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Chrome Complicates Mozilla/Google Love-In
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Dec 22, 2008 09:06 AM
from the also-water-is-wet dept.
from the also-water-is-wet dept.
Barence writes "Mozilla CEO John Lilly has admitted the Firefox maker's relationship with Google has become 'more complicated' since the company launched its own browser. Mozilla is dependent on Google for the vast majority of its revenue and has previously worked closely with the search king's engineers on the development of Firefox. But that relationship appears to have cooled since Google released Chrome in the summer. 'We have a fine and reasonable relationship, but I'd be lying if I said that things weren't more complicated than they used to be.'"
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Hmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They actually can't do that. They've been skirting a very serious MS sized antitrust action for some time now and if they start engaging in that sort of activity they will end up on the wrong side of a DoJ action.
The feds have been rather generous in their investigative and regulatory efforts into Google's control of the online advertising market, if they start using that influence to overtly harm competitors that's definite cause for an antitrust action.
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we're about to see if Google really isn't evil.
Just remember that it's not evil to not support a competitor.
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Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and the obvious addition: It's not evil to compete, either. (not even if you're Microsoft)
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Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Devil is in the details.
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Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually MS taking over VirtualPC was as much to protect Windows as anything else.
Without VirtualPC, OS X suddenly lost the ability to run Windows.
Virtual PC was working of a version for OSX on Intel.
Parallels hadn't been announced yet, let alone released.
VMWare hadn't entered the market.
Bootcamp hadn't been released as "beta".
Suddenly with the MS acquisition, the Intel version of Virtual PC was shelved indefinitely.
It was a calculated attack at OS X which was starting to gain market share as an alternative platform to Window, that could also run Windows if you needed to for an App or two.
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Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't think they're evil, but this is a good point for Mozilla to review their funding options. From the article:
[Mozilla CEO John] Lilly admits Mozilla will have to wean itself off its dependence on Google dollars. "Our goal is to be an advocate for the web for 50 or even 100 years, and you can't depend on any one organisation," he added.
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Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, replacing an estimated $70 million a year in revenue is easier said than done, especially if these types of search deals dry up.
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Relationships are hard. (Score:5, Funny)
So what? (Score:3, Informative)
It's not like Mozilla has some trade secrets to hide from their partner. All the secrets of making a browser seem to be released regularly as source code.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Source code isn't everything. There is a lot of trade wisdom, such as "oh, this is why this other on-the-surface simpler technique doesn't actually work out in practice", that is rarely written into the source code or documentation but that you can get access to if you have a close relationship with the developers. So Google's relationship with Mozilla
It's like you work at an ice cream store (Score:5, Funny)
Things are going pretty good. You're scooping some flavors, having some fun, and earning some money. The boss is pretty cool, but one day he brings in his son and tells you he's going to start working there, too. At first you're training the kid, showing him the ropes, and things are going pretty well. But then, before you know it, he's the assistant manager and you're still just a scoop jockey. Yup, that's life.
Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store (Score:4, Funny)
There's something disturbing in your analogy.
For instance, where's the car?
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ideally... (Score:5, Insightful)
While Chrome may "complicate" their relationship, ideally there should be as many browsers on the market as possible. Microsoft's monopoly over the web produced a sort of tunnel-vision toward website development. Having a variety of browsers available has been changing that. The more browsers available, the more pressure will be placed upon companies to support standards compliance.
So while Mozilla and Google may compete, doing so is in both their interests. In addition, competition is in the consumer's interest because it keeps pushing the browser market forward and gaining us great features like HTML5 compliance, process isolation, privacy modes*, malware protection, etc.
* I've found this to be an excellent way to use an admin login on a site where I also have regular user credentials.
Re:Ideally... (Score:5, Funny)
privacy modes*
* I've found this to be an excellent way to use an admin login on a site where I also have regular user credentials.
Well played, sir. Well played.
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Re: (Score:3)
Heh. Sorry, I just figured out that trick the other day and just had to share. Being a programmer, I'm terminally lazy about everything. And nothing is more annoying than either having to log out of my current account -OR- open a completely different web browser. (I used to do the latter.) I got the bright idea yesterday of using Chrome's incognito mode as a method of circumventing this issue. One incognito window, and *BAM* I'm clear from my browser's normal sessions and cookies. As a bonus, the browser do
Re:Ideally... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't agree. I feel a majority of the Chrome users are former Firefox/Opera/Safari users. When a dominant minority group (Firefox) is fractured or segmented... it doesn't hurt Internet Explorer. In fact, it helps it.
----- Current Breakdown -----
Internet Explorer 71.11%
Mozilla Firefox 20.06%
Safari 6.62%
Opera 0.75%
Netscape 0.46%
Google Chrome 0.74%)
Other (0.24%)
----- Fun Numbers ----- (100% made up)
Internet Explorer 60%
Mozilla Firefox 15%
Safari 10%
Opera 1%
Netscape 1%
Google Chrome 12%
Other 1%
With the above made up numbers, I can still hear our CFO saying "see, we should focus on Internet Explorer... everyone else doesn't even have 20% share! And, that 'Firefox' thing is going DOWN! "
I'd love to see some information as to what browser current Chrome users transitioned away from.
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Re:Ideally... (Score:4, Informative)
I'd love to see some information as to what browser current Chrome users transitioned away from.
Here [wikipedia.org] you go!
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Re:Ideally... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then point out that 40% of the potential customers are being turned away ....
If you ran a shop and you made the doors awkward for 30-40% of your customers and lost trade because of it you would get fired ...
It is still the case that a lot of websites are designed on Firefox tested on Safari/Opera/Chrome etc ... and then heavily modified to work in IE7, and then more so to work on IE6 ...
A few design to IE7 then find that it does not work on IE6 or anything else ... and spend more time redesigning it ...
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Re:Ideally... (Score:5, Informative)
Personally, I can't wait until Chrome is available for Mac. I will be switching from Firefox pretty quickly. Firefox has never worked well on the Mac, although the current version is much better than the horrid mess that was Firefox 2.0.
May I ask if you have tried/considered Camino (formerly Chimera), the Mozilla project's native Mac OS X browser? (Same engine, just a native GUI)
http://mozilla.org/projects/camino/ [mozilla.org]
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Pentrose (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you otherwise like Google Chrome, then SRWare Iron is the browser you should be checking out: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php [srware.net]
Chrome has a long way to go (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried Chrome, and while I find it's a refreshing innovation in GUI design for a browser, it has a *long* way to go to match Firefox's features.
Also, it's not yet-cross platform, and from what I understand, it'll take some doing before there's even a Mac version.
There's no browser for me that comes close to Firefox in terms of features. Many will argue that Opera does, and this may be true, but I find the interface a little too alien for my preference.
Also, there's the question of privacy, which Google has a poor track record on. Will Firefox users start to trust Google? I'm not so sure.
Re:Chrome has a long way to go (Score:4, Interesting)
>>I tried Chrome, and while I find it's a refreshing innovation in GUI design for a browser, it has a *long* way to go to match Firefox's features.
The thing is: the reverse is *also* true!
Firefox has also a long way to go before matching Chrome on some features such as responsiveness (thanks to Chrome's multi-process architecture).
I've dropped Firefox due to its poor responsiveness, I'm currently using Opera but my trials with Chrome were quite positive too.
So in one 'word': YMMV.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Additionally, it checks each and every URL you visit against google's malware-list.
I fail to see how checking hashes against a pre-downloaded list gives out any information about a user
Re:Chrome has a long way to go (Score:4, Insightful)
They're working on it. If you dare you can take a look at a nightly [mozilla.org] and see for yourself. For me it's now almost as fast as opera and that is under linux. Firefox used to be a real dog under linux, mind you, even worse than the windows version.
Well, I guess they can only do so much. We have tons of new features and an amazing Addon-System by now, the guys who developed all that probably couldn't focus on performance at the same time. But the good news is, as said, it's improving and one of your next fox updates will give you a nice speed boost.
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Use of resources (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google felt that a browser with Chrome's security / capability needed to exist, then they should have opened a dialog with Mozilla to discuss how FireFox could be enhanced to that end. Google could have provided funding or coders to help make that possible.
Internet Explorer has lost ground, but that is primarily because there has been a single, well-defined alternative - Firefox. Segmentation of the alternative-to-IE market at this point could be disastrous. The sleeping giant has already been awakened, and Microsoft has turned IE from a piece of crap that had languished for years into a modern, legitimate browser. Microsoft won't make the same mistake twice, and they are aggressively working to regain their browser market share.
I can only think of three logical explanations for Google to release their own browser:
It is really just an experiment, and Google will just pull the plug on it out of the blue. They've done this before with other experimental projects.
They want Chrome to replace Firefox as the alternative to IE, so they will have complete control over the market. This makes sense, because the web browser is the total point of interface to their multi-billion dollar industry. It is logical that they would want direct control over that component.
They did try to get Mozilla to make changes to Firefox, but their requests were ignored.
Re:Use of resources (Score:4, Funny)
Yea, that would be totally unlike Microsoft.
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Re:Use of resources (Score:5, Interesting)
you seem to have forgotten that little "be bold" thing. It's always easier and usually better to implement first and ask questions later. Good ideas will be adopted by others, bad ideas won't have wasted everyone else's time in discussions which lead to nowhere.
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Re:Use of resources (Score:4, Informative)
Also it's now a non-Beta-product, with a 1.0 version-number.
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Well, yeah. (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course it complicates things. Perhaps this should serve as a wake-up call to the Mozilla folks, seeing at this is now makes the developer (after AOL and Apple) to, having initially showed strong support for Mozilla's projects, ultimately reject Gecko when the time came to make its own browser.
The only common thread between these three companies (among others) and their rejection of Gecko is Gecko itself: they've embraced a wide variety of other engines, they stand in opposition to Microsoft to varying degrees (including, in some cases, none at all), and the browsers they ultimately produced tend to follow many different paradigms and philosophies. Yet all of them agree, in the end, that Gecko was not going to get the job done. Something is very wrong with that picture, and it bothers me how the Mozilla team seems to take it so nonchalantly.
I say all of this as a Firefox fan who is nonetheless worried about the future of the engine that made standards-compliance important on the Web again. I have a few guesses as to what mistakes might have been made, but I don't claim to know for certain. What I do claim to know is that something needs to be done, even if the first step is just to figure out exactly what that is.
Re:Well, yeah. (Score:5, Interesting)
If AOL had embraced Gecko, I wonder where they would be. They would have been seen as a force of good for internet standardization, and it probably would be the thing they do that makes them the most money right now. Considering they made their millions selling internet adds back in the day, you would think they could see the potential.
The choice of Apple to ignore gecko, and instead start from a very primitive engine and build on it is quite interesting. They clearly saw shortcomings in Gecko that they thought they could avoid, and felt that re-creating the wheel was an expense well spent (KHTML was pretty poor back then, with terrible DHTML support, and rendering differences to the extreme, in fact, until Safari 3, webkit was like stepping back 3-5 years and using Gecko).
The fact that developers are in general using webkit now when faced with the choice (many OSS browsers are switching even) is very telling too. It wasn't just Apple that saw shortcomings.
Nokia had a mobile browser they were working on using Gecko, but I bet the purchase of Trolltech will alter that choice to a point.
That pretty much leaves Sugar, and Firefox. Of course, the fact that Firefox has all those great extensions is a strong point in its favor, with the web developer tool bar being awesome, but hardly relevant to most people.
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Re:Well, yeah. (Score:4, Interesting)
I found the source code to be repulsive. I could not possibly take over that code and make my own browser out of it, except for minor GUI changes maybe.
I was looking into a problem for ReactOS [reactos.org] where the installer would explode, and just browsing the source made my head hurt. There were nearly-identical copies of files in a number of places - so that I couldn't determine which were the files included in the build - or maybe all were... and it wasn't just an old version, these files were out of sync with each other and being maintained separately.
There is no way I would let anyone but Mozilla Foundation play with that code.
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Gecko vs. WebKit (Score:4, Interesting)
I get that people like Firefox, but I don't understand the mentality that Firefox has some fundamental right to exist and anyone who does anything differently, in competition or cooperation that leads to a decrease in adoption is "evil." Even if Google is being "evil" that is pretty objective, where the legal reality is that Google has a duty to its investors; a legal duty, and if Chromium gets them closer to meeting their goals, then as much as one might not like it, they are doing what is the "least evil" in the eyes of those whose pocketbooks are proping Google up, and the government who has decreed that public companies have this duty. What Google does not have, is a bona fide responsibility to do anything for or against an independent third party, no matter how novel or great anyone or group of people think that 3rd party is.
If Firefox really is as great as many seem to think it is, it should flourish in the open market. I mean, it is already free-as-in-beer which is pretty difficult to compete with.
I don't care what anyone says and I'm willing to deal with being modded down, but a larger part (that most are willing to admit) of what made IE the dominant browser today is that IE4 "was better" in user experience and provided a better platform for developers than Netscape 4.x-n did. I'm not saying Microsoft's underhanded tactics weren't a big part of it... but IE4, for as often as it is bemoanded for ActiveX, made a "good enough" platform for the time, to bring "fat binary applications" to the web/intranet when Javascript/HTML (before flash, before AJAX, before frameworks like
This drove a lot of places I've worked to *require* IE for internal applications, because cross-platform didn't matter because everyone was on PCs or could Citrix into a Terminal server if it was important enough for the few Mac departments.
It could easily be said "no, it was because IE was there and IT didn't want to install Netscape on all those computers", but I have to say, if it provided any functionality IE didn't, the cost would have been negligible if it made our employees more efficient.
If Firefox is better, it will survive whatever is trown at it, and if it can't, then the market has deturmined that it "shouldn't."
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:5, Insightful)
They are just taking longer than they should to release it for Macux.
See, this is what I don't get. Linux folk claim they want companies to throw them a bone and open source their software and the "community" will do the rest. It sounds good when they say it, but why is it never the case?
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Re:Don't take the bait (Score:5, Insightful)
Because chrome offers very little that linux/mac users don't already have...
If they released the source to something that wasn't already available, you can be sure more developers would pick it up.
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Re:Don't take the bait (Score:4, Informative)
Except for an independent-process, one-tab-dies-the-rest-of-it's-fine browser that doesn't suck?
The only thing keeping me on Firefox is AdBlock Plus. The second that's in Chrome (or Chromium), I'm gone.
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Re:Don't take the bait (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Don't take the bait (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing keeping me on Firefox is AdBlock Plus. The second that's in Chrome (or Chromium), I'm gone.
Google sell ads. Why would they block them? Cory Doctorow [guardian.co.uk] has an excellent take on this.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right because we all know that Apple doesn't kill third party apps on their iPhone. Wait, you say they've been caught doing that?
I know that's a different company, but the argument that they couldn't do it if they wanted to is specious. Yes they probably didn't put code into the browser to do it, but they could. Suggesting that they won't at some point do so requires a suspension of belief.
I mean it's not like this is a company that's been trying to engage in anticompetitive behavior. Increasingly so, I'd b
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried the Chrome experience last week and had a similar experience. While the browser is faster (always a good thing), there is a serious lack of plug-in support under Chrome.
I too use Adblock Plus, Foxmarks and NoScript and consider these to be important features in any browser. Currently, Chrome is a less mature browser where few if any developers are writing plug-in's to equal the breadth and depth of tools available for Firefox.
I also have this nagging doubt that Google will be openly supportive of features similar to Adblock and NoScript as Google's revenue stream comes from selling advertising space. The old saying "you don't defecate where you eat" makes me question just how far Google will go to support features that allow us to deny adware, scripts and tracking cookies.
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Re:Don't take the bait (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for an independent-process, one-tab-dies-the-rest-of-it's-fine browser that doesn't suck?
It's a nice idea, but how does it help actually an average person?
Lets look at the flip side of the coin -
Crashes:
1) Chrome's GUI is natively coded as opposed to firefox's chrome which is written in javascript. So, a tab in chrome has more code that can to actually crash (from NULL exception, etc).
2) Separate process only help if you are actually using multiple tabs. Not everybody does, and if the wiki tab that you are writing your thesis in crashes you still lose work.
3) Overhead code to clean up failed tabs. Notify shared plugins that an instance died, remove GUI elements from shared spaces, etc. More code to fail or crash, more complicated for plugins, etc.
4) A crash of even one tab is never acceptable in the first place, so you have lots of extra code to handle a situation that must never happen anyway.
Performance:
1) Each tab must communicate with the container process and (for plugins) with other tabs. Although it may be infrequent, this adds latency and at least to some extent serializes many independent actions because they are 'behind' other requests in the pipeline. This can be worked around, by making the parts more complex to do out-of-order requests and such.
2) Many resources are not shared, or use expensive cross-process locking. For instance images are decompressed again in each tab they appear in.
Security:
1) It's easier to crash a Chrome tab due to it using different UI code than pages are rendered with.
2) Attacks that actually hack the the browser itself are actually pretty uncommon, so having separate memory space doesn't protect much against most malicious code. The same cross-site and leak problems are possible with chrome, they just are split between two separate parts (for instance the tab making the 'request' for an element and the container allowing/denying it).
There are plenty of advantages AND disadvantages to chrome's process-per-tab model. We'll just have to wait and see how it all shakes out. But what you can learn from Linus v. Tannenbaum is that complicated monolithic systems can sometimes end up being far, far better than 'everything is recoverable' kinds of systems.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Devil is probably in the details. I'm constantly running Flash constantly in Firefox both at work and home. I'd say "no crashes" except I think Firefox did drop out on me once last month.
That's not to say its not happening to you (or even a bunch of folks). That's the nature of these things. But I'm willing to guess that its not happening to everyone.
And again - it probably has to do with your environment; said details I noted before. Since I mentioned details... I don't have the details for my home en
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks to webkit, which is already available with other frontends...
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The community serves the community (Score:4, Insightful)
The community serves the community, and if you business plan involves having millions of volunteer developers work on your products, then you deserve to get your fingers burned.
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Re:fine and reasonable? (Score:5, Funny)
That's what a red-headed step-child says, when his mom and Gary decide to have a child together. Firefox: prepare your ass for a serious beating! And don't go crying to your real daddy, Marc Andreessen. He doesn't want anything to do with you, either.
Wow, that's a lot of emotion over a browser. Do you need a hug? We can talk, it'll be OK.
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