Digital Cheat Sheet

In the last year or so the market for web browsers has exploded. More work and advertising are being put into them and adoption rates are starting to pick up for new web browsers. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, and Apple's Safari are starting to become the most important applications on a computer (Yes, I'm deliberately ignoring Opera). With more of our computer taking place in the cloud on websites like Gmail, Yahoo mail, Flickr, Facebook, Hulu, and Twitter having a competent, fast web browser is essential. Google has made inroads this year with their Google Chrome browser and Apple's Safari remains a favorite among Mac users, but it appears that Mozilla's Firefox has been slipping in the previous versions. While adoption is up over Internet Explorer, in terms of speed and mindshare Firefox has been falling behind.

Both Safari and Chrome use Webkit, a fast, open-source rendering engine. Firefox relies on its own engine nicknamed "Gecko" and sports the roughly the same render speeds with loading webpages. Even Internet Explorer 8 is pretty faster using its own proprietary engine underneath. With having similar performance across the board the focusing on secondary features best helps to distinguish each browser from it's competition. Among these secondary features is OVERALL speed. One of Firefox's greatest strength's also turns out to be its biggest weakness. Firefox is an extremely flexible and expandable browser with its thousands of extensions that you can use to customize and expand Firefox. The only problem with this is that the more extensions you add into Firefox the slower it becomes. This becomes particularly painful on the Macintosh where Firefox is already overweight compared to Safari and Chrome. On average on my Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM it takes Firefox over 3o seconds to open up from my first click (I have 5 extensions installed). By comparison both Safari AND Chrome often open up in less than 7 seconds (Chrome, similarly has 5 extensions). There is absolutely no reason a web browser should take 30 seconds to load up on a laptop with a 64 bit OS and 4GB of RAM. 

In terms of mindshare most geeks will sing the praises of Firefox for its browsing speed, power, and customizability, but many are opting for Google's Chrome because it is simply "fast". Furthermore, even non-computer types are starting to use Google's Chrome on PCs and Apple's Safari on Macs because they are simply faster on boot and faster rendering webpages. People do not want to wait 45 seconds for their computer to boot up and then wait for an icon to bounce for 3o or more seconds simply to check their email or Facebook accounts. It seems that everybody is singing the praises of Chrome and Safari, but poor Firefox has been left in the dust, especially on shows like This Week in Technology where most of the hosts prefer the speedier Chrome. 

As the web browser becomes the window to our computing experience the entire experience, including the speed of opening the browser and extra tabs. It's not that I hate Firefox or think that it is not as good as Safari or Chrome, but I really just want this article to serve as a call to public awareness about the slowness of Firefox, especially on the Mac. Firefox being an open-source browser not tied to one company is an amazing treasure and something to be cultivated and promoted. I love my extensions on Firefox and really want it to be the best web browser it can be, but right now I believe that I and many others would agree that Firefox could serve to shed a few pounds. If it does not speed up I can see it quickly loosing market share to Google's Chrome browser that so far appears to retain its speed even when loaded up with multiple extensions. I really think what Firefox needs is a little bit of work to shave off those extra pounds and before we know it Firefox will be back in the race with Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. With a little work it could be the web's very own Rocky Balboa. 

-Hunt Henning

January 11, 2010