The Death and Life of Firefox

There is talk among the tech newsies (like this one) that the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser is somehow going to die because Google will take its moolah away. If you take Google's $100 million out of the Mozilla budget of $123 million, that is still $23 million. And that assumes others will not chip in because, now that Google has gone away, any additional funding can make a difference to Mozilla. Also, all that is likely to happen is that all Mozilla's fancier programs will disappear, and its stupid versioning system will collapse and revert to its predecessor.

The cutoff may well be a good thing for Firefox in the long term, too, because as long as Google was ponying up the dough it was making Firefox wear its collar. Google was probably the reason for the new versioning system. With Google gone, the old version system can be quietly reintroduced to bring relief to cowardly stability-needy Mr. Businessman, who would never touch Chrome with a ten-meter pole because its constant update changes imply instability.

I for sure do not want Firefox to go away. Extensions may be so 2005 for the tech newsies, but they are still important. Firefox makes it easy to extend it. You cannot extend Internet Explorer without third-party software. It is possible, but a hard slough (I have found), to extend Safari. And Chrome? Forget it! You cannot add custom toolbars to Chrome, as its support staff revealed in the bluntest way possible.

I also like to remind everyone that all those stiffs dumping Firefox for Chrome are what the programming community calls heatseekers, people foolish enough to get the latest product, or the latest version of an existing product, just because it is new. If Firefox can clean out its Gecko engine — and it will have to do so with its Windows version — to make it run faster and more efficiently, it could probably claw back some of the Chrome crowd.

Afterword (26 December 2011)

Google and Mozilla cut a deal, in which Google remains Firefox's default search engine and Mozilla gets funding from Google for the next three years. From this Slashdot comment, Google considers Firefox to be no competitive threat: Or, rather, Google has greater threats to its business (Microsoft, Apple, the U.S. Government) than Mozilla, which can still be a useful ally.