Firefox is Time Decreased Prestige? Its Founders Say That

Do you know about Quora? Yeah .. he is an appropriate forum to find out about products from prominent people associated with them. This is also the perfect place for prominent people to argue with each other, agree or disagree. That is happening now in the thread about the future of Firefox.

Someone in a post about Firefox in recent Quora question: Does Firefox have a double-digit market share within three to five years? Easy answers given by John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla) "Yes" and "No" said Blake Ross Firefox founder. So far, Ross won the argument, according to the voice of the user Quora.

Here's what Ross said:

I'm pretty skeptical. I think the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to old ways of being too timid, passive, and consensus-driven to issue a quick breakthrough product.

Lilly, meanwhile, offered this:

I'm almost not an unbiased observer, but I believe that it will. The product is getting better all the time, and especially with the approaching 4.0 in the fall. We have 400 users and growing numbers. And we have a large community of committed people throughout the world are working to make better. This is more competitive than before, but I feel pretty good about our chances, not only on desktops, but also on Android, which already looks good.

Ross, who served as Director of Product at Facebook (just happened to work at a competitor Quora), has an argument that Facebook seems consistent with a colleague (and former co-founder of Parakey) Joe Hewitt. That is, the body which regulates (in this case, Mozilla - in Hewitt's case, the W3C), which slows the development process on the web, and makes it harder to innovate. Both Ross and Hewitt have a long history in space, because they both worked at Netscape, before moving on and creating Firefox.

Obviously, both are upset at what had happened on their competitor's web browser. Firefox came around at the time of Microsoft's Internet Explorer has full control over the market, with more than 90% share. During the last 5 years +, IE share has dropped to under 60%, largely thanks to Firefox which now stands between 25% -30% of the market. But, with many accounts, Firefox no longer be considered a light, open as the first alternative. That includes the person who asked the question on Quora, which is inserted into the description: "Looks like they'll start seeing a massive erosion in the stock Chrome / Safari and IE9 keep pushing forward."

Of course, Google Chrome is now growing at a rate much faster than Firefox. Apple's Safari, meanwhile, has seen slower, but steady growth over the last few years. Both the browser based on WebKit engine, which seems to be the layout engine choice today. Firefox does not use WebKit. Instead, it relies on the Mozilla Gecko engine.

Lilly is right when he states that the key to this argument may be in the mobile space. The problem is that there is a WebKit browser began to dominate thanks to the popularity of Google's Android platform and Apple's iPhone (and BlackBerry will soon have a WebKit browser too). Build a start from Firefox to Android is in the wild, but it will take something that is very impressive for people to use it, not Android's built-in WebKit browser. Apple, meanwhile, has begun letting on alternative browsers as well - notably, the Opera. But again, it will be difficult for any browser to beat the integrated built-in browser (and who knows if Apple will even allow the mobile version of Firefox in the App Store).

Some of Google did not agree with the assessment Hewitt about the slow-moving web. But again, it was at Google, where they seem to be pushing things faster than Mozilla at this time. Can Hewitt and now criticism of Ross' shake them out of the malaise that?