I love how google bitch slapped mozilla with it.. and its not like they're revamping their whole approach (yet?).. As soon as I even heard about what chrome had to offer, I'd start fixing firefox to follow down that path, and hopefully along the way with some ingenuity, would come up with a)better way to do it or b)a different feature that is fasntastable.
Yep, pretty much. That's what the IE team did when Firefox got ridiculously popular. They pretty much just hung their heads in shame, said, "whoops, we fucked up," and started actually fixing things. For as far behind as Internet Explorer was in terms of technology, the amount of progress that they made on IE8 in a relatively short period of time shows that they're a force to be reckoned with. The fact that IE9 is looking to exceed most other browsers on certain standards (not to mention proving to be a strong contender in terms of rendering and JavaScript performance) is kind of exciting.
Then, in the other corner, we have Firefox 4. Pretty much all it has is a more Chrome-like UI, the ability to utilize Aero (you know, that one Vista technology that came out four years ago), proper Windows 7 compatibility (only about a year late on that one, far longer if you factor in the long beta/release candidate phase!), and a slightly better renderer. So, what were we waiting for all that time again?
If IE is close enough to be following in Chrome's footsteps, what the hell are they working on on the dev team over on firefox?! A ball-scratching extension?? cause I already have one of those
Does it work with 4.0 beta? Mine's coming up as being incompatible.
I think Google just has more pull in the open source crowd than Mozilla does at this point.
I don't think it's so much having a certain amount of pull, I think it's more about how the projects are run. Generally, if an open source project stagnates, it's because either people aren't contributing (which I highly doubt, given the popularity and large developer communities associated with Mozilla's projects), the code is a mess (which might be part of it; Apple was originally going to buy Gecko for their Safari browser but chose KHTML in virtue of its clean codebase), or the project gets managed into the ground (important patches aren't accepted, reported bugs and issues are ignored, managers put their own agendas over the good of the project, etc). All in all, the second seems like much more of a possibility than the others, but the third possibility could also be an issue. From reading Bugzilla, it seems as though a lot of people share some of my complaints, particularly about Firefox's awful private browsing mode (the only way it could be worse is if it didn't exist; Chrome and IE both do a very nice job at that feature), yet all of the complaints are brushed aside.
Yet, despite the development stagnating, I can't see them rapidly losing market share due to the ridiculous amount of marketing effort that they put into it. The extensions also help, though Chrome and Safari are starting to get some nice extensions now as well.