This is A Big Deal. Makes stealing session cookies from other computers on your local network as easy as clicking a button. Will be interesting to see how big sites respond. Are we finally going to see HTTPS deployed on all pages?
The Swing to Chrome
The following is my answer to the question “Will Firefox have double-digit market share in 3 to 5 years?” on Quora
I doubt it.
I see (non-mobile) browser users approximately falling into three categories:
- 60% are users who will always use the default browser installed on their computer. This is IE’s bread and butter. Combines home users who don’t know what a browser is or why they’d ever change, and works users who are forced to use whatever their IT department prescribes. (Also now includes people buying their first Macs and starting to use Safari)
- 10% are users who will seek out the “best” browser. In the early 2000’s, perhaps paid for Opera (and maybe still do), since around 2003 using Firefox. Care about things like speed, memory use, privacy, and extensions.
- 30% are users who would normally be in the first category, but have friends or relatives in the second. Have installed Firefox (or had Firefox forcibly installed on their behalfs) and perhaps even keep it up to date.
At the moment, I see the middle 10% swinging wildly towards Chrome. Over the last few months, given the OS X beta release, the improvement of the Developer tools, and the release of extensions, I’ve seen anecdotal Chrome usage amongst my peers (and disgruntlement with the bloat and slowness of Firefox) increase massively.
This will have the tail effect on the third group — I’ve already switched Joy to Chrome, and the next time my mum asks me something about her Firefox installation, I will undoubtedly suggest the same.
And finally, given Google’s immense power and advertising ability, they could even start to reach into the non-techies. They can use their search “monopoly” to strongly suggest Chrome installation, reaching out to people that Mozilla can only dream of.
The competition might give Mozilla a boost to improve Firefox, but the current change in their momentum doesn’t look promising for their future.
I stare at this caption, and I can’t even begin to work out what they THOUGHT they were saying. Every time you think you work it out, you realise it’s still wrong.
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firefox
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fox news
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wtf
Ooh, this I like. Moves your browser tabs to the left pane, and groups them by the tab that launched them.
Best Firefox extension I’ve seen so far in the “attractive tab-switcher thumbnailing” category.
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extension
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firefox
Nifty new Firefox extension, taking the quicksilver shorty-cutty app-launcher approach to the web. Looks very promising.
The classic arcade game Defender, implemented as a Firefox favicon! A bit of a silly hack, but the idea of updating favicons dynamically (to alert users when they’re looking at a different tab) has some milage.
In ye olde days, displaying PDF documents in the browser drove me nuts. You’d unwittingly click on a link, and your entire web browser would freeze up for 30 seconds while Adobe Reader started. But since PDF is baked so closely into the OS X system, this Firefox plugin is wicked fast, and thoroughly helpful.
Avoid being Rickroll’d with this anti-rickrolling firefox plugin. A great example of Firefox’s extensions making the internet a safer place to be.
Lovely lightweight theming for the Firefox UI — Easy to design, and easy to apply.
Dead handly location-bar-autocomplete-expander for Firefox 2 — It matches against all parts of the URL and page title, so it’s easier to find pages from your history.
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firefox
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mozilla
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plugin
“Blog” bookmarks
From my Firefox bookmarks: The folder containing all the blogs I followed regularly by hand, in the days before I discovered RSS.
Of the lists, blogdex, daypop, Haddock, Aaron Swartz's "Google Weblog" and Sassypants are the ones which have completely died, and of the rest, bloggerheads and "Nifty News, Decent Deals" are the ones I don't still subscribe to in Google Reader.
Firefox extension to bring OpenID into the browser’s chrome. (Also, Verisign’s OpenID provider now support using their PayPal Security Keys as a second-factor for authentication)
Firefox plugin which collaboratively identifies faces in photos all over the web. There’s no smart matching yet, but that’s promised for the future. Creepy, inevitable, and awesome.
Cool solution to the problem of automatically download bank statements from the gazillion different financial institutions out there: Easily scripting Firefox to download them for you. Well played, Wesabe. Well played.
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firefox
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wesabe
Superb Firefox extension, which remembers which sites you had to change the text-zoom level for. This should be baked into Firefox by default, if you ask me.
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firefox
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plugin
Opera’s latest feature, implemented as a Firefox extension within a week!
Bunch of handy GMail Greasemonkey scripts bundled up into one tasty Firefox extension.
I'm