Silicon Shecky

A few days ago I wrote about A problem with Add-Ons and Firefox 5, along with no support anymore for Firefox 4. Now Firefox is really trying to commit suicide.

Firefox was a great browser. Yes, I say was, because it won’t last that much longer. Not with the path they have chosen at least. Focusing on the consumer market isn’t a bad thing. You will get people who will use Firefox at home when their corporations don’t allow for its use internally. Actively saying, “We don’t care about corporations,” though is akin to committing suicide.

Mozilla might not care about the corporate environment, but they do need to be aware of it. With hosted apps, and work websites becoming more and more prevalent in the world, to survive on a consumer end, you need to be. Heck, most of the web sites that people visit are done by corporations. Now with the accelerated pace of releases, and no support for the prior release, web designers will need to check more and more versions of Firefox against their websites to make sure that they aren’t broken by the changes. The amount of manpower and time will drive up the cost of web development. Sites will shut down, or the other logical solution will happen.

Sites won’t try to be compatible with Firefox anymore. They just won’t care. Chrome is passing up Firefox in usage, and Internet Explorer still has the majority of market share. Google just needs to support prior versions for a corporate environment, just like Microsoft has already started to jump at companies reminding them they won’t run into a lack of security patches. Heck, IE8 and 9 are pretty good from a security standpoint as it is.

Firefox thinks that doesn’t matter. Consumers will continue to use Firefox. No, they won’t if it doesn’t render web sites properly. The lack of foresight on Mozilla’s part is pretty amazing. First thing taught in retail and marketing is that 1 complaint, 1 problem with a client, can hurt you in a huge way, as they spread the word to avoid such an item.

Six weeks between releases is ambitious, and hurts consumers who’s plug ins and add-ons might now work with the latest version. Can new versions of the plug ins be ready in under the time it takes for the next version to come out? This is the other side of the death spiral Mozilla is putting itself into. Consumers love the plug ins. If they don’t work, what good is Firefox to them anyway?

There is still time for Mozilla to save itself. They have to support a 3 month old browser they put out. They have to show the world that they care about more than their own egos. They have to stop being the poster child for what can be wrong with open source, and get back to showing what is right with it.

Firefox 4 is out. For a browser that re-sparked the browser wars, Firefox had been falling behind lately. Can 4 bring back Firefox?

I have a tendency not to download betas of web browsers. I’m not much of a bug hunter, haven’t been able to establish myself in those communities, don’t have a ton of time for actual hard core testing, and I’m not a developer. I just like having things work, especially where web browsing is concerned. So when I heard that Firefox 4′s final release was going to be the exact same as the last Release Candidate, I decided to actually jump the gun and start using it. I figured it couldn’t be any worse than using 3.6.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser since version 2, and overall have liked it. There have always been some issues with it, such as the memory hole it has, but they were things I could mostly live with. As  Firefox 3 kept getting updated though, it was all getting worse and worse. To open my iGoogle home page, which is set up with a bunch of news widgets, would take 5 minutes. Not only that, but the whole browser would be slow and unresponsive until it fully opened.

So I finished downloading Firefox 4 and installing it, expecting the same sluggishness. Surprisingly to me, my iGoogle paged opened in under a minute, and I was all set to go to other websites in other tabs, even while the iGoogle page was loading up. This is starting to look promising.

I continued on my browsing way, going to sites I frequent such as Tech Republic, ZDNet, Krebs on Security, and many more. All rendered faster than in Firefox 3.6. I did run into an occasional site which just wouldn’t open in Firefox 4 (Buffalo Wild Wings being one), but considering that there have been a lot of changes in Firefox 4, this doesn’t surprise me.

Everything isn’t all roses though. Java rendering (I enjoy playing Text Twist) and some Flash rendering is slow and painful. The Java being the worst of them all, as it slows to a crawl with a java game on Yahoo’s website. Once loaded, it works ok, but still a bunch of issues. Also, Firefox still uses a lot of memory, and doesn’t have the best memory management in the world. I have also heard reports of people who have had issues with it upon install, although the percentage seems to be small.

Is Firefox 4 an improvement? Definitely. Is it a game changer? No. Can it fend off Google Chrome? Maybe. Personally, I’m not going to Chrome unless I have to (Google has enough info on me from Android, Gmail etc, they don’t get any more if I can help it), and I don’t care of IE, Safari, or Opera. In the end, its really about what you are comfortable with and what works. On that, Firefox 4 is a solid, fast browser.

Coming off the heels of IE, Firefox and Safari getting hacked at the recent Pwn conference this week, I have to sit back and wonder what has happened to the browsers out there. Why must they all be hunks of junk?

IE has more security holes than swiss cheese, we all know that. Even IE8 is turning into a security nightmare. Safari is, well, and apple product that is ok, but doesn’t seem to be fast enough, nor does it have great windows support. Chrome is a bland browser based off the firefox core (does Google not know how to program its own thing from scratch) that reall does not make it easy to keep track of my RSS feeds.

Then there is my beloved Firefox, which is becoming the bloated hunk of junk that it was never supposed to be. Seriously, I can open up to my iGoogle home page, and it takes forever to be able to do anything. At least IE I am able to start navigating within 30 seconds of opening the browser. Firefox takes 2 minutes minimum (yes I’ve timed it). Then there is the fact that it has a huge memory hole that just keeps sucking up memory for as long as you have it open. this is a major issue that the Firefox community needs to address, because when you have multiple programs open, and your web browser causes you to have to reboot, well, this becomes a pain for business.

I’ve tried opera, but wasn’t real impressed with it either. I don’t know, maybe I’m asking too much from a browser. Somewhat Secure, fast, and easy to use with a few nice features. Oh yeah, and you better be able to run the WOT addon.