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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.'"
Maybe Google thought they were "on a break"...
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man still has no depth perception.
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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?
I think we're about to see if Google really isn't evil.
Just remember that it's not evil to not support a competitor.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
And add another layer to the tinfoil hat, just in case.
Similes are like metaphors
Oh, and the obvious addition: It's not evil to compete, either. (not even if you're Microsoft)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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.
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
Of course, replacing an estimated $70 million a year in revenue is easier said than done, especially if these types of search deals dry up.
Advertising that I'm a girl on Slashdot since 2008.
Because chrome offers very little that linux/mac users don't already have...
If they released the source to something that wasn't already available, you can be sure more developers would pick it up.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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."
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.
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.
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
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.