[olug] Firefox 3 launch party

[Christopher Cashell]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 9:35 PM, Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> I wonder if there will ever be a Firefox 4. KHTML has been more compliant and
> lighter for quite some time now (IIRC, around 3.2, over a year ago), and with
> Qt 4.4 including an integrated WebKit and powerful demo browser, I expect
> Firefox is going to be losing marketshare to it pretty soon...

Yes.

Say what you will about KHTML (and note that KHTML is directly
comparable to Gecko, the Mozilla project's rendering engine, it's not
a browser by itself) being more compliant, but I've had a lot more
problems with sites not displaying properly in Konqueror than in
Firefox.  Couple that with the number of great extensions and the
generally better (IMO) interface of Firefox, and Konqueror, though
installed, gets negligible usage by me.  In fact, a few of the
extensions are so useful to me that I'd be more than willing to give
up speed for the features.  Luckily, with Firefox3, I get the best of
both worlds (and I'd love to see some new performance comparisons,
'cause Firefox3 seems to perform really well to me).

More importantly though, on Windows, there are only three browsers
that have measurable usage stats, IE, Firefox, and Opera (with Opera
barely making the list).  And like it or not, the vast majority of
people browsing the web are using Windows.  There's really no kHTML
(or Webkit) based Windows browsers that get used (and don't say
Safari. . . I only know one person who runs it on Windows, and he's
the biggest Mac fanboy I know. . . and even he admits he uses Firefox
as much or more than Safari).

Who is Firefox going to lose marketshare to?

-- 
Christopher