How and Why Chrome Is Overtaking Firefox Among Power Users
Kerim Kalamujic
still in development. User comments below the article might be a good
source of feedback for future Firefox 4 improvements.
http://lifehacker.com/5645038/how-and-why-chrome-is-overtaking-firefox-among-power-users
Alina Mierlus
Hey Kerim,
Thanks for the link! I think that this is a topic worth disseminating here.
I personally observe that, lately, in Mozilla has spent a lot of time
and energy in engaging average users (mom, dad, etc.)
This is very nice, indeed. But I think that we need to ask "Is really this the
aim of Firefox? Marketshare domination? Take the place of IE?"
I believe that we have many things to keep the interest of power users and developers
and to maintain the contributor cycle working healthily.
But too many (average) consumers campaigns and initiatives could simply mask
what Firefox is - a platform for the (open) Web, a pioneer project in
Internet Consumer Industry and a poster of Free Software movement.
Users are very important, but there are many type of users (users who just consume,
users who give feedback, users who contribute).
Firefox experienced a fast growing thanks to a certain type of users. Most of them adopted
Fx because of its security improvements, community, add-ons, etc.
There are still power users who didn't switch and don't think to switch from Firefox to
other browsers, because there is something that other browsers (despite the technological
advance) can't offer so well: freedom (as was mentioned in an article about Fx and Chrome,
in Linux Format Magazine).
Firefox brought the web to the people and changed the way users surfed the Internet.
And because of this, it offered to thousands of developers the freedom to invent/experiment
and create.
Education is another critical point to maintain the Internet healthy and public. And
Mozilla does advance in this field too. But, we need to educate educators and power
users, rather than spend too much time and energy on millions of average users. Actually,
average users usually follow power users, as we have seen in the past.
As it is written in our mission, the aim of Mozilla is to create (and maintain)
a movement, to form leaders.
Now we are experiencing a new war on the Internet, which many see it as another browser
war. But it is not really a browser war. The browser might become another application and,
in a few years, it could become old school and fill the history books of Computer Science (this
could be the worst scenario).
Now the battle's camp is how the technology (specially the network) could help
the civil society. It will determine the way we control what we consume and the way
we use technology for the public benefit.
Mozilla already started to make the difference through Drumbeat and its participation at initiatives
such as CrisisCamp.
But still, Firefox is a key here, because it is the most important tool that Mozilla can use
to show the power of mass collaboration and decision-making, the importance of user
self-determination and thus, make millions of other individuals understand what Drumbeat is and
actions as CrisisCamp.
But for that, do we really need the to focus on having as much as possible average users?
In fact, I see that Firefox is for the web what Linux is for computer systems.
We are all using Linux and benefiting from it, through the services we use every day,
through some devices we love - Amazon Kindle and Android phones (even this is a bit tricky),
through the way we see the technology now.
-Alina M.
PS: Kerim, the launch of Fx 4 could be a good opportunity to revive your "Firefox wants you!" idea as an
engagement campaign for power users.
pa...@ilovetheopenweb.org
So currently when it comes to Firefox vs Mozilla we win on "freedom"
but lose on "performance"
(but much less so with Firefox 4 in my experience)
Not sure how we will win the "performance" race but i personally think
Firefox4 should be
minimalistic and push everything that only a power user might need to a
peripheral add-on
Perhaps we could have a discussion how Mozilla could build the fastest
browser that it
could possibly make and discuss the relative merits of streamlining
firefox against buliding
a browser from the ground up.
Best, Paul
> _______________________________________________
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Paul Booker
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Email : paulb...@ilovetheopenweb.org
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pa...@ilovetheopenweb.org
Brendan Eich
On Sep 23, 2010, at 1:56 PM, pa...@ilovetheopenweb.org wrote:
> Hello ,
>
> So currently when it comes to Firefox vs Mozilla we win on "freedom" but lose on "performance"
> (but much less so with Firefox 4 in my experience)
>
> Not sure how we will win the "performance" race but i personally think Firefox4 should be
> minimalistic and push everything that only a power user might need to a peripheral add-on
>
> Perhaps we could have a discussion how Mozilla could build the fastest browser that it
> could possibly make and discuss the relative merits of streamlining firefox against buliding
> a browser from the ground up.
Google has more engineering resources (people, money, etc.) than Mozilla. This is not something where we can hope to "win", anyway. Even if we were "fastest", there'd be some other quality that we traded off in order to be fastest.
Mozilla has stronger community than Google chromium.org or webkit.org, IMHO, but this does not equate to "fastest". Anyway, redoing things from the ground up to be fastest is a risky project, something we are looking into as Research, not something to bet the farm on.
Opera used to be "fastest", and yet Firefox 1.0 launched and zoomed way beyond Opera share. Why?
Chrome speed is an advantage (so is process isolation for crashproofing) and Firefox 4 and the release after will compete well enough. But if we are only about minimalistic UI and greatest speed, we are not Mozilla -- arguably we are Chrome.
The Google founders once expressed to me their hope that we could somehow switch Firefox to use Chrome under the hood, but the technical switching cost is too high.
Beyond technical costs, there is a "values issue". Mozilla != Google. "We" are not "They". We believe the browser should be more than an almost-invisible window frame (or picture-frame) on the web page or web app. Google touted chrome as almost "not there".
Oddly, Microsoft's IE9 beta lauch used similar "browser as nearly-invisible frame" language -- perhaps not so odd when you consider both companies hope to monetize web apps and services based on user relationships and user behavioral marketing.
Mozilla's mission is about not just choice and innovation, but user sovereignty and control over data privacy as well as browser choice. We believe the browser should not be invisible. It should be your "user agent" in a strong sense. It is the software you must trust more than any particular web site in order to use the web.
The browser may fade on some user-level tasks due to "apps", but I think it will endure. It has all your data, not just cookies and logins, also your awesomebar corpus and other such data. It can sync this data (encrypted) for you so you never lose it. It can mediate (intermediate or *disintermediate*) web services. And it can grow custom UI via add-ons and in-page innovations that make the user experience better over time compared to most more-silo'ed apps.
The sync and privacy issues show that Mozilla's mission goes beyond the browser, into the cloud. So even if I'm mistaken, and apps replace the browser, there will still be a need for Mozilla and our user-first agenda. But without the browser, with only (potentially OS or device-specific) apps, it will be harder to mediate as a good "user agent".
Why should we give up all these browser-centric, mission-based differences, just for a few points on SunSpider?
We're going to win on SS anyway, sooner or later, but such "fastest" victory is temporary. Our startup time is the harder nut to crack but we will improve that too, enough so that it should not be a big issue compared to Chrome.
Let's face it: Google did the minimized-UI, super-fast-to-start browser with Chrome. However good Firefox gets by those two measures, we have to (and I believe that we will) distinguish ourselves in other, deeper ways against Google and other browser vendors, who have different missions or agendas from Mozilla's.
/be
Benoit Jacob
By the way, right after we manage to win on SS, will be a very good time, IMO, to make more prominently (blogs, etc) the points that you make here. I mean that until we win on SS, people could think that we are trying to divert attention from JS performance; but once we win on SS people should be all ears again and we might have an opportunity to nudge focus back into what you said above (privacy, control, etc).
I would also like to stress that there _is_ a nonnegligible class of "power users" who are actually serious at placing issues of privacy/control/openness above "coolness" : I'm talking about many of the linux users. So may I hint that paying a little more attention to them might actually be a more important strategical move, than what OS market share surveys might suggest. (Disclaimer -- linux person here).
Cheers,
Benoit
Robert Kaiser
> Let's face it: Google did the minimized-UI, super-fast-to-start browser with Chrome. However good Firefox gets by those two measures, we have to (and I believe that we will) distinguish ourselves in other, deeper ways against Google and other browser vendors, who have different missions or agendas from Mozilla's.
+1
Fully agreed.
I have been in the camp of those saying this for a long time - sure,
let's develop to close the gap to Chrome in terms of speed, let's adopt
some cool ideas, that's what software development is about. But let's
work on bringing across and building on our strengths: Our flexible,
really awesome platform that allows add-ons to dig into and extend any
aspect of the product, not just very small surface features. Our strong
mission of openness, choice and innovation on the Internet. And, of
course, our incredible community.
Those are the things the others have a hard time to follow us on. They
possibly could on the platform, but probably don't want to. They
possibly could with the community, but building that takes time, and we
have about 10 years of advantage there, which is an eternity in the
Internet world. And they probably will never be able to have anything
near to our mission.
Those are the points we really need to build upon, we need to market,
and we need to deliver. (And next to that, sure, let's improve
performance, and let's match features they invent next to putting up our
own inventions, but let's not make this own primary or only focus.)
Robert Kaiser
--
Note that any statements of mine - no matter how passionate - are never
meant to be offensive but very often as food for thought or possible
arguments that we as a community needs answers to. And most of the time,
I even appreciate irony and fun! :)
pa...@ilovetheopenweb.org
The latest Firefox beta loads much faster and more importantly the page
loads within the browser seem
to match Chrome page for page :-)
--
pa...@ilovetheopenweb.org
am sure
we will continue to make further improvements (as already mentioned) but
it looks
to me after some further testing that the performance differences
between the latest
version of Firefox and Chrome are barley perceptible so i would imagine that
powers users will start coming back to us very soon :-)
However i would imagine Google are getting a lot of everyday web users
downloading chrome
from their google search pages as the ".. faster way to browse the web*
- *install google
chrome" advertisement seem to suggest a faster connection to the web
not a new browser although
if there switching from Firefox 3.x it will look definitely look like
they are getting a *faster*
connection to the web :-(
Best, Paul
On 24/09/2010 09:16, Kerim Kalamujic wrote:
> I am very happy to see that I got your attention with Lifehacker's
> post and I enjoy every word of this discussion.
>
> In most browser reviews I have read lately it is said that we are the
> biggest underperformer in town. We still got useful features but we
> lack innovation. And it's innovation that helped us get so many users
> worldwide.
>
> To my mind, we should fight the "performance" war. We should be fast,
> use less memory, etc. as much as possible. But, we should remain
> leaders in innovation. That is a winning combination (again, to my
> mind). If we can almost match Chrome and Opera performance and
> constantly bring new features than it's clear which browser people
> will use.
>
> Articles like the one I posted from Lifehacker are a good source of
> user feedback. What we need to do is read every single comment and see
> what users want and provide them what they want.
Benoit Jacob
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2010/09/mozilla-cto-why-firefox-wins-o.html
Comments are very positive overall.
Benoit