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Google & Firefox's Relationship
sebFlyte writes "More news from FOSDEM, this time about the depth of support for Firefox from Google. According to this article on ZDNet, Firefox' growth and Mozilla's staffing costs have been underpinned by the Foundation's tie-ins with Google, but they promise not to go the same way as Netscape by selling 'every bookmark and link'... and don't forget that the lead programmer (among others) is directly in Google's employ."
When Google will port Picasa to a web-interface, followed by a small word processor, and offer their customers 1 GB to store their data, they will need to have their fingers in at least one big browser. Not to pump it full with ads, but to make sure it is a good enough thin client for their purposes.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Every big company turns evil sooner or later.. it is only matter of time.
What about IBM? They used to be evil. Now they are helping the open source community and fighting off scum like SCO. They still have their own agenda, but they're not evil like it used to be.
I would personally think if they took a fork and created the gBrowser line, then it would negate all the good hard work that has gone into Firefox.
:)
Brand recognition is key, and Firefox is certainly better known than gBrowser.
Look at the blank expression on peoples faces when you say "do you have gmail?"
Most regular users have to be told "its googles email service, yes its like hotmail, only better..."
Firefox is firefox in my eyes
liqbase
Microsoft doesn't have to build a better browser. It just has to build one that's good enough. It already has the lion's share of the market.
If they build one that's good enough, and whose security model is comparable to Firefox's or Opera's, Alternate browsers will be marginalized again, W3C standards or no W3C standards.
I can't believe that this sort of talk continues on Slashdot. I thought people here were intellegent. You probably work for a corporation. Your computer was made by big corporations. You can't go shopping without some of your money going to corporations. If you have a problem with this "evil" in the world, move to the country and become a subsistance farmer.
If you think the corporate focus on the bottom line is a problem for society, let's talk about that. (And don't think for a second that when IBM and Google support OSS that they don't have the bottom line in mind. They're hedging their bets against other corps like MS.) Until we address the issue of "more money equals better", we can't complain that corporations behave like corporations.
Maybe when we focus our mental energy on redefining what businesses' responsibilities to the world are, and the evil you speak of can be held in check.
Note to Website developers: Stop sitting there with your arms crossed and insisting on making sites that aren't in compliance with public standards. Instead support the idea that if we -all- agree on standards it removes the power from proprietary software --- and that the mindset of "well it's just one cool non-standard feature" is exactly the mindset that got us in this mess!