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."
Not exactly a threat, not exactly friendly (Score:1, Insightful)
Not a direct attack, but definitely a threat to that Google Search box revenue stream...
Open source mojo (Score:5, Insightful)
I will be interested to see how much Firefox code is in Chrome... and down the line, how much Chrome code will be pulled into future versions of Firefox.
The ability to improve your codebase is one of the strengths of open source. This is a great opportunity to display that strength.
This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, Firefox's competitor isn't Chrome, it's diluting standards based browser compatibility. If Google can come in and hammer out some market share and re-establish even further the importance for developers to stick to standards, it might be all that FF/Safari/Opera needs to really muscle over the 30-50% market share, and just enough credibility to keep Microsoft at bay.
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.
I for one am very excited at what this means to alternative (to Internet Explorer) browsers.
This isn't a shot fired at Firefox, it's aimed squarely at Redmond.
The real target: MS Office (Score:5, Insightful)
It profits Google nothing to "kill" Firefox. I don't think that is their intended target. Besides, with both chrome and firefox being open source, there's nothing to stop Firefox from incorporating bits and pieces from Chrome wherever it makes sense.
IMHO, the real target is MS Office. Google makes their money from advertising, which means eyeballs and correlated data. Unfortunately for them, many people spend a majority of their day inside MS Word and MS Excel and other apps. Google would love to have those eyeballs and all that data to better shape their profiles and thus better deliver advertising. What better way than to get all those different apps to "occur" inside the browser?
Not worried? Perhaps they should be. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I use many browsers, though Firefox is currently my preferred one. But I can't help but pause at things like this. One after another, we've seen companies looking to developing their own browsers, but rejecting Gecko in favor of other engines, sometimes open-source and sometimes not, even when there was every reason to go with Gecko.
Why is this? I'm honestly curious. And what might Mozilla be able to do to counter whatever reasons there are for developers to often not just reject Gecko, but dump it flat after years of strong relationships? Why does Mozilla continue on as though nothing is wrong when the developers are voting with their products that something clearly is?
good or not, this is a bad thing (Score:2, Insightful)
The web already has four "major" browsers firefox, IE, safari and opera. Do we really need a new browser? Moreover, do we really need yet another partial implementation of the web standards?
I for one, do not want to code and test for another browser.
Not to mention that by using google's browser, you will give them unadulterated access to your every movement on the web.
Re:Open source mojo (Score:5, Insightful)
I will be interested to see how much Firefox code is in Chrome... and down the line, how much Chrome code will be pulled into future versions of Firefox.
The ability to improve your codebase is one of the strengths of open source. This is a great opportunity to display that strength.
Even without open source, we're seeing a lot of concepts getting shared among browsers. IE8 and Chrome are picking up the full-history address bar search from Firefox and Opera. Chrome's new-tab page looks a lot like Opera's speed dial. When one browser tries something that works, the others are copying the concepts, and all of them end up better.
Just having multiple groups working on the same problems, each trying out different solutions, is helping innovation.
Beating around the bush... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not worried? Perhaps they should be. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an interesting observation. :)
My $.02 is everyone sees the real oppurtunity for growth is in the mobile market. It's not hard to see what apple has done with the iphone and Safari, it's simply peerless on the mobile space, as far as browsers go.
I'm sure this is the base for their work on their Android Platform, and establishing more development and market share for Webkit based browsers.
If it was only about the desktop, I'd be scratching my head wondering why they didn't go with Gecko, but it seems clear that Gecko is just too heavy for current generation of handhelds.
I was really wondering the same thing when Apple announced that they were using Webkit over Gecko when they first launch Safari, but now that their vision for the iphone has come to reality, it makes a lot more sense why they chose the platform they did. I just can't help but think that's exactly why google made a similar decision.
Rendering engines, not browsers (Score:5, Insightful)
The web already has four "major" browsers firefox, IE, safari and opera.
More precisely, the web already has four major rendering engines: Gecko (used in Firefox), Trident (used in IE), WebKit (used in Safari), and Presto (used in Opera). Chrome is using WebKit, so it can leverage WebKit's existing standards support and all the pages that already work with Safari.
Scripting is going to be different, but HTML/CSS should (in theory) be pretty similar to Safari.
Re:Why Doesn't Google Just Contribute to Mozilla? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it will expose the dirty little secret of FOSS & GPL.
Making Open source software using the default team organization isn't all that its cracked up to be. Open source needs "leads" or managers or in general people in command without whoom, nothing moves. Yes you can fork, but its effectively useless because nobody wants your branch. Mozilla already has them, the kernel has Linus. Without a little bit of the cathedral the bazaar will create only crappy products.
Google needs control so they can actually build a test team, drive quality up (seriously, even if you LOVE firefox to death, aren't you fed up with the crashes? I know I am, an I don't care whose fault it is)
-ex FF fan...
Re:This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as they don't cannibalize the installed Firefox base to build their own, it's not an attack. On the other hand, if 90% of the people who install Chrome are the ones who would have gone Firefox anyway, and the rest still mope around with IE, then it's an attack. Intended or not.
Wrong layer (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the ideas for Chrome are good ones. But a lot of them seem to be reinventing the operating system. From Google's perspective the browser is the operating system, but that's not the real world. We used to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Emacs, but soon we're going to have to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Google!
Here's a big shocker: not everything is a web app! No really. There are problems operating systems solved decades ago that Chrome is just now gettng around to fixing, just because some people want their apps to be on the web. You can have distributed apps and ubiquitous data *without* HTML/CSS/ECMA/Ajax/Flash. Back when computers were so expensive no one could afford their own, everything was distributed. Now that computers are cheap enough that everyone has two or three, the industry is wondering how to distribute stuff.
Re:Not exactly a threat, not exactly friendly (Score:5, Insightful)
The current agreement goes through 2011, so it's not an immediate problem. The Firefox team over at Mozilla might want to comb through the Chrome code for ideas, if the two OSS licenses are compatible. WebKit is LGPL. I dunno what V8 or the other parts of Chrome are licensed.
Re:This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
Yanno... If they keep compliance, who cares?
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's just what I always wanted... for the company that tracks every page I view where they can and owns the DoubleClick network to build my browser.
No thanks. Somehow, I don't think the extensions I use to block Google will be supported by this fork.
Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
Firefox has done the deed of putting pressure on MS to move their browser forward. The only thing this will cause is more testing time for developers.
Re:This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox's competitor isn't Chrome
And Android isn't a competitor of the iPhone. Please, of course it is, but having another fair (I hope), well known participant in the market will be a really good thing. Maybe they'll even start being able to bully IE into more complete standards.
At least at first Mozilla should expect to see Firefox number drop consistently over the next couple of months. As a good number of the same people who use Firefox are exactly the same people who will be trying this new browser. If it's a good product, eventually it may start poaching off of MSIE, but clearly most of Chrome's first adapters will be converts from my (our current) favorite browser.
Open Source Search (Score:4, Insightful)
It may be old news, but I just listened to a podcast interview with Jimmy Wales today. He has started Wikia Search, meant to be a free-as-in-speech search engine, with publicly-available web crawls generated by distributed computing using Grub. The algorithms, he said, should be open too.
I have to admit that I'm practically a Google fanboi, but since owning search pretty much means owning the internet, I really like this idea. If you're uncomfortable with Google's power, why not try to help Wikia Search?
Here's a crucial thing this browser should (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a crucial thing this browser should have: Mozilla-like extensibility, so that I could install the things without which I can't imagine a browser anymore:
1. Ad blocker (AdBlock Plus)
2. Developer extensions
3. Debugger (Firebug)
4. FTP (FireFTP)
5. Javascript extensibility (Greasemonkey)
Of course they'll be called something else, but without this set (and particularly #1), they might as well forget about it.
Re:Wrong layer (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all open source, so at least the browser itself won't be up to any nastiness. I don't see how they'll be able to track you beyond what they're doing now. The whole thing really does seem like a way to build a proper platform for delivering web apps - I guess Google is tired of being held back by the relative lameness of the current crop of browsers, which is understandable. Why Mozilla or Apple didn't go with a multiprocessing model for tabbed browsing in the first place is beyond me.
Next from Google : A new programming language (Score:5, Insightful)
What comes next from a world like that? I predict that they'll announce a project to release Google's own general purpose programming language. I've seen it before. Objective-C anyone? C#? Eiffel?
Re:Open source mojo (Score:3, Insightful)
Webkit/Gecko is just used for rendering. The UI and other back-end parts of the browser are completely separate.
Re:Absolutely NOTHING new here, NOTHING (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:google go home (Score:1, Insightful)
rel='nofollow' anyone?
It's here... and it crashed immediately (Score:3, Insightful)
Screenshot [googlepages.com] (new window)
So far I can't get it to load a page. I am running this on a machine with user restrictions (I'm at work), but I did install it with adminstrator priveledges (I'm the admin).
We'll see how this goes.
Re:Chrome now released! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Absolutely NOTHING new here, NOTHING (Score:3, Insightful)
You mentioned half a dozen features from three different browsers. If they're all good ideas, whats wrong with the evolutionary step of putting them in the same browser? You brush over the sandboxing as if its all been done before, when in fact the model they're using is different from what's been tried before. The fact is most of the improvements are "under-the-hood" so it will be interesting to see if it catches on. Firefox had tabbed browsing as a killer feature people switched to because they wanted. Building a user base on "runs better" means not only do you have to have something that's way way better than the competition, but that your competition has to really suck in stability/speed/etc. I don't think either IE8 or Firefox run so badly that most users will look around for something just for the sake of stability.
Re:Here's a crucial thing this browser should (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Ad blocker (AdBlock Plus)
That's interesting to think about. Most of Google's revenue comes from advertising. In fact, I'm sure Chrome is a play towards that end. If (when?) someone designs and ad blocker plugin, what is Google going to do?
Re:Download page is up (Score:1, Insightful)
Good fucking start:
Because ?hl=en from a standard html form is much too complex. Oh and Windows sucks, where's the source code?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Open Source Search (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can I call 'em? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google update service (Score:2, Insightful)
Not only that but it was on autorun at boot. Sorry Google... I'm sure it's nothing but next time ask me.
Re:Open Source Search (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)
Two important differences to keep in mind:
- IE was bundled with Windows. Windows already had a near-monopoly.
- Chrome is open source.
Why everybody has turned completely bananas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Same thing. What's in a name? Apparently enough for an entire collective of product for advertisers/Slashdot users to use a browser by an ad broker who sells that product to clients. Sirs, Madams, I'm calling you nuts. Get a grip.
Market Share (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Ad blocking in Firefox is becoming the norm (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a lot of neat stuff under the hood and the UI is nice, though. I'm sticking with Firefox for now and await an update to firefox with V8, per-process tabs, and improved search bar, while retaining ad-block, flashblock, greasemonkey, etc.
Re:Chrome now released! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Back at you (Score:5, Insightful)
If/when Google publishes a Linux version, the package maintainers for the various distros will be looking at it. You don't have to write the program yourself with electricity you generated from the running of hamsters that you also bred yourself. You can just say, "it's open, and it's popular, so I trust this a little more". Even though you can't really trust the compiler, or the hardware, or the network, etc.
Re:google go home (Score:1, Insightful)
Why do you think they need their own browser? Because the apps they want to write won't run on anyone else's. Right now it's because the competition can't run the code fast enough. So the only browser that will run google code will be their own. At that point, why not break the standards? I'm not saying they have done this, I am saying they will do this. Mark my words. Code is law.
As for the hairless fetishists who apparently can't parse either latin or french, your cleverness is underwhelming, n'est-Ãe pas?
Re:Chrome now released! (Score:3, Insightful)
All it takes is a quick comparison of products made for both Win and Linux to see that they've optimized for the Windows platform and not Linux (or Mac, for that matter).
As far as testing goes, it's not even available to be tested under anything other than Windows.