One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.

Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.

I’ll be honest, at that moment Tristan was the software world’s Tom Jones and my knickers were mid-flight. Three years later and things are a little different. These days, standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue. We have the browser ballot – Opera’s work, but Mozilla celebrated loudest – bookmark syncing across multiple machines, private browsing, hardware acceleration. The list goes on.

Standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue

Internet Explorer is learning how to play nice with others, Safari gets prettier every iteration, Opera’s on feature steroids and Chrome goes whoosh. Do we still need Mozilla keeping everybody else honest? If not, then what is it that Firefox still offers? What is the outstanding feature? Add-ons are nice – I don’t use any because Chrome comes with all the ones I need preinstalled – but selling your browser on them, as Mozilla seems to be, is riskier than inviting Wayne Rooney to your nan’s birthday party.

Like the catalyst in a science experiment, I’m beginning to wonder if Firefox’s greatest contribution to browsers is not its continued existence, but that it existed at all. Put another way: Mozilla has won all its battles, is it time the company picked a new war?

My lord, if looks could kill I’d be stabbed, shot and dropped off a bridge by now. But bear with me, ferocious internet creature filled with malice and wrath. I’m not suggesting Mozilla give up on Firefox, or that the company’s rubbish at creating browsers. It’s not. However, given the resources available to rivals, and their renewed impetus, Mozilla’s beginning to look like a pantomime horse with a 100,000 people inside being asked to race in the Grand National.

Roaming troublemaker

I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

And in the finest traditions of “did you hear what that bloke just said about your mum” I’d like to suggest that it crash Microsoft’s cushy Office party. As it stands, Office 2010 and Office 2007 are brilliant, and all the rest are rubbish. I’m sure the community behind OpenOffice.org work very hard, but pretending the last seven years never happened is no way to make an office suite. Similarly, and I’m looking at you Google, pretending hard disks don’t exist isn’t exactly healthy, either.

In fact I’d rather carve words into my own flesh than ever use either again – a point rammed home every time to use Ubuntu for an extended period. (Just imagine how much more attractive Ubuntu 10.10 would be with a decent office suite pre-installed.)

This is a market that desperately needs somebody to be brave. Look at Scrivener on the Mac, an utterly brilliant piece of software chock full of ideas that deserve a bigger audience. I’ve written before about the implementation of tabbed documents in a word processor, and that’s only the beginning. There’s so many things that could be better.

I can feel the rope being slipped around my neck, but before you kick away the stool, give yourself over to wistfulness for just a moment. Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?

It takes 30 seconds to fire up the browser, Barry says. Well perhaps it does, but it’s still much faster than Internet Explorer, and in general my homepages – pcpro.co.uk and google.co.uk – are ready and waiting for me within ten seconds.

Of course there are irritations – every piece of software I’ve ever used has been irritating – but if Barry’s worried about the grey finish then add a theme. And maybe get a life while you’re at it. (Only kidding Barry, honest!)

And let’s concentrate on the plus points. While Google has a few Add-ins, it’s absolutely nothing compared to the universe of extras available for Firefox. Plus, Mozilla is a company that actually cares about its users’ privacy; Google rather less so.

So why is Google Chrome closing the gap in terms of market share? In part because it is a good product, in that it’s so damn fast, but also because Google is spending cash on promoting it.

Download Skype and you have to untick two boxes or Chrome will both be downloaded and become your default browser. Likewise, visit the Google homepage over the course of a week and at some point you’ll see a message suggesting you download Chrome. Or type “web browser” into Google itself and guess what comes top of the sponsored links?

Viewed in this context, shouldn’t Chrome be doing just a little better than 14% market share?

I’ve written in the past about my defection from Firefox to Chrome as my default browser, and was called everything from a “troll” to a “little bitch” for moaning about its increasingly slovenly performance and constant nagging.

Now, it appears even Mozilla’s friends are turning on Firefox. The browser’s co-founder, Blake Ross, was reportedly asked on a web forum whether he felt Firefox could maintain even double-digit market share over the next five years (it currently has around 25% of the worldwide market, according to Net Applications). He replied:

“I’m pretty sceptical. I think the Mozilla Organisation has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly.”

I make him right. It gives me no pleasure to lay into Mozilla – Firefox was my default browser for the best part of the last decade, and Mozilla engineers are among the smartest and nicest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to interview. But Firefox has lost it.

On the rare occasions I fire up the browser these days, it takes 30 seconds or so to get going, and then often needs a reboot once the various extensions have updated themselves. Admittedly, much of that delay is caused by me only opening the browser once a week instead of every day, meaning the updates arrive en masse, but it’s certainly no incentive to go back. Chrome never takes more than 10-15 seconds to get going, and is usually ready for action the moment I press the logo on the taskbar.

Mozilla Firefox also looks like a browser of yesteryear. That stolid grey chrome and old-fashioned menu bar look dated compared to Chrome’s clutter-free, blue interface. And although the performance difference is marginal compared to Internet Explorer, Chrome does have a clear advantage over Firefox on JavaScript-heavy web apps (most notably, of course, Google’s own).

It seems it’s not only me who has swapped Firefox for Chrome, either. The chart below shows the percentage of visitors to PCPro.co.uk using the two browsers. As you can see, Chrome has been rising steadily upwards to almost 14% of our visitors this month, while Firefox’s share has been eroded from a peak of mid-forties last summer to today’s share of 35%.

PC Pro visitors are by no means representative of the internet as a whole, but they are an excellent bellwether of things to come, with our early-adopter audience often reflecting trends that will soon become mainstream.

Unless Mozilla can pull something special out of the hat for Firefox 4 – and we’ve seen nothing revolutionary so far – Blake Ross’ prediction looks somewhat ominous.

Read Tim Danton’s sterling defence of Mozilla Firefox here

However, that’s far from the worst of its sins. When I went to email a colleague a file on my desktop, I right clicked on the icon and clicked Send To Mail Recipient as usual, only to find that Thunderbird had elbowed Outlook out of the way and installed itself as my default mail client. Without once asking permission to do so (at least, not in any plainly visible way that I can recall).

Come on, Mozilla. We expect these kind of tricks from commercial software vendors, not an open-source foundation. Don’t lower yourselves to their level.

1. Paint.NET

Windows 7 may now include a version of Paint complete with a fancy Ribbon interface, but it still doesn’t offer the features I need to quickly enhance photos and mould screenshots to my whims. Paint.NET does, and it also supports plug-ins for RAW files (and more), making it my top photo-editing choice.

2. Mozilla Firefox

Sorry Internet Explorer 8, but you’re too slow (as Microsoft’s own engineers accidentally admitted by saying they’d focus on performance with Internet Explorer 9). And frankly, I don’t use all those fancy right-click shortcuts that Microsoft has built in. I far prefer the faster Firefox, complete with all the Extensions such as Echofon for Twitter.

3. Windows Live Writer

I know it’s basic compared to some blogging tools out there, but Windows Live Writer is the perfect partner to our WordPress-powered blog. It’s easy to use while still offering all the power and features I need, such as retaining my favoured settings for photo formatting and links. To download it, type “live essentials” into the Windows 7 or Vista search box.

4. Adobe Reader

I’ve tried to like alternatives to Adobe Reader, such as FoxIt Reader, but against all my best instincts I keep on coming back to the bloated and comparatively slow Adobe offering. And that’s despite the fact I hate the way its install routine tries to sneak in a Yahoo toolbar and those annoying updates. The best thing that can be said about this program is that it works.

5. FileZilla

There may well be better FTP utilities than FileZilla, but as far as I’m concerned everyone can halt development right now: FileZilla is free, it works, and the interface – while doing for good looks what Bob Hoskins does for swimsuit modelling – is plain and functional. As far as I’m concerned, this is the poster child for open-source software.

6. VLC media player

I haven’t actually needed to use this tiny application since rebuilding my PC, but it won’t be long before a media file comes along in a form that Windows Media Player can’t recognise (one obvious example being FLV files). VLC media player, on the other hand, is fantastic at handling pretty much anything that’s thrown at it.

7. Spotify

While I still can’t bring myself to pay £10 per month for music I can’t keep, Spotify is my first port of call when it comes to distraction in the office. After all, a man needs to listen to something to drown out Stuart Turton’s whines about Liverpool’s latest failure (this weekend excepted), Jon Bray muttering to himself as he tests mobile phones, and Barry Collins ranting about various watchdog authorities.

8. BBC iPlayer

Travelling home by a train, sometimes I can’t quite force myself to do anything useful. Luckily those kind people at the BBC have built the iPlayer. With HD shows available for download as well, I’m in the odd situation where TV is better while travelling than at home. Note: this service is only available in the UK. If it’s any consolation, our weather’s awful.

9. Skype

I’ve moaned about Skype’s habit of grabbing my credit unless I use its pay-as-you-go service every six months, but this remains an essential tool in my foreign-trip armoury: much as I love my children, I’m not making 30-minute calls home on mobile roaming rates! With Skype, it’s free to call other Skype users and just 1.7 Euro cents to UK numbers.

10. Windows Live Mesh

I approach Live Mesh with a certain amount of trepidation: press Delete at the wrong time and it has the capability to permanently lose files with almost as much as speed as it allows you to share them. But if you, like me, flitter between different machines at a whim, then having one always-accessible copy of vital files can’t be underestimated.

In May, the company decided to have one last attempt at persuading the people on Firefox 2 to move up to Firefox 3, by hitting users of the old version with a pop-up that prompted them to upgrade. Those who declined were invited to fill out a questionnaire, asking them to reveal why they didn’t want the latest software.

The number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people’s bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. No fewer than 25% of Firefox 3 refuseniks cited this as the reason they wouldn’t upgrade. In fact, almost all of the people who provided feedback had tried Firefox 3, didn’t like what they saw, and headed back to Firefox 2.

“When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn’t really want to have displayed,” Firefox’s principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains on the Mozilla Blog of Metrics.

“In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object. Having something from your previous browsing displayed to someone else who is using your computer (or even worse) to a large audience of people as you are giving a presentation, is really one of the most embarrassing things that Firefox can do to you.”

There’s little doubt, then, that Firefox 3 had caused more than its fair share of domestic showdowns, as unsuspecting partners accidentally stumbled across sites that were previously buried in a folder called something like “Dave’s really boring bookmarks, nothing to see here”.

No wonder Mozilla hastily introduce a Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5…

The first design is fairly typical Firefox, with the tabs beneath the address bar (click to enlarge):

The Aero effect looks nice, and it’s a very clean interface, with only minor changes from the Firefox 3.7 concept images which Mozilla recently released. But there’s also a mockup with the tabs – unusually for Firefox – moved above the address bar:

I actually think it looks better that way, as the address/search bar to me is part of the tab I’m using, not a distinct element that works over all the tabs. But then I’m one of the few people who use Google Chrome as my main browser, and if you look at Chrome’s current design it’s easy to see why I like that Firefox layout.

Look familiar?

You can see more of the Firefox 4 mockups over on Mozilla’s wiki page, and there’s an interesting point near the bottom about the thinking behind some of the designs.

“I guess the idea of having a combined go/refresh button is good. It will help the users who are just switching from IE.”

I’ve been noticing for a while now that all the main browser designs seem to be converging, and this comment adds weight to that. If this is the way the designers are thinking, give it another year and Microsoft’s EU browser troubles will be irrelevant – they’ll all look the same.

As Matthew Sparkes noted in his preview of Firefox 3.5, not much has changed on the surface, with the exception of a rather clumsily implemented Private Browsing mode.

However, one issue I’ve noticed after installing the browser this afternoon is that my Google Gears Add-on has been disabled, because it isn’t compatible with this latest build. That’s a significant issue for anyone who uses Firefox to access services such as GMail and Google Reader offline.

Why hasn’t Google got its Gears Add-on ready for the launch of 3.5? Is this the first sign that cracks are beginning to appear in the once harmonious Google/Mozilla relationship, now that Google has its own browser to worry about?

The filter, dubbed EasyList, quickly became the first entry in the list of recommended filters shown after AdblockPlus is installed, and its success at picking up and blocking dozens of types of advertisement – from the simple banner ad to the more complex flash and java creations that now litter the web – is surely part of the reasons why Firefox is both popular and enjoys a far more favourable reputation than its main rival, Internet Explorer.

If you need further clarification as to Adblock Plus’ popularity, then look no further than Mozilla.org: the extension sits in both Mozilla’s list of recommended software and the leaderboard of most popular add-ons. In fact, it’s the most popular extension out there, downloaded more than 620,000 times per week and with over one thousand five-star reviews.

A blog post over at adblockplus.org mentions that Rick’s list ‘helped improve the browsing experience for millions of people’ and that’s no exaggeration – so next time you’re browsing a site and find that all those pesky adverts have disappeared before you’ve even loaded the page, raise your tea or coffee in a salute to the man who made it all possible.

Google’s shock entry into the browser market might be bad news for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but it could be terminal for Mozilla and Firefox.

Google is Mozilla’s sugar daddy. In 2006 (the latest figures we have available), a staggering 85% of Mozilla Corp’s revenue came from the homepage and search deal it has with Google. Firefox is almost entirely dependent on the company that’s just launched what could easily become its biggest rival.

Mozilla might therefore be thanking its lucky stars that just last week Google signed a three-year extension to that Firefox search deal. But why, knowing full well that it was about to launch a competitor, did Google decide to continue propping up Mozilla?

Aside from the fact that cutting ties with Firefox would have instantly wiped hundreds of millions of hits from Google’s search, Mozilla is now Google’s insurance policy. If Chrome fails, Google can maintain its tight-knit relationship with Firefox. If Chrome succeeds, Google can pull the plug on its Mozilla deal.

Which gives Mozilla three years to find a new benefactor. But which other search company would be prepared to pump money into Firefox? Microsoft’s about as likely to bankroll a rival as George Bush is to host an open-top parade through the streets of Baghdad. Yahoo, meanwhile, is now so closely aligned to Google that it’s practically unthinkable that it will step into the breach. Which leaves the minnows such as Ask, who certainly won’t be stumping up the tens of millions Google deposits in the Mozilla vaults every year.

Mozilla either needs to find a new way to make money. Or start cutting its cloth to suit a much tighter budget.