The death of Firefox

Stay with Firefox everyone. We need an independent, community-governed browser.

I think the author undervalues the power of Google in advertising. Seriously, every time I see the Google homepage, or a google property, there's an ad for Chrome. And, even better, the ad focuses on speed. That's what drove Chrome use up primarily (IMO, of course), though I can't doubt that word of mouth also had a large impact.

Firefox still has a great chance. They've sped up their dev cycle to try to keep pace with Chrome. As soon as they finally end the ridiculous memory usage problems that persist to this day and enable silent auto-updates (auto-updates are coming soon, I think), they'll be back in the game.<p>I only recommend Chrome because it auto-updates. If one of my users starts using Chrome, I always know they'll have the latest and greatest. That's not yet the case with FF, but I'll recommend FF again as soon as the auto-updates land.

You can pry it from my cold, dead hands.<p>I continue to insist on experiencing the web the way <i>I</i> want to. Firefox -- together with its extensions -- continues to do the best job of this. (Although I have not been pleased with its GUI "Chromification".)

Now that Chrome seems to be getting a bit more bloated and Firefox seems to be tightening it's belt, things will probably begin to even out.

The problem with FireFox is that it wasn't fast enough to catch with the innovation in the browsers market. Google Chrome was getting fast and pretty good at rendering. Its minimalistic interface has also helped a lot.<p>By the time FireFox figured that out, it was already a little late. But the problem is that they approached it the wrong way. Instead of focusing on what made Google Chrome successful (simple interface, auto-updates, speed...) they even made it worse (I still find the interface not easy and friendly as chrome, multiple confusing versions, and not that fast)

Chrome is less than 4 years old. The browser world can change fast. Grab the Firefox Nightly and help test.<p><a href="http://nightly.mozilla.org/" rel="nofollow">http://nightly.mozilla.org/</a><p>In my opinion, there's no reason why you can't run both Firefox and Chrome. They're both free and they're both great.

Seeing that Statcounter shot, I was taken aback at the graph, as I recently looked at some regional data myself: the picture in Europe is vastly different. See for yourself, e.g NA[0] vs EU[1]<p>[0] <a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-monthly-201102-201202" rel="nofollow">http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-monthly-201102-201202</a><p>[1] <a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201102-201202" rel="nofollow">http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-201102-201202</a>

I use both. (Especially since Google started only allowing you to login to one gmail session at once, but I used both before that.) Currently there are about three things that keep me from using Chrome entirely, because I do think it's a better overall browser but not better for my particular use case.<p>The first is lack of the Tree Style Tabs extension (in general lack of extensions was my biggest problem with Chrome until recently; now they have NoScript and AdBlock and ctrl+shift+j is about as good as FireBug which were the deal-breakers for me before), the second is not eating up huge amounts of memory if I have 593 tabs loaded into it (which is currently what I have on this Firefox), the third is I don't like their URL box. Firefox's AwesomeBar is almost perfect, I just wish it had better coverage of my history+favorites (I'm sure there's an about:config option somewhere that tunes it).

Firefox forced me to learn how SVG works to do clipping and masking, which turned out to be pretty awesome, so I owe that to them.<p>This article was completely without any substance beyond a graph of browser share stats. That's not necessarily evidence of Firefox "dying", rather than of the market simply expanding outside of its target demographic. In any case, as a web developer, Firefox will remain a critical browser to support for the foreseeable future, and as a user, I still haven't found a better overall option to use in Windows or Linux (I've stuck with Safari in OS X mainly due to the increased performance, stability and vastly superior font rendering).

Those who are worried about the memory in FF, do you know there is an option that will not load the tabs until you click on it.<p>I have around 700 tabs open but at a time only 10 or less are loaded.<p>Tools/options/General "Don't load tabs until selected"

I don't know what it is exactly they need to do, but strategically, Firefox needs to attract browser power-users once again. Firefox is losing because most of them have already switched to Chrome. And when that happens, it's only a matter of time before the mainstream does it, too, under their recommendation.

Chrome really is orders of magnitude faster than FF. It starts up instantly compared to any other browser I've used (FF, IE, Opera)<p>If FF had the speed of chrome, I'd consider switching back. I really want to try Pentadactyl for FF, but I can't stand how slow FF is sometimes.

Things might be different but the last time I checked I could not find chrome addons that are equivalent to NoScript, RequestPolicy and AdBlock. These three addons are keeping me firmly in the firefox camp...

Just about every developer I know has Firefox on their machine, but that's just because our automated tests tend to be written for Firefox. Almost none of the teams I have been a part of use Firefox for development, and even fewer for personal browsing. Chrome's market share grab has been quite impressive.<p>My most recent experience was with a client who was locked into IE for years, made the switch to Google Apps, and subsequently discovered the speed of Chrome. Phrased as "lots of our users skipped Firefox," it sounded like Firefox was in no-man's land.

I've been using it since Firebird and tried to stick with for as long as I could on my Mac, but after trying Chrome recently, annoyed by performance issues (memory management, flash video, etc.) the difference was so big that it was impossible to justify to keep using FF. Been really happy with Chrome since. Incredibly fast browser in comparison.

The article seems to assume that a declining market share means that Firefox is going to "die" and that you should start switching. This might make sense for a company, but not that much for an open source project. Firefox could stay very healthy with a much lower market share as long as the right people are still using it (and developing it).

Chromium is open source, which Chrome is based on. I don't understand what everyone is complaining about. Chromium will always be around, so if you're paranoid about Google sneaking in some stuff into Chrome to steal your info, then use Chromium. I like Mozilla, but they haven't been able to keep up in my book.

I still use FF for daily browsing. I have Chrome installed and use it for webdev but there are some annoyances (like adblock not working very well) which keep it from being my everyday browser.<p>I anticipate problems in the future, however, when I won't have access to Flash unless I use Chrome (I'm on Linux).

I'm at the point where I keep both Chrome and FF open. Chrome for work and FF for browsing, where I find Treestyle Tabs too valuable to lose. I've pretty much given up on there being a true Chrome equivalent at this point, but I would probably switch if there was one.

Stop versioning Firefox so rapidly and people will come back. Firefox 5 - Firefox 11 in 1 year. Come on Mozilla... switch back to minor version numbers. I don't think they realize how this perception negatively effects the regular consumer.

I'd switch to Chrome because it is speedier, but Chrome doesn't provide me bookmarks tags for all of my local bookmarks. So Firefox is holding just because of that.

It still disgusts me that Internet Explorer has users at all. Even IE9 is still unbearably bad, especially from the web developer point of view. I wish the rest of the world would have realized this and ousted Microsoft from a business it has no place in.

Google decided to kill Firefox. Not by lack of financial support, but by giving their own browser radically more financial support (the homepage marketing alone is worth an astronomical sum). There was never going to be enough room in the market for four or five major browsers, each with a lot of market share - markets consolidate naturally. Once Chrome gained traction, Firefox was destined to fall down to Opera's levels.

i'm too paranoid for chrome. stay with da fox.