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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."
Indeed. Nobody saw that coming. Google launching its own browser. Who would have thought that!
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I have used FireFox almost exclusively for about 2 years. What got me started on FireFox was I wanted the same browser feel despite what OS I was on (Windows or Linux). So it was the cross OS support that got me into FireFox, but what has kept me using it is the vast plugin support. One of my favorite being Foxmarks. (but Foxmarks is coming out for IE eventually, I am now alpha testing on IE). Anyway, so I look at Chrome and wonder will it met these two key needs and if it is as good as FireFox will that be any reason to switch? So I can see that it will be cross OS, but to be better the FireFox, but the next question is will it take it a step further, will it work on my Blackberry or other mobile PDAs? That would be the motivator to get me looking, but to solidify a change, I would need the plugin options the FireFox currently has and others like IE are lacking. Can Google do it? I think they have a great shot.
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If you have ever worked with the two engines you would not ask this question. Gecko is a huge mess of "OO in C" object model spaghetti. It is very hard for a new developer to get up to speed on or for development on individual areas to be compartmentalized.
Webkit, due to it's Qt/KDE origins, is very well designed from the ground up to be as API-clean OO as possible. It is therefore much lower barrier of entry for new developers to start up on, which is exactly what you are looking for when you are a company looking to roll out a browser.
As I understand it's based off webkit, which as I understand it means if it runs in Safari, it runs in Chrome.
As for google tracking people... it may be their goal, but if they get too intrusive (and even if people just like zero intrusion), it's open source. Someone will remove the code they don't like and viola! All the features, none of the mess.
Apparently the download page accidentally went live very briefly at midnight Pacific last nightâ"long enough to get into Google's cache. (They quickly purged it, however.)
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10028067-16.html
They've renewed their funding less than a week ago for another 3 years. Either they're planning something malicious, or they really don't care what browser people use, so long as the applications get developed. (which is google's primary mission - providing content, not competing in the browser area, hence open source and standards compliant.)
we don't want another browser, if it's more of the same.
Chrome is not.
It is developed from scratch with a completely new approach on how a browser should be. This doesn't necessarily mean that Chrome will be better than Firefox/Opera/Safari - it just means that it will be entirely different. Chrome could be a total disaster, or maybe google gets it right this time and we see Chrome being widely adopted.
Either way, i'm just plain happy that people still believe innovation is worth some effort and risk, instead of taking the easy road and photocopying.
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I feel your pain regarding multi-browser testing. But it seems like implementing standards - and having them clarified where needed - will only become more important as the number of browsers increases.
Also, the more open source browsers we have, the more transparent those implementations become - further fueling the standards conversation.
Maybe one day soon IE will be the only browser that major sites DON'T work on. And then it will have to conform.
??? I, for one, a long time developer hopes this does catch on. A browser for all platforms, specifically mobile phones, that works well! I am all for it. Having a standard set of APIs across these platforms, which remains to be seen, would also be a welcome addition. Trying to construct applications across these areas is difficult at best. This will hopefully break that barrier.
Reading through the comic it's pretty obvious what Chrome is about. Google clearly feel that web apps have hit something of a wall running on existing browsers, and that they need to take the drastic action of releasing a new browser with a new architecture to move things on. The V8 javascript engine is clearly to enable larger and more complex applications, and the thread-per-tab architecture means larger and more complex apps can be run without risking the whole browser.
Microsoft either got wind of what Google were planning or came to the same conclusions, thus the new architecture in IE8 (and the IE javascript engine is not as bad as it's made out to be, it just underperforms badly with string processing).
Mozilla (and maybe Opera) may well struggle to compete with Microsoft and Google here. Opera have shown that they do have the resources to develop new rendering and javascript engines, but Mozilla are still using a Gecko that has changed little in years apart from tweaking. It may well be the case that in a year or two we'll be seeing much more advanced web apps which Mozilla browsers handle poorly.
Chrome will certainly get tried by some people who would have tried Firefox.
But what exactly do you think will happen when everyone using IE visits www.google.com and finds out about a replacement for IE brought to them by the same people who make that awesome search engine and web mail they use all the time?
If all Google really wants out of the deal is beating IE, then they just make sure that you get a nice advertisment when you go to google to search with IE, and leave the firefox/safari/opera people alone.
There ARE ways for Google to directly target Microsoft only and leave everyone else alone. The question is, do they want to?
I fail to see how Google making their own browser is any different than IE 1.0. The goals are the same from this chair. Get people away from using the market leader in order to benifit our own profits.
I like what Google has done with themselves to date, but I've seen a big company like this make a web browser before and I'm still feeling the effects of that 10 years later. I'm more concerned with what Google does in the long term than who they are targeting. Who they are targetting is irrelavent really, what they intend to do if they succeed is what matters.
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I had my hopes up for a very quick port from a third party. Then I found out that Google is going to use the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license. I guess that we will only be seeing this when Google decides to port it to Linux, and only on those distros that Google feels are worthy of having Chrome ported to them, and only in the exact configuration Google selects. I suppose the Google fanboys will have endless explanations for why Google chose a no-derivatives license.
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Webkit was also the first to pass Acid3 and the first to support all CSS3 selectors. Webkit support for CSS is simply way out in front of other browsers though... It supports gradient, stroke, transform, box shadow, border radius. They've also got an HTML 5 client side database built into the browser. You can check it out in Apple's latest version of safari.
Well, I'm only guessing, but it doesn't strike me as likely that Google would want to pull out of the agreement, currently. If their browser were to fail gaining market share, and they'd manage to kill Firefox too - then they'd have handed the browser market to MS on a silver platter. I don't think they would want to take that risk.
Paul Thurrott's coverage of the Google Chrome leak/announcement ends with the remark that "what we've really got here is an example of Google pulling a Microsoft: Creating an unnecessary me-too product that they can use for product tie-ins. All of the features here are present in existing browsers, all of them. So what does Google really bring to the table?" The idea of opening tabs in separate processes has been part of Internet Explorer 8 since March, at least. Web-apps in windows that don't have an address bar or toolbar are not just a decade old in Internet Explorer, they've been a pain in the backside for a decade. Malware writers love them. I used to use Proxomitron to force them to have obvious controls. The thumbnail home-page is basically Opera's Speed Dial, and IE7 has had a thumbnail view for a couple of years (albeit it only shows current tabs). Putting tabs over the address bar is the standard Opera view, and utterly pointless for most people. Chrome's InCognito is already in IE8 as InPrivate Browsing, and was in Safari 3 before that. Omnibar is Firefox's Awesome bar. Auto-completion, anti-phishing and sandboxing features are all pretty old hat by now. Google can't even think up a new name: Microsoft Chrome was an old tool that allowed "Web developers to add multimedia features to HTML using Microsoft's DirectX technology". Additions and corrections are, of course, welcome ;-)
As with Gmail, Chrome may be a big hit if it's brilliantly executed, especially given Firefox's general crashiness and bad memory leaks (which, to be fair, used to be part of IE too). But if it's more like Google Base, Knol, Orkut, Froogle and similar rubbish, it may not catch on....
Here's a big shocker: not everything is a web app! No really.
Yep, you're right. But the reality is that the web app is the greatest advancement in maintenance since the mainframe/dumb-terminal. Right now, web apps are a complete PITA to develop in terms of simple things like storage, persistence, etc. But in terms of compatibility, deployment, and upgrades, they have the local app beat.
So while not everything is a web app, the web app is the *first* approach considered by 90% of people putting out customer facing apps, maybe even closer to 99%. Can web apps do everything? No. But they do answer issues of maintenance, upgrades, and control a lot better than locally installed apps.
I'm still not sure I buy all this cloud stuff, and I think a lot of it is hype. But we are going somewhere like that in one degree or another, and a lot of the apps you use in the future for day to day work are going to be web apps. So Chrome is aimed at that. Will it replace things like Adobe Photoshop? Doubt it. Will it make your online banking experience not suck? Oh, I sure hope so :-)
None of that will happen by magic. But then if Google gets behind web standards hard and shows IE that yes, you can make a browser that doesn't suck--well, the future of web apps might be a little brighter.
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It definitely feels different, but DOM performance seems pretty poor (testing on DOM heavy internal apps). Poor to the point that an operation that isn't specifically laggy in IE/FF pops up an unresponsive notice in Chrome (though it eventually finishes).
Anecdotal for sure, but to me it doesn't really help to speed up JS if DOM is the bottleneck in the first place (as it is in other browsers as well).
Am I the only one whose Windows computer is now running a service called "Google Update" which I was not asked to have installed?
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"It may well be the case that in a year or two we'll be seeing much more advanced web apps which Mozilla browsers handle poorly."
A fact I find interesting when you consider what XUL is suppose to be.
A lot of people complain about where's a linux version when talking about photoshop or something, and in those cases I understand why it's not on linux or at least why the company has no current interest, but of all companies, you'd think google would get, market share of the OS be damned.
How does mozilla release cross-platform the same day, when their codebase is supposedly a huge mess?
Ya I know it's in beta, but FF is released for all platforms, beta or not.
I would just think (or I guess hope) google would 'get it' and release cross-platform, and not 5 months down the line get a feature lacking version, that forever will be behind the windows version.
As Google continues to provide more and more things we use in our daily lives, I'm beginning to fear when this level of integration with the average user is going to begin a cycle of privacy violations.
Google is much more of a fearsome machine than even the behemoth Microsoft. Their web assets and datastores account for way more information they have on people's searching (via their search engine) and browsing habits (via Google Analytics and ads). Not to mention, the ability to link that lot up to personal information (Gmail, calendars, documents). I wonder what they could possibly use their browser for to further their information collection. Maybe browser history being stored online? Seamless favorites integration with their systems?
Seems benign, but I think on a large scale, disturbing.
Just something to think about.
Its hard enough to switch people from IE to firefox. What makes Google think they can switch users to yet another web-platform?
Firefox doesn't really make the rest of the web run better. It does have some features that are compelling, and some people get it for the plug-ins, others get it to avoid issues with IE, still others get it for the ideology, or cross platform consistency, but there really aren't any websites that 'work significantly better with firefox'.
If google starts pushing new features into Chrome that integrate with their online properties, that will give Chrome definite advantages over other browsers when accessing these services, and make them a more compelling download.
You say its 'hard enough to get people to switch from IE to...Firefox' and that's true, but firefoxes biggest obstacle is visibility. How does joe average find firefox? And once he finds it, what does it promise that IE isn't giving him that he really cares about?
Meanwhile with Chrome we can anticipate google telling him to download it every time he searches, everytime he checks his mail? So visibility is covered. It will also tell him it will make all this better, sites he's already using will be 'better' and its free too? he'll jump all over that.
Next consider how many people install their damned toolbar? Clearly if google puts up a link and says 'hey install our crap, it will make your gmail / gdoc / gmap / glife better', people WILL do it. We've already got evidence of that.
And if Google does the carrot of dangling extra features for using THEIR browser, people just wont use them and migrate to other services.
That must be why Internet Explorer failed, when IE started dangling extra features... oh wait.
As long as search, gmail, etc, works in IE and firefox people aren't going to stop using the services. And yes they may well switch to Chrome for a feature carrot they can't get elsewhere. Or maybe users will just pressure MS and Mozilla to implement that feature so they can use it in IE or FF too... and google sits in the coveted position of being able to create defacto standards.
And if google can get a few other players like myspace and facebook to utilize whatever new features google stuffs into chrome that would just be gravy on top...
One of the features of the new browser is an anti-phishing and malware service, which downloads updated lists of "trouble" domains from Google. I would bet that is what the update service you found is doing.
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I fail to see how Google making their own browser is any different than IE 1.0. The goals are the same from this chair. Get people away from using the market leader in order to benifit our own profits.
Google are not Microsoft - they don't make money by locking people in and destroying the competition (in the case of IE, the competition was the web). They make money by encouraging use of the web.
This is an entirely different situation and their motives are completely different. They just want a viable delivery platform for cloud apps, and current browsers aren't quite there yet. I imagine they'll start saying to people who complain that IE doesn't support things like their off-line mode for email - oh, why don't you try our new browser. To construe this as an attack on Firefox is to misunderstand its function; it may rival Firefox, but it certainly isn't an attack in the way that IE was an attack on Navigator (and with things like Active-X, and later Silverlight, an attack on the open web).
... yes and no. I've found bookmark and history management to be difficult at best and asinine at worst on IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, and Opera the last time I used it (which was in the late 90s, admittedly).
I like Safari quite a bit, warts and all - though I still use Firefox for certain websites due to its superior ability to remember log/pass for * - Safari does a few things "right" for me that no other browser does.... things I'm seriously wishing Firefox et al would pick up on.
First, the bookmark and history management is great. It's its own window instead of a fixed-maximum-width sidebar like Firefox's history sidebar, and while FF's history pop-up window does show the page title and url, it's doing it in a separate window. Clutter.
Second, and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before other browsers pick this up - RESIZABLE TEXT FIELDS. I can drag the "comment" field of the slashdot Post Comment dialogue to be any size larger than its original scale, and it's not just slashdot I can do it on. I spend a good amount of time editing posts in a CMS, so the ability to resize the text input fields has quickly gone from a "huh!" to a "must have!"
Now if only Safari would let me search inside said text fields (being why I still use firefox for webmail) and had a more robust (read: useable) log/pass manager...
Of course, Chrome could have all of this and fix my long-standing "why hasn't anybody done this?!" of being able to select a block of text containing multiple links and open all links in new tabs with one click, and it could have finally "fixed" open-in-new-window to force-new-window-into-new-tab, but..... it's a Windows Beta. So I can't try it out. Insensitive clods.
I was with you for that whole first list, but you lost me when you got to "control." Control for whom?
In a way, web apps are a reversion to the mainframe/dumb-terminal model. You don't control what program you're running. Someone else does.
The big problem I have with web apps is that almost none of them are open-source. Just when I have thousands of debian packages worth of applications to choose from, why in the world would I want to revert to a model where half the code is client-side code that I as a user have no control over, and the other half is server-side code that I can't even see?
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