Firefox's Fifth Birthday - what does the future hold?

Back in the day I used IE-- it just worked better than Netscape, and it was already integrated into the operating system.

I switched to Firefox when it came out because of the tabs feature.

Then I switched to Chrome when it came out because of the site-search feature (type a website, then type tab, then type your search and it will automatically use the site's own search feature which cuts out an extra page load each time I want to search phonearena.com or thottbot.com or imdb.com, or what have you).

But there is another reason Chrome might win over Firefox; the underlying technology.

Firefox is based on Mozilla which uses the "Gecko" engine to render content, originally developed waaaay back when for Netscape. Chrome is based on the open-source project "WebKit" which is used for Safari as well as a myriad of other browsers.

There is a fundamental difference between Gecko, which has inherited features from ancient times (remember Netscape was actually a part of a whole enterprise suite that included Email, Browsing and IM support) and WebKit which is small and clean and only does what its supposed to do: render webpages.

Don't get me wrong; Gecko has received some over-haul on it's rendering engine, it uses Cairo now. But we're still talking about a titan forged in the days before the internet, compared to Chrome which is engineered based on the philosophy of how a web browser is actually used.

Firefox is no longer the new innovative kid on the block.

More about the Chrome philosophy: http://www.google.co...rome/index.html
Reference article on Firefox: http://arstechnica.c...ed-to-gecko.ars