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Chrome Complicates Mozilla/Google Love-In
Barence writes "Mozilla CEO John Lilly has admitted the Firefox maker's relationship with Google has become 'more complicated' since the company launched its own browser. Mozilla is dependent on Google for the vast majority of its revenue and has previously worked closely with the search king's engineers on the development of Firefox. But that relationship appears to have cooled since Google released Chrome in the summer. 'We have a fine and reasonable relationship, but I'd be lying if I said that things weren't more complicated than they used to be.'"
Chrome is the next IE and Google is now Microsoft. Stick with Linux and stay away from Google.
I think we're about to see if Google really isn't evil.
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While Chrome may "complicate" their relationship, ideally there should be as many browsers on the market as possible. Microsoft's monopoly over the web produced a sort of tunnel-vision toward website development. Having a variety of browsers available has been changing that. The more browsers available, the more pressure will be placed upon companies to support standards compliance.
So while Mozilla and Google may compete, doing so is in both their interests. In addition, competition is in the consumer's interest because it keeps pushing the browser market forward and gaining us great features like HTML5 compliance, process isolation, privacy modes*, malware protection, etc.
* I've found this to be an excellent way to use an admin login on a site where I also have regular user credentials.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I don't use the Google Browser because I don't want all my browsing history and everything else put in their databases. I think they are overstepping their welcome. Common Google, how about the security of what we post, look at and search for? Are you the FBI? NSA? CIA?
If Google felt that a browser with Chrome's security / capability needed to exist, then they should have opened a dialog with Mozilla to discuss how FireFox could be enhanced to that end. Google could have provided funding or coders to help make that possible.
Internet Explorer has lost ground, but that is primarily because there has been a single, well-defined alternative - Firefox. Segmentation of the alternative-to-IE market at this point could be disastrous. The sleeping giant has already been awakened, and Microsoft has turned IE from a piece of crap that had languished for years into a modern, legitimate browser. Microsoft won't make the same mistake twice, and they are aggressively working to regain their browser market share.
I can only think of three logical explanations for Google to release their own browser:
It is really just an experiment, and Google will just pull the plug on it out of the blue. They've done this before with other experimental projects.
They want Chrome to replace Firefox as the alternative to IE, so they will have complete control over the market. This makes sense, because the web browser is the total point of interface to their multi-billion dollar industry. It is logical that they would want direct control over that component.
They did try to get Mozilla to make changes to Firefox, but their requests were ignored.
Better known as 318230.
Additionally, it checks each and every URL you visit against google's malware-list.
I fail to see how checking hashes against a pre-downloaded list gives out any information about a user
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
They're working on it. If you dare you can take a look at a nightly and see for yourself. For me it's now almost as fast as opera and that is under linux. Firefox used to be a real dog under linux, mind you, even worse than the windows version.
Well, I guess they can only do so much. We have tons of new features and an amazing Addon-System by now, the guys who developed all that probably couldn't focus on performance at the same time. But the good news is, as said, it's improving and one of your next fox updates will give you a nice speed boost.
The community is not something you should rely on to help your business... The community does not magically embrace things for your benefit... The community is not here to serve your commercial interest...
The community serves the community, and if you business plan involves having millions of volunteer developers work on your products, then you deserve to get your fingers burned.
If you looking at a company you might want to invest in, always look at where their income comes from. If most of it comes from a single location, that is a DAMN risky investment.
If a majority of Mozilla's incoming comes from Google, then Mozilla isn't financially sound. They should have started looking for other revenue streams long ago.
Source code isn't everything. There is a lot of trade wisdom, such as "oh, this is why this other on-the-surface simpler technique doesn't actually work out in practice", that is rarely written into the source code or documentation but that you can get access to if you have a close relationship with the developers. So Google's relationship with Mozilla was probably much more useful for producing Chrome than just having access to Mozilla's source code repository (epecially as Google used WebKit for the source code!)
Google doesn't care if Chrome succeeds or dies because other browsers step up to the plate and incorporated Chrome's features. I see Chrome doing several things:
* It puts more pressure on the other browsers to adopt WebKit as their rendering engine. WebKit is quickly becoming the default browser on the "Internet Device" market thanks to Google and Apple, and this will put more pressure on FireFox and Opera to adopt it. Or at least emulate it better. Apple and Google would love to see FireFox and Opera become WebKit based. For Apple, it means that the Internet is towards an open standard that makes devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch more desirable. For Google, it means they don't have to worry which browser their AJAX browser services work on.
Microsoft is already feeling the pressure which is why IE 8 is trying so hard to comply with the various Acid tests. I already know a few non-geeks who downloaded Safari or FireFox because IE is unable to render particular websites.
* It puts pressure on other browsers to incorporate the needed security and performance needed for AJAX web applications. Hey, Chrome is open source. Beg, borrow or steal what you want from the source code and put it in your own browser. Google doesn't care. Their money is in web services and not selling browsers.
So, there is no real issue with Google's support of the FireFox project. Google would be happy if Firefox becomes the #1 browser on the market and makes Chrome a historic footnote. That is, as long as Firefox incorporates the features Google plans on exploiting: Better security, better JavaScript, better performance.
And if they do, one of the ports of chromium will remove the third-party-plugin killswitch and chrome will die a slow, painful death, because all the people considering switching to it will use the port that lets them block ads.
How does Firefox "lose" by having another competitor? Are they losing sales? Oh wait, they don't have sales. Are shares of Mozilla losing value? Oh wait, they aren't a for-profit public company. Chrome is Google's way of saying, "See, we can make the web better." There's nothing stopping Firefox from taking every one of those innovations and putting them into Firefox, because it's all open source. In fact, Google would be thrilled if this happened, because it means more people will have more powerful web browsers, which means Google can write bigger, better web applications. This is about keeping the web moving forward and not stagnating (IE).
(IMO.)