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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."
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.
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.)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
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?
Kriston
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.