Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Firefox leading the way ... Haha :)

While I have to admit that Firefox is having a great impact on the browser world, I personally think that the crowds doing them are no different than the crowd during the concurrence... For example, look at this:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/22/0012210

Christopher Blizzard, Firefox evangelist: "... they would not have done it, if we would have not built Firefox. And the same is true for Apple, they are doing a lot to keep up with us."

A couple of random facts to keep things on the ground:
  • Opera 9.51 does 83 out of 100 on the Acid3 web compatibility test. Safari 3.1 does 75. Firefox 3.01 does 71. (All of them are the latest production versions today.)
  • Example: on Picasaweb, Opera actually works (even though the site claims it is not actually not tested) whereas Firefox 3 does not (even though Picasaweb says it's supported).
  • Example: Firefox is lagging behind in mobile. There are successful mobile browser products based on WebKit, Opera and IE deployed on millions of devices. Where's Firefox?
Firefox 3 is important. It is a great step forward, uses less memory etc. But they have to admit that their goodwill advantage is much more important than their technical one. And if they do not innovate on their own, they may be hit from unexpected directions.

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