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Firefox's Effect On Other Browsers
An anonymous reader points out an interview with Mozilla's "evangelist," Christopher Blizzard, regarding the future of Firefox and how it affects other browsers. It's an Austrian site, so forgive the comma abuse. From derStandard:
"It's sort of interesting though, part of our strategy is to make sure, that we continue making change and the indirect effect of this is that Microsoft continues to have to do releases, because if we get so far ahead that we're able to drive the platform they are not able to keep up and keep their users. I mean, we have this joke which says 'Internet Explorer 7 is the best release we ever did,' because they would not have done it, if we would have not built Firefox. And the same is true for Apple, they are doing a lot to keep up with us. Safari 3.1 is a good example, as far as we see it, the only reason they did this release was that Firefox 3 would come out and have Javascript speed which would be twice as fast as theirs, cause that's how it was before. So by pushing other people to make releases we can go on our mission to make sure the web stays healthy."
What astonishes me is more that this latest release has gotten even my totally non-tech-savvy friends to download it and acknowledge its superiority to Internet Explorer 7. The Firefox team has not only improved the browser for those of us who already used it, but managed to convert another large segment of the market. It's sort of like the Nintendo Wii effect -- they realized it made more sense not to enlarge their slice of the tech-savvy pie, but to expand the pie to include casual users as well. Or at least that's how I see it, feel free to correct me with your own interpretation.
Or maybe they did it because they were pushing javascript apps for the iPhone, and working on the javascript-based SproutCore frameworks and the associated MobileMe apps.
Not everything revolves around Firefox.
Apple did not release Safari because of Firefox. After all, Firefox was on Apple. They released it because they wanted to be in control of their future. As it was, MS had announced that they were going to pull MSIE from them. What amazes me, is that Apple has not pushed OO to be on there. They would be smart to add a few coders to the project just to ensure that it can compete against Office on their platform.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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I always maintained that Win2K was such a good OS specifically because of the competition Microsoft was getting from open source, they didn't want to be caught napping and wake up to find Linux as a good desktop solution. This theory kind of fell apart with Vista, I have no idea what that steaming pile is in response to.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Safari is not trailing Firefox as it is being developed in all ways, especially JavaScript performance. I actually prefer to use Firefox 3 on the Mac (much better array of plug-ins, and better security), but the latest WebKit nightlies, on http://www.webkit.org/ since the implementation of Squirelfish (see blog there) are quite a bit faster in JavaScript performance than Firefox. If anything, Firefox is going to have some catching up to do in that department.
And Opera is feeling so pressured by Firefox that it is systematically forced to copy Firefox's features months and even years before Firefox releases them... ^_^
What will Firefox copy next? (what? troll?)
middle-click-to-close on tabs comes to mind
It's hard to tell between a left-click, middle-click, and right-click on a one button mouse...
While Firefox may have inspired the release of IE 7 and pushed Apple to jump into the fray with a Windows release of Safari, it is also true that FF 2 was not all that it should have been and just maybe IE 7 and Safari pushed Mozilla hard enough to really ace FF 3 which it seems that they have done.
As a software developer who once loathed the idea of having to code for multiple browsers, I have now accepted that there will be differences and have learned to deal with it and promise to stop whining.
I applaud the browser race and hope that they continue to leapfrog each other for a long time to come.
is that Firefox has been driven (to a large extent) by Opera.
Credit where credit is due, please.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I never knew, that German, was quite so, comma-happy.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Apple does very little of the core work for Safari. They just take the open-source WebKit engine and slap their own UI over it
You are incredibly misinformed. A quick glance at recent WebKit changes readily shows how blatantly false your claim is.
They just take the open-source WebKit engine and slap their own UI over it
WebKit was developed by Apple, originally as a fork of KHTML for their Safari browser. Apple open-sourced WebKit and it was so good that many of its improvements were copied back into KHTML. It's also being used by a number of mobile phones because of its strengths relative to e.g, Gecko, including Android.
Without Apple, there would be no WebKit. But don't let reality get in your way.
I have a problem with pop-under windows. They "reappeared" recently, and I'm using FF exclusively. Unfortunately I can't tell if my switch from FF2 to FF3 was the reason, but it was around the time. Is this a known bug? I know I can try to figure out the domains of the sites appearing in those unwanted windows, but I'd be more interested in a general solution. BTW, I have "block pop up windows" activated in the settings, with a few exceptions.
No, you're thinking of GPL. The LGPL would have allowed them to use KHTML libraries without giving anything back.
They can link to it without giving anything back, but the LGPL does not allow them to make changes to it and distribute them without giving the source back. Since Apple had to make significant changes to make it work modularly and the way they wanted, they had to give all those changes back. They don't have to open source the code for Safari, which links to Webkit, and in fact they don't.
WebCore's "improvements" are largely Apple's own doing, apart from those changes which were shared upstream before KDE developers abandoned KHTML.
Apple has done significant work to make Webkit better than KHTML was, but they are certainly building on a lot of work that was done before they entered the game. Apple has played nice with the Konqueror folks and gone out of their way to help them integrate changes and revise the way the shared code base was developed such that improvements from multiple groups including Konqueror, Apple, and Nokia can all be included. That said, to claim Apple had a choice about how Webkit would be licensed or if their changes to it would be open source is simply not true.
You obviously didn't deal much with Win 3.x. Registry is much better than config files scattered throughout. I wouldn't mind if it were replaced, but it needs to be a step forward, not back. Linux still has config files scattered in a zillion different places. It would be nice if all configs went into an organized hierarchy.
Um. All the configs do go into an "organized hierarchy"! It just happens to be a filesystem hierarchy (/etc) rather than an impenetrable binary file.
XML files located in a couple of standardized locations. As in one location for machine level configs, and one location each for user level configs.
XML sucks for configuration files, to be honest. Trying to hand-edit XML in a 40x80 nano session in single-user mode... no thanks. Not to mention that XML is decidedly grep-unfriendly.
I think I'm going to have to assume that you don't have a clue what you're talking about, I'm afraid. Try harder!
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I totally agree that Linux use of plain text files in the "/etc" directory is a far superior solution. However I'd also like to see all the user level config files that currently go into the various "~/.prog_name" folders collected into something like a "~/etc" directory.
Obviously to hide it during "normal" use you could name it "~/.etc" but I do think that it would be more consistent and far tidier to have all the user level config files in their own subdirectory.
Mind you having said that I'd prefer the directories were called "/settings" and ~/.settings" but I suppose 50 years of *NIX cruft precludes this !
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