Firefox
In The Coming HTML5 Browser Wars, The Markup Should Remain The Same

On Monday, Google made a big splash with a customized Arcade Fire video page that showed off all the cool things HTML5 can do, from video, animations and 3D rendering to gorgeous fonts and choreographed windows. It’s all cutting edge stuff as far as what is possible with a Web browser goes, but there is one very big problem. It doesn’t work so great in all browsers, even browsers that supposedly support HTML5. If you go to the landing page that launches the video in Firefox or even the forthcoming IE9 (which isn’t out yet, but is very HTML5-friendly), it detects your browser and suggests you use Chrome instead. I received the following message on Firefox:
This site was designed with Google Chrome in mind and is unable to render properly in your browser. For the best viewing experience, we recommend downloading Google Chrome and trying this site again.
Happy Birthday Chrome, You’re About To Overtake Firefox On TechCrunch
As we pointed out earlier, today is Google Chrome’s second birthday. Since it launched in beta on September 2, 2008, it has come a long way (it’s already 6 versions deep). Back then, it was Windows-only, with official Mac and Linux support only coming late last year. But now it’s on the verge of another milestone: becoming the top browser coming to this site.
I’ve checked out our logs over the past few years to see how well Chrome has been doing compared to its rival browsers. The numbers are shockingly strong for such a new entry — particularly in the past year. Obviously, TechCrunch has a tech-centric audience, but I don’t think it’s off-base to say that you’re also a leading audience of early adopters that often point to where the general public will be in the future.
The numbers are clear: Firefox is in trouble. It has been the top browser since we began using Google Analytics to record stats back in 2007. By 2008, it was nearly 25 percentage points ahead of the next closest rival, Internet Explorer. As of yesterday, it stood just 3 percentage points ahead of the next closest rival, Chrome.
Here are the numbers. In August 2010 (the month that just ended):
- Firefox: 33.98%
- Chrome: 26.22%
- Safari: 18.40%
- IE: 13.23%
- Mozilla Compatible Agent: 5.46%
One year ago, in August 2009 (right before Chrome’s first birthday), the numbers looked like this:
- Firefox: 45.91%
- IE: 20.61%
- Safari: 18.85%
- Chrome: 10.09%
- Mozilla Compatible Anent: 1.83%
Two years ago, in August 2008 (right before Chrome launched), the numbers looked like this:
- Firefox: 55.63%
- IE: 31.21%
- Safari 9.76%
- Opera: 2.23%
- Mozilla: 0.62%
By September 2008, the month Chrome launched in beta, it had an immediate impact. But remember, it was Windows-only at the time:
- Firefox: 52.36%
- IE: 28.55%
- Safari: 9.18%
- Chrome: 6.58%
- Opera: 2.05%
And just for fun, let’s go back three full years, to August 2007.
- Firefox: 48.81%
- IE: 40.61%
- Safari: 6.59%
- Opera: 2.29%
- Mozilla: 0.72%
Chrome has clearly taken a bite out of Firefox, IE, and even Opera’s already small share. Safari is up big over the past couple of years as well, but its growth has seemingly stalled over the past year — despite iPad browser usage (in terms of visits to TechCrunch) exploding.
Of course, overall traffic to TechCrunch is also way up over these past few years. It just appears that more and more people who are visiting are now doing so via Chrome.
Let’s look at the numbers from yesterday:
- Firefox: 34.68%
- Chrome: 31.09%
- Safari: 15.65%
- IE: 12.77%
- Mozilla Compatible Agent: 3.48%
Yes, it’s just a matter of time before Chrome is on top.
As a humorous aside, IE with Chrome Frame, the plug-in Google made to make IE behave like Chrome, is now a bigger source of traffic to TechCrunch than Opera Mini or BlackBerry. While still tiny, it too is growing.
Snippet: How to Disable Firefox 4 Tab Preview in Windows 7
We all know that Firefox 4 comes with plenty of interesting and useful features. However, there is one feature that really annoy me out of hell – the tab preview feature (only available for Windows 7).
Here’s what happen: Let’s assume that your Firefox browser is opened with plenty of tabs, but it is not currently your active application (you might be doing some work in Ms. Office). When you hover your mouse above the Firefox icon in the taskbar, it will show a preview of all the opened tabs. This is good and fine as I can now pick the tab that I want to go to. The bad part is, I don’t want to manually select the tab everytime. When I click on the Firefox icon, I would expect it to switch to the browser immediately and load my last active tab, not to make me select the tab.
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Mozilla has recently released the fourth beta of the Firefox 4 browser. I have been testing it since the first beta and I am happy to see the progress and the addition of new features with each beta. I have held on the review of Firefox 4 because most of the features are still unstable or not in place. With the release of beta 4, things are becoming more stable and plenty of new (and revolutionary) features are added to it, so it would be a great time to do up a review. There will probably be another one or two more beta before we see the release candidate and the final version.
This week has produced some fantastic Firefox news. That's a good thing, but because we covered it all on Download Squad in a timely fashion, it leaves me with a bit of a problem: there's no new news to share with you. I've been left with producing a round-up for this week's Firefox column. I've never done a round-up before, but I'm sure it'll be good.
Previously we have discussed how to perform a 





