With Chrome Ascendant, Mozilla Is a Dead Man Walking

Worse than oblivion. Never thought of that. Makes sense.

 

Because IE9 won't work on XP, right?
Your contention is that when users finally migrate to a more current OS, that they will leave Chrome and Firefox behind?
Well, I was prepared to say that I agree... that I opted for using Chrome for the very reason that you state... that I couldn't run IE9.
But then I thought about baseball (oh good, a sports analogy!), and how it sometimes happens that a star gets injured and the new kid just called up from the minor leagues is shuttled in as his replacement.
It happens now and then that the new kid is so good that the star never wins his old job back.
The page gets turned, and things don't automatically return to how they once were.
I'm getting lots and lots of time to use, enjoy and appreciate Chrome.
Time will tell, of course.

 

Well, your sports analogy certainly works better than the evidently very popular car one I should clarify that I don't mean that Chrome and FF will get dumped once people move to 7. I only mean that for those on XP, those two are obvious choices, and, being that they will work on XP is some of the reason for, say, Chrome's growth spurt. You're right, time is going to tell. But I get tired of these threads that keep cropping up about such and such "dying" and other nonsense. Then again, I've never gotten the Chrome love affair anyway. Good browser? Yes, when it works properly. Gods' gift to web browsing? Not even close. The only thing they've brought to the table after the, admittedly, beautiful sandbox model, is speed. Nothing else, and that speed is dependent on a lot of things.

 

I do agree with you that the ongoing use of XP is in part responsible for the rapid growth of Chrome.
It is 100% responsible in my case (ha ha, in my case, pun not intended).

 

Yeah, somewhere past oblivion, my guess ... Milton Keynes?

 

And some parts of New Jersey, but we digress.
My own opinion is that Firefox will be around for a long time.
And for the people who use it and love it, I hope that's correct.

 

"Resistance is futile"

Electrolysis is the sandbox right? I'm waiting for Firefox 64 bit, I bet that will be the *dog's bollocks!

I think that Chrome's simplicity & lack of apparent complication is both its attraction & its Achilles heel.

*British dialect expression similar to saying something akin to 'the bee's knees'.

 

Well, if Netscape Communicator can survive in the guise of SeaMonkey this long, I'm sure Firefox is going to survive. I often wonder if the dramatic rise of Chrome is due to the way it is pushed & marketed. I have elderly relatives who are using Chrome as their default browser on Windows & have no idea how they acquired it. Obviously they have accidentally installed it with some upgrade/update like flash, I should imagine. They just thought it appeared like magic. Mind you, I think some of them still think that about TV or the 'wireless' (old term for a radio set). Ooh look ... magic pictures LOL.

I don't know if it is my natural British cynicism, but I am becoming increasingly worried about Google, its policies & its marketing tactics. I am also beginning to believe a lot of the attacks on SRWare Iron are to do with SRWare's criticism of Google & its motives. This was even raised in the German parliament.

Why can't you easily completely uninstall Chrome from your computer for instance?

 

Its entire explanation rests on the fact that Firefox has had a large chunk of market share. It's entirely irrelevant if Firefox doesn't maintain that market share. The reason Google wants Firefox to use Google search is because that adds 20% of the market to Google by default. That's worth the 100mill. But if suddenly it's only 10% or 5% of the market do you seriously think the situation will be looked at the same way?

No, Firefox won't hit 10% even at its current trend for about a year. Chances are something will either cause that rate to increase or decrease.

Electrolysis has been put on hold indefinitely. Firefox is working on other projects that will hopefully help out.

 

Baseball is the game invented in England that's like rounders right?

"The game originates in England and has been played there since Tudor Times, with the earliest reference being in 1744 in "A Little Pretty Pocketbook" where it is called Baseball. It is a striking and fielding team game, which involves hitting a small, hard, leather cased ball with a round wooden or metal bat and then running around 4 bases in order to score." ~ Wiki

The Morris Marina is a bit of a British in-joke.

I agree, plus its overall simplicity is quite attractive I should imagine. As for speed, Fx 8 seems every bit as fast to me, on both of my computers.

 

That's quite common in the Norwegian Blue, or am I thinking of Opera?

 

The article isn't some Chrome fanboy BS. It's pointing out a legitimate danger. If any company has 86% of its revenue coming from a single source and that source pulls out because it's no longer profitable the company is in serious trouble.

This has nothing to do with "Oh one browser is better than the other" no one is saying that. It's all about market share - the fact is that Chrome share is rising and Firefox is falling. This has been true for a year and Firefox had been rocky (bouncing) for the last two.

If Google does pull out 86% of the revenue... yeah... Firefox is going to have a really hard time competing on a budget.

 

Dude, you are in serious denial.

Ostensibly maybe not, but dw426's quite correct, it is just subtextual instead of 'flaming obvious'.

Chrome is having a good spike upwards, but Fx's fall just isn't as catastrophic as you seem to think. The figures on this thread just don't seem to indicate this.

Firefox is still used enough & has a significant market share for someone to invest in it. Bing is not the only alternative search engine.

 

At Firefox's current rate it is not "catastrophic" this article isn't saying "omg if it keeps losing .5 a year it's gonna be really low" it's saying "If Google pulls out Firefox is losing a lot of money."

Yes, duh. The entire point of the article is that its market share is dropping and whereas before Google relied on Firefox for a large portion of its searches that is not going to be the case if it continues to drop.

For a while it was just Firefox and IE. Google had a lot of reliance on Firefox. After Chrome they still relied on Firefox. Now Chrome has surpassed the Firefox market share and while they still get a large number of searches from Firefox they don't rely on it nearly as much as they used to. And as Firefox and Chrome continue their trends Google will rely less and less on Firefox to get searches done.

And that definitely is catastrophic for Firefox. Because you can bet that if Google drops them no other search engine is going to support them in nearly the same way because it won't be worth that 100mill for Microsoft to invest in Firefox and it won't be worth it to Google.

This is not an article about which browser is better. It's pointing out that if they lose 86% of revenue, as with any company they're gonna be screwed.

 

I mean at this point they're making as much money from Chrome as they are from Firefox - or disregarding other variables they should be getting similar search numbers from both because they have almost identical market shares. At this point Google doesn't need Firefox because they're making that money on their own. Throwing that 100mill at Chrome for new devs and servers would probably give them more profit than keeping it in their competitor. They just aren't going to pull out because MS might swoop in while Firefox still has its fair amount of market share. But if Firefox continues to drop it won't be worth it to Microsoft nor Google to invest in it.

 

Hmmm ... but earlier ~

Then ~

Yes, duh. The entire point of the article seems to be a little bit of FUD if you ask me. Firefox's drop is just not that spectacular.

There are others, considering the popularity of Firefox in the Russian Federation I wonder if Yandex or something similar wouldn't be interested.

As I said, Firefox isn't such a dead duck that no one else wouldn't invest in it even if that happened.

 

Look at the stats yourself. That's all the article is reporting on.

lol you've missed my point... It's not dead, obviously. 1/5 people use it. The problem is that, if the trend continues, it'll be 1/6 and then 1/7 and Chrome will be 1/4 and 1/3 etc and it won't be worth anyone's money to invest.

 

Remember what I said about Disraeli & his view of statistics?

I don't think so.

Obviously.

That is your extrapolation. It kind of reminds me of similar Malthusian extrapolations of population densities from 'statistical analysis'. None ever really came to fruition. As I stated earlier ~ FUD.

 

Except that multiple reports by different people are showing the same thing.

And yes, it's an extrapolation. Any prediction is an extrapolation of current data. That's what a prediction is.

I think it's fairly logical to assume that if Firefox continues to lose members Google will have no reason to pay them and neither will any other company because there would be no return. We can not definitively say "Firefox will continue on this trend" but trends exist for a reason. Maybe Firefox will bounce back and this was an extended lull. But if we expect the trend to continue (and that's kinda the point of a trend) then you can see the issue.

But if you want to believe that good projects never die go ahead. It's sad but it happens. Firefox has had a ridiculously huge amount of influence on the web and on MS and if it does die in a year or two it'll be a shame to see it go.

 

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1904

 

Love it. Wot type? Linear? Polynomial? Conic? French curve?

Elsewhere, we have:
Extrapolation is an American academic journal covering speculative fiction
and
http://www.businessinsider.com/beware-of-extrapolating-trends-2011-3

By the way, can anyone summarize the actual agreement that is being kicked about?

Is Google paying a flat fee? Or is the fee based on "usage"? If I don't search from the Google box but from the url bar, does it not count?

And this is a quote from the businessinsider.com link for that person who gets his trading done through a broker who insists on using Java to communicate:

 

And Mark Twain had something to say as well.

 

It's a contract, I think it's like... every 3 years it gets renewed? Not sure. I don't think anyone knows the details/ stipulations but I'm fairly certain the payment is flat.

I think what's being talked about is that Firefox has been in steady decline for about a year now and Chrome has been growing steadily as well. At this point google is spending 100mill on Firefox for 21% of the market and it's spending however much on Chrome for 22% of the market.

If in a few months that becomes:
Firefox 19%
Google 24%

and a few months later that trend continues (as it has since last January) it may not longer make sense for Google to support Firefox.

At the moment it would be idiotic for them to pull out. It could cripple and really hurt Firefox but MS could swoop in, be the hero to 1/5 users, and get Bing on a hell of a lot of computers.

But there will be a point where even MS won't bother and Mozilla will have to get by on donations.

 

Here's something from way back:

http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-fea...le-continues-to-feed-mozilla-but-for-how-long

 

Historians should be able to tell us when the previous announcements of renewals were made public.

Edit: added "public"