Chrome Complicates Mozilla/Google Love-In 307
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.'"
Don't take the bait (Score:0, Insightful)
Hmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Pentrose (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and the obvious addition: It's not evil to compete, either. (not even if you're Microsoft)
Re:Hmm. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Devil is in the details.
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:Chrome has a long way to go (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: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?
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.
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.
Re:Hmm. (Score:1, Insightful)
They're supporting with both money AND source code. Remember the original goal of Chrome was to create what Google thinks should be the vision of the web, and let others take from it.
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 ...
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.
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.
Rules of investing (Score:2, Insightful)
If you looking at a company you might want to invest in, always look at where their income comes from. If most of it comes from a single location, that is a DAMN risky investment.
If a majority of Mozilla's incoming comes from Google, then Mozilla isn't financially sound. They should have started looking for other revenue streams long ago.
Re:So what? (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 was probably much more useful for producing Chrome than just having access to Mozilla's source code repository (epecially as Google used WebKit for the source code!)
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.
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks to webkit, which is already available with other frontends...
Re:Hmm. (Score:2, Insightful)
What are you talking about? Google doesn't care about how many people are using their browser, they care about how many people are looking at their ads.
They want Firefox+Chrome+other-default-to-google-search-browers to have as much market share compared to non-default-to-google browsers as possible. They could give a shit if it comes via Chrome or not (I doubt that Chrome is even tangentially part of strategic planning, it is probably much more a result of the rather open corporate culture (open in the sense that people work on things that are interesting to them, rather than simply on what the management structure specifies)).
Google Doesn't Care About Chrome (Score:2, Insightful)
Google doesn't care if Chrome succeeds or dies because other browsers step up to the plate and incorporated Chrome's features. I see Chrome doing several things:
* It puts more pressure on the other browsers to adopt WebKit as their rendering engine. WebKit is quickly becoming the default browser on the "Internet Device" market thanks to Google and Apple, and this will put more pressure on FireFox and Opera to adopt it. Or at least emulate it better. Apple and Google would love to see FireFox and Opera become WebKit based. For Apple, it means that the Internet is towards an open standard that makes devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch more desirable. For Google, it means they don't have to worry which browser their AJAX browser services work on.
Microsoft is already feeling the pressure which is why IE 8 is trying so hard to comply with the various Acid tests. I already know a few non-geeks who downloaded Safari or FireFox because IE is unable to render particular websites.
* It puts pressure on other browsers to incorporate the needed security and performance needed for AJAX web applications. Hey, Chrome is open source. Beg, borrow or steal what you want from the source code and put it in your own browser. Google doesn't care. Their money is in web services and not selling browsers.
So, there is no real issue with Google's support of the FireFox project. Google would be happy if Firefox becomes the #1 browser on the market and makes Chrome a historic footnote. That is, as long as Firefox incorporates the features Google plans on exploiting: Better security, better JavaScript, better performance.
Re:droptrow? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:3, Insightful)
The only thing keeping me on Firefox is the complete lack of a standard interface in Chrome. Seriously, why can't it just look like every other program running on my computer? Instead of getting the Windows Classic interface that I have set, I get a huge chunk of Luna blue with a non-standard title bar, non-standard minimize and close buttons, and non-standard menus. It's fine to be innovative, but with interfaces I expect a bit of predictability.
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:3, Insightful)
What can they do to stop it? If they do anything, someone will fork Chromium, which is the open-source base of Chrome.
Re:Don't take the bait (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm using the default list (Easylist USA) for Adblock Plus and it blocks Google's ads just fine.
Re:Complicated (Score:3, Insightful)
How does Firefox "lose" by having another competitor? Are they losing sales? Oh wait, they don't have sales. Are shares of Mozilla losing value? Oh wait, they aren't a for-profit public company. Chrome is Google's way of saying, "See, we can make the web better." There's nothing stopping Firefox from taking every one of those innovations and putting them into Firefox, because it's all open source. In fact, Google would be thrilled if this happened, because it means more people will have more powerful web browsers, which means Google can write bigger, better web applications. This is about keeping the web moving forward and not stagnating (IE).
(IMO.)