Posts Tagged “Firefox”
After reading a short Tech Crunch Story about Chrome vs. Firefox market share I found myself thinking, who cares about this? For years there has been a push by developers and supports of open standard pushing Firefox over Internet Explorer, mainly because Microsoft was trying to control the web via their own standards by not supporting Open Standards and pushing their own versions of HTML, Javascript, etc. Personally I think the more browsers there are the better, just as long as they all support the standards.
That is why proposed “battle” between Firefox and Chrome that TechCrunch is pushing does not really exist. They are both excellent browsers and both support the Open Web-standards. So does it really matter to anyone beside Google and the Mozilla Foundation which browser has a larger market share? I don’t think so.
For me this is the future of computing, a completely open set of standards and technologies that make the type of computer, phone, web browsers, tablet you are using irrelevant. They all talk to each other and work.
Well it’s been a few weeks now since I starting using Firefox for everyday browsing and I have to say it is currently unusable for multimedia web use. Here are a few of the things I have noticed in my time using it.
Well it did not take long to find a problem with XMarks. 
I installed XMarks on my main computer running Firefox 3.5 with no issues. It seems that XMarks offers to sync passwords too, which I did not do. I then spent thirty minutes cleaning up all my bookmarks and synced with the server.
Then I jumped to my Mac and installed the plug-in in Firefox for Mac, logged into XMarks and synced the book marks up. Everything worked great… then I went to Safari.
After downloading the installer, which I did not like right off the bat, and installing the plug-in I was forced to logout and back in (essentially a reboot) then Safari refused to load complaining about a plug-in framework that failed to load. XMarks still worked, and synced the bookmarks, but I could not browse anything without Safari locking up.
I also hated the fact that XMarks installed a system icon in my system tray (sorry forgot the Mac term for the system tray) a browser plug-in should not require a permanently running app in the background.
Also, the fact that the actual plug-in did not even work in Safari is a problem. So I un-installed it immediately.
I am still happy with it for Firefox, but I think they might have been premature in removing the “Fox” part of their name. Because they are obviously still mainly a Firefox application.
It seems that Safari’s plug-in architecture might be to blame too, I just hope that the Chrome version is alot better when it’s release.
Now that I have a laptop (finally!) it has suddenly become important to me to sync my bookmarks across several browsers. So I started looking into solutions for this.
Foxmarks was the first product that jumped to mind. I had read about that add-on for Firefox a long time ago, but never had a need for it. After looking it up I saw that they have now re-branded to XMarks, this is due to the fact that they are trying to support several different browsers now. So obviously they want to move away from the Firefox centric branding.
After using Chrome for just a few weeks I have already become accustom to the great address bar functionality it provides. With just one address bar where you can type addresses, searches, without thinking about it is a great thing. Now I am using Firefox 3.5 again I started searching for ways to duplicate the functionality and found something a little disturbing.
It seems that Google has already patented that functionality, and I am not sure how I feel about that.
First I hate patents on basic
Recently I pretty much switched to Google Chrome as my browser of choice on my Windows machine. The feature I liked the most was the speed by far. I use GMail alot now and JavaScript performance is important. Firefox 3 was lagging behind quite a bit by being perceivably slower than Chrome at loading and working with Javascript heavy sites. Thankfully Firefox 3.5 (in particular TraceMonkey) takes a big step in closing the gap.
Firefox 3.5 still does not seem quite as fast too me as Chrome, but it is much much faster than 3.1 was. It’s so much faster that I can now live with it again. I am even willing to give up some of the features I loved about Chrome like the unified URL bar, and the threaded tabs to get access to some of the extensions in Firefox.
As I recently posted I bought a Macbook Pro, and have been using Firefox as the main browser in OS X. So now using extentions like XMarks or the in development Weave Project to keep all my bookmarks and links together.
Firefox 3.5 so far seems like a good upgrade and has once again taken the thrown of default browser on both my systems. Hopefully this fierce competition will continue, and leave IE even further in their dust.
I have been using Firefox forever, but I just decided to give Google Chrome a real shot to see how I like it. And my first impression of it is the awesome speed. All the PR about the speed of Chrome seems to be true in my limited subjective experience with it. Just browsing all my normal websites I see a noticeable display time improvement. JavaScript heavy pages (i.e. Gmail) in particular load very quickly. Even graphic heavy pages seem to load more snappily.
The release of Chrome is just great for all of us. Now that web standards are starting to become well… standard, for all browsers except for IE, the more browsers the better. With Chrome, Opera, and Safari all focusing heavily on performance Firefox is already starting to follow suite.
Chrome is good so far, and I hope it keeps moving along.
*UPDATE 9/10/2006: After reading some more “editorials from an analytical perspective” on the Popular Tecnology I now see that they are a Microsoft advocate blog pretending to be a impartial source. I think that sites like OSNews should be a little more careful when picking thier sources.
While browsing OS News I found a link to an article claiming that IE is more secure in 2006 than Firefox. They base this statement on the fact that Firefox had more vulnerabilities found this year. This is an extremely naive way to measure the security of a certain browser to another. There are several reasons why the metric they used to measure security is useless which I will briefly go over now.
