Tom’s Hardware presented a very detailed article as to why they think Mozilla can reclaim the title as ‘Top Browser’ with Firefox in 2012. Firefox did not fair well in 2011 and as we mentioned the other day, a lot of the decline has to do with Firefox 4. I am not so sure if Mozilla can really pull this off. I realize we just started the 2nd quarter of 2012, but Mozilla has a lot of work to do with Firefox still including improving the mobile side (Boot 2 Gecko should help this) as well as adapting Firefox for Windows 8 Metro interface (more om this later this week). Sadly, I have to agree with their conclusion that for now Chrome is the better balance.

Mozilla needs to focus on making Firefox more stable and speedier and stop messing around with the user interface and releasing half finished features such as new tab list (thumbnails don’t load), don’t load tabs until selected (behavior for pinned tabs changed on next release), smooth scrolling (currently in 12 Beta and 13 Aurora, users complaining it is ‘choppy’) and user Hardware Acceleration (many user have turned this off due to various performance issues).

Tom’s Hardware – Reasons Why Firefox Could Become a Top Browser Again