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.'"

Comments

Chrome has a long way to go

[javacowboy]

I tried Chrome, and while I find it's a refreshing innovation in GUI design for a browser, it has a *long* way to go to match Firefox's features.

Also, it's not yet-cross platform, and from what I understand, it'll take some doing before there's even a Mac version.

There's no browser for me that comes close to Firefox in terms of features. Many will argue that Opera does, and this may be true, but I find the interface a little too alien for my preference.

Also, there's the question of privacy, which Google has a poor track record on. Will Firefox users start to trust Google? I'm not so sure.

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[renoX]

>>I tried Chrome, and while I find it's a refreshing innovation in GUI design for a browser, it has a *long* way to go to match Firefox's features.

The thing is: the reverse is *also* true!
Firefox has also a long way to go before matching Chrome on some features such as responsiveness (thanks to Chrome's multi-process architecture).
I've dropped Firefox due to its poor responsiveness, I'm currently using Opera but my trials with Chrome were quite positive too.

So in one 'word': YMMV.

Re:Ideally...

[mitchell_pgh]

I don't agree. I feel a majority of the Chrome users are former Firefox/Opera/Safari users. When a dominant minority group (Firefox) is fractured or segmented... it doesn't hurt Internet Explorer. In fact, it helps it.

----- Current Breakdown -----
Internet Explorer 71.11%
Mozilla Firefox 20.06%
Safari 6.62%
Opera 0.75%
Netscape 0.46%
Google Chrome 0.74%)
Other (0.24%)

----- Fun Numbers ----- (100% made up)

Internet Explorer 60%
Mozilla Firefox 15%
Safari 10%
Opera 1%
Netscape 1%
Google Chrome 12%
Other 1%

With the above made up numbers, I can still hear our CFO saying "see, we should focus on Internet Explorer... everyone else doesn't even have 20% share! And, that 'Firefox' thing is going DOWN! "

I'd love to see some information as to what browser current Chrome users transitioned away from.

Well, yeah.

[Millennium]

Of course it complicates things. Perhaps this should serve as a wake-up call to the Mozilla folks, seeing at this is now makes the developer (after AOL and Apple) to, having initially showed strong support for Mozilla's projects, ultimately reject Gecko when the time came to make its own browser.

The only common thread between these three companies (among others) and their rejection of Gecko is Gecko itself: they've embraced a wide variety of other engines, they stand in opposition to Microsoft to varying degrees (including, in some cases, none at all), and the browsers they ultimately produced tend to follow many different paradigms and philosophies. Yet all of them agree, in the end, that Gecko was not going to get the job done. Something is very wrong with that picture, and it bothers me how the Mozilla team seems to take it so nonchalantly.

I say all of this as a Firefox fan who is nonetheless worried about the future of the engine that made standards-compliance important on the Web again. I have a few guesses as to what mistakes might have been made, but I don't claim to know for certain. What I do claim to know is that something needs to be done, even if the first step is just to figure out exactly what that is.

Re:Well, yeah.

[AvitarX]

The AOL rejection is weird, because they purchased Netscape, but it made sense. They already had their users hearing murmuring that AOL was not the internet, the last thing they wanted was to have their users not be able to visit online-banks.

If AOL had embraced Gecko, I wonder where they would be. They would have been seen as a force of good for internet standardization, and it probably would be the thing they do that makes them the most money right now. Considering they made their millions selling internet adds back in the day, you would think they could see the potential.

The choice of Apple to ignore gecko, and instead start from a very primitive engine and build on it is quite interesting. They clearly saw shortcomings in Gecko that they thought they could avoid, and felt that re-creating the wheel was an expense well spent (KHTML was pretty poor back then, with terrible DHTML support, and rendering differences to the extreme, in fact, until Safari 3, webkit was like stepping back 3-5 years and using Gecko).

The fact that developers are in general using webkit now when faced with the choice (many OSS browsers are switching even) is very telling too. It wasn't just Apple that saw shortcomings.

Nokia had a mobile browser they were working on using Gecko, but I bet the purchase of Trolltech will alter that choice to a point.

That pretty much leaves Sugar, and Firefox. Of course, the fact that Firefox has all those great extensions is a strong point in its favor, with the web developer tool bar being awesome, but hardly relevant to most people.

Re:Well, yeah.

[b4dc0d3r]

I found the source code to be repulsive. I could not possibly take over that code and make my own browser out of it, except for minor GUI changes maybe.

I was looking into a problem for ReactOS where the installer would explode, and just browsing the source made my head hurt. There were nearly-identical copies of files in a number of places - so that I couldn't determine which were the files included in the build - or maybe all were... and it wasn't just an old version, these files were out of sync with each other and being maintained separately.

There is no way I would let anyone but Mozilla Foundation play with that code.

Re:Use of resources

[Lord Bitman]

you seem to have forgotten that little "be bold" thing. It's always easier and usually better to implement first and ask questions later. Good ideas will be adopted by others, bad ideas won't have wasted everyone else's time in discussions which lead to nowhere.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Tisha_AH]

I tried the Chrome experience last week and had a similar experience. While the browser is faster (always a good thing), there is a serious lack of plug-in support under Chrome.

I too use Adblock Plus, Foxmarks and NoScript and consider these to be important features in any browser. Currently, Chrome is a less mature browser where few if any developers are writing plug-in's to equal the breadth and depth of tools available for Firefox.

I also have this nagging doubt that Google will be openly supportive of features similar to Adblock and NoScript as Google's revenue stream comes from selling advertising space. The old saying "you don't defecate where you eat" makes me question just how far Google will go to support features that allow us to deny adware, scripts and tracking cookies.

Gecko vs. WebKit

[Ohio Calvinist]

I don't understand why folks are calling this "evil." I see the biggest difference from everything I have read, is that WebKit is better suited for low resource (memory, CPU, power) utilization than Gecko is. Given that the mobile computing is the next "fertile" ground for marketing and capitalization, releasing Chrome as a desktop equivalent of whatever Google plans to do in the mobile arena (maybe in Android) seems like a really "good" idea; particularly if Firefox isn't as ideal for specific environments and platforms they are targeting for their products.

I get that people like Firefox, but I don't understand the mentality that Firefox has some fundamental right to exist and anyone who does anything differently, in competition or cooperation that leads to a decrease in adoption is "evil." Even if Google is being "evil" that is pretty objective, where the legal reality is that Google has a duty to its investors; a legal duty, and if Chromium gets them closer to meeting their goals, then as much as one might not like it, they are doing what is the "least evil" in the eyes of those whose pocketbooks are proping Google up, and the government who has decreed that public companies have this duty. What Google does not have, is a bona fide responsibility to do anything for or against an independent third party, no matter how novel or great anyone or group of people think that 3rd party is.

If Firefox really is as great as many seem to think it is, it should flourish in the open market. I mean, it is already free-as-in-beer which is pretty difficult to compete with.

I don't care what anyone says and I'm willing to deal with being modded down, but a larger part (that most are willing to admit) of what made IE the dominant browser today is that IE4 "was better" in user experience and provided a better platform for developers than Netscape 4.x-n did. I'm not saying Microsoft's underhanded tactics weren't a big part of it... but IE4, for as often as it is bemoanded for ActiveX, made a "good enough" platform for the time, to bring "fat binary applications" to the web/intranet when Javascript/HTML (before flash, before AJAX, before frameworks like .NET or Rails) alone were not up to par to bring the same functionality that a full executable would.

This drove a lot of places I've worked to *require* IE for internal applications, because cross-platform didn't matter because everyone was on PCs or could Citrix into a Terminal server if it was important enough for the few Mac departments.

It could easily be said "no, it was because IE was there and IT didn't want to install Netscape on all those computers", but I have to say, if it provided any functionality IE didn't, the cost would have been negligible if it made our employees more efficient.
If Firefox is better, it will survive whatever is trown at it, and if it can't, then the market has deturmined that it "shouldn't."