Firefox 4, A Day Later 435
Yesterday we noted that Firefox 4 is out in the wild. Since then, the popular browser has been downloaded 6 million times, double the numbers reported for MSIE9. Now the development team is talking about a new development process and what to expect for FF 5 and 6. And unsurprisingly, naysayers proclaim that IE will survive, while Firefox will die.
Ah, ZDNET (Score:0, Insightful)
...still propping up the Microsoft Monopoly after all these years!
Re:Interesting idea (Score:0, Insightful)
Also remember to install it on public computers and at your school and make sure IE is removed from start menu and desktop.
Re:Interesting idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you proposing a trojan that silently installs FF in the background? Yeah, that's going to work out really well for the reputation of FF.
Stupid idea is stupid.
Crikes.
--
BMO
Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this guy really saying "wow, look, Firefox took forever to release a version which was just 0.5 higher, while Chrome went from 9 to 10 in four weeks."?
How the FFFFFFFFFUUUUUU- does a moron like this get hired to write a tech column?
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:4, Insightful)
He writes articles with inflammatory headlines and gets clicks. He gets it into clueless middle managers' heads that IE is better than Firefox. There are people who will pay well for both of those things.
Re:Interesting idea (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see Firefox every rising above ~30-35%, due to fragmentation of the market:
- 1/3 for mozilla
- 1/3 for microsoft
- 1/3 for google
- Plus a few percentage points for "minor" browsers like Opera and Apple safari. Oh and if Firefox ever did "die", which I doubt, I'd sooner switch to Opera's opera or Mozilla's Seamonkey then IE.
I am forced to use IE with my Dialup provider (image compression only works with IE6/7/8), and it stinks. Mostly from the lack of features.
What blog was that again? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Ed Bott's Microsoft Report" predicts that IE will survive and Firefox will die.
In other news a VCR said that VHS ain't going nowhere...
(And what's worse, the fkuc up is making arguments based on major version number delta over time. Such uncanny insight is rare!)
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:5, Insightful)
no, he; actually says "Firefox took 2 years to go from version 3.5 to version 4", whereas Microsoft managed to put out a beta and a release candidate in that time - go microsoft devs!
I suppose he completely forgot about Firefox 3.6 while he was kissing Ballmer's shiny bum, and the 12 (?) beta releases that FF put out, or the 2 release candidates.
Not that I consider a beta or a RC a proper release - they're 'toys' for the early adopters to play with, but regardless of that, you cannot be considered a serious journalist if you don't compare the same way.
Incidentally, I can say that IE9 will not get a foothold too much - we've just had an email sent out from corporate IT saying "don't install it, it breaks all our lovely enterprise apps". So I could install it, but then I wouldn't be able to fill in my timesheet (I know, the pain) so I guess I'd better do as they say and continue all my usual surfing using FF4. I know my salesman has converted to Chrome and he barely knows what the internet is so I can't say IE9's future is as cheerleader-bright as he thinks it is.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you're saying that the Google funded, closed source, web browser "Chrome" is capable of quickly catching up to the features that the free donation & ads supported Firefox took so long to develop.
Basically you're saying: more money and developers == Faster Development. Thanks for your input Mr. Obvious.
P.S. Yeah, that's right: I said, "Chrome is closed source". Chromium is open source, and Chrome may or may not be a direct derivative of the open source Chromium. Needless to say, Google adds their own proprietary bits to Chromium before they ship it as Chrome, ergo: Chrome = Close Source.
Don't get me wrong, I like Chromium [chromium.org]. Chrome is a joke -- Why anyone would want to use the closed / proprietary version (with Google's late-night secret sauce added), when there's a clean open source version available is beyond me.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I don't like this new tactic of a major version number increment every 3 months or so. I think it was helpful to think of the major version number as a really big, API-breaking change that didn't happen very often, with minor version numbers representing significant but not too major evolutions of functionality.
This new scheme means we'll have Firefox 40 by about 2020. I predict that somewhere before that, they'll either stop the major version increments, or drop the emphasis on major version number altogether and just call it 'Firefox'.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, it is worth stressing that Chrome had the advantage of no prior baggage, and the benefit of hindsight. So the architecture of Chrome was built from the ground up to resolve issues that afflicted other browsers including Firefox, and at the same time, did not have to be compatible with existing add-ons/extensions. Mozilla presumably have a tougher time resolving existing issues, whilst maintaining compatibility with a *huge* number of add-ons. If they did massively break compatibility, they'd be kissing goodbye to one of the main advantages to Firefox.
and STILL no official MSIs, or AD templates
^ this
Sometimes I'm not sure Mozilla are really helping themselves though! It strikes me that this would be relatively easy to resolve, so I'm not sure what's gone wrong with the Mozilla world domination team.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ed Bott is just a pro-Microsoft troll (usually... though he has done a few good pieces). His job is to piss people off, and generate visitor sessions for ZDNet.
Any "Microsoft App Platform" will be for Windows. Microsoft's definition of targetting code for multiple platforms means multiple versions of Windows. XP, Vista and Windows 7 32 and 64 bit etc.
Funny how their crap doesn't catch on like it used to. For example, they have resorted to forcing Silverlight on people's computers. If you want MSN Messenger, or anything in the Live Essentials suite you get Silverlight. I have yet to see any content I couldn't view for lack of having silverlight. (That doesn't mean there isn't, just that I haven't encountered it. It's really not that popular). No sane developer is going to put their money on that, and risk alienating visitors. There's a reason that Flash is the most widely used technology today and that is because there's a good chance that most all of your visitors have a Flash plugin available. It's the closest thing to multi platform there is, for media content. Flash Player Square allows pure 64 bit browsers to participate too now. .Net Framework is rubbish. Fragile, hardware intensive rubbish (They work around that now by having services that run all the time to pre-compile byte code) that produces apps chock full of GUI annoyances. Many computers need to have multiple implementations of it too. 1.1, 3.5 (which covers 2.x) and now 4.
So I think we'll be seeing Firefox survive Internet Explorer 9, or Chrome, or Opera regardless of what nonsense Ed Fucking Bott extrudes from his flabby rectum. With a more level playing field in this day and age, it will remain a viable choice.
Re:Jesus Flipping Christ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds great! Where can I download the Linux version?
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)