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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.'"
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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?
I think we're about to see if Google really isn't evil.
Just remember that it's not evil to not support a competitor.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
And add another layer to the tinfoil hat, just in case.
Similes are like metaphors
Oh, and the obvious addition: It's not evil to compete, either. (not even if you're Microsoft)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
They are just taking longer than they should to release it for Macux.
See, this is what I don't get. Linux folk claim they want companies to throw them a bone and open source their software and the "community" will do the rest. It sounds good when they say it, but why is it never the case?
Similes are like metaphors
Of course, replacing an estimated $70 million a year in revenue is easier said than done, especially if these types of search deals dry up.
Advertising that I'm a girl on Slashdot since 2008.
Because chrome offers very little that linux/mac users don't already have...
If they released the source to something that wasn't already available, you can be sure more developers would pick it up.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The only thing keeping me on Firefox is AdBlock Plus. The second that's in Chrome (or Chromium), I'm gone.
Google sell ads. Why would they block them? Cory Doctorow has an excellent take on this.
Except for an independent-process, one-tab-dies-the-rest-of-it's-fine browser that doesn't suck?
It's a nice idea, but how does it help actually an average person?
Lets look at the flip side of the coin -
Crashes:
1) Chrome's GUI is natively coded as opposed to firefox's chrome which is written in javascript. So, a tab in chrome has more code that can to actually crash (from NULL exception, etc).
2) Separate process only help if you are actually using multiple tabs. Not everybody does, and if the wiki tab that you are writing your thesis in crashes you still lose work.
3) Overhead code to clean up failed tabs. Notify shared plugins that an instance died, remove GUI elements from shared spaces, etc. More code to fail or crash, more complicated for plugins, etc.
4) A crash of even one tab is never acceptable in the first place, so you have lots of extra code to handle a situation that must never happen anyway.
Performance:
1) Each tab must communicate with the container process and (for plugins) with other tabs. Although it may be infrequent, this adds latency and at least to some extent serializes many independent actions because they are 'behind' other requests in the pipeline. This can be worked around, by making the parts more complex to do out-of-order requests and such.
2) Many resources are not shared, or use expensive cross-process locking. For instance images are decompressed again in each tab they appear in.
Security:
1) It's easier to crash a Chrome tab due to it using different UI code than pages are rendered with.
2) Attacks that actually hack the the browser itself are actually pretty uncommon, so having separate memory space doesn't protect much against most malicious code. The same cross-site and leak problems are possible with chrome, they just are split between two separate parts (for instance the tab making the 'request' for an element and the container allowing/denying it).
There are plenty of advantages AND disadvantages to chrome's process-per-tab model. We'll just have to wait and see how it all shakes out. But what you can learn from Linus v. Tannenbaum is that complicated monolithic systems can sometimes end up being far, far better than 'everything is recoverable' kinds of systems.