{"id":334,"date":"2010-09-10T05:33:37","date_gmt":"2010-09-09T18:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/?p=334"},"modified":"2010-09-10T09:56:29","modified_gmt":"2010-09-09T22:56:29","slug":"reasons-not-to-worry-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2010\/09\/10\/reasons-not-to-worry-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Reasons not to worry (part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About a month ago I <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/2010\/08\/08\/reasons-not-to-worry\/\">wrote<\/a> about the negative reaction Firefox often gets on sites like Slashdot, Reddit and Metafilter, and how I found this reaction dispiriting.<\/p>\n<p>The post received lots of interesting comments.\u00a0 Interestingly, there was a huge variety of reactions:\u00a0 suggestions for improving Firefox, explanations for how Firefox had gone wrong, etc, but there was certainly nothing like a consensus of opinion.<\/p>\n<p>This got me thinking about why people would use each of the main five browsers.\u00a0 My overly short, tongue-in-cheek list looked like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Firefox: add-ons!<\/li>\n<li>Chrome: speed! (and, for the moment, new shiny!)<\/li>\n<li>IE: I&#8217;m a Windows user and I don&#8217;t know how to change my browser.<\/li>\n<li>Safari: I&#8217;m a Mac user and I don&#8217;t know how to change my browser.<\/li>\n<li>Opera: Hey, look how quirky I am!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>More seriously, on a technical level the five main browsers are converging.\u00a0 When one of them implements a new compelling feature, the others will get something similar eventually.\u00a0 Firefox introduced the awesome bar, and now all the browsers track history in a sophisticated way in the address bar.\u00a0 Chrome pushed the envelope on JS speed, but once Firefox 4.0 and IE9 are released the gap will have mostly closed.\u00a0 And so on.<\/p>\n<p>(An aside:\u00a0 Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 had bad memory behaviour, ie. lots of leaks.\u00a0 That was mostly fixed by Firefox 3.0, but the reputation has stuck, primarily through the word &#8220;bloat&#8221;.\u00a0 But &#8220;bloat&#8221; has various meanings, so any time a new feature is added to Firefox that someone thinks isn&#8217;t useful, they&#8217;ll cry &#8220;bloat!&#8221; even though that feature may not affect memory footprint at all.\u00a0 Cue Twain&#8217;s quote: &#8220;Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep until noon.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>So if you assume technical convergence (which isn&#8217;t entirely true, but it&#8217;s not so far off) then Firefox really is special, because it&#8217;s the only browser made by a non-profit organisation whose desire to create good software isn&#8217;t sullied by commercial interests.\u00a0 As a single example, consider Firefox Sync, which allows you to synchronize browser history, passwords, etc., between different machines.\u00a0 The Sync protocol is encrypted, so Mozilla can&#8217;t read it.\u00a0 Furthermore, if you don&#8217;t believe that, you can run your own Sync server.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t see Google implementing that in Chrome.\u00a0 (Indeed, although I have Chrome installed on my laptop I&#8217;ve barely used it because I&#8217;m uncomfortable wondering exactly what information it&#8217;s sending back to Google HQ.\u00a0 I already have a gmail account, they&#8217;ve got enough on me already without knowing my browsing history, thanks very much.)<\/p>\n<p>In other words:\u00a0 It&#8217;s the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mozilla.org\/about\/manifesto.en.html\">mission<\/a>, stupid!<\/p>\n<p>I was reminded of this with my favourite comment on my earlier post, from Ryan:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The add-ons are nice, sure. But to me, Mozilla is about hard working,  smart web-wonks undeterred by hairballs of code from netscape, miniscule  market share vs. Microsoft or really, reality in general. That\u2019s  awesome \u2013 and worth celebrating.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In a similar vein, Phil Ringnalda on IRC pointed me at <a href=\"http:\/\/rasterweb.net\/raster\/2010\/08\/10\/here-let-me-fix-that-for-you\/\">a blog post<\/a> that ended with this quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>I believe in keeping the web free and open<\/strong>. <strong>I believe in building a better Internet, and helping people take control.<\/strong> These ideas align with those of Mozilla,  btw\u2026 and it\u2019s one more reason I\u2019m sticking with Firefox as my browser  (and Mozilla) instead of abandoning it for Chrome or Safari, or another  browser created by a for-profit company interested in controlling my  browsing experience. Mozilla was there for us, they saved us from the  big bad IE Monster, and helped keep the web open and free, and they\u2019re  still doing that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Words to live by!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a month ago I wrote about the negative reaction Firefox often gets on sites like Slashdot, Reddit and Metafilter, and how I found this reaction dispiriting. The post received lots of interesting comments.\u00a0 Interestingly, there was a huge variety of reactions:\u00a0 suggestions for improving Firefox, explanations for how Firefox had gone wrong, etc, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/nnethercote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}