Mozilla plans multi-engine search results, native iOS browser

Competition perhaps

Multi- search engine results, sounds interesting.

It would make sense that when the results come up on then screen it tells which search engine give which results, but this might upset the apple cart.

Search engine providers, Google and Co I'm looking at you, rely on secret algorithms to give you your results. This is also linked in to advertising.

Imagine how watered down your product would become if each time a search is made your competitors and rivals feature in the search? It does make for competition but at what cost?

Will the Cororations support it, or not?

Sorry, nothing compelling there

to make me switch from Opera.

Firefox on the desktop is a one-trick pony and not a very good one at that. It's a bloated memory hog.

Here's an idea

Go back to basics, be the slimmest cleanest fastest browser out there, like you were when you launched, make Do Not Track your mantra and nuke all in page advertising and link spam, fund the project entirely on search referrals.

Launch it as a new browser alongside Firefox, but share the codebase so the optimisations flow back to FF for the die hards.

What is the reason you would pick Firefox over Chrome?

I'm a developer, and FF works better for that than any other browser. Gecko > everything. That's always been my reason, and given how buggy Webkit is (stick your nth-child selector bugs up your highly polished ARSE!) it looks set to stay that way. It also has the best feature set, for my money.

From an end user's perspective, I can see why they'd be using Chrome, aside from the massive advertising campaign. There's no denying that it's bloody quick, and that seems to be the only thing most end users care about.

Personally, if I wasn't using FF, I'd probably be using Opera to be honest. All the speed, similar feature set, none of the bugs (just a couple of its own), and if you turn off Turbo, no dialling home either.

Lefthand list of search engines sounds like a terrible idea

We don't change our default search engine because it defaults to Google, not because we want to use other search engines but are too lazy/stupid to do so.

Nobody wants more bars on the edges of their browser windows. Hasn't Mozilla noticed that the trend is towards less crap around the edges? From the old days of toolbars, to modern day when it's just tabs and an address bar? IE9 even pushes the address bar up into the tab row (making it awkward to type long URLs, which implies that this is the limit). It also breaks up the division between the browser controls and the page, which has always been, browser at top, below that, it's all page...

I use Firefox when I need the developer features, and when I don't need to watch flash videos (which are currently crashing FF, if you hadn't heard)

Don't clutter up the real estate

would be my advice.

Oh and on that subject, El Reg, please don't accept any more of these intrusive Microsoft Cloud ads featuring androgynous George Takei look-alikes wearing armour and chiffon.

re. ".. vertical row.."

Many people refer to this as a 'column'.