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Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages
Gervase Markham has put up a
brief posting on Mozilla's advantages as he sees them, and on how those
advantages could be better used. "I'm sure a large proportion of
Chrome users are ex-Firefox users. In the time before Chrome, when we were
the new shiny, we missed an opportunity to educate them about why Mozilla
is different, why the open web is important, and why having the coolest,
fastest, slickest browser around is a great thing but it's not the most
important thing. So when something they perceived as cooler, faster and
slicker came long, they left us for precisely the same reason they
arrived. We didn't tell them why they should stay."
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Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 17, 2011 19:15 UTC (Sun) by colo (subscriber, #45564) [Link]
From the short abstract above, that sounds an awful lot like the merits of Free Software vs. those of Open Source debate...
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 17, 2011 19:46 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
Not even that, just whining why Firefox cannot compete with Chrome.
And that Google is eeeeevil in the undertones.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 17, 2011 21:16 UTC (Sun) by tobiasu (subscriber, #72521) [Link]
Your two comments make it sound like the article is crap.
I'm not going to reiterate its points here, but I think it's a valid if somewhat short criticism of the direction Mozilla is headed. And worth the short read.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 18, 2011 7:55 UTC (Mon) by colo (subscriber, #45564) [Link]
It wasn't my intention to affront the author with what I posted, in fact, I do agree with what he says in the article. It's both kinda sad and funny though how Mozilla's Firefox marketing campaign (to me) seemed to focus on the technical merits of the product alone, and left out the (again, to me) more important facets of what Free Software and a community gathering around it is about. Now, with another sound and "open" product competing with Firefox (on technical quality alone), this seems to be biting back.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 17, 2011 21:00 UTC (Sun) by simosx (subscriber, #24338) [Link]
The stats show that the Firefox market only lost a tiny bit to Chrome.
Most of the Chrome market share came from IE.
See http://gs.statcounter.com/
I would say that there are many XP computers around, with not much browser upgrade options, that when they try to access the ubiquitous Google services, they are advised to install Chrome.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 17, 2011 23:51 UTC (Sun) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]
You meant Microsoft, I presume.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 18, 2011 10:53 UTC (Mon) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]
I think he did yes, but google aggressively pushes chrome to IE users when they visit google.com.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 19, 2011 3:45 UTC (Tue) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] To add to this discussion, Mozilla is pushing contemporary releases of Firefox to Windows XP users since the latest IE versions won't run on WinXP. I can only imagine Google might be doing the same with Chrome. This isn't to say that Mozilla and Google aren't pitching their respective browsers to Vista or Win7 users; I'm sure they are.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 21, 2011 13:03 UTC (Thu) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]
You cannot read that from the statistics. Surely you are not implying that most IE users nowadays go directly to chrome, and only a few go from Firefox to Chrome.
It makes a lot more sense that from ex-IE users, one part starts using Firefox, another part moves to Chrome. And you also have new users starting with Firefox and Chrome rather than IE. But Chrome has overall the most traction between ex-Firefox users, ex-IE users and new users.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 18, 2011 1:28 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
It is true that Mozilla has a lot more community contributors than Chrome, at least right now. But WebKit, which Chrome is based on, seems to have the healthier developer ecosystem overall. WebKit is getting used by Safari, Android, Midori, and lots of other applications. Meanwhile the Firefox developers have announced that they are no longer going to support embedding Gecko into other software.
I feel like Firefox made a mistake in leaving behind the users of old-style Firefox extensions. It's true that the old extension framework was vulnerable to malicious extensions. It's also true that the old extension framework was clunkier than the shiny new Javascript-based ones that Chrome and Firefox both now have. But it provided functionality that you just can't get any other way, like NoScript or AdBlock.
I might get flamed for this, but I have to ask: would we as a community be better off channeling our developer resources into something like an open-source Adobe Flash runtime than into maintaining Firefox? Chromium (Chrome without the proprietary parts) is just as open source as Firefox, and demonstrably more secure.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 18, 2011 6:30 UTC (Mon) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
My NoScript & Adblock Plus & WoT are working already in 7.0a2.
The issue about extensions is likely to fade, once ppl are used to the new versioning.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 18, 2011 18:53 UTC (Mon) by ghutchis (guest, #76995) [Link]
IMHO, it seems like a much better effort to push people to adopt HTML5 and other open platforms than to reproduce closed-source Flash. Both Firefox and Chrome (and many other open source browsers) are leaders in modern web technologies.
So no, the best thing is to push websites away from Flash, not reproducing a buggy, CPU-hog.
Are you really sure? Posted Jul 18, 2011 20:13 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] So no, the best thing is to push websites away from Flash, not reproducing a buggy, CPU-hog. Are you sure it's even wise? Flash has it's bugs, but they are not all that common and as for CPU-hog... this is totally unjustified crap: typical HTML5 site requires more resources then equivalent Flash, not less. The only reason Flash is perceived as CPU-hog is because Flash designers don't even think about CPU usage... but will anything really change if you force them to use SVG? At least you can disable Flash relatively safely. If all these 200% CPU-using dancing ads will be written in pure HTML... it'll be much harder to block them...
I'm sure Posted Jul 19, 2011 11:46 UTC (Tue) by jjs (guest, #10315) [Link]
1. HTML5 is a standard. Flash is a proprietary system.
2. I've never seen Flash used well in a website. Normally it's either to present eye-boggling, CPU hogging eye-candy that I block as soon as I can, or to create an entire website that could be done in bog-standard HTML in proprietary language "because they can".
Also, what evidence HTML5 will be a bigger CPU hog than Flash?
I'm sure Posted Jul 19, 2011 12:20 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] HTML5 is a standard. Flash is a proprietary system. HTML5 isn't a standard, at least not in the sense that, say, HTML4 is a standard. It may eventually become one in 2014 or so if the people in charge of writing down what the browser programmers consider cool enough to implement don't find better things to do with their time. Which is not to say that HTML5 as something that is, in principle, vendor-independent even if it isn't an actual standard is not a lot better already than something like Flash, which depends on a single vendor.
I'm sure Posted Jul 19, 2011 13:20 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> Also, what evidence HTML5 will be a bigger CPU hog than Flash?
chrome.angrybirds.com. HTML5, and a *huge* time hog.
I'm sure Posted Jul 19, 2011 18:50 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I've never seen Flash used well in a website. Normally it's either to present eye-boggling, CPU hogging eye-candy that I block as soon as I can, or to create an entire website that could be done in bog-standard HTML in proprietary language "because they can". Come on. There are lots of sites where Flash is used sensibly (things like Google Finance where Flash is used to show dynamic graphs). Or even GMail (where Flash is used for videochat). Sure, most of the CPU-hogging crap is using Flash, but you can create CPU hogs in HTML5 just as easily. Also, what evidence HTML5 will be a bigger CPU hog than Flash? I never said HTML5 will be bigger CPU hog. It'll be more-or-less the same CPU hog. If you ask browser to scale 10000x10000 picture "to make animation really smooth" you'll have a CPU hog no matter what technology you'll use. The perception "if we'll just replace Flash with HTML5 we'll immediately have much faster and more responsive site" is just wrong: Flash is pretty damn effective technology... if used correctly. Proprietary, yes, but effective. Switch to HTML5 may help WRT openness (never said it'll not help), but CPU hogs? No, Flash is not to blame, sorry.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 19, 2011 2:00 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> It is true that Mozilla has a lot more community contributors than Chrome, at least right now. But WebKit, which Chrome is based on, seems to have the healthier developer ecosystem overall. WebKit is getting used by Safari, Android, Midori, and lots of other applications.
WebKit is 'larger' in some senses yes, but whether it is 'healthier' is a tough question.
For one thing, the main WebKit contributions currently come from Apple and Google - WebKit is used in other places, but little code flows back. For another, the structure of WebKit is more complex - for example on mobile, there are many 'WebKit' browsers, and they are not all compatible. Mozilla on the other hand has a more centralized and focused process, even with the community around it. There are benefits and detriments to both approaches, and it isn't clear which is 'healthier'.
> I might get flamed for this, but I have to ask: would we as a community be better off channeling our developer resources into something like an open-source Adobe Flash runtime than into maintaining Firefox? Chromium (Chrome without the proprietary parts) is just as open source as Firefox, and demonstrably more secure.
Chrome has some technology that offers, in theory, better security. But actual comparisons don't show it as being more or less vulnerable than Firefox (whereas both are better than IE and Safari). So not sure what you mean by the last comment there.
Regarding Flash - no, I don't think that the open source community should write an open source Flash. We shouldn't enable Flash in any way. Instead, we should push HTML5 forward so it replaces Flash quicker.
It is a **good** thing that we have more than one open source browser. As mentioned above, there are big differences between the development processes of the two, and many other significant differences as well. Having both benefits everyone.
Final comment on what you said there, Chromium might be open source, but it isn't developed as openly as Firefox (or the Linux kernel for example). Furthermore, 99% of people using one of Chromium and Chrome use Chrome, and Chrome has significant non-FOSS elements (even bundling Flash), which worries me.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 19, 2011 7:00 UTC (Tue) by scarybeasts (subscriber, #39890) [Link]
Are you sure Firefox has better security than, say, IE9? Remember that Firefox still doesn't have a good sandbox story and this is a really big deal in the modern browser security landscape. IE has a mediocre sandbox, and this is a lot better than none.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 19, 2011 18:29 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
IE9 does have a better sandbox than Firefox, but security is a lot more than that - it's code quality, how fast you patch vulnerabilities, proactive testing (like fuzzing), etc.
In actual measurements, Firefox and Chrome tend to come out on top these days, with IE and Safari lower down.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 18, 2011 6:37 UTC (Mon) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
Seems like ppl above comment without even reading a short article!
Any agenda is actually in the "Goodwill" section and it's about churn fears, due to rapid release cycle. The way FF updates on Windows, a 6 weekly update is not more disruptive than the regular security patch releases to fix vulnerabilities in the 3 series.
The new UI introduced in 4, did take a day or 2 to get, but it is better. However as KDE4, GNOME3 & Unity projects have recently showing, grand UI chaanges (especially "modernising") are contraversial. Many computer users are basically "stuckists", they know what to expect and it's what they have had and everything else is by definition wrong.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 18, 2011 9:04 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
He's right that Mozilla should care more about its users, but wrong that an appreciation of the ideology will lead to a greater marketshare. I know huge numbers of Linux users, who would never have used Windows, who happily switched to Mac OS X soon after it appeared. Most people just want a system that works. The ones who care about the ideology will always be fewer than 5%. Firefox grew to challenge IE because it offered a superior product. It is now losing to Chrome because it is not the superior product.
(I'm posting this from Google Chrome, on Linux. I still have Firefox, but Chrome just feels better to me: not just the speed, but the overall experience.)
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 19, 2011 1:06 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Replying to myself: I think what we need, more than free software, is open standards and compliance to those standards. So far this has been a byproduct of free software, not an explicit goal (the GNU project tends to be dismissive of standards like Posix).
Chrome (and even Opera) fares better than Firefox on most recent tests, starting from acid3. That's important for web developers, and eventually for everyone.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 19, 2011 3:32 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> Chrome (and even Opera) fares better than Firefox on most recent tests, starting from acid3.
Not really. The only reason Firefox doesn't get 100 on Acid3 is that it doesn't support some deprecated font stuff. In other words, the problem is in the test. Here is a more complete summary:
http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/
Bottom line, Mozilla could implement those deprecated things just to get 100 on Acid3 and look better, but introducing vulnerabilities just for the sake of marketing is a bad idea, so it is a good choice not to.
Overall on support for recent features, Chrome and Firefox are about neck-to-neck. Opera is not bad, but still missing WebGL for one thing. Safari is also lagging, in great part due to its slow release schedule (Lion will probably bring us a modern Safari, at long last).
standards conformance Posted Jul 19, 2011 8:48 UTC (Tue) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]
If you want a measure of conformance to web standards, as distinct from draft proposals, then a better measure would be conformance to the CSS 2.1 test suite. By that measure, Gecko is beating both Opera and WebKit.
It is a bit premature to look at numbers given that CSS 2.1 has only just reached Recommendation status (and even then only by cutting corners in ways that are responsible for some of the red in the following linked table), but the most recent official numbers are http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/20110323/reports/..., and I'm told that Gecko and IE9 are now both doing pretty well against the test suite.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 18, 2011 11:47 UTC (Mon) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link]
If people with level heads, a firm grasp of the ideals behind Mozilla, and real programming experience like gerv were driving the decision making rather than loose cannon self-proclaimed evangelists like Ass Dotzler, both Firefox and the platform as a whole would be in a much better position.
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 18, 2011 14:26 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
I don't see how switching from Firefox to Chrome can really be framed as not appreciating free software. In both cases you have a free browser which is then packaged up and branded and distributed, for Windows at least, as a binary installer. (The underlying free browser for Chrome is called Chromium; the underlying free browser for Firefox doesn't really have a name, but you are not allowed to call it Firefox and still keep the freedom to modify and distribute.)
OK, so Chrome contains a little bit more proprietary stuff bundled in, but essentially it's a convenient way to get Chromium as a pre-built binary.
And why exactly does Firefox have a monopoly on 'the ideals of the open web' and all that blather?
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 18, 2011 15:57 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
I have to agree. Community, ideals and goodwill are nice and well, but they cannot replace a technically good browser. The day that Mozilla needs to resort to that instead of trying to be the technically best option, they will be doomed. Fortunately they seem to be going in the right direction instead, and making Firefox faster and better with each release.
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 18, 2011 18:14 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] Chrome is also not developed in as open an environment as Mozilla is. Although it's not one of FSF's four software freedoms, I think the ability to become an equal contributor to a project is an important part of having a real Free Software community. The big, commercially created software where the company that started them tries to maintain long-term control over the project will never be as free as ones that are genuinely controlled by the community. Mozilla is admittedly not the best example of a true community project, but it's still miles better than Chrome.
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 18, 2011 23:44 UTC (Mon) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
> And why exactly does Firefox have a monopoly on 'the ideals of the open web' and all that blather?
Err, because they're a public-interest charity foundation whose purpose is to keep the web open, in the same way that the NRA's purpose is to get rid of gun control laws, the ACLU's purpose is to maximize civil liberties, and Google and Facebook's purposes are to convince people to give them personal information so they can sell more ads?
(I *use* Google, and even Gmail, but that doesn't mean I think it's a charity that will choose to serve the public interest at the expense of shareholder profit!)
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 19, 2011 1:47 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> I don't see how switching from Firefox to Chrome can really be framed as not appreciating free software. [..] OK, so Chrome contains a little bit more proprietary stuff bundled in, but essentially it's a convenient way to get Chromium as a pre-built binary.
I think there are a lot more issues than that here, and that Chrome is in fact less open than Firefox.
First of all, Chrome contains an **unknown** amount of proprietary code. That's precisely the case with closed-source products, we can't look to see how much is added. Firefox, on the other hand, even when it ships as a convenient binary, is not closed in any way - you can get the entire source to every single part of Firefox, as well as the build scripts and so forth. If you build that, you get exactly what the binary Firefox download is.
Second, of the closed stuff we **do** know about in Chrome, there are some significant bits. For example, Chromium lacks functional print preview. Chrome, on the other hand, does have that feature.
Third, Chrome bundles closed-source code that is not just closed-source, but bad for open source in other ways. I mean Flash, which is the single biggest obstacle to a web browsable entirely by FOSS tools. In bundling Flash, Chrome enables and promotes it.
Fourth, Firefox is developed in the open, while Chromium is only partially so. For example, significant code drops happen into Chromium (concrete example: crankshaft), which is opposed to community development. FOSS isn't just that the code is open right now, it's also that it is developed openly.
As a FOSS supporter, I greatly prefer that people use Chrome over IE, Safari or Opera. Chrome is much more open than them. But Firefox, in turn, is more aligned with the ideals of free software than Chrome.
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 19, 2011 8:20 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]
> I think there are a lot more issues than that here, and that Chrome is in fact less open than Firefox.
I think everyone agrees that Chrome is less open than Firefox. What about Chromium?
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 19, 2011 14:45 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
Chromium is less free than Firefox due to the last reason I posted, that it is not developed in as open and transparent a way as Firefox.
Another concern with Chromium is that hardly anyone uses it - people that would be interested in Chromium almost always end up using Chrome, which is very much not open for the reasons mentioned before.
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 19, 2011 13:29 UTC (Tue) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> Second, of the closed stuff we **do** know about in Chrome, there are some significant bits. For example, Chromium lacks functional print preview. Chrome, on the other hand, does have that feature.
What? Print Preview isn't part of the OS printing subsystem yet? That is totally not something that app developers should have to make themselves. Sheesh, what are the OS builders doing?
Chrome not equally free? Posted Jul 19, 2011 15:49 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] We used to have it in KDE 3.5 but then the KDE developers took it away in the name of innovation.
Markham: Mozilla's competitive advantages Posted Jul 21, 2011 19:23 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
Last time I checked, Chrome was unusable for me due to not having anything as good as AdBlock easily available, as well as ignoring screen DPI settings.
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