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Is Firefox Becoming Mainstream?
Posted March 31, 2005 – 1:11 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in TechnologySometimes you can guess that a software product has become mainstream enough when a big company starts supporting it. I think this is exactly what just happened with FireFox: Google just announced support for “pre-fetching” - a feature ONLY available on Mozilla browsers. This is a refreshing breath of air as opposed to the normal practice of supporting only Internet Explorer.
However, I would be more comfortable if they supported something that was standardized since this is basically putting non-Mozilla users such as IE, Safari and Opera at a disadvantage. Unfortunatly in the long run a practice of supporting Mozilla-only features has the effect of disenfranchasing other browsers, a tactic which Microsoft has employed with IE.
Tags: firefox, ie, microsoft, mozilla, opera —
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2 Responses to “Is Firefox Becoming Mainstream?”
I really don’t think this is an issue. The lack of support in other borwsers doesn’t hinder viewers from accessing exactly the same content. With Yahoo, they announced they wouldn’t strive for full compatibility with all browsers, which hinders Mozilla (and some Opera) users from viewing the same content you can while browsing with IE.
Supporting an additional feature behind the scenes I have no issue with. Otherwise, this feature for Mozilla is completely useless. But if it hindered IE and Opera users, then I’d have a problem with Google’s move.
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The Computations of AdamR
By AdamR on Mar 31, 2005
The issue I have with it is that it starts a slippery slope. What if gMail starts supporting XUL for Mozilla ONLY, and everyone else will get the standard HTML interface? The problem is that once you get into the mindset that supporting browser-specific features is important, there is no end where you might go.
By netwizard on Mar 31, 2005