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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.
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I will be interested to see how much Firefox code is in Chrome... and down the line, how much Chrome code will be pulled into future versions of Firefox.
The ability to improve your codebase is one of the strengths of open source. This is a great opportunity to display that strength.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Really, Firefox's competitor isn't Chrome, it's diluting standards based browser compatibility. If Google can come in and hammer out some market share and re-establish even further the importance for developers to stick to standards, it might be all that FF/Safari/Opera needs to really muscle over the 30-50% market share, and just enough credibility to keep Microsoft at bay.
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.
I for one am very excited at what this means to alternative (to Internet Explorer) browsers.
This isn't a shot fired at Firefox, it's aimed squarely at Redmond.
Indeed. Nobody saw that coming. Google launching its own browser. Who would have thought that!
Yes, I am the one with the legendary sig.
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.
I like that pronoun for Microsoft.
Not "them", or "they", and certainly not "he" or "she", but "it".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It profits Google nothing to "kill" Firefox. I don't think that is their intended target. Besides, with both chrome and firefox being open source, there's nothing to stop Firefox from incorporating bits and pieces from Chrome wherever it makes sense.
IMHO, the real target is MS Office. Google makes their money from advertising, which means eyeballs and correlated data. Unfortunately for them, many people spend a majority of their day inside MS Word and MS Excel and other apps. Google would love to have those eyeballs and all that data to better shape their profiles and thus better deliver advertising. What better way than to get all those different apps to "occur" inside the browser?
davejenkins.com |
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.
I use many browsers, though Firefox is currently my preferred one. But I can't help but pause at things like this. One after another, we've seen companies looking to developing their own browsers, but rejecting Gecko in favor of other engines, sometimes open-source and sometimes not, even when there was every reason to go with Gecko.
Why is this? I'm honestly curious. And what might Mozilla be able to do to counter whatever reasons there are for developers to often not just reject Gecko, but dump it flat after years of strong relationships? Why does Mozilla continue on as though nothing is wrong when the developers are voting with their products that something clearly is?
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?
The web already has four "major" browsers firefox, IE, safari and opera. Do we really need a new browser? Moreover, do we really need yet another partial implementation of the web standards?
I for one, do not want to code and test for another browser.
Not to mention that by using google's browser, you will give them unadulterated access to your every movement on the web.
How's Mozilla's finance? What sources of fund for them other than Google? How much does this nudge the relationship balance between Mozilla and Google?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
Respect the Constitution
The web already has four "major" browsers firefox, IE, safari and opera.
More precisely, the web already has four major rendering engines: Gecko (used in Firefox), Trident (used in IE), WebKit (used in Safari), and Presto (used in Opera). Chrome is using WebKit, so it can leverage WebKit's existing standards support and all the pages that already work with Safari.
Scripting is going to be different, but HTML/CSS should (in theory) be pretty similar to Safari.
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.
Because it will expose the dirty little secret of FOSS & GPL.
Making Open source software using the default team organization isn't all that its cracked up to be. Open source needs "leads" or managers or in general people in command without whoom, nothing moves. Yes you can fork, but its effectively useless because nobody wants your branch. Mozilla already has them, the kernel has Linus. Without a little bit of the cathedral the bazaar will create only crappy products.
Google needs control so they can actually build a test team, drive quality up (seriously, even if you LOVE firefox to death, aren't you fed up with the crashes? I know I am, an I don't care whose fault it is)
-ex FF fan...
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.
Some of the ideas for Chrome are good ones. But a lot of them seem to be reinventing the operating system. From Google's perspective the browser is the operating system, but that's not the real world. We used to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Emacs, but soon we're going to have to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Google!
Here's a big shocker: not everything is a web app! No really. There are problems operating systems solved decades ago that Chrome is just now gettng around to fixing, just because some people want their apps to be on the web. You can have distributed apps and ubiquitous data *without* HTML/CSS/ECMA/Ajax/Flash. Back when computers were so expensive no one could afford their own, everything was distributed. Now that computers are cheap enough that everyone has two or three, the industry is wondering how to distribute stuff.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The current agreement goes through 2011, so it's not an immediate problem. The Firefox team over at Mozilla might want to comb through the Chrome code for ideas, if the two OSS licenses are compatible. WebKit is LGPL. I dunno what V8 or the other parts of Chrome are licensed.
Chrome has an Omni Bar which is very similar to the awesome bar.
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.
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.
It may be old news, but I just listened to a podcast interview with Jimmy Wales today. He has started Wikia Search, meant to be a free-as-in-speech search engine, with publicly-available web crawls generated by distributed computing using Grub. The algorithms, he said, should be open too.
I have to admit that I'm practically a Google fanboi, but since owning search pretty much means owning the internet, I really like this idea. If you're uncomfortable with Google's power, why not try to help Wikia Search?
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.
Here's a crucial thing this browser should have: Mozilla-like extensibility, so that I could install the things without which I can't imagine a browser anymore:
1. Ad blocker (AdBlock Plus)
2. Developer extensions
3. Debugger (Firebug)
4. FTP (FireFTP)
5. Javascript extensibility (Greasemonkey)
Of course they'll be called something else, but without this set (and particularly #1), they might as well forget about it.
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.
It looks to me like the attitude within Google is that internal engineering resources are infinite and therefore they should work on their own version of anything they think they can improve.
What comes next from a world like that? I predict that they'll announce a project to release Google's own general purpose programming language. I've seen it before. Objective-C anyone? C#? Eiffel?
"We are so, so happy with Google Chrome," mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
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....
They could implement it using iframes and AJAX.
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/
Screenshot (new window)
So far I can't get it to load a page. I am running this on a machine with user restrictions (I'm at work), but I did install it with adminstrator priveledges (I'm the admin).
We'll see how this goes.
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
It will get even faster over time, as the Google Overmind figures out what you would have likely posted (based on the tracked history of everything you've ever used your borwser for) and posts for you ahead of time. You get first posts before you even see the story in your browser! Of course, your posts will contain Double-Click-served ads, but it's a small price to pay.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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.
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.
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.
Would you run a browser built by DoubleClick?
Same thing. What's in a name? Apparently enough for an entire collective of product for advertisers/Slashdot users to use a browser by an ad broker who sells that product to clients. Sirs, Madams, I'm calling you nuts. Get a grip.
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.
This behavior is repeatable, and Chrome prompts to restore previous session.
Other thoughts:
My sig has been answered.
There is a lot of neat stuff under the hood and the UI is nice, though. I'm sticking with Firefox for now and await an update to firefox with V8, per-process tabs, and improved search bar, while retaining ad-block, flashblock, greasemonkey, etc.
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.
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.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In terms of risk assessment, I think it is better, even if it's slight. People create a false dichotomy when they point out that the user isn't necessarily reading the code. Published source code you didn't read is not the same as unpublished code. There's varying levels of trust, and I'd say it's not unreasonable to trust the FOSS app a little more. The concept is so simple ("here's the code" vs black box) that I wonder if people read into it too much.
If/when Google publishes a Linux version, the package maintainers for the various distros will be looking at it. You don't have to write the program yourself with electricity you generated from the running of hamsters that you also bred yourself. You can just say, "it's open, and it's popular, so I trust this a little more". Even though you can't really trust the compiler, or the hardware, or the network, etc.