Lately I’ve been noticing a number of people criticising the performance of the latest versions of Firefox, since 1.5. With IE7 coming very soon, with many of the features that Firefox has (tabs, RSS integration, etc), now is not a good time for Firefox to lose developer support. I don’t mean to sound alarmist, but remember when Netscape got overtaken by IE circa 1997? From an article I wrote a couple of years ago in Digital Web Magazine:
“By 1997 Microsoft had finally caught up with and indeed overtaken Netscape in browser technology. While Netscape was the first to release its 4.0 browser, in June 1997, Microsoft soon trumped it with the release of IE 4.0 in October that year. IE 4.0 was widely seen as being a superior product—for example, IE’s stylesheet support was better than Navigator’s.”
Well the signs are beginning to show that Microsoft may do it again – nearly 10 years later – and trump the technical leader in the browser wars. The ball is in Firefox’s court though and it’s by no means too late to stop the rot. Firefox desparately needs to keep the upper hand in browser innovation and performance.
