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Chrome Complicates Mozilla/Google Love-In
Barence writes "Mozilla CEO John Lilly has admitted the Firefox maker's relationship with Google has become 'more complicated' since the company launched its own browser. Mozilla is dependent on Google for the vast majority of its revenue and has previously worked closely with the search king's engineers on the development of Firefox. But that relationship appears to have cooled since Google released Chrome in the summer. 'We have a fine and reasonable relationship, but I'd be lying if I said that things weren't more complicated than they used to be.'"
I think we're about to see if Google really isn't evil.
Maybe Google thought they were "on a break"...
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man still has no depth perception.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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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.
While Chrome may "complicate" their relationship, ideally there should be as many browsers on the market as possible. Microsoft's monopoly over the web produced a sort of tunnel-vision toward website development. Having a variety of browsers available has been changing that. The more browsers available, the more pressure will be placed upon companies to support standards compliance.
So while Mozilla and Google may compete, doing so is in both their interests. In addition, competition is in the consumer's interest because it keeps pushing the browser market forward and gaining us great features like HTML5 compliance, process isolation, privacy modes*, malware protection, etc.
* I've found this to be an excellent way to use an admin login on a site where I also have regular user credentials.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I don't use the Google Browser because I don't want all my browsing history and everything else put in their databases. I think they are overstepping their welcome. Common Google, how about the security of what we post, look at and search for? Are you the FBI? NSA? CIA?
And add another layer to the tinfoil hat, just in case.
Similes are like metaphors
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.
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.
This space left intentionally blank.
No, not really. Considering Chrome is open-source. They are just taking longer than they should to release it for Macux.
If Google felt that a browser with Chrome's security / capability needed to exist, then they should have opened a dialog with Mozilla to discuss how FireFox could be enhanced to that end. Google could have provided funding or coders to help make that possible.
Internet Explorer has lost ground, but that is primarily because there has been a single, well-defined alternative - Firefox. Segmentation of the alternative-to-IE market at this point could be disastrous. The sleeping giant has already been awakened, and Microsoft has turned IE from a piece of crap that had languished for years into a modern, legitimate browser. Microsoft won't make the same mistake twice, and they are aggressively working to regain their browser market share.
I can only think of three logical explanations for Google to release their own browser:
It is really just an experiment, and Google will just pull the plug on it out of the blue. They've done this before with other experimental projects.
They want Chrome to replace Firefox as the alternative to IE, so they will have complete control over the market. This makes sense, because the web browser is the total point of interface to their multi-billion dollar industry. It is logical that they would want direct control over that component.
They did try to get Mozilla to make changes to Firefox, but their requests were ignored.
Better known as 318230.
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.
They are just taking longer than they should to release it for Macux.
See, this is what I don't get. Linux folk claim they want companies to throw them a bone and open source their software and the "community" will do the rest. It sounds good when they say it, but why is it never the case?
Similes are like metaphors
Because chrome offers very little that linux/mac users don't already have...
If they released the source to something that wasn't already available, you can be sure more developers would pick it up.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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.
Not the same but Privoxy or blocking using your hosts file serve the same purpose. http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
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.
Thanks to webkit, which is already available with other frontends...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
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.
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'.
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.
Tisha Hayes
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
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.
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.
No existe.
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%
Everything is subjective.
What can they do to stop it? If they do anything, someone will fork Chromium, which is the open-source base of Chrome.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
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.
.NET or Rails) alone were not up to par to bring the same functionality that a full executable would.
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
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."
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
I'm using the default list (Easylist USA) for Adblock Plus and it blocks Google's ads just fine.