Mozilla's Thoughts On Google's Chrome

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?

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.

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.

Re:Can I call 'em?

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.

Open source mojo

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.

Re:Open source mojo

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.

Re:Open source mojo

They explicitly said they used code from the mozilla project.

This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox

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.

Re:This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox

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.

Re:This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox

Chrome will certainly get tried by some people who would have tried Firefox.

But what exactly do you think will happen when everyone using IE visits www.google.com and finds out about a replacement for IE brought to them by the same people who make that awesome search engine and web mail they use all the time?

If all Google really wants out of the deal is beating IE, then they just make sure that you get a nice advertisment when you go to google to search with IE, and leave the firefox/safari/opera people alone.

There ARE ways for Google to directly target Microsoft only and leave everyone else alone. The question is, do they want to?

I fail to see how Google making their own browser is any different than IE 1.0. The goals are the same from this chair. Get people away from using the market leader in order to benifit our own profits.

I like what Google has done with themselves to date, but I've seen a big company like this make a web browser before and I'm still feeling the effects of that 10 years later. I'm more concerned with what Google does in the long term than who they are targeting. Who they are targetting is irrelavent really, what they intend to do if they succeed is what matters.

Re:This is a good thing for Mozilla/Firefox

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]?

"It"?

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.

I like that pronoun for Microsoft.

Not "them", or "they", and certainly not "he" or "she", but "it".

The real target: MS Office

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.

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?

Re:Not worried? Perhaps they should be.

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.

Re:Not worried? Perhaps they should be.

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.

Mainly the OO model

If you have ever worked with the two engines you would not ask this question. Gecko is a huge mess of "OO in C" object model spaghetti. It is very hard for a new developer to get up to speed on or for development on individual areas to be compartmentalized.

Webkit, due to it's Qt/KDE origins, is very well designed from the ground up to be as API-clean OO as possible. It is therefore much lower barrier of entry for new developers to start up on, which is exactly what you are looking for when you are a company looking to roll out a browser.

Re:Not worried? Perhaps they should be.

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]

Good chance against Mozilla

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.

Wrong layer

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.

Mozilla should be worried

Reading through the comic it's pretty obvious what Chrome is about. Google clearly feel that web apps have hit something of a wall running on existing browsers, and that they need to take the drastic action of releasing a new browser with a new architecture to move things on. The V8 javascript engine is clearly to enable larger and more complex applications, and the thread-per-tab architecture means larger and more complex apps can be run without risking the whole browser.

Microsoft either got wind of what Google were planning or came to the same conclusions, thus the new architecture in IE8 (and the IE javascript engine is not as bad as it's made out to be, it just underperforms badly with string processing [codinghorror.com]).

Mozilla (and maybe Opera) may well struggle to compete with Microsoft and Google here. Opera have shown that they do have the resources to develop new rendering and javascript engines, but Mozilla are still using a Gecko that has changed little in years apart from tweaking. It may well be the case that in a year or two we'll be seeing much more advanced web apps which Mozilla browsers handle poorly.

Here's a crucial thing this browser should

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.

Next from Google : A new programming language

It looks to me like the attitude within Google is that internal engineering resources are infinite and therefore they should work on their own version of anything they think they can improve.

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?

Rendering engines, not browsers

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:Linux support will be coming later

I read that support for Linux will be coming out later.

Like most of the other Google toys, the Linux version will come out after Chrome leaves Beta.

Re:Not exactly a threat, not exactly friendly

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:Not exactly a threat, not exactly friendly

Well, I'm only guessing, but it doesn't strike me as likely that Google would want to pull out of the agreement, currently. If their browser were to fail gaining market share, and they'd manage to kill Firefox too - then they'd have handed the browser market to MS on a silver platter. I don't think they would want to take that risk.