Siu Lun

The final beta release of Firefox 3.5. I’ve installed it on my Mac and having lived with it for a few days. I have actually noticed a speed improvement. Though, I think it will be short-lived.

Firefox has always been good and fast since it was released, but many people including myself, have defected to the likes of Chrome and Safari for normal web serving as Firefox has somehow become slower than a lot of other solutions out there. The reason I believe is because of add-ons. The new beta, after I tried it, is fast, but I think it’s because all my plugins currently does not work with it so they’re disabled.

I still use FF as my main browser on the Mac, but I use Chrome as my default on Windows. I’m actually hoping Chrome for the Mac will be released soon. I’ll only ever use FF for work due to the community support and add-ons avaliable.

With the release of Google Chrome beta for Windows and the planned beta soon after for Mac and Linux. It is obvious that a major player in the internet field has finally extended it’s claws into the browser.

Google Chrome, based on webkit, has essentially made it’s rendering speed and features the same as Safari. A lot of people are hailing about it, even newspapers for the ordinary folks.

According to techCrunch, some people thinks it can catch up to firefox’s 20% market share in 2 year time.

I’m not so sure about that. Don’t get me wrong, Google is certainly strong however, with no development tool comparable to Firebug and I certainly can’t see any easy module installation functionality at this moment.

Google Chrome will not be as successful as Firefox, Google Chrome will only be categorised the same as Opera and Safari.

The 20% marketshare that Firefox enjoys today at the end of the day is due to the developer community spreading it like fire whenever they have the chance to do so on their relative’s machines and at their workplace.

The ability to have completely customisable addons is what made Firefox. Unless other browsers do the same, they’ll always be “consumer” oriented browsers that will require enormous amount of public advertising to get any market shares.

So. I don’t doubt Google Chrome as a browser that we developers will need to add it onto our list of “supported browsers” in a year or two. But gaining the marketshare of Firefox? Maybe in 5 years time.

I’ve found it really frustrating to learn that many people in the developer world and indeed the world in general stupidly mixes ‘key’ selling words like ‘Open Standards’, ‘Open Source’ etc.. wrongly.

Here is what the Director, BBC Future Media & Technology had to say about seeing AAC and H.264 being adopted in the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/08/open_industry_standards_for_au.html.

After reading that, I think it can be concluded that Erik Huggers is not suitable for the job. Either he is rediculously not clued up. OR he is in the pockets of Apple.

AAC _requires_ a patent license to implement. It is NOT open standards. Ogg Vorbis and Theora can very well be! (At this time apparently no one knows whether there are hidden patents associated with those technologies)

In any case, this is more reasons not to have software patents in the first place. Erik Huggers could be right that they’re open standards in the UK as software patents are not recognised. However we live in a world, not a single country. Half the world do acknowledge software patents.