Why you (probably) won’t be using Firefox a while from now

This assertion is made almost entirely without support.<p>A good counterexample to his argument is Firefox itself.<p>(edit: although I do see HTML5 as being a potential threat to firefox and open source browsers in general if h.264 becomes the dominant codec for &#60;video&#62;, but this is another matter)

I'm sorry, but the author is misinformed. His "points" are based on the common (mistaken) belief that Firefox isn't commercially backed. Firefox <i>is</i> commercially backed, just like Chrome. And he seems to think/imply Chrome isn't open source. Chrome <i>is</i> open source. Chrome development is very transparent too.<p>So this article and the points he's trying to make don't hold up.

I think Chrome and Safari have both got a long way to go until they get the right mix of usability. I just switched back from Chrome to Firefox 3.5 and it's like putting on an old pair of very comfortable shoes. Chrome and Safari are definitely "designer" browsers, while IE is still slow as buggery.<p>Firefox hits the sweet-spot for me, and just about everyone I know (not just tech-savvy folk either). So long as they keep improving the way they have, I think that plus inertia will carry Mozilla for a while to come.

Ok, I read the 'article' but I'm not sure I agree with the apparent conclusion, not for the reasons given, anyway.<p>I'm a linux user and a web developer - and I've already abandoned Firefox for everything except FireBug - after having used every version of Firefox, on several platforms, since it was called Phoenix, I just use it as a vehicle for using Firebug (and occasionally Flash) now.<p>For everything else, I've switched completely to Chromium (the open source platform which is released as Google Chrome). Even though it's currently pre-beta on linux, and doesn't really support plugins yet, it's just such a vast improvement over FF, I've already completely converted.<p>Firefox's huge memory issues - regularly sucking up 3Gb+ after a week or two of use - constant CPU usage (even when idle) general slowness and occasional instability, make it such a pain in the ass for professional web development that Chromium coming along was a massive relief. Chromium is _much_ faster than Firefox and it's process-per-tab model is genius, making transparent the direct link between tabs and RAM; it also means that it never bogs down, no matter how many tabs &#38; windows you've got going and closing a tab ends that process and free's that RAM, unlike Firefox.<p>I'm running Chromium nightlies from the Ubuntu PPA and it's coming along rapidly - they've recently made the webkit developer tools available (right click, Inspect Element), which are nearly as good a firebug, so it won't be long before I completely phase out Firefox altogether.

It does seem to be rather fashionable to slate Firefox at the moment.<p>I've tried using Chrome and Safari 4 but have gone back to Firefox (on mac). It looks fine on a mac with the GrApple themes Fission and the PDF Plugin. The addons I use are few genuinely useful (lasttab, FireGestures).<p>Safari still doesn't even remember the tabs I had open last time.<p>I'm all for competition though, I just don't think that it necessarily means that Firefox will disappear. IE still has by far the largest share of the market.

Last time I checked neither Safari, Chrome or IE ran on Linux. Opera is not in the Ubuntu repositories. Also I couldn't do without FireBug or AdBlock+. I am only qualified to speak for myself, but I expect I'll be using Firefox for a while still.

I already stopped. Firefox was just too slow after using Safari for a little bit. Now with Safari 4, it's even speedier, and the web development tools make a decent replacement for Firebug.

After upgrading to 3.5 I thought the article was going to be about how memory problems are getting worse with firefox. It was using over 1gb today!