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

Hmm.

[contra_mundi]

I think we're about to see if Google really isn't evil.

Re:Hmm.

[Jugalator]

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.

Re:Hmm.

[Jugalator]

Oh, and the obvious addition: It's not evil to compete, either. (not even if you're Microsoft)

Re:Hmm.

[De Lemming]

I don't think they're evil, but this is a good point for Mozilla to review their funding options. From the article:

[Mozilla CEO John] Lilly admits Mozilla will have to wean itself off its dependence on Google dollars. "Our goal is to be an advocate for the web for 50 or even 100 years, and you can't depend on any one organisation," he added.

Re:Hmm.

[at_slashdot]

The Devil is in the details.

Re:Hmm.

[Jugalator]

Exactly! Let me know when Microsoft decides to compete rather than create a monopoly.

There are dozens and dozens of examples. I'm sitting here with VMware running, so that's an easy target. Virtual PC.

Re:Hmm.

[binarylarry]

Fortunately for Mozilla, Chrome has never "took off."

It's not that great really, more of the same.

Re:Hmm.

[Slashdotvagina]

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.

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're supporting with both money AND source code. Remember the original goal of Chrome was to create what Google thinks should be the vision of the web, and let others take from it.

Re:Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually MS taking over VirtualPC was as much to protect Windows as anything else.

Without VirtualPC, OS X suddenly lost the ability to run Windows.

Virtual PC was working of a version for OSX on Intel.
Parallels hadn't been announced yet, let alone released.
VMWare hadn't entered the market.
Bootcamp hadn't been released as "beta".

Suddenly with the MS acquisition, the Intel version of Virtual PC was shelved indefinitely.

It was a calculated attack at OS X which was starting to gain market share as an alternative platform to Window, that could also run Windows if you needed to for an App or two.

Re:Hmm.

[Bert64]

Indeed, they are now integrating hyper-v with windows in an attempt to force vmware out...
How long before windows starts having all kinds of compatibility problems with vmware and not with hyper-v, making vmware look inferior?

Re:Hmm.

[jmyers]

Evil does not equal dumb. If Google wants to destroy Firefox, cutting off all funding in an instant is not the way to do it. They should enter as a nice guy until they reach a feature level and market share level where they can pull out the rug. Then they will pick up defecting FF users. If they piss off alternate browser users at this early stage they have no chance.

Re:Hmm.

[megamerican]

Oh, and the obvious addition: It's not evil to compete, either

To quote John D. Rockefeller: "Competition is sin."

Google has every right to "compete" in the browser market.

However, is it really competition when Mozilla relies on its competitor for the vast majority of its funding? Mozilla's entire future is in the hands of Google. It'll only be around so Google can beat anti-monopoly laws.

Re:Hmm.

[Arancaytar]

Well, it's one thing to compete with someone, another to collaborate with someone in a market you're not fighting for, then entering that same market as a competitor.

If not evil, at least it won't make you friends. Ask Hasso Plattner and Larry Ellison... :P

Re:Hmm.

[maxume]

What are you talking about? Google doesn't care about how many people are using their browser, they care about how many people are looking at their ads.

They want Firefox+Chrome+other-default-to-google-search-browers to have as much market share compared to non-default-to-google browsers as possible. They could give a shit if it comes via Chrome or not (I doubt that Chrome is even tangentially part of strategic planning, it is probably much more a result of the rather open corporate culture (open in the sense that people work on things that are interesting to them, rather than simply on what the management structure specifies)).

Re:Hmm.

[hedwards]

They actually can't do that. They've been skirting a very serious MS sized antitrust action for some time now and if they start engaging in that sort of activity they will end up on the wrong side of a DoJ action.

The feds have been rather generous in their investigative and regulatory efforts into Google's control of the online advertising market, if they start using that influence to overtly harm competitors that's definite cause for an antitrust action.

Re:Hmm.

[erwanl]

1) They can't, because they're bound to Mozilla by a contract
2) They're not paying Mozilla "to be nice", but because Mozilla is bringing them visitors. It's a simple business contract, in which both parties are benefiting.
Now, if Google decided not to renew the contract after it expire, Mozilla may be able to find an other partner. It may hurt them or not to work with a service different from Google.

Re:Hmm.

[headbulb]

VirtualPC was bought way before apple started to use x86.

VirtualPC was more likely bought to port to the xbox360 (at least parts of it) to emulate the old xbox so that the xbox 360 could claim being backword compatible. Which the xbox360 uses PowerPC, the same ISA that VirtualPC was originally coded for. Now how much code they used is another question.

They also bought it since it was ported to windows. Which just so happens to be on x86. While I am sure they could use this code on the x86 version of osx it wasn't really planned since apple didn't announce that yet.

It wasn't really a direct attack on apple. Microsoft still released it for the mac. It just became part of the office suite.

Now when apple went with x86, other developers found they would use visualization instead of emulation which is what virtualpc does

Re:Hmm.

[crayz]

Does anyone think the web per-se will still exist 25 years from now, much less 100? Clearly to some extent all the major players(Mozilla, Google, MS, Apple) want to push the web in a variety of directions. Can Mozilla give us a vision of what sort of Mozilla product we'd be using say 15 years from now to browse the "web"

That's not sarcasm, I'm genuinely curious. 15 years ago Mosaic had just been released. Today people can message each other online using a wireless network that didn't exist back then, on a tiny iPhone that's an order of magnitude more powerful than desktop computers from 1993. Can Mozilla really write a business plan that looks even 15 years into the future and tells what it's place will be?

Re:Hmm.

[xant]

I'm not sure what Google's goals are with Chrome, but it may not accomplish them, whatever they are. If that happens, expect Firefox to continue to grow in dominance. Google isn't going to throw all its money in one basket; it'll cut Firefox loose only when the overhead of supporting them is greater than the revenue brought in by Firefox traffic.

Re:Hmm.

[Omniscientist]

And how can anyone associate the offering of competition to be evil in any shape or form, especially in regards to browsers?

This sort of uncomfortable atmosphere leads to innovation, and helps avert any chance of eventual complacency (*cough* IE6).

Re:Hmm.

[stevehadd]

Maybe we should move to a radical new idea. People PAY (money!!!) for the goods and services they consume, instead of being subsidised by a third party (i.e. advertisers), who will be deciding for you what you should see! The one bad thing about the internet (well probably one of the bad things) is that people expect things to be free. Some one some where contributed his or her time, and that person(s) has to live. Of course, companies over charge ridiclously when charging for info (think CD's and DVD's), but directly (rather than indirectly through a higher cost of goods because the money need to pay for advertising which pays for what you're using) is always the best option.

Re:Hmm.

[shutdown -p now]

VirtualPC was more likely bought to port to the xbox360 (at least parts of it) to emulate the old xbox so that the xbox 360 could claim being backword compatible. Which the xbox360 uses PowerPC, the same ISA that VirtualPC was originally coded for. Now how much code they used is another question.

I do not have a good knowledge of the virtualization market, so I won't try to guess why MS bought out VPC. But one thing that stands out to me is this: ever since the VPC purchase, Microsoft has been very active providing trial and beta/prerelease versions of its products as preloaded VPC images. If you go to their download site, you'll see that pretty much every major product comes in both the conventional trial version (an .iso file), and a VPC image. Some only come as VPC image (for example, Visual Studio 2010 CTP).

Relationships are hard.

[fullymodo]

Maybe Google thought they were "on a break"...

So what?

[OrangeTide]

It's not like Mozilla has some trade secrets to hide from their partner. All the secrets of making a browser seem to be released regularly as source code.

Re:So what?

[williamhb]

It's not like Mozilla has some trade secrets to hide from their partner. All the secrets of making a browser seem to be released regularly as source code.

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!)

Re:So what?

[OrangeTide]

Yes, it's called a mailing list. We have those for the Linux kernel too, so that wisdom can be dispensed.

Re:So what?

[OrangeTide]

That's not the issue at hand. The question that I bought up is if the technology that Mozilla possesses is a trade secret or not.

If you want to quibble about the value of mailing lists or kernel development, go somewhere else. Because right now I don't care what opinion(s) people hold on that topic.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It's like you work at an ice cream store

[Anonymous Coward]

Things are going pretty good. You're scooping some flavors, having some fun, and earning some money. The boss is pretty cool, but one day he brings in his son and tells you he's going to start working there, too. At first you're training the kid, showing him the ropes, and things are going pretty well. But then, before you know it, he's the assistant manager and you're still just a scoop jockey. Yup, that's life.

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[Anonymous Coward]

Or if he brings in his daughter, you marry her.

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[Thanshin]

There's something disturbing in your analogy.

For instance, where's the car?

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[geckipede]

You joke about it, but I would dearly love to see the projects merged somehow. When I started using the Chrome beta a few days after it was announced I started compiling a list in my head of features that would need to be added before I would be happy using it instead of firefox. Skins, about:config, adblocking, generic addons preferably similar in implementation to firefox so that existing ones can be converted... After a while contemplating the list, I realised that it would be a lot simpler just to say that I wanted firefox with the seperated thread handling.

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[zindorsky]

Or if he brings in his daughter, you marry her.

Dude, gay marriage has opened this whole thing up. It doesn't matter if it's his son or daughter!

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[Nerdposeur]

OK, it's like you're a car, who works in an ice cream store...

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[jonaskoelker]

For instance, where's the car?

Obviously it's an ice cream truck

Just like the internet I got this morning...

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[dunkelfalke]

well, since netcraft confirms that the car industry goes the way of bsd, car analogies aren't considered politically correct speech anymore.

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[badkarmadayaccount]

Pretty much agree, but I'd rather they port that cleaned up UI too. It's not native on anything but KDE, but it's still lightyears ahead of anything else. Heck, I'd use it just for that.

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[atraintocry]

Once Firefox started recovering tabs after a crash, I stopped worrying about that altogether. So I have to say I disagree about the separate processes per tab...on the very rare occasion that FF crashes (and only then because I like to run the betas, 3.1 especially has some nice features for Mac users) I have all my tabs and I usually know which one it was anyway.

If having separate processes per tab allowed them to implement features they couldn't otherwise do, maybe like tear-off tabs (it's on the roadmap, I don't know if it requires separate processes -- only speaking hypothetically), then that'd be neat. But for me personally I don't see a gain other than feature parity with Chrome and IE, since FF has dealt with crahses gracefully for a while now.

Re:It's like you work at an ice cream store

[geckipede]

It's not crash prevention so much, although that would be nice. What I want is proper memory management of tabs. It's very silly for a browser to slowly drift towards being an operating system in its own right and re-implementing things that are incredibly well refined in the kernel. Firefox's memory management got a lot better in version 3 but it is still far from good, let alone perfect.

Ideally...

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Ideally...

[not already in use]

privacy modes*

* I've found this to be an excellent way to use an admin login on a site where I also have regular user credentials.

Well played, sir. Well played.

Re:Ideally...

[Andr T.]

He's Batman. How could we expect anything less?

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.

Re:Ideally...

[dword]

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

Here you go!

Re:Ideally...

[owlnation]

I suspect that very few Chrome users are former Safari users. Just simply because Safari has very little penetration outwith Mac users, and Chrome isn't available for Mac.

Personally, I can't wait until Chrome is available for Mac. I will be switching from Firefox pretty quickly. Firefox has never worked well on the Mac, although the current version is much better than the horrid mess that was Firefox 2.0.

I don't see any issue with Google competing with Mozilla on this. May the best browser win. If they build the best product they can (i.e. not bloated with awesomebar-esque gimmicks), then people will choose that browser. It's why I switched to Firefox in the first place. And why I will switch away from it, when something better becomes available.

Re:Ideally...

[JasterBobaMereel]

Then point out that 40% of the potential customers are being turned away ....

If you ran a shop and you made the doors awkward for 30-40% of your customers and lost trade because of it you would get fired ...

It is still the case that a lot of websites are designed on Firefox tested on Safari/Opera/Chrome etc ... and then heavily modified to work in IE7, and then more so to work on IE6 ...

A few design to IE7 then find that it does not work on IE6 or anything else ... and spend more time redesigning it ...

Re:Ideally...

[Tanktalus]

I'm just not sure what I count as... I use firefox for about 60-70% of my browsing, but nearly any time there's a URL to click on elsewhere (in my konsole, in kmail/kontact, xchat), it opens in konqueror. Should some of these numbers add up to more than 100% then? Or, more likely, does it just count whatever I happened to use at their site(s), and thus be somewhat biased toward primary browsers, ignoring the strength (and importance!) of secondary browsers.

Re:Ideally...

[jonasj]

Personally, I can't wait until Chrome is available for Mac. I will be switching from Firefox pretty quickly. Firefox has never worked well on the Mac, although the current version is much better than the horrid mess that was Firefox 2.0.

May I ask if you have tried/considered Camino (formerly Chimera), the Mozilla project's native Mac OS X browser? (Same engine, just a native GUI)

http://mozilla.org/projects/camino/

Re:Ideally...

[jollyreaper]

* I've found this to be an excellent way to use an admin login on a site where I also have regular user credentials.

Well played, sir. Well played.

"Yeah, I'm both a user and administrator on startrekfursuitsex.com but perhaps I've said too much..."

(I don't know if that's a real site but I'd still advise everyone to not try visiting it)

Re:Ideally...

[Chemisor]

> Then point out that 40% of the potential customers are being turned away ....

That depends on who your customers are. If you are selling some technical product, or something that runs only Linux, you can ignore IE users completely, since IE does not run on Linux and no self-respecting geek would use it anyway. Likewise, if you would like to only sell to intelligent people, perhaps to save on tech support costs, then making a site that doesn't work in IE is an effective way to do it.

Re:Ideally...

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.

It's too bad you can't fire that CFO if he can't see IE drop from 70% to 60% marketshare and think IE is dominant, *particularly* if developing to open standards enables you to hit 100% of the market. Barring browser-specific workarounds to address showstopper bugs where some browser doesn't follow w3c fully/correctly, no web development should be targeting any browser.

Re:Ideally...

[lwsimon]

I build websites professionally, and most of us build to Firefox, because of its superior development tools - Firebug, Yslow, and others. Its also relatively standards-compliant, though I find WebKit to be better in practice.

I typically have IE7, Firefox, and Chrome open, and test in IE and Chrome every couple of changes. For IE6, after I'm done, I unlink the stylesheet, and rebuild the whole thing, usually in a slightly more simplistic style, while maintaining look and feel. Once both are done, I add behavior with Javascript, using jQuery to abstract away browser differences there.

Where acceptable, I usually add a small alert box or something to the IE6 version urging the user to try Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or at least upgrade IE. I get a surprising number of click-through with those links, but obviously I can't put them on most commercial sites.

Re:Ideally...

[kj_kabaje]

I think my sarcasm or irony detectors failed. Isn't having standards the same thing as creating tunnel vision--just at a more global level? ;-)

Re:Ideally...

[AKAImBatman]

Heh. Sorry, I just figured out that trick the other day and just had to share. Being a programmer, I'm terminally lazy about everything. And nothing is more annoying than either having to log out of my current account -OR- open a completely different web browser. (I used to do the latter.) I got the bright idea yesterday of using Chrome's incognito mode as a method of circumventing this issue. One incognito window, and *BAM* I'm clear from my browser's normal sessions and cookies. As a bonus, the browser does not save the admin session or login, making it a nice boost to security.

The only problem I've found with this scheme is that Chrome does do form pre-filling in incognito mode. Which (call me crazy) seems like a rather severe breach for a "privacy" mode. Go figure.

Re:Ideally...

[dword]

That's browser usage. You can't tell if someone accidentally used Konqueror or Firefox or Safari or Chrome or Opera or IE to open a link or if they've used that particular browser intentionally. There are many people that use multiple browsers (I use Firefox, Chrome and Safari).

I remember, I almost got a job for a company where they said that they're not going to improve their website and they'll keep it working with IE6/7 because that's what most of their visitors use. So I asked, "why not spend a bit of time to make it standards compliant and almost everything will work in FF/Chrome/Opera/Safari?" The answer was "because almost all our visitors are using IE and even most using FF quickly return to our site with IE, you can see their IPs and web clients in the logs" Umm... yeah, so I tried to leave as quickly as I could and never returned. Their website was working fine in IE6/7 but it sucked in any other browser, so people with FF either never came back or came back using IE. They analyzed the logs and forgot to interpret what the figures of people that only had a couple of hits with FF really meant - they didn't think for a second WHY those people weren't interested in their website.

The moral of the story is that interpreting these figures is extremely difficult because there are a lot of variables involved. I'm only telling you what Wikipedia is giving you: the estimated number of users that use a specific browser to surf on pages that are in relations with those statistics companies. Those stats are gathered from only a handful of websites, compared to the greatness of the Internet and it would be extremely difficult to differentiate between two different people and a single person using multiple browsers, which is called an error. You're right, those stats are missing something very important: the error margin.

Re:Ideally...

[arivera71]

You are missing the point here. Of course in the short term this is going to affect Firefox users mostly. That's because Firefox users would be more likely to try new things thank IE users. The long term scenario is all about cloud dominance and Google Apps. Why did google build their own mobile operating system and not a desktop operating system based on Linux? Google wants to make sure they have 100% control over the user experience with their Google Apps. In this case it makes sense that they have their own browser and they can make sure all their apps run perfectly in chrome. The operating system here is not important because it is the browser what controls the Cloud Environment. All they need to do is make sure they port Chrome to as many operating systems as possible. The mobile environment is completely different. They built Android so they can do the same thing. But in a mobile environment Web Applications are not enough. You need to build Native Applications that connect with the Cloud and control the User Experience as much as possible (Think Apple). This is all a long term scenario and I think the success of Chrome (and maybe Android) is tied to the success of the Google Apps and Google's Cloud computing plans.

Re:Ideally...

[hplus]

Because intelligent people never use other people's computers, including at work!

Re:Ideally...

[P00k13]

I switched from Firefox to Chrome. Chrome does a lot of things that Firefox should be doing now with a 3.0 version and all. Instead of improving the user experience, Firefox development time is wasted reimplementing things like the bookmark system to sql, which normal users don't care about and can't see any improvements. If anything, I'm more confused by the new bookmark system. Firefox feels really 1990's to me with the file menu at the top and little innovation to the user interface over the old Netscape other than having tabs. The only thing I like more about Firefox is that it gives more tweaking power like cookies being deleted when the browser closes. Google's browser is prettier and plus never crashes. I'm not going to uninstall Firefox any time soon though, because I still trust it more than anything else in terms of security, but it would be nice if the Firefox team can learn from the things Google has done well.

Re:Ideally...

[Fallingcow]

Yeah, hell, I can't imagine trying to develop for anything other than Firefox these days (initially, at least). Firebug, the web developer toolbar, Yslow, open poster... I even do FTP from Firefox, since the FireFTP extension is superior to any stand-alone solution I've seen in Linux.

I do pretty much what you do: develop in firefox, test IE7 every now and then, then when I'm done I take a look (and have a laugh) at how screwed up it looks in IE6 so I can figure out whether I need to tear it all up and have a separate stylesheet or just a couple little hacks.

If I have time I give Opera and/or Konqueror a whirl, but 99% of the time they look acceptably similar to Firefox, so I don't treat that as a priority.

Heh, I've been kind of hoping someone writes a Geany/Notepad++-like text editor as a Firefox addon. Then I'd be able to do an entire site, from the point where I have the graphics prepared to the end, inside Firefox! I'd be able to use the exact same tools on Windows and Linux. Pretty sweet.

Re:Ideally...

[lwsimon]

That would work, but I do a lot of my Javascript and PHP development inside Aptana. I've yet to find anything better, though I'm sure it exists. It is essentially an Eclipse plugin, though, so i do use it in both Linux and Windows.

Re:Ideally...

[pbhj]

If you ran a shop and you made the doors awkward for 30-40% of your customers and lost trade because of it you would get fired ...

More likely sued under the Disability Discrimination Act.

What you actual mean is making it awkward for 30-40% of people. They're not your customers until they leave with something they've paid for. If it's hard to leave once your in (eg better user experience) & if the 30-40% are the lame-o-s that take everything out the packet but never buy, well then you're definitely up.

*hmm* anyone seen that analogy, it was round here someplace, seem to have ....

Re:Ideally...

[ampathee]

I use Firefox with IETab for this trick. Firefox has the cookie for my regular login, IE has the admin login cookie. One click on the statusbar to toggle my credentials!

Of course, it's not as secure as your method, but I mostly only use it for our company's internal bugtracker.

Re:Ideally...

[badkarmadayaccount]

Here you go: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/394

HTH!

Re:Ideally...

[badkarmadayaccount]

Yeah, but when you follow standards, you can't file broken rendering of your page as a bug report to the bugtracker of the respective browser. i keep wondering why web-devs don't use Arena. ;)

Re:Ideally...

[atraintocry]

With respect, I think the hypothetical numbers you posted simply back up the parent's claim.

In your numbers, IE's share has gone down, and the spread between the remaining browsers has evened out somewhat. This is only possible if those other browsers are all similar in what percentage of sites render nicely in them (stardards win) or have some killer features that drew people away from even Firefox (features win).

In practical terms, what I want is open standards and lots of competition between products. That it's made by Mozilla or whoever else makes no difference to me.

You are saying that there should be a strong, single competitor to IE so that it can be adopted in the enterprise. In this specific case, I take the opposite view...if you're running a Windows domain and IE is not the only browser on your user' machines, you are making a lot more work for yourself. There is only one browser that works with GPOs out of the box at the individual feature level, and that is IE. It updates through your SUS/WSUS setup on a schedule that you specify. It can use NTLM authentication for intranet apps. And so on.

It seems like there are far more zero-day exploits for IE, so I'll give you that, but running a Windows shop without good antivirus and timely MS updates is bad news anyway. At my place we have web filtering, too. Prior to putting in the web filtering I toyed with the idea of deploying FF but in seeking others' advice I realized the disadvantages and haven't looked back.

Re:Ideally...

[JasterBobaMereel]

Want to tell that to the heads of IT who seemingly all use Firefox/Opera/Chrome and do all the IT purchasing .... ...You seem to have just accused everyone who does not IE of being a freeloader? Does that incluyde the one who paid for Opera before it was free?

Pentrose

[pentrose]

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?

Re:Pentrose

[Midnight Thunder]

If you otherwise like Google Chrome, then SRWare Iron is the browser you should be checking out: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

Re:Pentrose

[FishWithAHammer]

Isn't that the magic of open source? You can go look at the code?

Fearmongering retardation for the lose.

Re:Pentrose

[FishWithAHammer]

Chromium is the browser he should be checking out. It's the official community-dev fork of Chrome.

Re:Pentrose

[BarryJacobsen]

If you otherwise like Google Chrome, then SRWare Iron is the browser you should be checking out: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

I'm sorry, but if they can't take the time to capitalize the word "I" on their FAQ page, I can't be bothered to take them seriously. It makes me feel like the prince of Nigeria...

Re:Pentrose

[lwsimon]

Its German, and English and German is different on capitalization. I'm betting their translator got confused, or didn't fully understand common vs. proper nouns.

Re:Pentrose

[bgarcia]

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?

Google Chrome Privacy Notice

Read the privacy notice. It explains in pretty plain language exactly what information gets sent to Google. Note that "all your browsing history" is NOT one of the items. It also provides links explaining how to disable various features if you don't want that information being sent.

Re:Pentrose

[msormune]

You do know you can turn all that off in Chrome? Oh wait, no you did not :) Oh well, +5 insightful for you anyway... You would get better privacy, if you did not use Google at all, btw. It saves and indexes your searches anyway.

Re:Pentrose

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Firefox browsing history is already going into Google's database if you have either of the following two options turned on:

Tools - Options - Security - "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected attack site"

or

Tools - Options - Security - "Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery"

Re:Pentrose

[gad_zuki!]

>I don't use the Google Browser because I don't want all my browsing history and everything else put in their databases. I

The never expiring tracking cookie works on all browsers. Has anyone written a FF add-on that resets this cookie? If not theres always this easy way to do it:

http://www.everythingisnt.com/archives/00002067.htm

Re:Pentrose

[Arterion]

Add to your HOSTS:

127.0.0.1 google.com

!!

Re:Pentrose

[DragonWriter]

Common Google

As opposed to "Rare Google"?

I think you mean "Come on, Google, ..."

Re:Pentrose

[AngusSF]

Mod this post +10 ... just as you shouldn't trust Microsoft to guard the security of your Microsoft Windows computer, you shouldn't trust Google's Chrome to guard your online privacy. I use Firefox with CustomizeGoogle, and until Chrome offers a similar add-on, I won't even consider using it.

Re:Pentrose

[badkarmadayaccount]

Here you go.

They'll be fine

[biscuitlover]

Firefox currently has over 20% of the market share and growing - if it continues to gain share then I can't see Google pulling out of an agreement where they're the default search offering for over 20% of people on the web.

Having said this, it's going to be difficult for Mozilla to find a revenue stream that even comes close to that from Google. If they want independence, they'll have a hard time finding it. Somehow I can't see Microsoft stepping in with a bid if Google were to eventually pull out...

Re:They'll be fine

[iammani]

Firefox currently has over 20% of the market share and growing

Wait till Google starts signing agreements with OEMs and Chrome is shipped as the default browser for both Windows and Linux boxes.
And I dont subscribe to the argument that Firefox users would forget/stop using google search, if Yahoo/MSN is set as default browser (Unless of course Mozilla explicitly makes it inconvenient for users to use Google). I would consider Firefox users to be capable to change their default search engine to whatever they prefer.

Re:They'll be fine

[williamhb]

Having said this, it's going to be difficult for Mozilla to find a revenue stream that even comes close to that from Google. If they want independence, they'll have a hard time finding it. Somehow I can't see Microsoft stepping in with a bid if Google were to eventually pull out...

Oh I can. They paid Facebook enough to get access to Facebook's advertising and search market, they still make mention of doing a search deal with Yahoo, and Ballmer has made mutterings about open source browsers recently. If Google dropped their deal, I imagine Microsoft would pounce pretty fast. Great marketing with the techie crowd, and a darn site cheaper than a lot of what they've been doing with live.com

Re:They'll be fine

[jonasj]

I dont subscribe to the argument that Firefox users would forget/stop using google search, if Yahoo/MSN is set as default

MSN???

"Google makes their own browser now, competing with ours! Quick, switch our default search engine to one that's not made by a competing browser vendor! Yeah, MSN, that's a good choice!"

Uh...

Re:Don't take the bait

[not already in use]

And add another layer to the tinfoil hat, just in case.

Re:fine and reasonable?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what a red-headed step-child says, when his mom and Gary decide to have a child together. Firefox: prepare your ass for a serious beating! And don't go crying to your real daddy, Marc Andreessen. He doesn't want anything to do with you, either.

Wow, that's a lot of emotion over a browser. Do you need a hug? We can talk, it'll be OK.

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

[RiotingPacifist]

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

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[garcia]

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 about Chrome that is the most attractive is its small footprint (aside from the god damn GoogleUpdater running in the background) and speed in loading. My main machine at home is an underpowered laptop and Chrome is smoking the living shit out of a fresh install of Firefox (i.e. no add-ons installed) speed wise, especially in booting up.

Do you remember when Firefox came out as an alternative browser and its main focus was being on slim and fast? Well, those days are gone and we now have a bloated monster which takes for-fucking-ever to boot on my slower machine. Why is this, I really want to know?

While I don't install Chrome on all my machines (I like GreaseMonkey scripts and AdBlock Plus), it is very useful on a machine where I don't need it swapping out to load the application and three windows/tabs. Firefox really needs to step back and say to themselves, "do we need to continue down the path that so many other browsers have taken up and failed with?" Google needs to heed those words for future consideration as well.

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:Chrome has a long way to go

[Kent Recal]

Do you remember when Firefox came out as an alternative browser and its main focus was being on slim and fast? Well, those days are gone and we now have a bloated monster which takes for-fucking-ever to boot on my slower machine.

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.

Why is this, I really want to know?

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.

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[garcia]

They're working on it. If you dare you can take a look at a nightly and see for yourself.

I have run the nightlies and had been running Minefield (as suggested here once before) for a while before I realized that WordPress 2.7's admin panel wasn't saving drafts of my posts automatically. Thinking it was a WordPress issue I reported a bug and then later found out it was a Minefield issue. I "upgraded" to Shiretoko (I believe that's what it was) and it worked again but other failures in basic functionality appeared (e.g. not being able to submit a web-based tweet on twitter).

I like the add-ons and find them useful but for them to completely ignore speed (which was the original goal of the browser) and develop something else (which wasn't) is wasteful.

BTW, while the nightlies might appear faster, they're still a huge hog and nowhere near the speed that Chrome offers. I find it spectacularly odd that you would get a +5 for your comment which is little more than a rehash of what others have suggested.

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[Bert64]

The "google updater" is the fault of your OS rather than google...
If the OS provided a standard way to check for updates, then it wouldn't be necessary for google and other vendors to write their own... For something which is internet facing like a web browser, an auto update mechanism is absolutely essential.

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[ArsonSmith]

Time for a car analogy:

My Volkswagen Bug is nice and fast and has a small foot print but it can't tow a fully loaded semi-trailer. Their working on it so soon we'll have a small fast Volkswagen Bug that can tow a lot.

What do you mean the new Volkswagen Bug is nearly the size of a house and weights 20k lbs?

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[fractalspace]

I currently have an open relationship with Firefox. When it comes to chrome, I belong to the group: "Tried and moved on". It failed my acceptance tests.

1. Interface: I want simple, clean, functional, customizable interface, with maximum real estate for content and minimum for controls and overhead. I cant accept any stubborn control lingering in my face when I never used it. (Miserably failing is Opera)

2. Speed: I want my browser to start the moment I initiate the launch. Not 1 minute after, not even 10 seconds after. I also want my browser to show me the page whose link I just clicked, as quickly as possible (relative speed compared across major browsers). (BTW Firefox also failed this test and is getting worse by the moment).

3. Switch Engines: I don't want to blackout a large chunk of the internet just because my browser cant see it. Doesn't matter whos fault it is.

4. Some key extensions: (bookmarking, automation, mouse gestures)

Oh, BTW, NO background automatic 'update' tasks allowed on my machine. Just check for updates when I start the application ok ? The only exception I can allow is for antiviri. Thats it.

I even wrote these to Google survey while uninstalling chrome. Last I checked, nobody bothered to take any notice. Why should I ?

Thankyouverymuch

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[Kent Recal]

I wouldn't say it was wasteful. For 99,99% of people even the current firefox is more than fast enough. Those same users likely care a bit more about being able to enjoy niceties like Adblock or enter new levels of development productivity via Firebug etc. That's where Firefox gets its market share from, not some 10% performance difference.

Also I cannot see what is so particularly zippy about chrome. Running FF, IE, Opera and chrome side-by-side in my vmware here I can only say that opera still "feels" the quickest but they're all pretty much on par...

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[bishiraver]

Whoa! Completely skinnable!

I can choose one from 3,000 of ass-ugly user-created skins! I can't decide whether I want unreadable shit-brown on black, or neon green on pink! OH how about this one? it has racecars!

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[renoX]

Yes I known, but you know what? Those IPC are fast enough that on a normal CPU you don't care about them, but on Firefox when one tab use 100% of the CPU, you'll definitely see the whole browser being slow as a snail and you won't easily know which tab is the guilty one..
On Chrome 1) it won't slow down the other tabs as much 2) you can start Chrome's task manager and close the guilty tab, problem solved.

So there's fast and fast: Chrome is fast by being smart (even though it use some slightly slower operations), FF is fast AND dumb: its design make it very fast but only when displaying nicely behaving websites only which is a very fragile situation so a dumb design decision.

Chrome allows you to avoid the websites which use 100% of the CPU too often and if Chrome becomes widespread (unlikely, I know) then badly coded websites will see less users coming and either fix their website or close down.

 

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[BenoitRen]

Do you remember when Firefox came out as an alternative browser and its main focus was being on slim and fast?

Popular misinformation. This was never the case. Its main focus was to to be a great Windows web browser with the "right set of features.

A Firefox install might be fresh, but is your profile fresh? I doubt it.

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[hkmwbz]

Why are you assuming that all the skins are ugly?

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[bishiraver]

Very, very few of any skins for any program are aesthetically pleasing. Look through the firefox skins - you get paint shop pro wood grain texture crap, screencaps from an anime stretched with buttons overlayed, and other ugliness. There are *maybe* five skins for firefox that are decent. I haven't looked into opera's, because I don't like its UI. It's simply not elegant. Not the way chrome is (Chrome: everyday at-home browsing; Firefox: at-work developing). Hell, even most gnome/kde themes are utter crap.

In my experience, skins tend to come in a couple different styles:

* Operating system integration (Look, Opera on my windows box looks like safari now! lolz -- or KDE/Gnome theme integration)
* "Look Ma I Just Pirated Photoshop And Followed A Tutorial On Making Shadowed Round and/or Glowy Glass Buttons!"
* "I feel like making things more playful. Unfortunately, my icons for buttons suck"
* "High contrast makes everything better. Always." (I understand that this is necessary for some people as an accessibility need, but why do they have to be so damn ugly?)
* "I don't know what anti-alias means."
* "I want to stare at this hot cartoon I idolize all day, and maybe some other people will like to, too"

Rarely are community skins any good. I've found a few gems to spruce up my gnome desktop, but it took quite a bit of digging.

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[he-sk]

There is a standard that is platform independent: AppCasting. It's brilliant in its conception, basically a RSS feed with the program as an enclosure.

There's a very nice implementation for the Mac called Sparkle that has a clean and simple GUI, gets the job done without fuss and is free software (MIT license so it can be incorporated in proprietary software).

But of course Google has to invent their own Google Update Engine. Talk about NIH syndrome. What's worse, it constantly runs as root and they install it as part of their Google earth browser plugin without telling the user about and with no option to skip installation violating their own software principles in the process.

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[pbhj]

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

Yeah because they're certain to be one way cryptographically hard hashes and Google has no computing resources that could possibly reverse hashes on popular hits to see who's visiting it's payrolling advertisers.

If it states in the user agreement that they'll never connect your ID with websites in the malware list then I'd probably let it pass for now though.

You've got out of band information too: the time of day and number of different pages and number of malware laden sites you choose to visit will be key metrics for some of Google's employers. Anti-malware and Porn promoters for example.

Re:Chrome has a long way to go

[hkmwbz]

Looks like you are basing your comments on personal bias rather than reality.

Chrome's UI is really ugly and hard to work with, though.

Re:I don't want to break up....

[sveard]

Be sure to finish that with the "it's not you, it's me" routine :)

Re:Don't take the bait

[techprophet]

No, not really. Considering Chrome is open-source. They are just taking longer than they should to release it for Macux.

Use of resources

[Dan East]

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.

Re:Use of resources

[Shados]

Google is aggressively advertising Chrome lately, so I doubt they'll be pulling the plug on it

Re:Use of resources

[eulernet]

Your post was interesting until I read:

Microsoft has turned IE from a piece of crap that had languished for years into a modern, legitimate browser

Uh ? When did IE7 become a legitimate browser ?
It's super crappy, slow as hell and almost as buggy as IE6. And IE8 will continue with a super slow Javascript engine, when Javascript becomes more and more important.

And you also argue that Microsoft won't do the same error twice. Well, I think they lost the edge since XP. They are no more the leaders since a few years ago. They keep copying excellent ideas from their competitors, and transform them into underwhelming features.
Because of Vista's aggressive pushing, I think that a lot of consumers have lost their faith in Microsoft.

Re:Use of resources

[Serious Callers Only]

Microsoft won't make the same mistake twice

It wasn't a mistake; IE (and the internet with it) languished for years for a reason.

They want Chrome to replace Firefox as the alternative to IE, so they will have complete control over the market.

Or perhaps they just want anyone but Microsoft to control the market, because Microsoft's MO has been to attempt to undermine and destroy their competitors utterly, by any means they can. Having a company like that with a monopoly of the browser market must make Google very nervous - browsers are the only conduit for users to reach Google and see their ads and use their online office suites etc.

Did you consider that their motivation might be to replace IE as the default browser with something else? Google do not have to control this market, or even come close to doing that, to win. They just need someone other than MS to control it.

Re:Use of resources

[JasterBobaMereel]

Have you seen IE8?

Gets the Lowest score in the compatability tests (Less than some mobile phone browsers)
Gets the lowest score in the Javascript tests ... (and cannot even complete some!)

when are they going to turn it into a legitimate browser ?

Re:Use of resources

[larry bagina]

Reason 4: Google is also working on a mobile phone stack which includes a browser. Releasing a windows version means 1) bugs/incompatabilities in the browser can be found and 2) web developers can test android compatability without an android phone. Note that Apple released a windows version of Safari for similar reasons.

Re:Use of resources

[BlueParrot]

Microsoft won't make the same mistake twice

Yea, that would be totally unlike Microsoft.

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:Use of resources

[lwsimon]

The lack of a decent JS engine is what will kill IE, if anything will.

The web is getting to the point now where even the most simplistic business's site will have some javascript on it. A menu system, a scrolling news section, *something*.

From now on, when users pick up an alternate browser, they won't see the standards support, or better privacy features, or add-on capability - they'll see that facebook loads fast and all their widgets are faster too - because the javascript engine for Firefox and Chrome will be an order of magnitude faster than IE's.

To compound this issue, MS doesn't have an effective auto-updater, so users who are ignorant of their options and still on IE won't even know they're running an old version. When they DO learn about another browser and try it, it will be just that much faster.

Re:Use of resources

[Lennie]

Also it's now a non-Beta-product, with a 1.0 version-number.

Re:Use of resources

[onefriedrice]

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

Well, no. Firefox has gained marketshare because of good marketing and being in the right place at the right time to fill in the gap when a lot of people started realizing how horrible IE was in terms of security. In reality, the codebase of Firefox is old and crufty. It would be no simple task to try to make Firefox be a multi-process program. I'm not fan of Google generally, but if they wanted to do a rewrite from the ground up using a good, small, standards-compliant renderer like webkit, I have no problem with that, and Mozilla better think about doing something similar if they want to continue to be competitive in the near future.

Re:Use of resources

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I think Google needed Firefox to gain greater share than it has; they've pumped money in, but afaik, the vast majority of PCs still ship with IE as their default browser. Consequently, IE is still very much the dominant browser. If (say for example) Google were to push Chrome direct to PC manufacturers, then they might be able to change this.... and I believe** that's the plan [either because I read it somewhere, or because I'm clairvoyant]. Google needs better browsers in order to punt their online apps. But whilst I think** I heard the Mozilla folks talking about getting Firefox shipped with new PCs, I don't think that's really happening. Google might do better hear since they have financial clout, and they also have a nice advertising business that could tie up nicely with this.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out; in two years time, where do you think IE's market share will be? It strikes me that if Google didn't produce Chrome, then Firefox share probably isn't going to increase too much more, so in two years, IE would have pretty much the same share... might even gain some back if IE8 actually works (and despite the negative reports here on /. , imho, it is fairly solid.... no better than anything else, but not really worse either). With Google pushing Chrome, we can reasonably hope IE will be at or below 50%.
** I've just noticed how incredibly vague everything I say actually is. I should get a job in politics!

Re:Use of resources

[drew]

Internet Explorer lost ground because Microsoft abandoned developers. Unless Microsoft can win back developers, it doesn't matter how many alternatives there are, assuming they remain sufficiently compatible with the same standards. As long as developers prefer to work with Firefox, Chrome or Safari, it doesn't really matter how much share of the end user market IE has, it will never again have the same dominance it did in 2001.

Re:Use of resources

[mirshafie]

The Mozilla team has always had a very clear vision of what they wanted Firefox to be. Other projects have different visions, that's why open source is so powerful. But of course, some haters will say that "segmentation is disastrous", call for a unified Linux distro, a single open source browser to rule them all, and so on.

I don't agree. Choice is good. It forces people to think for themselves, even people that aren't nerds. Chrome has already added some new ideas into the browser market, and it has provided a good alternative to some people that wanted speed (formerly Operas throne) and simplicity (formerly Firefox's) and could do without some extensions for now.

Chrome is being developed for Linux too. Even if I understand the frustration that it isn't already on the Linux platform I can't understand why it isn't obvious to everyone why Google released it for Windows first and puts its focus there. It's called market share. It's a no brainer.

Re:Use of resources

[bishiraver]

One of the reasons MS wanted IE (and the internet with it) to languish:

JavaScript was developed as a pie-in-the-sky idea that would bring desktop-like applications to the web browser. It blundered, partially because functional programming (even with prototypal inheritance) is difficult for most people to wrap their heads around - and partially because its syntax for typical object-oriented duties is downright strange.

So, I blame the stagnation of the internet on three things: IE taking over marketshare (to prevent a competitor from showing up delivering apps via the browser), dot-bust, and the high learning curve of effective javascript.

Disclaimer: I'm a full-time JS developer, and love the language. Even its little quirks. I don't know if that makes me insane, masochistic, or both.

Re:Use of resources

[gstein]

You struck gold on #3. If you don't work at Mozilla Corp, then you have a LONG, HARD road ahead of you to get changes in. Much less an architectural revamp to enhance security and speed.

Re:Use of resources

[Daimanta]

"you seem to have forgotten that little "be bold" thing."

No I haven't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold

Re:Use of resources

[Neon Aardvark]

If google "pulled the plug" on chrome, some else would take it over.

Personally, I think it's great that there are 3 well known alternatives to IE on windows, each of which is far better than IE (lets not forget Opera, which is a really fine browser).

Also, I think the more people are hit on the head with the fact that other browsers exist, the more they will start to use them. So chrome being released can only be a good thing (long term).

Re:Use of resources

[robbrit]

There doesn't need to be just one alternative to IE. How many people do you think switched from IE to Firefox and then back to IE because they thought Firefox sucked? Or switched from IE6 to Firefox and then to IE7? I know a number of my non-techie friends did this, they liked the way IE7 did things more than Firefox. Maybe Chrome will attract some of those users.

Re:Use of resources

[pbhj]

I can only think of three logical explanations for Google to release their own browser:

There's at least one other legitimate reason, especially if you consider the apparent focus on javascript "runtime" optimisation.

Google can't have a situation where they've built a whole suite of apps that require a specific class of browser and then the key browser makers (ie IE, FF) decide to do something that potentially jeopardises all those apps.

If they have technological control of at least one browser then they can continue to offer their apps. They can also focus attention on improving those apps by improving the underlying browser.

I suspect this is an overoptimistic view however.

Re:Use of resources

[Lennie]

Hotmail does silly browser checks on the User-agent-string. A Mozilla Firefox Beta would also not work, if I understand it correctly.

So that's hardly a Chrome-issue, Microsoft/Hotmail is being an ass(hole). This is no surprise for readers of this forum I'm sure.

Or they are on purpuse doing it for the simple reason to make it harder for spammers to abuse their systems, well that's just my theory.

Re:Use of resources

[Lord Bitman]

So you haven't forgotten. Your proof is to provide a somewhat-related link to wikipedia and provide no further comment.

Well, shit, I guess I haven't forgotten anything about programming in C++, in that case. I'll prove it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

Re:PEOPLE!

[iammani]

Chromium is poisonous and "Mozilla" is imaginary, like Jesus and Santa Claus. So get over it! Everyone should explore the Internet Explorer in their own way and I love them anyhow! Everybody should hug me now!!!!!! -- Steve Balmer

Fixed it for you

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:Well, yeah.

[jonasj]

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

What?

You are talking about AOL, Apple, and Google, right? "embraced a wide variety of other engines"? AOL stuck with Internet Explorer's engine in their product, and Apple and Google are both using the KHTML-derived WebKit in theirs. How is one company sticking with IE and the others using ONE other alternative engine in any way a "wide variety" of engines? You make it sound like they went "anywhere but Gecko" when in reality they just went to WebKit.

Re:Well, yeah.

[ClosedSource]

"The AOL rejection is weird, because they purchased Netscape, but it made sense."

I think AOL bought Netscape so they could qualify as a Microsoft "victim". Although they succeeded in getting money from MS, it wasn't as much as they imagined and the ended up losing money on the deal.

Re:Well, yeah.

[Dynedain]

AOL bought Netscape because it was relatively cheap, and they could use it for leverage to get better deals out of MS who were too scared of losing such a significant portion of marketshare.

Re:Don't take the bait

[not already in use]

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?

Re:Don't take the bait

[Bert64]

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.

Competition

[overseerbrian]

Maybe so but here are some possible numbers for when Firefox starts to incorporate some of the good things from Chrome, like threaded browsing.

Internet Explorer 66.11% Mozilla Firefox 25.06% Safari 6.62% Opera 0.75% Netscape 0.46% Google Chrome 0.74%) Other (0.24%)

Re:Competition

[Aetuneo]

Well, that may be true, but here are some numbers with little or no basis in reality which represent a few moments of random speculation:

Internet Explorer $RANDOM% Mozilla Firefox $RANDOM% Safari $RANDOM% Opera $RANDOM% Netscape $RANDOM% Google Chrome $RANDOM% Other $RANDOM%

Re:Competition

[Daimanta]

WTF?! Firefox's share is OVER 9000!!!!

(You did say random)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Don't take the bait

[FishWithAHammer]

Except for an independent-process, one-tab-dies-the-rest-of-it's-fine browser that doesn't suck?

The only thing keeping me on Firefox is AdBlock Plus. The second that's in Chrome (or Chromium), I'm gone.

Not much to worry

[Xymor]

Mozilla will have Google's support as long as FF marketshare stays big and that google search textbox keeps bringing google several hits.

Re:Not much to worry

[onefriedrice]

Mozilla will have Google's support as long as FF marketshare stays big and that google search textbox keeps bringing google several hits.

The question is, how long will FF marketshare stay high when Google puts its weight and brand behind Chrome? Two events will turn the tide quickly:

1. Chrome is native on the Big Three (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux).
2. Chrome supports plug-ins, extensions, add-ons, etc.

After that, Mozilla will be in a sad place, so hopefully they can figure out something clever to stay competitive before that happens. A lot of us are looking for a slimmed down and expandable browser, and FF has just become too bloated to meet that first criteria.

The community serves the community

[jopsen]

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.

Re:The community serves the community

[not already in use]

The community does not magically embrace things for your benefit..

How is Chrome getting ported to linux for their benefit? Do you think google is salivating over Linux' sub 1% desktop market share?

The community serves the community

So let me get this straight: Corporations should serve the community. The community serves the community. The community does not embrace corporations. Quiet a sense of entitlement you have there.

Re:The community serves the community

[chromatic]

Do you think google is salivating over Linux' sub 1% desktop market share?

Suppose Google wants Chrome to run on the Linux-based Android.

Re:The community serves the community

[jopsen]

I'm not saying the commercial interests should be ignored... But, you shouldn't expect the community to embrace your products and port them to linux, just because you've release the source for it...

Re:The community serves the community

[jopsen]

Do you think google is salivating over Linux' sub 1% desktop market share?

No, but I tend to think of Google as good guys... or maybe just, not bad guys, yet... :)
Nevertheless, Google would probably like a Linux port, because it makes them look good in the community, which I assume they want to otherwise they're probably wasting money on SummeOfCode etc...

So let me get this straight: Corporations should serve the community.

I never said that "corporations should serve the community" and I'm not sure they always should, but doesn't the community consist of those who use a product... e.g. customers?

Rules of investing

[C_Kode]

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.

Re:Rules of investing

[Toll_Free]

But, Mozilla is F/OSS.

That means they don't need revenue. They will make money supporting it. Lord knows an internet browser is a COMPLICATED thing!!!!!

Wait, that just isn't working, is it?

--Toll_Free

Re:Rules of investing

[Lennie]

They have made public before, they already have a large surplus, they can go on for years without any revenue.

Re:Don't take the bait

[octaene]

And use what, Opera with no AdBlock extension? Or, did you mean for us to use Epiphany or Konqueror?

Re:Don't take the bait

[rsax]

Not the same but Privoxy or blocking using your hosts file serve the same purpose. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Re:Don't take the bait

[windsurfer619]

The only thing that dies when I'm running firefox is flash, and even then, it doesn't bring down the browser.

I think Firefox certainly has a fighting chance.

Re:Googles new strategy?

[Lord Bitman]

3) Share openly so everyone can use your enhanced products

Re:Don't take the bait

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Google is NOT Microsoft

[EmotionToilet]

Google has grown rapidly over the last 10 years, and they are a big company, but they are not Microsoft. The culture at Google is not rotten like it is at Microsoft. Google does produce low quality software like they do at Microsoft. Google is still innovative in many ways that MS is not. Google is making steady progress in a way that MS has not. And overall, Google is not run by a bunch of idiots like MS is.

Also the saying "Stick with Linux and stay away from Google" has no meaning because Google's products are not dependent on any desktop OS; they are internet based. "Stick with Linux and avoid Microsoft" would make more sense, but it would also be way off topic.

I hate to see people compare Apple or Google to Microsoft because it is a false comparison. Just because a company has grown very large very quickly doesn't mean that it is a Microsoft. That's just an ignorant thing to say.

Re:Google is NOT Microsoft

[hedwards]

Nice to see some fanboyism here. I'd hate to think we could dispense with it.

It's not a false impression. Google is more zeitgeist than masterpiece and suggesting that a corporation can continue to function indefinitely without a solid business plan is just plain silly.

It's the crap like buying doubleclick and trying to illegally collude with Yahoo to form a cartel which warrant the concern. After all the years of the complaints about MS engaging in that sort of behavior, I find it hard to believe that it's purely coincidental and completely unfair to compare behaviors.

Re:Google is NOT Microsoft

[EmotionToilet]

I just don't think that because a company becomes big and has a huge advantage in a particular market that it inherently becomes "evil" like so many people like to think. All I'm saying is that big does not equal bad. A company can be big and have huge control over a particular market and still have good motives and still produce quality products and still greatly improve the services / products that they offer. I'm not saying that everything Google does is virtuous, I just don't think they have some secret evil scheme to take over the world like so many people like to claim / assume.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Bert64]

Thanks to webkit, which is already available with other frontends...

Re:Don't take the bait

[redxxx]

fastest is in some part due to v8, but that is already cross platform, IIRC. It's not just webkit that makes it fast, and v8 hasn't been rolled into other official releases of other browsers yet.

A lot of the practical stability is due the multiprocess design, which has not been implemented in much of the competition either.

It's mostly thanks to webkit, but not entirely. Chrome is unique in some regards, at least for the moment.

Re:Don't take the bait

[AnalPerfume]

You can block ads in Opera, they just don;t make it obvious like AdBlock in Firefox. Google for "opera urlfilter.ini" and you'll find a tutorial.

Like adopting WebKit?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Like adopting WebKit? If you had followed the conversations, you would have known that that wasn't up for discussion. And knowing the attitudes of most of the Firefox developers, the other radical features that Chrome has might never have gotten started either. And even if they would have wanted to help, it would still have essentially meant a browser redesign, for which their previous expertise may not have been ideal; maybe Google felt their developers were more up to the task. The 'if you want something done, do it yourself' argument. It's all very understandable, and I don't think Google deserves any flak over this.

Re:Don't take the bait

[hedwards]

You make it sound like that happens all the time. If you're not running flash chances are you're not going to have things die very often.

Having firefox completely die weekly isn't that big a deal, I mean it does save the opened tabs and unless I happen to be typing something I haven't lost anything at all. It's been months since it caused me any meaningful headaches. And even then it wasn't that big of a deal.

Really that's a minor feature at best, if people weren't using and abusing flash it wouldn't be of any help whatsoever.

Re:droptrow?

[hedwards]

Right because we all know that Apple doesn't kill third party apps on their iPhone. Wait, you say they've been caught doing that?

I know that's a different company, but the argument that they couldn't do it if they wanted to is specious. Yes they probably didn't put code into the browser to do it, but they could. Suggesting that they won't at some point do so requires a suspension of belief.

I mean it's not like this is a company that's been trying to engage in anticompetitive behavior. Increasingly so, I'd be surprised if they stop before the DoJ gets involved.

Google Doesn't Care About Chrome

[qazwart]

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.

Re:Google Doesn't Care About Chrome

[hkmwbz]

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.

Yeah right. As if Opera and Mozilla are going to accept being dependent on Apple's release cycles. It's either that or making a fork, which basically means that in a while you'd have several different engines again and you wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

Re:Google Doesn't Care About Chrome

[friendklay]

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.

Yeah right. As if Opera and Mozilla are going to accept being dependent on Apple's release cycles. It's either that or making a fork, which basically means that in a while you'd have several different engines again and you wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

It is actually not the Apple release cycles one should be concered about. As an example Chromium is on a continuous build cycle where each day they are around 5 to 10 builds made.
But there is a concern in another area. Webkit coders are generally protective about patches and new features and trying to get a patch approved in upstream is usually a very tiring process right now. Sometimes they demand a complete clean rewrite of code as they are worried that the patch might break something. Code review process also tend to be slower and absurb statements like this would make Safaris UI more complicated seems to be not uncommon. I believe at one point Chromium developers will start to mantain a trunk that is a bit differnt from upstream. Right now they wait untill it is approved with webkit.

Re:Google Doesn't Care About Chrome

[hkmwbz]

It is actually not the Apple release cycles one should be concered about. As an example Chromium is on a continuous build cycle where each day they are around 5 to 10 builds made.

By "release cycle", I'm not referring to new builds, I'm referring to how WebKit is designed to meet Apple's needs, and whatever happens to it depends on what Apple needs for their next release.

I believe at one point Chromium developers will start to mantain a trunk that is a bit differnt from upstream.

Right, so what I'm saying is that other users of WebKit will either put up with this, or you will basically see a gradual fork of WebKit in multiple directions. And in the end you'll have several different engines again. I doubt that giants like Google will accept being "dictated" by Apple :)

In fact, didn't this already happen to Nokia? They had to fork WebKIt, and figured out that maintaining it on their own was a pain. So now they got TrollTech to do it. But in the end they'll be forced to maintain the whole thing for themselves again. It'll be expensive...

Re:droptrow?

[AmaranthineNight]

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.

Re:? How does common sense become news?

[lwsimon]

Because web browsers are the window through which users view the Web, and as geeks, most of us have jobs that are directly or indirectly involved in dealing with those users?

Complicated

[nulled]

As the article title states, it IS complicated.

Yes having many browsers is good for the web, as it helps to keep it standards complaint. (All browsers generally follow the standards, as opposed to Internet Explorer).

But, there is the issue, that goes deeper, than just a Browser. Google was build using Open Source. Firefox was saved, by the Open Source 'movement'. Firefox is/was the very SYMBOL that showed Open Source does work and IS a viable alternative to evil Microsoft, and Google was there to help Firefox, knowing that it (google) too used the same software dev model. Now google comes out and delivers their OWN browser? This in effect is a DIRECT COMPETITIVE move AGAINST the interests of Firefox and Mozilla. Mozilla's only real product is Firefox.

Point being, when a company gets too large, they start to get massive pressure from their STOCK SHAREHOLDERS, which in my opinion, makes businesses extra cut throat, in order to continue to GROW PROFITS and the stock. Google, it appears WANTS CONTROL over the web, due to the fact, without a browser, Google is NOTHING. However, Firefox has done NOTHING to harm Google, and now Google slaps mozilla in the face with a product to DIRECTLY COMPETE with an Open Source Icon (firefox)?

This my friends, makes the beginning of the end of the Google Goodness and a new era into slowly, but surely, google becoming 'evil'.

Re:Complicated

[Fastolfe]

Point being, when a company gets too large, they start to get massive pressure from their STOCK SHAREHOLDERS, which in my opinion, makes businesses extra cut throat, in order to continue to GROW PROFITS and the stock. Google, it appears WANTS CONTROL over the web, due to the fact, without a browser, Google is NOTHING. However, Firefox has done NOTHING to harm Google, and now Google slaps mozilla in the face with a product to DIRECTLY COMPETE with an Open Source Icon (firefox)?

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.)

netbooks

[zogger]

odd thought but if moz was to jump on the selling of netbooks deal, they might turn a penny or two. And if they were to say put out the call for ideas and developers to help with the design if the thing, so it actually worked well out of the box, hardware and software, especially if the host OS was announced to be linuxey, they wouldn't be forced to be tied so much to either microsoft or google, at least they would be in a stronger bargaining position.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Il128]

Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.

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.

No Problem

[ClosedSource]

Slashdot posters have been telling us for years that you can make a profit with FOSS, so I'm sure Mozilla won't have any financial problems. Firefox T-shirts anyone?

Re:Don't take the bait

[_Sprocket_]

Devil is probably in the details. I'm constantly running Flash constantly in Firefox both at work and home. I'd say "no crashes" except I think Firefox did drop out on me once last month.

That's not to say its not happening to you (or even a bunch of folks). That's the nature of these things. But I'm willing to guess that its not happening to everyone.

And again - it probably has to do with your environment; said details I noted before. Since I mentioned details... I don't have the details for my home environment handy (other than its Debian Unstable) but my work laptop is as follows:

Flash:
Shockwave Flash 10.0 r12

Firefox:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008111318 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.4

Re:Don't take the bait

[0xABADC0DA]

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.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Mozk]

The only thing keeping me on Firefox is the complete lack of a standard interface in Chrome. Seriously, why can't it just look like every other program running on my computer? Instead of getting the Windows Classic interface that I have set, I get a huge chunk of Luna blue with a non-standard title bar, non-standard minimize and close buttons, and non-standard menus. It's fine to be innovative, but with interfaces I expect a bit of predictability.

Re:Don't take the bait

[0xABADC0DA]

Flash on 64-bit linux has alway run in a separate process, and you can do it on any linux with nspluginwragger. When flash crashes you just get some black rectangles where before there were annoying adds.

Separating native code (flash, ActiveX, etc) into other processes is a great idea.

Separating type-safe javascript code into other processes... not so much. If at all.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Headcase88]

Chrome is open-source.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Paladin128]

What can they do to stop it? If they do anything, someone will fork Chromium, which is the open-source base of Chrome.

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."

Re:Gecko vs. WebKit

[jamesborr]

Can't speak for Windows or Linux, but the latest versions of Safari are memory whore's on OSX 10.5. Put up with it as long as I could, but eventually had to switch to FireFox on my Mac (with 3 GB of memory), just to get my sanity back (besides which, more sites that I need access to play nicer with FireFox then with Safari).

Re:Gecko vs. WebKit

[Ma8thew]

What exactly are you doing in Safari? I'm using Safari (or rather WebKit nightlies) on a Mac mini core solo with 1 GB of memory, and it runs perfectly fine. The only time I have problems is if I start up a really hungry program like Aperture, or leave lots of apps that I'm not using running.

Re:Gecko vs. WebKit

[jamesborr]

Typical web browsing (which these days means lots of flash :-( as well). Safari just seems to accumulate more cruft over time, using more memory, and generally getting slower until it crashed (every couple of days). FireFox in my experience appears to be much more kind on memory usage 200-300 MB over time, as opposed ti Safari (500-600MB over the same timeframes). Even with the extra memory, it didn't appear to perform any quicker. I really wanted to standardize on Safari (have used it most of the last 3-4 years, but the latest version of FireFox on OSX is really quite good, including: - Inline support for PDF's - Less memory usage - more compatible with my range of websites I think/hope Safari/Webkit will continue to improve, but for me, for now, FireFox is just a better browser on OSX (this coming from someone with a whole family of Mac computer users, an Apple TV, and Apple Extreme, iPhone, etc...).

Re:Gecko vs. WebKit

[Ma8thew]

I have found that using an advert blocker dramatically improved performance for me. I have found two methods for doing this in Safari. The first is to use an input manager hack called Safari AdBlock. I've had no problems with it, but it's completely unsupported and can break after updates. The second is to use a local proxy as explained here.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Pinckney]

If the system blocks only competing ads, they'll probably be quite happy. Adblock plus doesn't seem to block Google's ads, at least with the filters I'm using. I suspect they'd get in legal trouble if they tried to actively block competitors ads, but they're free to let the community do it for them.

Complicated 'ey?

[dgun]

Maybe Mozilla should consider getting into the search business. They have 20% of the browser market, so that would be a good start.

Re:Don't take the bait

[mdew]

ofcourse you can block ads in opera, see sig :)

Re:Don't take the bait

[Supergibbs]

That depends on what you consider performance. Yes there is some overhead, mostly memory but memory is cheap. I'd rather use more memory and have a faster and more stable browser. Then again, if Firefox fixed their memory management problems it would probably be faster and more stable.

Not sure how having the Chrome tabs and pages use different UI code makes it easier to crash. A website shouldn't ever modify the OS UI parts. The separate memory space feature isn't a killall solution but it does make it less susceptible to some exploits. Session cookies aren't shared between tabs.

The word "Evil"

[Luke has no name]

is meant for people who beat pregnant women to death, or who torture animals and laugh about it, who rapes children before killing them, etc.
Shinra? Very unlikeable. Evil? Ehh...
Microsoft isn't evil. Google isn't evil. Bad-intentioned? Unlikeable? Greedy? They can be all these things and not be evil (unless you're Catholic).

Guess what Mozilla, welcome to open source

[recharged95]

Just like Academia and Business Corporations (Harvard is a corporation BTW) fight amongst themselves in the philosophical fight of what "works", we are now seeing it in FOSS.

.

Mozilla has had a 'microsoft monopoly' over the years and it's strategy has been divide and conquer, same a MS. I find this good as it puts two FOSS titans against each other to figure out what is FOSS in the business and mobile environments. We all know the benefits of FOSS on the home desktop.

Google-Chrome basically took the FOSS concept and used it to their advantage: competition doesn't go away and now Mozilla has 4 fronts to fight (Safari, Chrome, IE, and in most cases Opera).

This is the way FOSS works and if Mozilla doesn't get their butt in listening to non-firefox users and creating a high quality product, then they'll just have an extension framework (i.e. what everyone shouts as an advantage of Firefox over IE/Chrome/etc...) and that's pretty much it (in the end, do the IE users really care?)

.

FOSS isn't about 'good' vs 'evil', nor 'right' vs. 'wrong'. It's about choice and innovation. I welcome the Google competition. Push the limits.

Re:Guess what Mozilla, welcome to open source

[freddy_dreddy]

Well put.

Why exactly should I be supporting Mozilla as a foundation instead of Mozilla as a browser ? The /. crowd normally embraces a corporation which supports (in this case pushes) FOSS. Foundations which rely on generosity are more sensitive to this kind of trends, I think time will show they're transitional in nature.

And as to google's possible future issues with add-blockers: hey people, it's open source - you can fork it or whatever ... it's the kind of answer I normally get when criticizing FOSS before I'm flamebait-tagged.

Don't like it

[JunkyardCat]

I've used Opera for a number of years now. I tried Firefox, but Opera was still faster and smoother. I've tried the updated versions, and I still end up uninstalling them and returning to Opera. I gave Chrome about 15 minutes, disliked it more than Firefox and returned to Opera. The only other browser I use is IE, and that's strictly for MS updates. My Ubuntu box has Opera.

Re:Don't like it

[koolfy]

Agreed.
I think what Opera needs is to be better known. However, like most people here, I don't feel confortable with that "divide the non-IE browser market share" idea...
Let's keep it secret : "Opera can be, depending of your point of view, as good or even better than Firefox"

Once there is place for a true and equal competitivity between browsers out there, we'll spear the word. For now just install Firefox on your friends computers.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Escogido]

I take it you're referring to the trollbait you've just posted. Yeah, following that advice would be wise, so I'm not biting. :)

Re:Don't take the bait

[HeronBlademaster]

I'm using the default list (Easylist USA) for Adblock Plus and it blocks Google's ads just fine.

*sob*

[CynicalTyler]

I hate it when Mommy and Daddy fight!

Re:Don't take the bait

[hkmwbz]

Opera has content blocking, and there's also stuff like this

Re:Don't take the bait

[hairyfeet]

That is why I don't think we have anything to worry about with regards to FF going anywhere. With Chrome, Safari, or IE I have to have a browser THEIR way, and with FF I can have it MY way, which to me is worth a hell of a lot more than some faster Javascript, which I have blocked with Noscript so is kinda pointless to me anyway. With FF I have Forecastfox to keep me abreast of bad weather, I have Noscript and Adblock Plus so I don't need to be irritated by ads, I have video downloader and download statusbar to make videos and downloads nicer, and finally I have FEBE to keep my FF on the desktop synced to my flash.

So while folks can talk about this browser being faster or that browser having a better engine I just can't see anything taking the place of FF for me. And Google would be crazy to cut off the cash to FF because I am sure that MSFT would be more than happy to pay to be the default search engine in FF. So while I have tried Chrome and Opera and think both have nice things to offer, being able to see the web MY way makes FF a no brainer for me.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Chelloveck]

The only thing keeping me on Firefox is AdBlock Plus. The second that's in Chrome (or Chromium), I'm gone.

Or the equivalent of FoxyProxy. It annoys me no end that Chrome uses IE's proxy settings. Change one and it changes in the other. That's great if you have one proxy through which everything must be funneled, but that's simply not the case for me. I use Privoxy as an ad filter. When I'm running Windows Update I don't want to burden my poor little underpowered Privoxy server. I really like FoxyProxy's ability to select a proxy based on the URL. Which reminds me, I ought to set up TOR and enable it for certain URL patterns.

It's not really intended to be competition

[LINM]

I do not think that it is actually about competition. The issue for Google is that they are banking a lot on their online office applications (and other?) that will compete against the MS Word and MS Excel's of the world.

They need a reliable browser platform to support their applications and it is probably safer for them to launch Chrome than to arm wrestle with Mozilla or try to control its development path. Furthermore, it will be much easier to prioritize bells and whistles that support their apps in Chrome than it would be in Mozilla (not to mention the endless trolling they would get for it).

It would be like if GM was worried about the US road system so they would invest in some pothole repair service to keep the roads safe and people buying cars. Errr, make that Toyota...

Re:Don't take the bait

[FishWithAHammer]

I didn't even know about that FoxyProxy program.

OK, now there are two things keeping me on Firefox...

Re:Don't take the bait

[shutdown -p now]

It's fine to be innovative, but with interfaces I expect a bit of predictability.

On Windows, you can forget about UI consistency. Have you seen the Explorer and IE in Vista, or Office2007? And if you read the Vista UI design guidelines, you'll see that this approach is in fact the favored one.

By the way, Chrome actually looks better on Vista than it does on XP. It's still non-standard in that it reuses the titlebar as a tabbar (but then Office2007 reuses it as a toolbar, so there's precedent), but it doesn't replace the window chrome (Vista titlebar is tall enough), so it looks nice.

The Web is the Computer.

[friendklay]

One of the reasons why Google came out with a Browser is to support Webkit. A platform that they consider is crucial for Mobile Devices. By increasing the mindshare of webkit, Google is able to push the Mobile Web in a direction that they want. Safari made a nice dent in the Market share, and the iPhone went further. Nokia is running a browser based on Webkit. So trying to speed up adoption of this makes a lot of sense. Right now sales of mobile far outweigh the sales of Desktops, but the browsers that run on them still leave much room for improvement. This where webkit comes in and makes mobile web apps more appealing and powerful. The browser for Google is a medium for them to push Ads through. Trying to gain first hand knowledge of Browers, and of web application developments on these browers is importnat for Google. As an example, Gtalk for Gmail offers more features than the Desktop version (which now includes Video). Since this is the medium where they can push Ads on they are more focused on making that version a priority. I doubt that these features really came from the 20% time. Push the Web, understand the Web and Extend it. Kill the Desktop. That's their mantra.

Chrome needs some debugging first

[Moishe alexander]

Chrome first has to clean up their browser (bugwise) and actually be competetive before they start having any real political issues with mozilla, etc.

--
My Resume

Re:Don't take the bait

[Bert64]

Asterisk interoperates with gtalk quite nicely, not exactly a "client" per se but you can interface any sip/iax client with it, including a physical ip phone handset (i use a cisco 7960 with it).

Re:Don't take the bait

[Bert64]

The v8 javascript engine seems to be about on a par with the one present in the webkit nightlies, is it the same engine or a separate one? The nightlies are a lot quicker than the released versions of safari.

Re:Don't take the bait

[Bert64]

Is the UI javascript? Or is it mostly static rendering... Will the improved javascript interpreter in newer firefox builds make the interface much snappier?

Re:Don't take the bait

[hairyfeet]

Surely you can't be serious, Mr. Anon Coward! You can not look someone in the eye and with a straight face compare that lame ass .ini adblocking trick with Adblock Plus, now can you? Or even worse having to block EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT individually on every page? Or the fact that you can turn off JavaScript and make the web completely unusable to the ease of Noscript? Are you actually serious? With Adblock and Noscript I have auto updating one click solutions. With Video Downloader And download Statusbar I have a completely customized environment that drops the videos in the video folder and auto clears the bar and disappears.

Are you SERIOUSLY comparing that to what Opera has? I know they say the reality distortion field is strong in Apple fanbois, but lately what I have read from the Opera guys makes their RDF look weak by comparison. While I give Opera the fact that Presto is a great rendering engine and it uses less memory, especially when running from a flash, I'm afraid that the features simply can't compare. When you can show me one click adblocking and script blocking solutions that autoupdate like Adblock and Noscript AND allow me to add wild cards with two clicks from the statusbar, along with an easy to customize downloader that lets me specify where videos are stored separate from everything else, THEN I will say they are on the same level. But right now they aren't even close, no matter how much you wish them to be.

Re:Don't take the bait

[badkarmadayaccount]

Tell me about it... Uhhh, I'll probably grt modded down if I detail this, put take this advice - don't run Chrome with more than 2 tabs on a 1,4GHz Celeron M w/ 512MB RAM. It's not fun.

Re:Don't take the bait

[badkarmadayaccount]

BS, it's completely standard, looks just like any other Qt app... oh, I get it. Still, it's got the second best UI I've seen since my days in Opera. That's what I liked about her, snappy as they come (still have that nagging feeling that it's faster than firefox), and every little convinience is built in, and properly implemented. And tab management... short of patching FF at compile-time and/or dealing with a kludge of bitchfight-happy add-ons (not that I don't like 'em, I don't like needing them), I don't see how you can reach feature parity. Chrome is a cleaned up version which I like even better, only it and FF are both going-into-swap prone, and don't talk about GC's latency... multiproc browsing is a good idea, but for something like Vista-ready machines. I wish it had a toggle switch ;(. That's enough for tonight I think. Cheers!