Are things going slightly awry at Mozilla? The recent news that Firefox 3.6 will be delayed for an unknown period of time –maybe as long as two or three months – means that the much vaunted V4 will probably not come onto the streets until next year. The reason for the 3,6 delay is down to bug squashing and if this is the case then Mozilla is to be applauded to getting it right rather than releasing a buggy version into the wild. However, bug squashing or whatever else might be the reason seems to be more prevalent from a software that was designed to be as bug free as possible.
Furthermore, development on Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client seemed to take ages and even now the latest version doesn’t support the Lightning calendar bolt-on which seems to make you wonder if left hand and right hand are communicating! And before Christmas there was a flurry of news that the Firefox mobile browser was just days away … maybe I am being too impatient.
The news that Google’s Chrome browser has overtaken Safari – no big shock there – to take third place in the browser league cannot be filling the developers at Mozilla with joy, One of Firefox’s great strengths, its add on extensions, is no longer unique and extensions for Chrome are coming out thick and fast.
Also, one wonders about the historic bonds that Google and Mozilla shared in their joint battle against Microsoft and if the funding from Google maybe under threat, Google might like to give the impression of being The Good Guys but are we really going to believe they will continue to throw cash at Mozilla when Chrome could/will become the biggest contender to Internet Explorer and become webworld’s leading browser?
Looking at this blog’s stats Chrome is becoming more prevalent as the browser of choice and it is easy to see why. It is fast, damned fast and the new extensions are making it more flexible and powerful without threatening that speed advantage. To be fair I have never experienced a major crash and multiple tab closures with Firefox but those in the know say that Chrome is more robust in this area and such a scenario cannot happen.
And there’s a stalking dark horse. Opera, always the bridesmaid and never the bride, is making it’s presence felt. I am told that it’s new Beta 10 is faster than Chrome. I used to be a big Opera fan – hell I even committed the unheard of sin of paying for it! – but the lack of decent and usable widgets hacked me off and it got put on the shelf to gather dust. A quick visit to the Opera site reveals the widget catalogue has grown tremendously, so the question is will Firefox be able to hang on to its second place for much longer?
What is your take on what is happening in the browser sector.
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