I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Filed under 'mozilla'

May 18, 2010

The Swing to Chrome

The following is my answer to the question “Will Firefox have double-digit market share in 3 to 5 years?” on Quora

I doubt it.

I see (non-mobile) browser users approximately falling into three categories:

  1. 60% are users who will always use the default browser installed on their computer. This is IE’s bread and butter. Combines home users who don’t know what a browser is or why they’d ever change, and works users who are forced to use whatever their IT department prescribes. (Also now includes people buying their first Macs and starting to use Safari)
  2. 10% are users who will seek out the “best” browser. In the early 2000’s, perhaps paid for Opera (and maybe still do), since around 2003 using Firefox. Care about things like speed, memory use, privacy, and extensions.
  3. 30% are users who would normally be in the first category, but have friends or relatives in the second. Have installed Firefox (or had Firefox forcibly installed on their behalfs) and perhaps even keep it up to date.

At the moment, I see the middle 10% swinging wildly towards Chrome. Over the last few months, given the OS X beta release, the improvement of the Developer tools, and the release of extensions, I’ve seen anecdotal Chrome usage amongst my peers (and disgruntlement with the bloat and slowness of Firefox) increase massively.

This will have the tail effect on the third group — I’ve already switched Joy to Chrome, and the next time my mum asks me something about her Firefox installation, I will undoubtedly suggest the same.

And finally, given Google’s immense power and advertising ability, they could even start to reach into the non-techies. They can use their search “monopoly” to strongly suggest Chrome installation, reaching out to people that Mozilla can only dream of.

The competition might give Mozilla a boost to improve Firefox, but the current change in their momentum doesn’t look promising for their future.

May 24, 2009

Introducing Jetpack, Call for Participation

Mozilla Labs is launching a sort of Greasemonkey++ — in addition to tweaking web pages, you get some limited control over the browser chrome. Will be interesting to watch this grow

February 13, 2009

Bespin: A new Mozilla Labs experimental extensible code editor using Canvas

An attempt to create an in-browser lightweight IDE. This is interesting for a bunch of reasons: Hardcore use of <canvas>, a goal of creating SubEthaEdit style realtime collaboration, and if nothing else, creating a genuinely decent-looking web-based text editor.

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September 9, 2008

History of the browser user-agent string

Or how we got from “NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1)” to “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13”

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August 27, 2008

Mozilla Labs: Introducing Ubiquity

Nifty new Firefox extension, taking the quicksilver shorty-cutty app-launcher approach to the web. Looks very promising.

December 9, 2007

Autocomplete Manager :: Firefox Add-ons

Dead handly location-bar-autocomplete-expander for Firefox 2 — It matches against all parts of the URL and page title, so it’s easier to find pages from your history.

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July 23, 2007

Linux.com :: Latest Mozilla Sunbird is a well-connected calendar

Sunbird is flourishing into a good-citizen calendaring client. Syncs both-ways with Google Calendar, which is handy.

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April 12, 2007

Correo - a new mail client for OS X

An attempt to mould Thunderbird into a more Mac-like mail client.

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January 9, 2007

xmpp4moz - Trac

Yowsers! A Firefox extension that enables simple asynchronous webapps, using Jabber’s XMPP prototcol. If this gets legs, it could be the birth of some wicked cool stuff.

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October 10, 2006

Open Source madness!

Good commentary of the unpleasantness that’s about to unfold with this Firefox/Iceweasel fork. The two new “features” which will now ship with Debian, Ubuntu, et al are just the tip of an iceberg of confusion and incompatibility.

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July 26, 2006

Problematic extensions - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

If, like me, you’ve got a shedload of Firefox extensions installed and, like me, are seeing memory leaks in Firefox, this guide can help you track down the responsible parties.

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.