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: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.