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Has Firefox lost its flame?

Abe Olandres Editor-in-chief April 26, 2007 · 1 min read

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Some people say that others use Mozilla Firefox not because they loved the functionalities it provides but because they just hate Internet Explorer (or they hate Bill Gate’s guts). It’s like a bandwagon effect against the monopoly or the establishment.

With the release of IE integrating tabbed browsing (the first feature I love about FF), the gap between the two browsers have closed in. Again, there are other alternatives out there that are as robust (others even faster) as Firefox. Now, the number of Firefox users have climbed to a level (2-digit figure) that one can no longer consider it as a minority. That label may now be passed on to Maxthon (which Google bought into) and the ever-social Flock browser.

Will the day come that people will start leaving Firefox? Has Firefox lost its flare?

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and is considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines.

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37 Comments

Phaw · 18 years ago

no comment

Abel · 19 years ago

Hell no. :) Once you’ve touched the flames of the fox, you won’t use any other browser again.

Jerome · 19 years ago

IE is still slow, the main difference from these two browsers is IE wait for the whole page to load. and as for firefox, it starts to flame the first few elements as it loads giving you an idea how the site looks like instead of waiting in IE. Firefox parin ako!

Cesar · 19 years ago

I don’t think FF is losing its flame. FF still is the best browser because FF can support some plugins while IE lost its case on the ‘plugins’ court battle. IE remains the slowest and still a spyware magnet.

Raein · 19 years ago

IE is really slow compared to FF. That’s about it.

max · 19 years ago

what i like about firefox is that it feels light as opposed to IE which feels heavy when it comes to launching both applications IE feels like its doing a lot of things in the background so there is a ceratin amount of delay .. this is just a feeling .. there is no hard evidence to support it

Nicholas · 19 years ago

A majority of my users use Firefox, but then again, most are United States based.

I think with a majority of the Filipinos who use the internet cafes, Internet explorer will still be the most used browser by a landslide simply because most owners of cafes haven’t switched to Firefox.

I have to agree with some regarding Firefox, I use it almost exclusively on my computer, and it does have a tendency to freeze up once in a while.

But, IE’s tabbed browsing, in my opinion, is much easier compared to FF.

juantanamera · 19 years ago

Damn, correction:

Web Standards, Firefox plugins just happens to be the reason, I or some stick to IE.

Web Standards, Firefox plugins just happens to be the reason, I or some stick to FF.

Dave Starr — ROI Guy · 19 years ago

@ ==>> Junnel: Interesting that you find FF loading faster than IE7. Perhaps that on some othe platform than Windows XP? I use FF, so don’t think my comments come from a Microsoft worshipper, but FF laods slowwww compared to IE7, and Yuga even posted reslts of some tests here a few months back that showed the truth .. FF often takes twice as long to render a web page.

Generla thought on this is the FF is stuck in the “over-improvement” whirlpool that so many good products fall into. Version 2 is a great step back from 1.5. It hogs resources like crazy, the wonderful fail-safe restore features are misisng, because FF tried to take on the session reload tasks that a couple good plug-ins were handling better, and (as someone else noted) FF gobbles up a horendous amount more screen space with “unk” by default.

For guys who run technogeek sites FF is great, but on general interest web sites my FF users are not growing rapidly .. IE is still the browser of choice, so that’s what you need to design for.

Interesting how every time someone makes a post about FF a religious jiad erupts … they are both good browsers and they both have faults, no need to get so worked up over it.

issai · 19 years ago

IE sucks! Firefox, you can have all the web dev tools like firebug. Helps out with debugging js and ajax. IE can only pop up a error box if you install its script debugger. I’m biased as a developer. IE screws up the DOM too. It’s crazy, it loads freakin slow too!

Sorry dudes, i’m really biased against IE, especially when working with JS.

Chino · 19 years ago

I am not using Firefox so for me (since I am bias.. LOL) it will not lose its fire even I just recently went back to Internet Explorer… because of IE7.

I like my desktop to be very simple and neat. IE7 has a very simple interface compared to FF and most of all… IT LOADS FASTER than FF. I don’t know why but even if I make a fresh installation of FF, it is still slower than IE.

juantanamera · 19 years ago

IE7 Rules! FF Sucks (resources)! FF hangs too much on ubuntu! Grr….

Web Standards, Firefox plugins just happens to be the reason, I or some stick to IE. For casual surfing, it’s better to use IE7 or Opera if you’re not on windows.

Is FF dying? I think it not, but they need to work out their issues. FF v.3 or v.10?

Aja Lapus · 19 years ago

WIE7’s browser layout is just so uncustomizable and radical—I can’t find the stop and refresh button no matter how long I’ve been using it. Performance-wise, Opera is the real winner—and it also passed the Acid2 test.

What makes me stay with Fx is its simplicity and customizability. Don’t get confused as I’m not trying to be ironic—I look at Opera and there is so much buttons and menu items I really can’t or don’t use, and options/preferences are a little bit confusing. Plus, Fx has built-in session saver, easy hassle-free updater, a variety of privacy and security features, plus addons [WebDev toolbar, colorzilla, FireFTP, Foxmarks, Image Zoom, ShowIP, UA switcher, etc.]

I’ve been waiting for Fx3’s release with the Gecko 1.9 engine—more standards support and passes Acid2, et al. :)

I do hope I could try Safari, though.

Hamilton Chua · 19 years ago

If you develop web sites for a living, Firebug on FF is indispensable.

Show me a tool that can rival firebug on IE and I just might concede.

Junnel Animo · 19 years ago

Here’s the difference between Firefox and I.E

Firefox- better browsing experience, faster to load, you can still restore all sites you visited when your PC shutdowns automatically, less pop up ads, nice tabs, safe browsing experience

I.E- old PC users still use this, If you are a web designer you still need this in your PC to test if your website works correctly without limitations, easy to refresh webpages compare to mozilla.

alwell · 19 years ago

On the last episode of digital tour, they had this comparison segment among IE, fireofox and opera. After going into features testing guess what? opera was declared as the winner. Opera loads even faster according to their comparison test.

Personally speaking I’m not really into browser thing. I just use whats available on my PC which is IE.

Jaypee · 19 years ago

Like what jangelo said, FF uses up too much resources and if you’re running a machine that has a less than 128 MB of RAM, it’s not worth it. From what I know, Flock uses up less resources. However, I don’t have any problem running FF on Ubuntu.