Be quick or be dead: is Firefox falling?

Tipping Firefox across the chasm is an excellent post written more than five years ago. In this post, the author analyzes the rising of Firefox in the browser market share, listing some of the causes that made this possible. However, there's one point that actually is worth of mentioning: performance. In fact, Firefox is not considered under this aspect but only as an alternative to the obsolete Internet Explorer 6. Time changes everything. After five years, new browsers have been released, and a key aspect that now seems to be on the top of any browser wish list is actually performance. Take Chrome for example: it's fast, maybe it's one of the fastest browser on the market. Safari is fast too, just as Opera. Internet Explorer is just filling (or try to fill) the gap with the next release (9). And Firefox? Actually, it's much slower than Chrome, Opera and Safari. But why performance? Because in the meantime users got faster connections, so they want to see fast responses when they surf the web. A website must load in a snapshot. Period. I know that this is utopia from a mere point of view of a web developer, but the success of a browser is often determined by its users who, of course, are non-developers if they're considered as simple percentages. In other words, simple users can effectively push a browser on top or, conversely, let it falling down to minority. This is something that Firefox developers must seriously take into account. In simple words: be quick or be dead.

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