How’s that for a sensationalistic headline? In all seriousness now, after pondering the issue for a good part of the evening, I realised how fine a line Firefox is walking, even more now than in the past.

Think back to mid 2005, early 2006, the days of Firefox 1.5. That’s when Firefox became a solid alternative browser. As more and more tech-savvy people were getting sick and tired of Internet Explorer 6, Firefox was the right thing at the right time. It promised less crashes, better performance and most importantly better security. Along came the extensions and themes, and as their number grew from tens to hundreds – now thousands – the user base expanded further and eventually trickled down to people less interested in tech. Three versions later, it’s 2009, and Firefox has 25% of the market-share according to a Net Applications survey.

What has essentially changed from three years ago?

• We’ve got ubiquitous wireless internet access via 3G networks and WiFi at pretty good throughputs, sufficient even for video streaming.
• Fibre-Optic and high speed cable connections are more accessible.
• Web applications seem to be quickly attacking the current computing paradigm. It could turn out to be the second coming of the thin-client.
• Whereas in 2006, we would accept pretty much anything to get rid of IE 6, we now have something called competition.

First of all, Firefox lacks any sort of meaningful leverage. It only comes preinstalled on a number of Linux distributions. Which as much as we’d want to, doesn’t amount to more than 1,6% machines. On comparison Internet Explorer is preinstalled on millions of Windows machines, from netbooks to gaming PCs. Even Safari, which is based on the same underlying technology as Chrome, benefits from more leverage by being preinstalled on Macs, not to mention the millions of iPod touches and iPhones. So, I guess this is strike one. (Nay-Sayers out there, my mom isn’t going to be installing a browser anytime soon. Being ‘there’ is very important for a large sector of the market.)

Second of all, Firefox isn’t revolutionary anymore. It’s no longer the fastest, the most stable or secure, the most open. Does anyone have any doubt that by next year, every single one of Firefox’s add-ons will be ported to Chrome? I for one, do not. And the trouble is, it’s the only thing that separates Firefox. If anyone out there has leverage, then Google has it, with its millions of hits every day. They already have a message for IE 6 users browsing YouTube, asking them to upgrade their browser to either Chrome, Firefox or IE 8. And how much would it cost them to give Chrome a plug on the frontpage? Or AdSense links?

Lastly, think about more devices like the ‘alleged’ Apple tablet and netbooks running Chrome OS. Is Apple going to let Opera publish its browser on the App Store? I don’t think so. More than that, Google can choose to end its search engine referral deal with Mozilla, which nets for 91% of all the revenues. Who’s going to promote and sustain active development, at a level that would allow them to compete with Google’s resources?

I’m not saying this is a good or a bad thing. That’s for each of us to decide. More than anything else, it should be a message to the developers working on Firefox that there’s still a window of opportunity to make Firefox relevant once again.

I recently wrote an article about Opera 10 – which is currently in development – and got a lot of backlash from readers.

According to about 70 comments which were published, I downplayed Opera’s importance as a browser and as an innovator.

Jon says:

I agree with N_P. To say Opera has stagnated because it has not brought true innovation is just wrong. For one, they were the first to introduce a system like “speed-dial” which you describe as being familiar to rival browsers who were simply emulating Opera’s innovation.

I left the Opera camp a long time ago, at least 4 years, and according to some, I’ve missed the mark completely when I said Opera didn’t bring true innovation these past years.

You are wrong, then. Firefox’s awesome bar? Ripped off from Opera. Chrome and Safari’s top sites feature? Ripped off from Opera. And so it continues… Just look at the feature list for Safari 4. It’s like looking at a list of existing Opera features!

Thomas Ford, Communications Manager at Opera, contacted me after a day or so with some clarifications. We continued our conversation, and, as a result, I’ve got some interesting bits of information which I’m going to share with you.

A lot of the comments raise different points, but I’d like to highlight a few that they didn’t. I won’t take issue with you saying there isn’t much new in the labs release. That’s fair. The labs release of Opera 10 with Turbo is essentially to showcase that technology only. It certainly isn’t a complete representation of Opera 10.

Thomas then goes on to point out an interesting aspect about the Opera Turbo technology:

One important thing about Turbo though is that it is different from Opera Mini technology. Where Opera Mini’s OBML is actually a transcoding technology, Opera Turbo is a compression technology. They have fundamentally the same client-server architecture, but they work quite differently. Opera Mini translates the code from the Web into OBML then spits it out on the handset. Opera Turbo simply compresses things. It doesn’t transcode. This means you can use technologies like Ajax which are broken in the transcoding process.

I replied shortly:

Truth be said, I’ve lost my faith in Opera a while ago and I didn’t give Opera Turbo enough time when I wrote the review, which was clearly pointed out by the comments.

Referring to ads integrated into the browser interface, one of the main reasons I gave up on Opera years ago:

Totally fair. I think the ads turned a lot of people off. We faced a problem. We used to be a paid product, then wanted to release a free version. Of course, we had engineers to pay and our mobile business had yet to really take off. So the ads were a necessary evil to make enough money to keep operating. I think that was in 2000 or so. In 2005 we were able to go free through the same monetization strategy Firefox uses (Google search).
I think there are a lot of users who went through the same thing with Opera. Convincing them to try us again is a challenge, but I think we’re trying even harder now.

How would you feel about releasing the Opera code into under GPL, like Mozilla did with Firefox? What are the benefits for keeping the source code closed?

It’s actually something that has come up a lot. I should point out that some things we do are open source. We released Opera Dragonfly (our developer tools) under a BSD license and we’ve released a bunch of open developer libraries.
But in terms of releasing the browser core under a GPL or other OS license, the benefit isn’t necessarily there for us. We make a significant amount of revenue from licensing the browser. Since we have only one core (the same browser core is at the center of Opera on desktop, on mobile and on TVs, etc), we would give away a lot of our competitive advantage.
Our CEO I think had a decent answer to the question. He’s a computer scientist by training and has worked on open source projects before. Here’s an interview that might be interesting if you have the time.
You raise a valid question and it’s definitely something we can’t rule out for the future as our company evolves. Overall though, I think our resources are best spent trying to bring open standards to the Web to improve interoperability.

If Mozilla comes out with a decent competitor for Opera Mobile, they showed some alpha code recently, what would your response be to that situation? It would probably cut a whole lot of your revenues from OEMs.

In practice OEMs and network operators expect many things from a Web browser. Often it requires a great deal of customization to meet their demands. No two OEMs or operators have the same demands so it makes the mobile browser space quite different to the PC browser space.
I don’t think that it necessarily would cut into our revenues. Currently there are several Windows Mobile browsers already available. Even with those competitors we have been able to grow our revenues every quarter.
Mozilla does present a more formidable competitor due to its brand recognition and pre-existing user base. I guess we’ll have to see how it plays out. I’d like to think we add value to operators and OEMs through close collaboration and partnership and thus would continue to earn their business.

To conclude, I think Opera 10 is definitely worth another review when it reaches Release Candidate status.