whopa

It seems that nearly every post about Chrome results in a multitude of comments like this one, about how extensions are key and Chrome is useless without them. Google realizes this and is working on bringing extensions to Chrome. Mozilla, on the other hand, isn't working on bringing process-per-tab to Firefox at all. It almost seems like willful ignorance.

Firefox may be dead simply due to Mozilla not having any long term strategy vision about how to stay relevant. The issue isn't that Chrome doesn't have extensions now, but what is Mozilla doing now to plan for the future when they no longer have the extension advantage. So far it looks like nothing.

Even Firefox's vaunted new JS engine in 3.5 isn't going to be turned on for extensions, only web content. Meanwhile not only does Chrome's extension code get the V8 love, they also run as a separate process, which means they won't impact performance of browsing as much as Firefox's extension framework does.

The b3 improvements are incremental, I doubt you'll see that big a difference in benchmarks.

There wasn't a whole lot of change from Firefox 1.5->2.0, Firefox 3.0 was the big refresh. I don't actually remember that much complaining about poor performance in Firefox 2.0 relative to 1.x.

What do you feel are missing features in Chrome that actually matter to people that you feel with materially impact performance significantly?

The article links to another article comparing Chrome to Firefox 3.1b2, with Chrome still coming out ahead on performance. The JS engine is only one part of the equation. Chrome is faster than Firefox in a host of other things, like DOM manipulation and startup time, as well as the process-per-tab design makes it scale to multiple cores far more effectively.

Mozilla's lagging pretty hard on the innovation front. Everyone (except IE) has fast JS engines now. It's not really a differentiator. They aren't really doing anything notable long term, they're just gliding on their inertia. At least Google is actively working on Mac and Linux ports and extensions for Chrome, which are their two big catchup areas. Mozilla isn't even thinking about process-per-tab.