Top Click Media Staff Blog » Firefox

Can Firefox stay relevant? (Part 1)

Matt Thomas — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:00:40 +0000

The fact is that Google simply have too much money and cache to fail, unless the browser is awful. Unfortunately for Firefox, it isn’t. Early tests of Chrome have found it to be efficient and secure even if it is not quite as customisable as Firefox… At least not yet.

And that’s just the thing, Google have the power to pour money into Chrome until it works, a privilege that Firefox definitely do not have. Just as important as the ability and resources, is the will and Google have proved time and again that they have that in spades, they routinely pour millions of dollars into projects that have no concrete monetisation plan. They do so in the hope, very often the justified hope, that these projects will bear fruit eventually. Chrome is essentially one of these.

So should Firefox just pack up and go home? Well, not necessarily, recent reports have told us that Chrome’s already weak market share has dwindled as the novelty wore off for the web professionals who signed up as soon as the new browser became available.

All this does is buy Firefox time however, Chrome will almost certainly bounce back once the browser is promoted and optimised properly.
Firefox’s survival hangs on their latest browser update, the latest beta of which is out now.

Can Firefox stay relevant? (Part 1) For years now Firefox has been the web geek’s browser...
What does the future hold for Firefox? Google Chrome has been performing well so far; it got...
Chrome in last place. Well, apart from Netscape Anyone looking for a reason why Google are considering offering...

Second Beta of Firefox 3.1 available now

Jay Smith — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:02:06 +0000

The second beta version of Firefox 3.1 is available for download. The browser was made available to Windows, Linux and Mac OS users, in over fifty different languages, late yesterday.

The new version includes a private browsing function that, when turned on, means that the browser keeps no record of sites visited. If you forget to turn on private browsing, you can still remove a specific website and all traces of it from the history. Both features are useful for shared computer users who, for whatever reason, don’t want other users to view their history.

The original beta version offered small preview windows before switching between tabs, like on the Opera browser. These have been removed thanks to numerous complaints about them, though there is now a cool feature that allows you to transport tabs from one window of Firefox to another.

Overall the browser is just generally better; its Acid3 web standards score is now 93 out of 100, which is very respectable indeed.

There are a load more improvements on the last version that I’ve not got space to mention here, so I wholeheartedly encourage you to download it and play around though remember it’s still only a beta version. I’d use a released version for any important work.

What does the future hold for Firefox? Google Chrome has been performing well so far; it got...
Security and ease of use: the twin Watchwords of IE8 (Part 1) If you were to ask Microsoft about the new version...
Can Firefox stay relevant? (Part 1) The fact is that Google simply have too much money...