Slashdot Mirror
Nokia Invested In Mozilla?
Pine UK writes "The Register, is reporting that Nokia has invested in the Mozilla Foundation. This news should come as a shock to Opera, who in recent times have had a very large market share in the area of portable device browsers. Opera has also been the browser choice for Nokia, who ship it with all their Symbian 'smartphones.' Nokia have not yet confirmed nor denied their investment in Mozilla."
If you fork, you have to pay developers. If you invest and make the Mozilla Foundation (works for other OSS organisations too) see what you need and rally to your cause, you get them to develop for you .
That's no worse than not giving money and taking the product, which they could also do. As long as Mozilla is getting a fair deal in return for adding the features Nokia wants, I don't see a problem with it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Of course there is no 'force' involved here. You can choose between banners, google text ads (just about as bad for your privacy as looking at them in a webpage), and paying a few bucks.
It is FUD that Google stores URLs you visit. Google is not storing this on a IP level, and https sites and password protected URLs are not sent to Google by Opera to begin width.
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
Firefox is 4.7 MB (actually with the latest nightlies, there was yet another size decease to 4.4 MB) and Opera is 3.4 MB.
Inspired by this article, I just downloaded Opera for my #2 computer (Debian Sid, w/ 96MB of RAM, somewhat taxed already by other services). The overall experience is quite a bit snappier than with Firefox 0.8. Firefox seems to choke on memory quite a bit more than Opera, even when I have image display enabled on Opera, and disabled on firefox. The playing fields is level in the sense that I'm running Ion3 display manager (which rocks BTW, all resource-starved should check it out ASAP!).
The memory footprints as reported by 'top' don't appear all that different - both have 20MB resident (firefox a bit more), Opera has 22MB shared and Firefox has 29MB (well, that's 8MB difference).
OTOH, on my main machine with abundant ram and other resource, I would never use a non-OSS browser. There it's Firefox all the way.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Companies like Nokia, Intel etc have a fairly independent investment (or venture capital) fund that makes investments in a very broad portfolio of companies. They spread their bets so that whichever horse wins, they win. Its called the spray and pray strategy. As a result, they will frequently make competing investments.
The interesting thing is that just because they invest in a company does not mean that the business units interact with those startups.
Mozilla is not bloated code - everything in there does something. Bloat refers to useless code.