10 Reasons Firefox won’t be worried about Chrome

Oh internets, you hysterical zeitgeist, please simmer down. Google Chrome is not the end of Firefox. Another open-source browser is not going to bring down Mozilla’s ten years of development and evolution overnight. Here’s a quick 10 reasons not to panic:

10. Chrome is going to have problems releasing on Mac and Linux. You have to imagine it broke Google’s heart not to release for Mac and Linux when they released for Windows. The only conceivable reason they didn’t release for all must be huge, ugly dev problems that will take a lot of time and work to tackle. For instance, I’m guessing they can’t do multiple process rendering to a single window on Mac yet. There’s no supported way to do this as far as I know. And that’s only the beginning of the challenges involved with multiple processes (more here).

9. Chrome wants to be like Firefox. Many of Chrome’s main features – such as its “omnibar,” private user mode with icon, one-click bookmarks, and drop-down notifications are lifted directly from Firefox’s features and planned features. In places they used Mozilla’s code directly. I think this says that Chrome would like to be more like Firefox than its statements imply.

8. Chrome’s got security issues to work out. One biggie is its vulnerability to carpet-bombing attacks. Another is malicious links through undefined handlers.

7. Navigating your tabs and windows is impossible in Chrome. In Firefox, not only can you install one of a countless number of extensions for organizing, sorting, coloring, grouping, fading, and poking your tabs , but also cool new features are being added that allow you to visually navigate your content. How do you find your tab in Chrome? You don’t… tabs are the same color, have no favicon or visual differentiation, and there’s not even a way to see the names of tabs when you have too many in a window.

6. What we’re hearing about Chrome is mostly hype. Chrome’s an interesting new project from Google, so of course the media is chroming at the mouth (pun credit) to tell you all about it, but this is how the media makes money. A plethora of coverage does not prove Chrome is the best browser, it proves it is the newest. We won’t really know what people think of Chrome until the smoke clears and people use it in their daily lives.

5. Chrome is an unfinished product that still lacks polish. While most Google products are in “beta,” this one has a ton of kinks to work out. Google’s documented some of the bugs here, and new ones are being reported here. Sure, Firefox has plenty of issues itself, but Mozilla’s been documenting and fixing them for a decade. Chrome isn’t even fully compliant with CSS yet. For more on why Chrome lacks polish, see Peter Svensson’s article

4. Mozilla has a dedicated fan base. I’d argue more dedicated than any other browser’s users. Have you ever met a passionate user of Internet Explorer? Chrome has plenty of people excited, but it’s unlikely to gain the same kind of loyalty that Firefox enjoys from its users worldwide.

3. Competition will only make Firefox better. Competing with Internet Explorer can at times be a bit too easy, because the product is so bad and so different from Firefox. But Chrome offers new challenges in the areas Firefox cares about, such as open standards and open source. Finally, a worthy competitor for Mozilla. I also predict that Mozilla will be more willing to make substantial improvements faster now that Chrome’s in play. And, unlike Google, Firefox is Mozilla’s flagship project and has the undivided attention of many more developers. Mozilla’s focus is fixed on the browser, but Google’s main attention is on search revenue.

2. Chrome can’t match Mozilla’s extensions, tools, and plug-ins. Mozilla has an ever-growing community of developers who build excellent tools for customizing your web experience. For nearly anything you want to change about your experience in Firefox, an add-on is available for free. If it’s not there, you can write and distribute your own add-on. Many of these add-ons have their own communities and companies – they’re established and depend on Firefox to reach their users. Chrome is starting out with nothing comparable in place and thus a user experience that isn’t customizable.

1. You can’t beat Mozilla’s community. What makes Firefox awesome is its volunteer army – the thousands of developers and supporters throughout the world that contribute to Firefox’s evolution. Forget even the Mozilla employees – the community is the heart and soul of the project. This is something Google can’t develop easily, even with all their employees and resources.

So what we’re looking at is not the end of Firefox, but another exciting step towards open innovation on the web. For a more on Mozilla’s exciting new challenges, see Mitchell Baker’s and John Lilly’s comments.

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