have never heard of,
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...facebook is not a search engine...
Which is why the company might want one.
Horizontal or vertical integration - can never remember which is which.
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taking on firefox does not get them a search engine, cos thats not one either!
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...taking on firefox does not get them a search engine, cos thats not one either! ...
Good point, well made.
If I was in charge of Facebook it would have 800 users, not 800m.
I take the point that browsers is not a business, but Firefox does have an awful lot of users, so I reckon someone might see an opportunity there somewhere.
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I find Chrome a little unstable compared to Firefox.
I do think IE9 will take a lot of users away. In the old days when setting up clients PCs installing Firefox was the first thing I did, but now I usually install IE9 unless I know they have a preference for another browser.
It will be a shame if Firefox goes, I have been a user since Firebird 1.5.
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Use' SRWare Iron' which is Chrome without the spyware. Fed up with telling ya all. (:0;0)
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I too like and have used Firefox for years.
Chrome is not an alternative, it hides too much. Not all the time, but I do use most of the menu bar options that Firefox offers, along with a fair few add-ons.
In the dim and distant, I used Opera, but that must have been getting on for 15 years ago.
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I mentioned Zuckerberg/Facebook earlier, but saving Firefox for a grateful browsing public would be good PR for someone, if not a big earner.
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I missed this yesterday during my own Firefox crisis - I came close to dumping it yesterday from my Mac - it slowed to the speed of stunned slug. Fired up the (hardly ever used) native Safari which worked at the speed of light in comparison - it's fine this morning. Been a fan of Mozilla for many years - had my first doubts yesterday. I suppose Google could buy it out to crash it so out speak. Remember that Firefox was the only real alternative to the dreadful Microsoft product for a long time.
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Was always lots of alternatives but Firefox for a long time was the most viable one. There was a purer version of Mozzila but it was a bit bloaty and the idea of Firebird (since renamed Firefox) was to remove all the bloat.
Opera was a shareware product for a long time so was no real alternative.
Netscape indirectly became Firefox.
I remember when I was doing my dissertation (2004-2005) a big part of it was researching how well the ASP.NET platform worked with other browsers and how accessible it was. I quickly found that if you wanted to make a complex ASP.NET site work properly with other browsers you couldn't use a lot of the built in features such as datagrids. This was a very early version of the .NET platform and has since been massively improved.
I recently had to register with Microsoft as an OEM system builder so I could download the Windows 7 deployment kit, as soon as I registered it said the site does not work with Firefox! It seems Microsoft are worryingly hopeless and making websites, considering they market web development technology to developers!
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>> I mentioned Zuckerberg/Facebook earlier, but saving Firefox for a grateful browsing public would be good
>> PR for someone, if not a big earner.
And therein lies the problem, people are not grateful, increasingly less grateful, as they turn away from Firefox, its loosing market share. You cant save what people dont want.
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>> And therein lies the problem, people are not grateful, increasingly less grateful, as they turn
>> away from Firefox, its loosing market share. You cant save what people dont want.
I don't think it's a case of being grateful. I loved Firefox and was grateful every day for Firebug being able to help me debug sites for IE6. However, I stopped loving Firefox when it kept crashing, kept on not being able to stream streaming media without skipping all the time and kept on having sites break on it.
However, as a loyal user of Firefox, I upgraded to 4, then to 5, then to 6 and finally to 7 and after 3 updates but still encountering more issues than I want to, I fell out of love with Firefox. It felt like the end of a long term relationship.
Gradually it started to do things which peed me off but I glossed over them, found ways of dealing them them. I did the equivalent of going to counselling and stuck with Firefox through a number of upgrades but then Firefox felt like an abusive partner still doing the same old issues and making my working life more difficult despite being given chance and chance again to put things right.
So I did what any sane person would do and gave Firefox the boot. No more abuse you bad browser. You had enough chances to put things right but no more. The day I put my bookmarks into Chrome felt as significant as leaving my toothbrush around a boyfriend's house.
What people want is a browser which works. For us in web, we need a browser which can debug, run site speed tests and which allows us to see what is going on under the surface of a website.
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I read elsewhere Microsoft have signed a revenue sharing deal with Mozilla for Bing to be integrated in Firefox.
If that's right, there could be life in the old browser yet.
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The end of Firefox? - Zero
