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Mozilla Chairman Speaks on Open Source/Microsoft
ChrisMDP writes "Tom's Hardware has an interesting interview with Mitch Kapor, the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. They discuss, amongst other things, what it's like competing with Microsoft, and Firefox as an operating system." From the interview: "Pragmatically, I think we have to distinguish between a base set of extensions and everything else. It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions when there are nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings. There's a basic tension in principle that can never be completely resolved."
It's called bloat. It happened to Red Hat. It happened to SuSE and it happened to Opera. You have to have limited objectives to avoid bloat. This is the key for browsers like Lynx etc. I would say Slackware Linux is one of the few distros that has managed to avoid bloat whilst still being very modern and "full of possibilities"...
Microsoft has never intended to compete on a level playing field. Instead they have tipped the field to favor themselves, sacrificing product quality and user benefit over and over again.
This is a great quote. It explains partially how Microsoft got where they are today, and why their current size and monopoly is unsustainable. Unless they make a fundamental change in their business model, something's going to happen to them.
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Q: how does it feel to spend 20 years being beaten^H^H^H^H competing with Microsoft?
A: Microsoft totally cheat. They don't play fair. OK, sometimes they can pull their socks up, like when they bought Spyglass and abandoned MSN version 1.
Q: Firefox is like... the new operating system?
A: Yes, and one day it may actually instal Flash support automatically. There's no end to what's possible?
Q: How's Chandler doing?
A: Who?
Q: You know, the open source thingy.
A: Ah, yes, very well. That's such a kind thing to ask. Any day now. There's no beating open source.
Q: so, since CPU's have passed 3Ghz, does it make sense to write better code?
A: better code is better code.
Sigh.
I love Firefox open source as much as the next righteous Slashdotter, and Kapor is a totally cool dude, but WTF? WTFF?
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The challenge is changing the end-user more than anything. I have tried for the longest to get my company to convert to Firefox, but users have integrated, in their heads, that to use the web is to use IE, and they can tell they're firing up another browser they get nervous, blame all problems going forward on the new browser, and simply don't like change. Microsoft did something very powerful by link IE to Windows. IE has become saturated within the minds of users. The few users I have converted over I have to change the new browser icon to the big "E."
People also have a great amount of grace for microsoft, excusing their security holes, making such statements as, "well, if another browser gets as popular as IE then it'll have the same problems, etc." And I'm talking about IT professionals not just end users. I try to explain that, no, Microsoft has been uniquely bad at security....
No matter what the browser, it has an uphill climb against IE....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
somehow I always think that this premise might actually be somewhat true for our society:
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
Forgot where that is from (Spaceballs?), but sometimes I feel that evil does win out in the end. Companies that use evil tactics to get ahead may not win out in the long run, but really screw things up in the short timeframe.
Of course you could look at it this way, Firefox could be an example of Good winning in the long run because Microsoft was being evil 5-8 years ago. Wow, its been that long already?
No, it's called bloat when the nearly infinite possibilities are part of the default application - the base set.
That's why Mozilla and Firefox work with extensions. Users can personalise their application, add the missing features they need (or think they need). But without the overhead of the missing features they don't need.
That's particularly true for a light-weight browser as Firefox.
But because the fact that lots of extensions exists and lots of combinations of extensions are possible, the problem of the nearly infinite possibilities for customization and tweaking of settings is as real in such a customisable application with extensions as it is in a bloated application.
Dang, it looks like mozilla is going the way of emacs... "What? You're exiting mozilla? Why? It has everything you'll ever need for your entire computing experience! It debugs itself too!"
Microsoft releases products for its customers, which is what it should do.
/.'ers more than anything else is that most people don't care about merit. They just use products that are there, and which do the job required. This is something which most geeks don't get.
However, the reason Microsoft is deemed evil by some is because it uses its power in order to capture marketshare. This is a huge faux pas in geekdom, which is traditionally a meritocracy.
What annoys
Whassat? Firefox as an operating system? You mean a program that was cut off from the "bigger" mozilla to be "just a browser"? Hm.... When a new Firefox's Firefox is due to fork out? :-)
from Securityfocus.com: as of January 2005, SecurityFocus readers using Firefox (46%) eclipsed Internet Explorer users (44%) in our traffic logs for the first time ever. I just can't wait for similar numbers hitting msn.com -- I must be a zealot for bashing microsoft.
Mitch oughta know this by now. Product is just the wrapper for the business plan. Product is just a carton you put on a shelf to aim your markeing at. Product really doesn't matter all that much. If it did then Firefox and Openoffice would have been able to charge $5 for their product and make billions doing it. And Bill knows this too because the great genius of Bill Gates is understanding that if you talk to your competitors about 'product' it will distract them from looking at your business plan. And without a credible bizplan, products like Mozilla are essentially interesting experiments that demonstrate how close you can come to MS's product. In other words they are triumphs of reverse engineering. But as I said, 'product' really doesn't matter so those organizations have spent all their time and effort to replicate a wrapper, a box without having anything to put in the box.
Back in the day of good old DOS, the Un*x and Vax guys reminded all the DOS guys, that DOS was just a program loader and not a true operating system.
Doesn't this apply to browsers as well?
I just don't see how refering to these application's as "operating systems" helps any cause they are working twards, and it would seem to add a stigma that is perhaps not necessary.
Owwch.
"and Firefox as an operating system."
Doesn't Mitch know that it's almost exactly that statement that caused Microsoft to launch its slaughterfest against Netscape when Marc Andreesen said it?
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Now give me a ide and some documentation so that I can create xul apps. The biggest push should be to get a xul ide together to help extend and push the platform. I don't care if it is written in xul or python or whatever, don't point me to xul maker either it looks like ass and is being developed way to slowly. I love firefox now make it damn easy for me to build cool xul apps.
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Mitch Kapor is Mozilla foundation chairman (scroll down).
Mitchell Baker is Chief Lizard Wrangler (also Foundation president).
I have noticed that the teacher's computers where I am attending are loaded with spyware. They were all using Internet Explorer. A few switched over to Firefox right after I told them MSIE lets spyware in. But most couldn't care less. Finally, I found something that is getting the others to switch over. I ask them "Would you use a web browser created by a convicted monopolist?" They always say "No." Then I tell them they are using one (Internet Explorer). This gets there interest and then I get them to download and switch over to Firefox.
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I see a lot of IE versus Firefox comments, so I'll just get it out of the way now.
/leaner memory footprint, and renders CSS like a good webbrowser SHOULD, then firefox loses some of it edge.
Firefox renders CSS more consistently than IE. Developers like that.
Firefox uses about 2 mb less than IE while running in windows XP viewing the same slashdot thread.
Firefox allows window tabbing.
things not affected: Popup blocking, since SP2 does it. Plugins, since activeX is dead anyways.
Basically, if IE 7 uses tabs, has a smaller
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
"They discuss, amongst other things, what it's like competing with Microsoft, and Firefox as an operating system."
Wow. I didn't think Firefox had reached the functionality of emacs yet...
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Rather, I'd say that bloat is a question of architecture. The command line isn't bloat, since all the commands are properly seperated from the shell itself. If every command was a part of the shell program itself, then it would be bloat, even though it has the exact same capabilities.
That's why Firefox may be called bloated -- not because all the extensions are included by default (which they, of course, aren't), but rather because all the extensions that you choose to include run as part of the same program. They become part of the firefox program itself when you install them. That is also why "It gets progressively more difficult to create seamless solutions". Since the extensions aren't properly seperated from themselves or the core Firefox program (the shell, if you will), it becomes ever more difficult to avoid conflicts.
That's also why a Linux distro is often considered less bloated than Windows, even though it's capable of so much more.
Note again the parallel of the UNIX command line. There are even more combinations of programs (extensions, if you will) in the command line than there are for Firefox, but that's not a problem since it has a better underlying architecture. Not really part of the subject, but I can't help noting how "light-weight" is such a relative word... Firefox may be light-weight compared to IE, the Mozilla suite, etc., but can you really call any program that takes 25 MBs of memory just to start of "light-weight"?