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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."
Did I call it, or what? ;-)
For those of you who are interested, Chrome is supposed to be launching later today. Apparently around 11 AM PDT 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 out of Google's 404 page.
For those of you who didn't get to see it, the comic book is now available for viewing.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I read that support for Linux will be coming out later. I can only hope the schedule is more aggressive that the one they used for Google Earth. It seemed ages before I was able to get that running.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
i just hope they don't share the same rendering engine..
Chrome uses WebKit, so they don't. Or are you saying you hope Firefox doesn't switch to WebKit later on?
Since Chrome is based on WebKit with their own high performance javascript engine, I'd guess 0 lines of code.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
There is already a well known web browser technology called "chrome". It's an integral part of Mozilla web browsing technology. Confusion in the marketplace anyone?
Perhaps a team that isn't forced to respect ass-backwards coding guidelines 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.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Chrome has an Omni Bar which is very similar to the awesome bar.
It's traditional in the USA for companies to be referred to in the singular.
If you read the "comic" 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.
- Vincit qui patitur.
When Google gets in the business of coming up with their own standards, server and scripting languages I'll get back to you on that.
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?
Google and Apple both explained why they went with Webkit instead of Gecko.
Sorry I can't find the links at the moment but basically Apple said Konquerer as a base was much smaller and cleaner, easier to get started with and to work with than Gecko.
Google said the same thing, they went with Webkit for it's speed and ability to run well on low end computers, easy to hack.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
They explicitly said they used code from the mozilla project.
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
Google Chrome has now been released
Hot off the press - page changed in the last couple of minutes.
Interestingly nokia is switching to gecko in maemo http://browser.garage.maemo.org/
Okay... I switched to the Administrator user account, re-installed, and now it's running fine. I'm posting this from Chrome as we speak.
Looks like the installer doesn't play nice with user account levels...
To any of those having problems, make sure you're logged in with administrator rights, and not just running the program as administrator.
The incognito mode isn't really useful either.
It doesn't work by using totally throw away data, only *new* data is thrown away. For example, going to google in incognito mode sends my real google tracking cookie to google (and the same for other sites).
This is probably to keep ads working, but totally nerfs the feature. I don't really care if my local computer keeps track of what I've browsed, I want to ensure that nefarious sites aren't getting my session cookies.
Don't mod me redundant, but the comic is released under a no-derivs license. The actual browser is released under a Free, open-source license.
V8 is also open source. In fact in the webcast just an hour ago one of the V8 devs said they'd love for other browsers to use their engine, or to use their ideas to make a better Javascript engine.
Actually it isn't a service, it's now a regular background process started from HKCU\\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
Google Earth's downloader asks you if you want to install it, but Chrome's just goes ahead and sideloads it without asking.
Kriston
This behavior is repeatable, and Chrome prompts to restore previous session.
Other thoughts:
My sig has been answered.
Like I already mentioned somewhere up in a reply, its fast and snappy. Love the drag&drop features but totally hate the lack of any adbloc.. never mind.
The browser task manager is awesome. I hope the ff dev team picks up on that and adds it to the next release. I just checked the details of the 10 tabs I have open and its showing a total memory usage of ~58 MB (which is not bad although FF3 has more or less the same stats) but what got my attention was that it clearly showed that the one flash site open was gobbling up the major chunk of that memory space. Nice to know which tab/s is/are screwing up.
One honest question though, Will Google even support an adblock type plugin for Chrome?
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
It's not a service, it's an application, but yeah, installing it without the user's consent is Evil.
You'll find the startup hook for it in HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run
What's even more interesting is that it runs an exe from %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data. This should be a no-no. On a properly installed system, anything under that folder should be non-executable, and for Google to rely on files there being allowed to execute means they don't even understand Microsoft's guidelines.
One bad, and one evil.
Oh, and one stupid: No gopher support
You've probably installed more than one app from the big 'G'.
You can stop them starting easily enough. Start->Run->'msconfig'
On the last tab, find the references to Google update and uncheck them. Then either kill the processes you have running or restart windows.
If you want to delete the executables for update, they're in x:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Update\