I am going on record that, unless Mozilla changes the direction they are heading, Internet Explorer will push Firefox back to single digit market share within three years. I’m sure a lot of people will flame me that Microsoft could never pull that off, but try telling that to Netscape. Each incarnation of Firefox since at least version 1.5 has not been a significant improvement on the previous version. Yeah, they claim all sorts of new features, but really, what is going on with Firefox 3?
Sure it is supposed to use lower memory, but the user interface is seriously going downhill. They seem so insanely focused on the underlying technologies (which isn’t necessarily bad) that they don’t spend any time on the UI. Look at the new download manager; functionally it actually works a lot better, but I’ll be damned if my parents (or any other average user) would ever figure out how to use the new features it has.
Then there are the areas where they have changed the underlying system dramatically (database driven history and bookmarks) that really don’t work any better than the old way. I ran FF3 Beta 3 for about a month, honestly the new bookmarking/history features adds about 5% benefit (it does the search in the location bar instead of in the history sidebar) but at a cost that every extension written for bookmarks or the history don’t work. That is a major deal breaker for me. Maybe Firefox 3.5 will actually expose more useful functionality for this feature, but it isn’t that great right now.
My real problem is the direction that Mozilla is taking Firefox. Their handling of adding features and juggling extensions is a joke. They consistently seem scared of adding a new feature that would be genuinely useful to the average user. I have seen this first hand on Bugzilla with a feature request for save to PDF support. Firefox 3 has the built-in underlying technology (through Cairo) to save web pages to PDF, but they don’t want to add it as a feature. They just say that it should be delivered through an extension (which exists). The code is all there except for a user interface to expose the functionality to the user!
Every user has to go out and find the extensions though. Why can’t Firefox have official/recommended extensions (maybe weather, gmail, etc) that can optionally be installed with Firefox? Or why aren’t there different versions of Firefox? Just think, they could make a Firefox Developer Edition that would come with many common web developer extensions like Firebug, Web Developer, or HTML Validator.
The biggest problem with extensions is that they never work from version to version. Firefox is a terrible platform in this regard. It is ridiculous that by far most extensions won’t support FF3 it before it launches. But the Mozilla folks seem to believe that that doesn’t matter. Why is it that extensions constantly have to be redone for new versions of Firefox? Hell, even Firefox 1.0 extensions didn’t work on 1.5 but “add-ons” for Internet Explorer 6 still work on version 8!
This finally gets me to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. The bottom line? I kind of like it. They are actually going in a direction that I’m interested in with features like Webslices and Activities. Basically, Webslices allow you to subscribe to a portion of web page; similar to how you sign up for an RSS feed. It fits a very different usage scenario than RSS feeds though. A Webslice could be a eBay auction you are following, the status of a friend on a social network, or the latest news headlines. Here is a link to Microsoft’s page and a video on Webslices.
Internet Explorer Activities allow you to select text (anchors can be embedded in the page too) and get context sensitive options. The most obvious example is selecting an address to get a map. The cool part is that the activity can show information (like a map) without leaving the page (see image below). Any website can create activities for IE8 as well; it isn’t locked down to just Microsoft services.
The best thing about Activities and Webslices? They just come built-in to IE8. They aren’t some “great” extension that only one in twenty users of a browser with 15% market share have. So with Firefox the feature will be so uncommon (3% of web users) that no web developer can really target it. Within a year of IE8 coming out it will have more than 50% of the market. Consequently, websites will actually implement Activities and Webslices.
Another illustration of where IE8 is going is that it includes a Firebug-esque development tool built-in. The Mozilla people need to come to grips with the fact that a huge amount of the “value” of Firefox to users is found in the extensions. They try to position Firefox as an extensible base platform with a rich ecosystem of add-ons, but the add-ons break between every single version. That is, if the average user has even found or realized that they can add those add-ons.
Bottom line: I haven’t switched to Internet Explorer yet, but if Microsoft and Mozilla keep the trajectories they are on I can’t rule it out in the future.
*Disclaimer: I have been using a Mozilla browser as my primary browser for six years. First Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) v0.95, and then Firefox when it was known as Phoenix 0.6. I have been exposed to some of the development activities on Mozilla’s Bugzilla too. So I don’t want to hear that I’m just some Microsoft fanboy.
Note: This article is cross-posted at PseudoSavant.
Monday, 17. March 2008
I have a love/hate relationship with Firefox (I’m using 2.0). It has all these cool plugins that I’ve grown accustomed to. But it dies at least weekly, apparently from memory leaks.
And anytime I think of trying a new browser instead, I’m annoyed that I can’t get the plugins I need.
Monday, 17. March 2008
Love/hate is definitely how you could describe my take on Firefox. The memory leaks are often caused by extensions, but that is really just an excuse that Mozilla uses to justify ignoring them. It isn’t like they try to provide resources to developers to fix the memory leaks, and FF sure doesn’t try to clean up leaks caused by bad extensions.
To make matters worse, extensions have to be modify (often quite significantly) to work on each new version of FF. So even if XYZ extension was working great with FF2 there may be a new bug in the FF3 version.
This is a very interesting point to draw a parallel to the IE vs Netscape fight. Netscape 4 was good when it came out, but then they just kind of sat on the product as Microsoft dramatically improved IE. Eventually there was no point to using Netscape. Mozilla has been sitting on FF (more or less) since version 1.0 (which was good) and it is going to take more than visual refreshing and some very subtle functionality enhancements for FF to just keep its market share.
Monday, 17. March 2008
Maybe you’re not a fanboy, but you sure are acting it.
You’re upset at Mozilla because the GUI hasn’t changed? Because plug-ins break between major versions? How much time passes between each major version of Firefox – a year? Suck it up. And you complain in the other article that extensions don’t work in Firefox 3 BETA. There’s a reason it’s called the beta. As soon as the final release is out, developers will be scrambling (and are already scrambling) to make their plug-ins compatible. Many of my plug-ins work already, such as the StumbleUpon toolbar, Firebug, Chatzilla, and Adblock Plus.
The whole point of add-ons is that it doesn’t come with the browser and bloat it for those who don’t want it. Believe it or not, most users could care less about saving to a pdf file. Unless you pay an arm and leg for the Adobe software, you can’t edit the file, and all it serves to do is increase Firefox’s memory footprint. The trajectory they have now is the right way to go, focusing on improving speed and memory usage.
IE8 is basically Microsoft’s attempt to catch up to Firefox, not surpass it. They were excited just to see that it meet web standards – Firefox has been rendering pages correctly for years.
About the developer edition, Mozilla has already done similar things such as the Campus Edition: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/add-ons/campus/ – most developers are smart enough to download the plug-ins anyways. It’s just a matter of 3 or 4 searches, not really a big deal.
BUT WHAT’S THIS? IE8 CAN LET YOU LOOK UP MAPS FROM A WEBPAGE? Perfect for stalking others, maybe. Have fun with that.
Monday, 17. March 2008
Josh-
“How much time passes between each major version of Firefox – a year?”
This works against you, not for you. Just because Mozilla calls something version 2 or version 3 doesn’t imply that it has huge improvements (or is the equivalent of what that kind of nomenclature means for the rest of the software industry). So how “fast” they are with version releases doesn’t support their case if not much changes. It’s more misleading than anything.
“most users could care less about saving to a pdf file… all it serves to do is increase Firefox’s memory footprint.”
PDF is used extensively everywhere in academia and business. I really think the burden of proof is on your shoulders to show how exactly “most users could care less.” And as for the memory footprint, I’ll just quote the bolded section from the article above:
“The code is all there except for a user interface to expose the functionality to the user!”
I think the memory footprint would be extremely minimal at worst. By the way, I’ve been using Firefox for years now and don’t do much in IE.
Monday, 17. March 2008
I dont really use Firefox now and probably never really will make it my default browser, but my reasons are pretty stupid. It’s not that I don’t know how to use it or find it difficult, I just prefer the way IE handles basically everything to the way Firefox does it. As you mentioned Bob, the extensions get kinda rediculous…just include some of the basic features in the release!
Tuesday, 18. March 2008
@Josh
“Maybe you’re not a fanboy, but you sure are acting it.” I love the internet today, where if you express a negative view on anything (even stuff you use personally everyday) you are labeled a fan boy.
I am actually tweaked at some of the GUI changes they have made. They made the download manager have better functionality, but completely ruined the UI. FF2 had a decent UI but the some functionality (pause/resume) didn’t work. Now in FF3 all of the functionality works great but the UI looks like an alpha-level placeholder. Have you even tried FF3?
And explain to me again how extensions being broken by Mozilla (by releasing a new Firefox) every year is a good thing? I would never want to develop a FF extension just because I’d have to redo/fix it every year. It is a terrible platform as far as stability is concerned.
Would you really consider the ability to save to PDF (in addition to HTML) bloat? Especially when the code is already there. How many times do you order some thing or go to some other web page that tells you to “print this for your records”? I have a PDF printer installed just so I can print those to PDF and save some paper. It’d be really nice to just save to PDF, like Word and OpenOffice can.
“The trajectory they have now is the right way to go, focusing on improving speed and memory usage.” So you are basically saying it is ok for them to just improve speed and memory usage and not do anything else? Is there really nowhere left to improve the browser? No. And again, why should the memory reductions and speed improvements break all of the extensions? Because that is basically what FF3 has done; better speed/memory, broken extensions.
Again, Netscape just sat on their browser making trivial improvements and Microsoft wiped the floor with them. You can say what you will about Microsoft, but they can be damn strong competitors. If Mozilla wants to stay above 10% market share they are going to have to bring their “A game” every release, and I don’t think they are.