Chrome beats Firefox. Hands down. There, I said it. And not from an evangelical standpoint either. I used to love Firefox. I used to be a beta tester and laugh at people that used IE instead of Firefox. That was 5 or 6 years ago when Firefox was new, lean, fresh, lightweight and was ready to conquer the …well, the browser market. There’s no question that back then, Mozilla had a great product. It was more standards compliant than IE. It was quicker too. Then add ons came along and opened Firefox up to a whole generation of enthusiastic plugin makers.

Things were great for a few years and Firefox was slowly taking chunks out of IE to the tune of a few per cent a year. Within 6 years, it was anticipated, Firefox would become the dominant browser. The de facto standard because of it’s quality, it’s openness and it’s hardy spirit.

That was 3 years ago. Now Firefox is losing ground to Chrome at that same rate, who’s also taking chunks out of IE. Microsoft say IE9 will reverse this trend but to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies – “well, they would say that, wouldn’t they”. Microsoft has always been worried about someone (remember the Halloween documents?), and recently it’s been Google, who are the only company who really have the might and the resources to stand up to them.

The rivalry between Microsoft and Google is well documented. But where did Firefox go wrong?

Well, nowhere really. Mozilla are almost a victim of their own success. Mozilla (the precursor to Firefox, which also used to be known as Firebird) released their browser as free software to compete with IE, back when standards compliant browsers were something of a desirable luxury. IE sucked and everyone knew it. Then came the extras..the add ons..the themes..the toolbars..and everything was still OK because IE still sucked. The memory footprint of Firefox grew a little, but hey it’s free and it’s not IE, so what ya gonna do?

Then IE7 was released, and still sucked, but marginally less so than IE6, which Firefox trampled over like a horse on crack. Firefox got bigger, and added more features, add-ons and plugins. There was a great community but no one was considering the future. Firefox was fast approaching bloatware status that it has railed against for so many years. See it for yourself. Open up Firefox and get 20 tabs open. Not unusual for anyone who works with or browses the web a lot. Open a PDF too, then maybe activate a few plugins. Change the default theme and add a stumble toolbar. Then run top.

560,000k is about what you’ll see. Half a gig of memory to run Firefox, the ‘lightweight’ web browser. That renders it pretty much useless on any computer over 4 years old. So you’d better stop telling your non-geeky friends to switch from IE, because they’ll only be disappointed. That also renders it pretty useless on a netbook too.

So, the story continues. IE8 was marginally better than IE7, but it still sucked somewhat and when it first came out, Firefox was still gaining market share at 2 or 3% a year. I wonder if the people at Mozilla knew what was coming next.

Chrome.

Chrome had the speed of the Firefox glory days, standards compliance that any open standards guru would be proud of and the memory footprint of a ferret. It looked good too. If a tab crashed, it didn’t bail you out of the whole browser and it had a neat idea for the homepage. And since it was created by Google, they knew which homepage to set as the default too. Whilst IE offered you Bing by default, Chrome offered you Google. That’s liked being offered the choice between a library where the librarian goes and gets the book you want, silently, efficiently, and diligently then brings it to you within 0.05s, or a library where the librarian looks like a paper clip, smells faintly of cheap perfume, takes ages to find the book you want, and even when she does.. it’s the wrong one.

If the page you’re trying to load doesn’t work in Chrome, you might as well give up because Firefox, as Webb once said, ‘ain’t gonna be no better’.

As long as Chrome doesn’t make the same mistakes Firefox did (unlikely, given the business acumen behind its creation), it should be the dominant browser within 3 years. It’s already gaining market share faster than Firefox ever did and it’s easy to see why. It’s delivered a knockout blow from which Mozilla Corporation are going to find it hard to recover. We should be sad about this. Google might have created a better browser then open sourced it, but Firefox, for all its forgivings, has its heart in the right place.

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