Google and Mozilla: Partners, Not Competitors 151
Much has been said about the (perceived) rivalry between Chrome and Firefox, but Google engineer Peter Kasting had enough when he read an article trying to discern Google's true motives for signing a new Firefox search deal. Kasting posted to Google+ to clarify what value the company sees in funding a "rival" browser. Quoting:
"People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It's very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That's it. It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done. The end. So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well."
Peter Kasting [conviniently] excluded one tidbit (Score:5, Interesting)
I am sure this is what he has in mind:
It's important for Chrome to actually gain tons of users because that potentially creates more search traffic for us, complementing our efforts with Android on the mobile front.
In fact, Chrome's current momentum, which has enabled it to grab more than the initial goal of 10% worldwide usage does not hurt at all.
Someone should tell this engineer that we know what he's thinking.
Re:Google and Mozilla (Score:3, Interesting)
Gaaaah! Yes, but your counter-critism is even more flawed.
Do you think that $100/$300m is a goodwill gift? No!
The key points are:
a) Mozilla are not a search company.
b) Google make the vast proportion of their profit from search.
c) This contract brings in very significant additional revenue to Google.
d) It keeps that very significant market share away from it's competitor(s).
So no matter how much people think Google want a browser war, they'd over the moon if Firefox gained 100% market share - because their search revenue is what this is all about.
The bottom line is that apart from the engineering advancements in browser technology (which is a key enabling factor to grow revenue in the other Google products) as long as firefox+chrome has a greater market share than chrome or firefox alone, Google really don't care if the userbase split is 50:50 or 1:100.
Remember MS didn't, and don't make IE because it's a nice idea - they quickly realised that the OS and the Apps (99% of there revenue at the time) were not important in a Web 1.0 world, and so they needed to control that space urgently and entirely, which at one point was very successful. They then moved into locking business into web-enabled technologies (e.g. Sharepoint) to hinder large migrations to Apple (or HP/Dell on linux) plus web solutions.
IMO, MS is basically held up by it's marketing and stong sales channels at the moment - if these sales channels all started shipping with Linux (+Office etc.) it could all come down like a big house of cards. That's a big 'if' - but that's also a very big fall.
Where the hell is this diversity?! (Score:0, Interesting)
Wait, what? Where is the diversity between Firefox and Chrome these days? Basically every change since Firefox 4 has been about making Firefox look and behave just like Chrome.
Mozilla has made a lot of stupid moves to achieve this. First, they screwed up Firefox's UI. They dropped the traditional menus, they moved the tab placement, they got rid of the status bar, and they got rid of the protocol from the URL bar. These are all horrible "innovations" that Chrome introduced, and then Mozilla immediately copied.
Then Mozilla went further and tried to imitate Chrome's very frequent release schedule. Any Firefox user knows how bad of an idea this was, given how it prevented extensions from working almost constantly after any update.
In terms of standards, they both target HTML5 these days. HTML5 is the biggest crock of shit we've seen when it comes to web standardization. They introduced a bunch of unnecessary new tags, added in audio and video support without the important step of specifying mandatory codecs, and the funniest part is that this shitty standard isn't expected to be finished until 2022!
There is no diversity any longer. In each and every way, Firefox has become just a half-assed clone of Chrome.
A lot of people are mistaken about Chrome's growing popularity, too. They think that more people are using Chrome because Chrome is doing things right. Well, that's not the reality. What we're actually seeing is all of the other browsers doing it wrong, by trying to copy Chrome, but they're all inferior in one way or another.
Why would anyone want to use Firefox these days (or IE, or Opera, or Safari, all of which are making the same stupid let's-clone-Chrome moves) when it looks just like Chrome, behaves just like Chrome, except it's a lot slower and uses a lot more memory? You might as well just use the real Google Chrome, and have the least-shitty of all of the shitty experiences, even if the UI isn't what you want, it doesn't behave like you want, and the performance and memory usage still aren't very good.
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they are nothing alike (Score:4, Interesting)
Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web
mozilla is a foundation to promote software.
google is a COMPANY whose goal i to PROMOTE ITSELF.
stop playing the fool, people. google is not out to help you. they are out to make a profit.
the biggest con is that google created a marketing jingle (sans tune) that goes 'do no evil'. its a lie and most of us knew this from the very start. a company (in america, especially) HAS to be profitable and has to be absent of ethics (well, its not a must-have but it surely helps).
google wants lock-in and they want to serve ads. they are NOT doing things 'to better the internet'. almost everywhere I go (on major websites) when I visit some i/o happens and goes to google. when I order electronic parts, some googleapis site gets triggered! I can't escape google even if I tried, and I have most of their domains blocked.
google is quite quite evil. every one of their plans should be carefully inspected and the real motivations exposed.
yeah yeah, the kids working there get free lunches and shirts. they are bribed to look the other way and they're in their own little bubble, insulated from much of the rest of the world.
google, like the devil, has a great accomplishment: convincing the world that they are not evil. ooooh, shiny websites! they CLEARLY have our interests at heart.
pathetic how we eat up this drivel.
google is the new microsoft. make no mistake who your friends are. google would sell you out as fast as facebook would. neither are your 'friends'.
Re:whatever google, stfu (Score:4, Interesting)
The sad thing is that most Google fanbois try to claim that Apple is a cult and yet their devotion is at times even more devout when it comes to the holy word of Google.
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Re:No, Google like diversity (Score:3, Interesting)
You are the product; advertisers are the users. In the realm of web advertising, Google has a huge monopoly and is being investigated for antitrust abuse.
Re:whatever google, stfu (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm not a hater... just a cranky critic. Facebook is infinitely worse, and I'd rather have a hundred Googles than one Facebook. Google admittedly does a lot of good for the web, but I can't think of a single thing that Facebook has ever done that benefits the web. I rewrote my original post, because it seemed to be too negative. Maybe I should have rewritten it again, to make it even less negative, but it does seem somewhat even-handed to me. Maybe it's because I'm so used to massive flamewars and melodramatic rants, anything that's not trollishly polemical seems even-handed and neutral. To be honest, I think that whenever I write anything on the internet, it comes out at least a bit too harshly worded. So, in conclusion, I don't hate Google... but I certainly don't love them, either. I'd say that I'm vaguely dissatisfied.