Author Topic: Got meself some upgrades!  (Read 8247 times)

Spectere

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Re: Got meself some upgrades!
« Reply #15 on: August 25, 2010, 11:02:14 PM »
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.
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Bobbias

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Re: Got meself some upgrades!
« Reply #16 on: August 26, 2010, 05:18:39 AM »
The thing I love about chrome most: Nearly everything I wanted was already there. I don't really need any extensions, aside form adblock. Well, I have stumbleupon, TooManyTabs (which I never use :/) and some thing that pops up little flags beside the "favorite" star thing in the address bar, telling me where the site's hosted. But I could easily do without those with no problems at all.

And I can definitely say that google and the contributers are quite active in the chrome issues department. I've raised a couple issues so far and had some fairly quick responses.
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Spectere

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Re: Got meself some upgrades!
« Reply #17 on: August 26, 2010, 10:05:28 AM »
One thing that I think helps Google tremendously is that they don't have to worry about the rendering engine too much, since everything is based on WebKit.  They can focus on getting a kickass interface together, tuning their V8 (lolol see wut I did thar?), and let Apple do the grunt work when it comes to standards compliance.

Speaking of rendering engines which just took off, I have to give Apple a lot of credit for what it did with WebKit.  KHTML was always known for being broken and buggy, yet Apple took it and got that code passing Acid2 ridiculously quick, then made that same thing pass Acid3 a bit later.  The part that really kills me is that WebKit works beautifully on mobile devices.  My iPhone can pass 100/100 of Acid3 (obviously, due to screen and device limitations, rendering isn't pixel-perfect and the performance isn't where it "should" be).  My G1 (running Android 2.1 via Cyanogen 5) gets in the 90s, I believe, since it uses an older release of WebKit.  That's bloody amazing.

I'm almost afraid to see how the Android port of Mozilla Fennec is going to perform, considering most of the browser features are being preserved.  Firefox runs very badly on Pentium II systems with limited memory, and it even struggles on Pentium IIIs with a decent amount of RAM.  The very thought of it running on an 528MHz ARM7 with 192MB of RAM (or, hell, even a SnapDragon with 256-512MB of RAM like the newer Android devices) scares me.
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