Mozilla's Thoughts On Google's Chrome 604
tandiond writes to tell us that in a recent blog posting, Mozilla CEO John Lily shared his thoughts on Google's new browser project, Chrome, and what that means for Mozilla. "It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they've got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it'll be interesting to see how it evolves." Mozilla's Europe president, Tristan Nitot also chimed in during an interview with PCPro, stating that they don't view this as a direct attack on Firefox, even if it did catch them by surprise. "I'll take another example: just before Microsoft launched Vista, it invited us [to work with it] so that Firefox works better on Windows Vista. Because for it, Firefox being a top-tier application that was very successful - we now have 200 million users around the world - it could not afford to have Firefox run slowly on Vista. Therefore, it helped us improve Firefox for Vista. That's just the same for Google. It wants Firefox to perform well with its applications, that's for sure. Indeed, it even wants IE to perform well with Gmail and the rest. It's just that it has very limited control over this. That's why Google's been frustrated and it is launching this Chrome browser."
Can I call 'em? (Score:5, Informative)
Did I call it [slashdot.org], or what? ;-)
For those of you who are interested, Chrome is supposed to be launching later today [blogspot.com]. Apparently around 11 AM PDT [i4u.com] to coincide with the press conference. (Any moment now...) For those of you who can't wait, PCWorld seems to have figured out how to finagle screenshots [pcworld.com] out of Google's 404 page.
For those of you who didn't get to see it, the comic book [google.com] is now available for viewing.
Linux support will be coming later (Score:4, Informative)
I read that support for Linux will be coming out later. I can only hope the schedule is more aggressive that the one they used for Google Earth. It seemed ages before I was able to get that running.
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:4, Informative)
Google Chrome - Download a new browser
Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.
gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en - 7k - 18 hours ago - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
download link at gears it seems
Re:Open source mojo (Score:4, Informative)
i just hope they don't share the same rendering engine..
Chrome uses WebKit, so they don't. Or are you saying you hope Firefox doesn't switch to WebKit later on?
Re:Open source mojo (Score:3, Informative)
trademark infringement (Score:2, Informative)
There is already a well known web browser technology called "chrome". It's an integral part of Mozilla web browsing technology. Confusion in the marketplace anyone?
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:4, Informative)
(Any moment now...)
Hopefully soon, the "hype misfire" has caused all sorts of people to be spamming blogs with all sorts of links to God knows what as "secret chrome download here!"
Re:Linux support will be coming later (Score:3, Informative)
Good chance against Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps a team that isn't forced to respect ass-backwards coding guidelines [mozilla.org] can attempt to produce something fast and reasonably safe, instead of spending all their time optimizing code for Visual C++ 1.5.
Seriously, Mozilla has their heads so far up the ass that is an ancient codebase, and is extremely slow at fixing the numerous bugs that have shown up over the ages, that I see little chance for them to be a significant competitor in the future, unless they manage to clean up their act in a major way instead of shoving out incremental updates as major versions.
Re:No awesomebar? Good. (Score:4, Informative)
Chrome has an Omni Bar which is very similar to the awesome bar.
Re:"It"? (Score:1, Informative)
It's traditional in the USA for companies to be referred to in the singular.
Re:Not worried? Perhaps they should be. (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the "comic [google.com]" that describes Chrome, you see that they plan to create a separate PROCESS per tab in the browser. Not a thread, an actual process. Gecko is quite heavy and likely would fare poorly in this space. Webkit by comparision is small enough to be used on the iPhone, Nokia S60 devices, and Android devices of various sizes. It's very compact, and its code base is easy to integrate and work with.
Re:google go home (Score:4, Informative)
When Google gets in the business of coming up with their own standards, server and scripting languages I'll get back to you on that.
Re:This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
This is not a close source browser that Google is shipping (According to their blogs/information), anyone can fork it and run with what they like/dislike.
It's worth mentioning that this is exactly how Chrome's Webkit engine got invented in the first place. It started out as a revision, then a fork, of KDE's KHTML engine. A lot of us were pretty hard on Apple when it became obvious that they weren't interested in participating in KHTML's ongoing development. But now that they've created a successful, portable, fork that's popular on a number of platforms (including KDE!) you have to admit that they made the right call.
Even so, forks are usually not a good thing. When you decide to fork an OS project, you're opting out of the original community, and basically telling them you don't care for where they're taking the project. It's like getting a divorce. Just as partners shouldn't break up their family the first time they get pissed at each other, it's dumb to pull out of a community just because they don't agree with all your priorities.
This is hard for many software people to understand, since they tend to have big opinions about little things. Which is why the Pidgin IM project got forked in a totally unnecessary squabble over a minor GUI feature that easily could have been made optional. Speaking of which, does anybody actually use the fork [sourceforge.net]?
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not worried? Perhaps they should be. (Score:4, Informative)
Google and Apple both explained why they went with Webkit instead of Gecko.
Sorry I can't find the links at the moment but basically Apple said Konquerer as a base was much smaller and cleaner, easier to get started with and to work with than Gecko.
Google said the same thing, they went with Webkit for it's speed and ability to run well on low end computers, easy to hack.
Re:Open source mojo (Score:5, Informative)
They explicitly said they used code from the mozilla project.
Re:Not worried? Perhaps they should be. (Score:5, Informative)
For all that the Mozilla team isn't worried, they've got a long history of developers rejecting Gecko for other engines: first AOL rejected it in preference for IE (and then again on the Mac in preference for WebKit), then Apple (again for WebKit), and now Google (once again for WebKit). In the mobile space it isn't doing all that much better, with developers rejecting it in favor of Opera. In quite a few cases, including AOL and Google, we've even seen this rejection when the company previously had a history of active support for, and even paying developers to work on, the Gecko engine.
AOL is an interesting case. On the Windows side, I doubt AOL was ever really interested in using Gecko other than a bargaining chip against Microsoft to get preferential desktop placement in XP. I suppose if they were ever really interested in doing Gecko in AOL Win, they could have as it was pretty well known that they had internal builds running that way.
As for AOL Mac, I'd say the issue there is that development stagnated in general on their Mac client side. Seriously, the version of Gecko they had shipping for the longest while was something like 0.9.8, meaning pre-Mozilla 1.0 and pre-Firefox 1.0 by a long shot! Somewhere in between that version and their newer version, they fired all of their Netscape employees and shut that division down. At that point, it only makes sense to use Webkit because you don't have any resources capable of leveraging Gecko any more.
As for Google, that'll be an interesting question for the time being. It's worth noting that Android uses WebKit, so it could simply be a case of leveraging the work already done there to understand the platform. It's well known that Gecko needs to lose a lot of fat around the edges to make it from Desktop to Mobile platforms, so that's a good reasoning for that choice there.
It could simply be a case that Firefox is too much of a beast for third-parties to jump in and start hacking on the code. Remember that it was borne out of 1998-era Netscape code, and while they had to restart at least once in there, you're probably going to get some crud that makes it complicated.
As for clients that embed Gecko, here you go: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mozilla-based.html [mozilla.org]
Re:Linux support will be coming later (Score:1, Informative)
Whooooosh!
Chrome now released! (Score:4, Informative)
Google Chrome has now been released [google.com]
Hot off the press - page changed in the last couple of minutes.
...and nokia si switching to gecko (Score:2, Informative)
Interestingly nokia is switching to gecko in maemo http://browser.garage.maemo.org/ [maemo.org]
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:5, Informative)
FYI, the browser is now available. Feel free to promote the Firehose story:
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=1142843 [slashdot.org]
Re:It's here... and it crashed immediately (Score:3, Informative)
Okay... I switched to the Administrator user account, re-installed, and now it's running fine. I'm posting this from Chrome as we speak.
Looks like the installer doesn't play nice with user account levels...
To any of those having problems, make sure you're logged in with administrator rights, and not just running the program as administrator.
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it's live now. In fact, I'm entering this on it.
It's simple, elegant, and blazingly fast. That said, I miss several of my add-ons on Firefox.
Hmm... I think this is unique to Chrome. I can resize the text box in which I'm typing. I don't see that on Firefox, so I presume that it's application-specific. Neat.
Re:Linux support will be coming later (Score:5, Informative)
I had my hopes up for a very quick port from a third party. Then I found out that Google is going to use the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license.
Your information is incorrect. The code is under a BSD license. It's the Chrome comic that is CC attr-nc-nd.
Re:Initial impressions (Score:3, Informative)
The incognito mode isn't really useful either.
It doesn't work by using totally throw away data, only *new* data is thrown away. For example, going to google in incognito mode sends my real google tracking cookie to google (and the same for other sites).
This is probably to keep ads working, but totally nerfs the feature. I don't really care if my local computer keeps track of what I've browsed, I want to ensure that nefarious sites aren't getting my session cookies.
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:5, Informative)
That is a WebKit feature. It is present in Safari too. (For developers who care, it can be customised in CSS using min/max-width and min/max-height.)
Re:Linux support will be coming later (Score:5, Informative)
Huh?
Chrome is using the BSD license, see http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html [google.com] .
Re:Open source mojo (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not exactly a threat, not exactly friendly (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Google update service (Score:4, Informative)
Actually it isn't a service, it's now a regular background process started from HKCU\\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
Google Earth's downloader asks you if you want to install it, but Chrome's just goes ahead and sideloads it without asking.
Re:trademark infringement (Score:4, Informative)
In Mozilla, "chrome" is a generic term for the client-side/static parts of the GUI and resources for those. It's a technical term for internal use, so there is no confusion and certainly no trademark infringement.
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:4, Informative)
Apple wanted a single codebase for the PowerPC, Intel, and now Arm processors. They wanted something simple and easy to develop and easy to test.
They also needed it to be low resouce for both the original PowerPC systems (G4) and now the Arm systems (both at 400+ MHz). So it makes sense they didn't go with multiprocessing out of the bat.
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:3, Informative)
I stand corrected. This behavior can be disabled via:
Options -> Deafult Search -> Manage-> Uncheck 'Use a suggestion service..'
First Crash (Score:5, Informative)
This behavior is repeatable, and Chrome prompts to restore previous session.
Other thoughts:
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:5, Informative)
It's seems to be back now, but there does not appear to be a download link, and it's windows-only right now, so not interested. Sorry google.
Re:First Crash (Score:2, Informative)
Not bad.. (Score:2, Informative)
The browser task manager is awesome. I hope the ff dev team picks up on that and adds it to the next release. I just checked the details of the 10 tabs I have open and its showing a total memory usage of ~58 MB (which is not bad although FF3 has more or less the same stats) but what got my attention was that it clearly showed that the one flash site open was gobbling up the major chunk of that memory space. Nice to know which tab/s is/are screwing up.
One honest question though, Will Google even support an adblock type plugin for Chrome?
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:3, Informative)
I wasn't calling the release of the browser. I was calling the reason why it was released. Since Mozilla's comments reflect my own from yesterday, my comment was very much on topic.
Good grief. I didn't quote that particular section for my amusement. (Though it was rather amusing. :-P)
Re:Linux support will be coming later (Score:3, Informative)
It looks like they've got builds working at the moment:
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/waterfall/builders/sub-debug-linux.html [chromium.org]
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:3, Informative)
My first impressions:
I would really like a customizable interface. The default is nice but the location of the bookmarks is very annoying. I want to just click the bookmarks button, then scroll to what I want, then click it. However, I will need to add back a whole bookmarks bar to get that one bookmarks button that I want!
My screen is 1680pixels wide, I don't need that incredibly long omnibar, they can fit a bookmarks button in there. Since I know my preferences don't represent everyone, I hope customization is implemented soon.
Overall I love how minimal it appears and I want it to stay that way. I noticed a few people missing the progress bar. I don't know if they noticed that the progress notification only pops up at the bottom of the window while loading. When it's done loading it goes away to save room when there's no progress to report on. This makes sense.
I like that they chopped out the windows interface buttons. But I'm used to starting at the upper left to access functions typically listed under "File". All Windows windows follow this rule, and so it becomes second nature to do this, other interfaces are designed with similar functions at the upper left because they know that's what people are used to, so they preserve that consistency.
The big factor that will probably stop me from using it for now is the change in hotkey usage.
Most people waste mouse buttons on back and forward. They don't need to be on seperate buttons! I bind mouse 4 to lshift. This means I can just hold mouse4 and roll my mousewheel to get back/forward, and the wheel allows me to jump back or forward multiple pages without having to repeatedly hit a button(especially jumping into and out of threaded forum conversations). Also, lshift+Mouse1 opens a new window!. This frees up mouse 5 for minimize window(Or close window/tab as others might want to use). However, Chrome does not support shift+mousewheel navigation, so I have lost a button and some navigation comfort.
The awesome:
-Omnibar
-Task Manager
-Tab manipulation
-Indivdual processes for each tab
I hate to bring it up, but it has to be said. I don't think everyone will remember to browse porn in incognito mode. And that means that new screenshot-based homepage of most-visited sites is bound to cause some hilarious goofs.
Re:Google update service (Score:1, Informative)
It's not a service, it's an application, but yeah, installing it without the user's consent is Evil.
You'll find the startup hook for it in HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run
What's even more interesting is that it runs an exe from %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data. This should be a no-no. On a properly installed system, anything under that folder should be non-executable, and for Google to rely on files there being allowed to execute means they don't even understand Microsoft's guidelines.
One bad, and one evil.
Oh, and one stupid: No gopher support [floodgap.com]
Re:Google update service (Score:1, Informative)
You've probably installed more than one app from the big 'G'.
You can stop them starting easily enough. Start->Run->'msconfig'
On the last tab, find the references to Google update and uncheck them. Then either kill the processes you have running or restart windows.
If you want to delete the executables for update, they're in x:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Update\
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:3, Informative)