Might Have Some Bearing on Recent Firefox Related Problems

In the past two years, Google's Chrome browser has made remarkable strides against Firefox and the rest of the the browser field. Chrome's share of the market has gone from 5% to 18%, according to Net Market Share, and Firefox's share has dropped from 25% to 22%.
(Remarkably, Internet Explorer still has 52% of the market, though that's down from 62% two years ago. Apple's Safari is stuck at an irrelevant 5%).
If nothing changes, Chrome will soon vault ahead of Firefox.
But, as Ed Bott observes over at ZDnet, something big may already have changed. Specifically, Mozilla, which makes Firefox, may have had its oxygen supply cut off.
The Mozilla Org is funded almost entirely by a toolbar deal with Google.
The little Google search window you see at the top right corner of your Firefox browser is a paid product placement: For the past several years, Google has paid Mozilla something on the order of $1 per copy to have that window there. Last year, that Google search window accounted for 84% of Mozilla's $123 million of revenue, or about $100 million.
The Google-Mozilla search deal ended in November. There has been no update about whether it has been renegotiated.
Ed Bott asked Mozilla about the status of the deal, and Mozilla hemmed and hawed. Specifically, Mozilla referred him to a 2009 announcement saying that Mozilla believes that "search providers will remain a solid generator of revenue for the foreseeable future." When Bott pressed them about the Google deal, Mozilla said, "we currently do not have an update to share."
Now, if you're Google, and you're trying to build Chrome into the world's leading browser, and you have the ability to pretty much put one of your two biggest competitors out of business by pulling the plug on their funding, you might do that, right?
Yes, it's safe to say that you might.
So, will anyone else step in to save Firefox to hold off Chrome?
Well, Microsoft certainly might. And inasmuch as Microsoft is not just trying to keep Internet Explorer relevant, but is also trying to build a Google-killing search business, one would expect Microsoft to step in. But it's December 4th, and we still haven't heard anything.
So, what's going on with Mozilla--and, thereby, Firefox?
Ed Bott predicted earlier this year that Firefox is toast. Even if Microsoft does step in and save Mozilla for another year or two (or Google renews its own deal and keeps Firefox alive), the writing does seem to be on the wall.
Based on the trends of the past two years, the browser wars will soon be between Microsoft and Google. And then, beyond that, it will be interesting to see whether Facebook, Amazon, or Apple make a truly serious push.

Read more: And Has Google Now Killed Off Firefox Completely By Pulling The Plug On Its Toolbar Deal?*
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I absolutely abhor the Chrome browser. If it comes down to it I'll make the switch to Opera as I already use Opera Mini on my phone Opera Mobile on my tablet and Opera 11 when running Linux.

 

my machine was built to run 98se
i did upgrade to w2k a while ago cuz of satellite
next os change will be to linux
hate he newer spyware loaded windows
wont ever use them

 

FYI, the FireFox that came with the new release of Mint is Duck Duck Go...
Duck Duck Go: The new default search engine is Duck Duck Go. It doesn't show different results depending on who's making the search, it doesn't track or record user information, it provides you with optimized results and it's built on and contributes to Open Source.

 

I love Opera

Have used it for years now. Like the way it thinks and when using JAP, you are almost invisible.
anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html

As for the rest of the pack...let 'em cook in their own greed...

Gafarmboy

 

Yah.. I think Opera is **** too and agree that FF is bloated. I use Google Chrome 100% of the time and use FF, IE to test my applications with. I honestly couldn't give a **** about safari.

 

I did too until I actually bothered setting it up to mimic the way I have FF set up. Once I found all the right plugins and got a handle on the privacy controls it was good to go. The one feature I like about Chrome is the built in task manager thingie. Comes in handy when those flash games freeze and you can just kill the single tab while retaining everything else.

 

I have Chrome as an alternative browser in case my IE goes belly-up. I really don't like Chrome - too stripped down, seems almost nothing there. The opposite of IE, which has too danged much useless drivel on the screen.

Still looking for a happy medium that will allow me to totally bypass my current CenturyLink/IE combination in times of trouble.
I keep the IE, so I have commonality with my work system.

What ever happened to Nutscrape...? IE pretty much eclipsed it, then it seemed to disappear from the market?

 

As Chrome is from Google who uses non expiring dom cookies; I avoid using it.

 

That's a joke right?

 

I just ran across this...didn't know if you knew this. Having these launch parameters could come in handy.

List of Chromium Command Line Switches « Peter Beverloo

 

Not that the cookies don't expire - they expire in 2038, I think.

 

Now this I have to see. Adobe's being annoying again (for Linux), only chrome/chromium seem to want to follow their pepper idea. I might consider a switch...

 

Nice ..and as a bonus, you can pretty much copy your profile from G-chrome to the default profile in SW..

I have it up and running now.

 

might have been a function of the linux version. I'm on win7. I have a love hate relationship with linux. Everytime I use it, I always feel like I've stepped back in time 8 years on the experience scale. But that's just me.