As much as it pains me to say this but the short stick of it is yes, it is in my opinion. Firefox used to be that shiny new pet we all loved in the tech community while it was still young and cheerful. Whilst IE was being profoundly shunned by the tech community for having as many security loopholes as paper colander, Mozilla’s pride and joy came out firing with all guns blazing boasting crazy fast browser speeds and extensions that made the browser more than just a browser. A few years down the line however and Firefox has really started to show it’s age. The wrinkles are beginning to appear and the once blazingly fast browser now feels bogged down with an overbearing weight problem it just can’t drop. The irony is that the latest edition of Microsoft browsers, IE9, has largely been met with much praise and certainly seems to have picked itself up.

So why has Firefox fallen so badly out of favour? The simple answer is competition. More specifically Chrome. Chrome is to Firefox what Moriarty is to Sherlock Holmes and what Lex Luthor is to Superman. Google’s Chrome brought with it many game changing features to the browser wars that saw them leap frog ahead in credibility to the point where it’s difficult to see why anybody would use a browser other than Chrome.

Google recognised the two most important factors to having a great browser, that’s speed and functionality. In essence what they’ve done to the modern day browser is what Audi did to Rally Motorsport racing through its four wheel drive revolution. By using the WebKit engine and introducing SquirrelFish into the game, Chrome altered people’s perceptions of the speed of a modern browser. Connection permitting, why would you wait for a page to load anymore? Everything has to be snappy, everything has to be modern and that means that everything has to be as close to instant as possible. People are too impatient in this day and age and with the speed that technology is rushing through, it’s not surprised that people aren’t happy to simply wait around. The introduction of Google instant, although universally available has quietly changed the way we search for everything. Finding information and data has never been quite so easy or efficient. Not too long ago at the start of the decade people were still on 56k dial-up modems and for the younger readers that means waiting a good thirty seconds for any webpage to arrive. Now our perceptions of a browser is that everything is instant, if something takes more than an awkward silence between two people in front of a monitor, the first comment’s always going to be about why is the internet so slow?

Extensions. Firefox brought them into the light of day and they could do everything. If you wanted to change the currency displayed on a webpage to your own domestic currency you could or if you needed to check the weather at your grandparents place on the other side of the world, you could do that too. This is what set Firefox apart from its competition and what really made it grow was the number of developers signing on and improving everything from security to the general infrastructure. This kept Firefox in the running for a long time as when Chrome came out, the most common complaint most people had would be that they couldn’t live without their precious extensions. Firefox had changed the way we perceived the browser and how we used it in very much the same way in which Chrome changed our perception of speed in the browser. Soon Chrome cottoned onto this and soon the applications came flooding in and to no end as their fairly recently released app store has attested to.

So what can Firefox do? Are they out of the running entirely? Is there a proverbial rise from the ashes from our old Firefox friend? Well yes they could. However ruthless the tech industry is, many people still use Firefox, either out of sheer ignorance or for most people, loyalty. The truth is, we’d all like to fall back in love with Firefox and I think a lot of people are looking for that excuse to. Firefox tried it’s best to slim down and although still bloated and sluggish, Mozilla promises that the next major edition (4.0) will indeed bring about major changes. One thing Mozilla can learn is that although they must try to closer match the pace of Google’s week to week development cycle that it’s professional development team use. Firefox needs a way to get updated faster and more in tune with the times. It risks becoming an extinct software or at least be put to the fringes of the tech society in much the same way that Opera has done. So although casted out by many, we’ll be waiting for the day to welcome a new Firefox onto our computers once more.

And yes I’m aware of the figures that Firefox is still big. And yes I know there are fan boys who will try to kill me (maybe) for saying this, but I really would just like to have a snappy, secure and useful Firefox again.