Why Firefox's Future Lies In Google's Hands

Barence writes "Firefox has just turned five, and it now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications. Its success has forced rivals to raise their game, and the past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly. Google is the default homepage when Firefox first opens, and the default search engine when users type something into the 'awesome bar.' The deal, which runs until 2011, was worth $66 million to Mozilla in 2007, accounting for 88% of the foundation's revenues that year (the last year for which it had published accounts). But now that Google is a competitor as well as a partner, is it really wise for Mozilla to be so dependent on Google?"

Comments

Lone Wolf

[sopssa]

Mozilla is actually alone in this. Even Opera (while also getting revenue from Google) does lots of its business with other devices like Wii, Mobile Phones, and other non-pc devices. Hell, I was visiting a hotel which had one of those tv's with hotel interfaces. One day it suddenly booted itself for update and when booting up, there was Opera logo on the start.

So only Mozilla is dependent on others.

Re:Lone Wolf

[richlv]

opera has a surprisingly large market share on various embedded devices (as you mentioned) and in included on very large share of mobile devices.

what i found funny in the summary - "past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly".

if anything, firefox has mighe have been closing the feature gap with opera, which had absolute majority of the features first.

disclaimer - opera user for many years here.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to realize that most of the Firefox community is under 20 years old.

That means they were, at most, 4 or 5 years old when the Internet really started taking off. So they missed using older browsers like Mosaic, Lynx, Netscape Navigator, Netscape Communicator, IE before version 7, and Opera.

When they did get interested in using the Internet, which would have been around 2004 or 2005, Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox was the most-hyped browser. So it's not surprising that they started using it then, and quickly became fanatics.

Not knowing much about this history of web browsers, coupled with a near-religious fanaticism for Firefox, leads to absolutely fucking stupid comments like we see in the summary.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct, but Opera wasn't causing anyone that matters to worry about any kind of feature parity because it has just over 0% marketshare. Firefox, while not my favorite browser, spurs competition. This is a big part of the project's utility, even if you don't personally use the browser.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

most of the Firefox community is under 20 years old

Holy assumption Batman. Citation please.

Re:Lone Wolf

[sznupi]

Opera is the number one browser (overall, ahead of IE) in Ukraine (and supposedly Belarus, though it's hard to get reliable stats about that country...), in Q2 2010 it should be no.1 in Russia. Also, in a lot of countries of Central Europe, in all those new EU members, it has quite respectable share of between 5 and 10%. In some of them even Opera Mini (j2me) is ahead of Safari.

I guess it's also about many people from those areas not visiting webpages generating stats at which you look.

Re:Lone Wolf

[atfrase]

You need to realize that most of the Firefox community is under 20 years old.

[citation needed]

"Under 30" I *might* give you as an out-of-the-blue ballpark figure, although still totally unsubstantiated; "under 20" is just setting up a straw man to justify the rest of your rant. No wonder you posted AC.

But I understand why you wanted to gloss over that age group of Firefox users -- we remember when Opera cost money. In 2000 they released a free Opera, but it was ad-supported, which I for one would never tolerate in a web browser. It wasn't until 2005 that the free Opera was ad-free, at which point Firefox was already very well established.

Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)

Re:Lone Wolf

[ZombieRoboNinja]

>>Not knowing much about this history of web browsers, coupled with a near-religious fanaticism for Firefox, leads to absolutely fucking stupid comments like we see in the summary.

Well, maybe they know just enough history to remember back to 2005 when Opera was neither free-as-in-Braveheart nor free-as-in-beer, and Firefox was both.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

BS. I was on the Net before Berners-Lee came up with the whole URL concept, I've used Spyglass, Mosaic, Lynx (still do at times), Netscape from v1 onwards, IE, Opera, FF, Safari, Chrome and some of the crap that comes with mobile devices.

I have used Chrome for a while, but as I could never quite see what it was doing (Google "free" means "we're taking something from you that you won't notice") and as FF plugins give me the control I need I switched to FF again, and I'll stick with it. On Windows, on Linux and if I buy a Mac on Mac too.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

indeed. I dumped some motorola roms based on Linux and their proprietary browser is nothing more than their own UI to libopera.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

Which doesn't make their comments any less stupid. Opera not being free at the time doesn't change the fact that it was way ahead in terms of features and innovations.

Re:Lone Wolf

[FlyingBishop]

Eh? Anyone 20-25 had Netscape navigator in their middle school computer lab, and consequently remembers when IE was crap, and the transition where IE became king of the hill on up to the present.

I switched to Firefox... 2004 maybe? I don't know. Even then I think Firefox had more mindshare than Opera. It's not mindless fanboyism.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Hal_Porter]

non-pc devices.

I've noticed that too. My mobile phone is always complaining about how black people don't know their place, asking who that 'mulatto' is whenever Obama is on CNN and saying that women should be back home cooking for the husbands.

Oh well, it's an old model I guess.

Re:Lone Wolf

[sopssa]

we remember when Opera cost money. In 2000 they released a free Opera, but it was ad-supported, which I for one would never tolerate in a web browser.

It's pretty useless to compare current age to history. For once, it was in 2003 that Google themself started making money of advertising. They were probably long away from providing share for browser makers at that point.

Do you remember why IE actually gained it's marketshare? Because Netscape cost money, and many people though it was great to have a such a good free browser. Web was a completely different place then.

Re:Lone Wolf

[RemoWilliams84]

Now I didn't rtfa, the summary, or the comment I am replying to. But I really don't feel good about whatever all of this is referring to.

Re:Lone Wolf

[BrokenHalo]

Holy assumption Batman. Citation please.

Indeed. Many Firefox users are old Mozilla users. In fact I used to maintain a build of Mozilla as a browser-only program (i.e. without the mail and html authoring stuff) for several years including the period when Firefox was still known as Phoenix. It took some time before I became satisfied that Firefox offered a useful (or usable) alternative.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they were looking for something that worked? I've always found Opera browsers to be extremely buggy,

Re:Lone Wolf

[elcid73]

I paid for Opera back in those days. Sure a free browser is nice, but I'm willing to by software, particularly software I use 99.0% of the time I'm on my computer. I always viewed it as: what's it worth to me to have a browser with mouse gestures and tabbed browsing et al? Certainly the price of a couple of meals at TGI/Applebees/Shenanigans

Free and crappy/boring wasn't as good a deal as the 20 or 30 bucks I paid for the best UI out there at the time.

Re:Lone Wolf

[zullnero]

Nice rant, but totally and fundamentally wrong. Still, it's fun to declare that everyone who uses Firefox are basically teenagers. The funny thing about that is that a whole lot of that crowd uses their cellphones to surf the web, and judging by you and the GP, apparently that means they're probably all Opera users as well...well, maybe not. If smartphone sales numbers are any indicator, they're probably using Safari or some other webkit browser.

I stopped using Opera because major features never seemed to work, even though I forked out cash for it back in the day. Sure, I could have hacked the ads out, but I believed in Opera at that time, and paid for the thing. However, even with 128 bit security, it couldn't properly id itself as IE or Mozilla. Which meant I couldn't check my bank account with anything but IE6, no matter how much back and forth I had with my bank. Which meant that I crumpled up Opera and threw it in the trash for the early beta of Firefox, aka Phoenix. I started out with Lynx. I still use Firefox because it works, I'm a developer and like to tweak things, and believe me, I can tweak the hell out of Firefox to my hearts content. To get me back, Opera would have to hand me a freaking refund AND prove to me that it can do the job better than Firefox...and from the times I've done browser compatibility tests, I've seen nothing glaringly better about Opera that would really make me want to switch back, just like I haven't seen what I want in Chrome or IE8, either. A little more speed optimization at memory expense isn't going to cut it for me. And it doesn't for most of the developers I've worked with that prefer Firefox for web development, for personal surfing, and generally for just about anything (unless, of course, you're a Mac person...though I've never been fond of Safari's UI on a larger screen...though I kind of dig the webkit browser on my phone).

Re:Lone Wolf

[Hal_Porter]

I get these figures on my site

1. Internet Explorer 42.82%
2. Firefox 42.63%
3. Chrome 7.80%
4. Opera 3.11%
5. Safari 3.04%

I.e. Firefox and IE are neck and neck, big drop down to Chrome, another big drop down to Opera and Safari. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Opera myself but even for a geek site it's not that common.

Re:Lone Wolf

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I don't think it's a generational thing. The reality is that most Firefox users are those who migrated from IE; mostly likely IE6 and IE7, both woefully stagnant examples of a browser. Firefox was a big step up and most Firefox users have seen little reason to change, believing that Firefox represents the pinnacle of web browser innovation. And to be fair, up to 18 months ago, there weren't a lot of core features on other browsers compelling enough to get Firefox users to switch.

It's true that Firefox has typically been playing catch up throughout its lifespan. However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside). Process separation, general speed, stability, memory fragmentation, etc. Their stance on self signed certs is also, frankly, backward; putting the brakes on a more secure web for each and every one of their users. And while extensions are all well and good, I personally find that Mozilla have been offloading much needed innovations in their UI and feature-set to third party add-ons (Tab-Mix Plus anyone?); Bare-bones Firefox leaves a lot to be desired. Now we're not likely to see Firefox 4.0 until the end of this year, if that.

I personally think Firefox is going to end up losing a substantial fraction of its userbase over the coming year as competitors--especially Google--keep continually releasing new features and widgets. Killer extensions are not going to save it if the core feature set falls behind.

Then again, there's always the Adblock factor.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of the people around 20 years old, and I have not grown up with Firefox. I actually dont know any one who has.

People who today are 15-20, at least in Sweden, grew up with Netscape Navigator on computers in school and IE 5 at home, and most certainly did not start using the internet around 2004. Dont know about the rest of the world, but IT has actually been used in schools here in Sweden since the late nineties.

Still, most people find Firefox easy to use, and customizable to an extent that I have not found Opera and other browsers.

Re:Lone Wolf

[YojimboJango]

Opera is going to need to implement AdBlock, FlashBlock, and NoScript as well as Firefox before I'll admit that it's caught up in features that matter to me. I could care less about gestures, and I've got more than 256 megs of ram.

I always see people touting how Opera is so much better than Firefox, yet when ever I ask them about script blocking I get blank stares. This is my killer feature. I will not browse without being able to whitelist (and temp whitelist) who I want to run code on my machine from the browsers interface. Last time I downloaded Opera (admittedly over a year ago) it couldn't do that. I've read the articles here when Opera pushes out releases, and I've seen nothing that indicates that it's changed.

I'll admit comparing stock Opera vs stock FireFox, Opera wins hands down. But FireFox has this feature called Tools->Add Ons. I've seen no browser that even comes close to matching that feature set.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

Under 20 here and used the Internet when I was ~5+ years old, mostly Netscape and IE. Even if I'm an outlier, most elementary school kids were exposed to a web browser on an outdated Mac within the first 3-4 grade levels.

Re:Lone Wolf

[dwiget001]

I beg to differ. I turned 48 last year, worked in the computer software field since 1987.

"Most of" the people I associate with, 30s and 40s, use Firefox.

Myself, I was using Mosaic, from the "Internet in a Box" days, circa 1994. Prior to that, from 1987 to 1994, my online connectivity was through CompuServe.

Not long after that, roughly 1995, I started using Netscape. I continued using it until about version 4.7, at which time I tried out Opera. I still found Netscape 4.7 to be more then sufficient for what I needed at the time. I continued using Netscape up until Firefox ("Phoenix" at the time, beta), and have used it as my browser ever since.

I only use IE when stupid fricken sites "require" or "recommend" it. But, thankfully, those sites are becoming fewer and fewer, to the benefit of us all.

As an aside: I tried Netscape versions after 4.7, but always went back to 4.7. When 6 came out, I was appalled at the bloat and slowness. So much so, that in 2002, I was at Internet World, visited the AOL booth, talked to one of their so-called techs about 6.0. His solution was to give me a copy of 7. I tried it, and promptly threw it in the circular file, piece of crap. I always have had top-of-the-line systems at home, due to the nature of my day job, so the system resources were never the problem with Netscape > 4.7, it was just that Netscape > 4.7, were pieces of crap.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

AdBlock, FlashBlock and NoScript all deal with problems that should be handled well outside of the browser.

The filtering they perform should be done by a proxy, which can be used by virtually all browsers and clients that might make any sort of an HTTP request.

It is just plain stupid to have that functionality duplicated in each and every browser, when there are numerous proxies for numerous platforms that do a much better, and much more transparent, job of filtering.

Re:Lone Wolf

[AndGodSed]

+1 for lynx, absolutely killer for testing a website from remote servers via ssh if you are to lazy to telnet to :80 and call up the page source from there...

Re:Lone Wolf

[Rockoon]

..you mean standards compliant?

I remember when many claimed that Opera rendered pages wrong. Over time, the other browsers have slowly moved to a position where they render those same pages "wrong."

This isnt to say that Opera doesnt have issues with standards.. all browsers do.. but time and again many complaints have been because Opera wasn't rendering incorrectly.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Rockoon]

opera has a surprisingly large market share on various embedded devices (as you mentioned) and in included on very large share of mobile devices.

Surprisingly large is an understatement. Opera is #1 on embedded devices by a very large margin (as in over 50% market share.) The rest of the alternatives combined would still be a minority, and this is the case because the competition doesn't have a clue about the importance of memory footprint on these devices. Opera is cheaper for the manufacturers than the alternatives.

For the most part, only the trendy high priced gadgets use something other than Opera.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with you here. What is with people that can spend $100 a bar night constantly, but cant spend $20-30 on software they use all the time?

Re:Lone Wolf

[sopssa]

Actually Opera has the perfect NoScript built-in. Disable global options for whatever you feel like (noscript example is javascript) and enable it in site preferences for the sites you want to. And you can control lots of other things than just javascript too.

As far as AdBlock goes, Opera has it's equivalent. But I've got used to Ad Muncher as it has updating block lists and it works in all browsers. Full version does cost, but I have no trouble paying for a software that does it's job good and that I use daily.

I always see people touting how Opera is so much better than Firefox, yet when ever I ask them about script blocking I get blank stares. This is my killer feature.

Seems your people don't know much :)

Re:Lone Wolf

[sopssa]

Like sznupi said, these are for countries that don't generally visit english sites and have their own alternatives instead. Russia has its own Facebook too. You cannot apply global stats into country specific stats, like you seem to have done.

For those interested, here's a good article on Opera's share on CIS countries: A look at desktop market share, CIS edition. They flat-out beat IE(!), firefox and all other browsers.

Re:Lone Wolf

[tjwhaynes]

It's true that Firefox has typically been playing catch up throughout its lifespan. However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside). Process separation, general speed, stability, memory fragmentation, etc.

This meme about Firefox memory fragmentation just won't die! Firefox 3.0.x you could still claim that Firefox was sucking down more and more memory as pages got visited. With 3.5.x, you can kiss that problem pretty much goodbye - Firefox returns more memory back to the system than any competing browser.

And Firefox isn't the largest memory consumer here either - that prize probably goes to Chrome, simply because one-tab-per-process is inevitably a heavier memory requirement.

Firefox stability is still a minor issue. However, it's stable enough that I get about 1 crash every three days, which is well within my tolerance level (14 extensions, 11 plugins). Tools like abrt provide a decent mechanism for informing the necessary bug trackers.

Speed-wise, Firefox devs know they are in a race with Chrome. 3.6.x looks like it will be faster than 3.5.x by a fair margin. Project Electrolysis stands to improve matters further. I'm all for competition - keeps everyone working on the issue.

Give me a plugin sandbox so that Flash trapping doesn't take out the page and I'll be content.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Lone Wolf

[travisco_nabisco]

In 2000 they released a free Opera, but it was ad-supported, which I for one would never tolerate in a web browser.

You do realize that Firefox is ad-supported as well. There is a reason Google it the default search provider, and why the Google toolbar is distributed with Firefox. You may not like a visible ad, but you certainly have bought into an ad supported browser.

Re:Lone Wolf

[zblack_eagle]

IE gained market share because it came bundled with Windows. Or do you not remember the whole antitrust thing?

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

a review about opera from opera....lol

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

IE gained market share because at the time netscape was a steaming pile of SHIT. bundled sped up the process, but the extremely poor quality releases post version 3 of netscape is what gave IE the market share.

Re:Lone Wolf

[bigstrat2003]

The reality is that most Firefox users are those who migrated from IE; mostly likely IE6 and IE7, both woefully stagnant examples of a browser. Firefox was a big step up...

Eh. That depends entirely on when you tried it (and your needs, of course). FF 1.0, for example, was a piece of shit. I downloaded it, found that it wouldn't render half of my sites properly (and rendered slowly, to boot), and never went back to FF. Not all that long thereafter (although I don't recall exactly how long), IE 7 became available in beta form, and it added the only thing IE ever lacked for me, which was tabs. So I really wouldn't agree that FF was a step up from IE at all. It was a huge step down in its early incarnations, and while I've found it doesn't render as badly as it did back then... it simply doesn't offer anything useful that IE can't do.

However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside).

I don't know if the FF devs have fixed this yet, but when IE 8 came out, FF was certainly seriously lagging behind IE. The reason? IE separated tabs into processes, and FF didn't. I hope they've fixed it since then, but the moment IE had that feature didn't and FF didn't, FF was in automatic last place (imo).

Re:Lone Wolf

[BikeHelmet]

if anything, firefox has mighe have been closing the feature gap with opera, which had absolute majority of the features first.

Yes and no.

Opera innovated a lot with stuff like tabs, mouse gestures, and fast page rendering.

But ever since Firefox 1.5 - which is roughly when a strong community had been built up - extensions/addons have been leading the way for relevant new browser features.

Re:Lone Wolf

[JordanL]

I found the claim that Opera was "catching up" in the summary spurious at best. Many of the features that Firefox has were developed first by the Opera team, including tabs.

Re:Lone Wolf

[sznupi]

On one hand...yeah, I know what you mean.

But on the other - Opera Software is a Nordic company. That implies certain business ethics unheard of in, say, US.

Re:Lone Wolf

[cheesybagel]

First browser I used was Netscape 1.1. I use Mozilla Firefox. I used Opera at a time, but it had more issues rendering pages than Firefox. Really. It was small and fast, and had an MDI interface long before most everyone else switched to tabs, but I always had issues using it as an everyday browser.

Re:Lone Wolf

[.tekrox]

Google Toolbar is distributed *with* Firefox? Since When?

Certainly not last week when I reinstalled Firefox on a windows machine, Not on my Macbook either...

Re:Lone Wolf

[.tekrox]

Indeed,

My Earliest 'Internet' experiance was Netscape 3/IE 3 (Dialup was expensive in Australia before the advent of iPrimus' $29.95 'All-You-Can-Eat' Plan (Unlimited Hours AND Downloads! - Actaully - Who remembers the concept of Internet usage in Hours rather than data...)

I Remember IE4 for Win 3.11 - and the Flashy DHTML tricks it could do; Took awhile to upgrade to '95 in my house...

School was mostly an Internet Void until 1998/9 - and then it was Netscape - Actually I can't remember which version; High School was Communicator 4.77 until 2004... Which was then changed to IE6 - when IE6 was a Godsend..

I'm in my Early 20's

I didn't 'grow up' with Firefox.

Re:Lone Wolf

[shutdown -p now]

Anecdotal evidence confirms those stats. I remember back when we only had Mozilla and no Firefox yet, and yet Opera (then versions 5 and 6) was already considered a viable alternative (to IE) browser by many power users in Russia.

Today, though, same anecdotal evidence seems to show that Firefox adoption rate is higher than Opera for new users. It's just that there are still a lot of people around whose browsing habits were formed in late 90s to early 2000s.

Re:Lone Wolf

[kingturkey]

if anything, firefox has mighe have been closing the feature gap with opera, which had absolute majority of the features first.

Exactlly. I was going to say the same thing. The article is trolling a bit there.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the fact that Opera had actual ads in the browser UI which Fx has never had, but you might be to young to remember these things...

Re:Lone Wolf

[jonadab]

> You do realize that Firefox is ad-supported as well

Okay, yes, technically, but not in the horrible nagwareish way Opera used to be, with a big fat ad banner taking away 15% or so of the space that would otherwise be used for showing web pages. That was just terrible.

The way Firefox and modern versions of Opera handle this is unobtrusive and does not degrade the user's experience.

Re:Lone Wolf

[jonadab]

Wait, you used IE6, and you tried Firefox 1.0, and it didn't stun you with its relative awesomeness?

Wow. That's just... astonishing. Talk about an alien perspective!

I didn't switch over to Firefox as my primary browser until at least 1.5, but that's because I was using the old Mozilla suite, which I had been using since the late nineties. I certainly would have preferred Firefox 1.0 to IE6. Even the earliest alpha releases of Phoenix made IE6 look like a steaming heap of refuse. I can't imagine trying to use IE6 for daily browsing. Just using it for a few minutes on a new install until you could get another browser downloaded was painful. (Not quite as painful as earlier versions of IE, granted. I'm pretty sure IE4 was the worst browser ever.)

Re:Lone Wolf

[jonadab]

> I continued using Netscape up until Firefox ("Phoenix" at
> the time, beta), and have used it as my browser ever since.

I never really used Netscape 6 and 7 much. They lagged too far behind the unbranded Mozilla suite, not just in terms of features but also bug fixes. There was a general decline in crashiness from every few minutes circa 1998 down to virtually never, so that you can now leave a single browser window open for months at a time, by about 2006.

For a while around the turn of the century, the improvement in stability was so rapid that frequently even a nightly build would be noticeably more stable than the previous release. Meanwhile, Netscape's branded release was usually several releases behind, so it pretty much sucked pond water. IMO, this lag is what finally killed the Netscape brand (not that it was in great shape by then anyway).

The individual browser release that I used for the longest time, of course, was Navigator 4.08. I used that as my primary browser until the Mozilla suite became stable enough to actually use, sometime in 2000.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Carewolf]

You do realize that Firefox is ad-supported as well. There is a reason Google it the default search provider, and why the Google toolbar is distributed with Firefox. You may not like a visible ad, but you certainly have bought into an ad supported browser.

Technically that is not adware, it is spyware...

Re:Lone Wolf

[SnowZero]

The comparison you site adds up the memory of all chrome processes, which will not take memory sharing into account (which is significant). Thus chrome memory usage is likely very overstated.

I love Firefox, but on Linux it still grows >1G and gets very slow after several days of browsing with ~30 tabs. It really seems to be time more than anything. I don't like Chrome's lack of decent UI plugins, but it really is the only browser that I can keep open for a week with my browsing habbits. Also, however much memory it ends up using, it doesn't start freezing for multiple seconds like Firefox does after being open for days. Things seem to be better for Firefox on Windows, but I'm not going to switch my OS to get an improved browsing experience.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Draugo]

One crash every three days... wtf! I'm running two to four instances of opera every day with each one having 20+ open pages at the same time and can't remember the time when one of them crashed.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Richard_at_work]

IE was also the better product, but that tends to get overlooked in favour of the antitrust argument...

People today seem to forget just how terrible Netscape Navigator really was back then.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Ginger Unicorn]

i havent seen firefox crash for as long as i can remember so fuck knows what's up with his system

Re:Lone Wolf

[mdwh2]

Yes, this is why everyone here loves Linux and hates OS X.

Oh wait.

I don't understand why this fanaticism exists - sure, I love open source, but it's clearly not all that matters. With any other kind of software, people accept commercial alternatives, and anyone insisting that only open source is worth considering would be written off as a RMS clone. For some reason, when it comes to bashing Opera, the rules are different.

Anyhow, when Opera was around, Firefox didn't exist. The choice was Opera or IE. Neither were free - you're saying you preferred IE?

Re:Lone Wolf

[mdwh2]

That's the thing though - I like a browser that just works out of the box. It's one thing to download Firefox, but if I then have to spend ages working out which add-ons I have to find and install to replicate basic functionality, that's a pain.

Re:Lone Wolf

[Jeruvy]

Not at all, as already stated IE gained market share because at the time it was the better browser. Netscape was in a perpetual state of decline and cost money. Sure the Anti-Trust issue became apparent later when it was stated that MS was abusing it's privileges but most of 'over 20's were actually there, and know that IE raised the bar in web browsing from versions 1-5.

Re:Lone Wolf

[sznupi]

Seems like you are much closer to what's happening in Russian browser market than me (being only in one of semi-neighboring countries, having a buddy from Ukraine which seems to have similar browser share to Russia), I wonder if you can confirm my suspicions as to "why":

one of the major factors in Opera uptake is that people usually got white-box PCs, often set up by somebody who knows a thing or two about them, installs the OS...and knows which browser works fine. Especially in a place where many machines are slower and with low amounts of RAM, where Opera flies. (?)

I imagine uptake of laptops changes this a bit...though from what I see still not all of them come with usable OS.

Re:Lone Wolf

[shutdown -p now]

Seems like you are much closer to what's happening in Russian browser market than me (being only in one of semi-neighboring countries, having a buddy from Ukraine which seems to have similar browser share to Russia), I wonder if you can confirm my suspicions as to "why":

one of the major factors in Opera uptake is that people usually got white-box PCs, often set up by somebody who knows a thing or two about them, installs the OS...and knows which browser works fine. Especially in a place where many machines are slower and with low amounts of RAM, where Opera flies.

It's likely part of it (though I generally stick Firefox on PCs when I'm asked to set one up these days, because the UI is simpler and closer to IE, and most people have at least some experience with the latter). It doesn't, however, explain why the people who set up those PCs have a preference for Opera in the first place. I've posted my thoughts on how it came to be in an earlier Slashdot post.

Re:Lone Wolf

[sznupi]

They know it works fine? Like...really fine, on slower machines (and connections - it had bandwidth preserving functions for a long time, now there's even 2-3x compression via Opera Turbo)

The father of my buddy that I mentioned uses P4-era machine (with Celeron based on P4 even, from what I remember) with 256MB of RAM (and dial-up, in a huge city like Dnepropetrovsk). From what he says such machine isn't very atypical, upgrades are postponed much longer than in the "West". I don't have any trouble believing that Opera is a fully usable browser on them...since I have an old dual PII 266 with 192MB & win2k lying around - and latest versions of Opera still run fine when I try them (excluding Flash of course). Firefox (on mine) - no way.

And lately it even seems like Opera tries to make their GUI more approachable...

Re:Lone Wolf

[shutdown -p now]

Well, yes - a friend of mine used to own a P166 with 64Mb of RAM back in 2002 or so, and he really couldn't afford anything better. So he had W2K for an OS, and a carefully selected set of applications that could run in such an environment with tolerable performance - in particular, Opera for web (both Mozilla and Firefox - then still Phoenix, IIRC - were too slow), and MPlayer for video.

Re:Lone Wolf

[hkmwbz]

Opera has AdBlock, FlashBlock and NoScript.

Re:Lone Wolf

[hkmwbz]

What browser features have extensions been leading the way for?

Re:Lone Wolf

[hkmwbz]

It's not a review, you dumbass. It's an overview of market share.

Re:Lone Wolf

[hkmwbz]

You know what he means regarding what? Do you agree with him that someone from Opera referring to third party market share numbers is a bad thing?

Re:Lone Wolf

[BikeHelmet]

That depends entirely on what you value.

Firefox has had the best Javascript debugging environment for a long time.

I highly value addons like Adblock Plus, Snaplinks, Greasemonkey, Menu Editor, Lazarus (if my browser crashed right at this instant, all this text would be recoverable with a simple right-click), FireFTP, etc.

And what did Opera implement first? A half-featured torrent client?

Opera unite is an interesting idea. They're starting to innovate again - but Firefox extensions have definitely added a lot of cool features before other browsers could.

Re:Lone Wolf

[sznupi]

That doesn't exclude the possibility of picking the stats that suit you best. Even if I think it's highly unlikely it happened consciously in this case.

Re:Lone Wolf

[hkmwbz]

Actually, all the stats seem to agree that Opera is highly popular there. Even local stats.

Re:Lone Wolf

[hkmwbz]

But none of those features have become standard in browsers, unlike Opera's multiple pages within the main window, the popup blocker, the full-page zoom, sessions (continuing where you left off), intergrated search from either a search field or the address bar, easy deletion of private data, Speed Dial, and basically most of the things you take for granted in a modern browser.

What was your list? Basically a bunch of features that have remained extensions, and haven't really made it into other browsers.

By the way, Opera had User JS before Greasemonkey even existed. They used it for the Bork version ages ago.

Re:Lone Wolf

[sznupi]

Well, yes, I know; if only because "there" is "here" for me, more or less (check my other responses in this thread).

I was just addressing the mere aspect of possibly selecting sources which paint you in better light; even if just slightly, even if unconsciously. I don't think it is much of a factor in this case, but you always have to remember about the possibility.

Re:Lone Wolf

[BikeHelmet]

User JS wasn't exploited nearly as much as Greasemonkey. I don't know if it's as powerful.

So you only value features that show up in every single browser?

I value features that make the browsing experience better, regardless of weather they show up in another browser.

It took years for tabs to catch on. Maybe in a half-decade all these extensions will be present by default in your Opera. ;)

Re:Lone Wolf

[hkmwbz]

We were talking about "relevant new browser features", which implies that it is something that was adopted by other browsers. Clearly, Opera is the winner in the sheer amount of features that have been adopted by most other "major" browsers. If I happen to like a specific feature but it has a small group of users, it isn't really relevant here. Just like your pet extensions.

Most of the most popular Firefox extensions are already in Opera, and were there long before they became extensions. They exist as extensions because Opera had them in some form, and people wanted the feature for Firefox.

Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[elrous0]

This issue has been discussed on /. many times before. Mozilla needs a sponsor. Their revenues are the only thing that lets them stand out from most of the rest of the OSS crowd as a truly professional piece of software. Lose those revenues and it will eventually deteriorate into yet another lame piece of poorly-documented, poorly-maintained piece of abandonware on SourceForge. So, what options does Mozilla have? Well, they could stay with Google or they could defect to Yahoo or Bing. But MS is even more of a browser competitor than Google. And Yahoo isn't in a financial position to be sponsoring anyone right now. Sure, you could maybe come up with some other more complicated solutions, but $66 million worth? Not many companies, or even groups of companies, have that kind of money to throw around for a little advertisement. There just aren't a lot of alternatives.

So, SHOULD they break away from Google? Probably. CAN they break away from them (and maintain their quality)? Probably not. So, like a bad marriage of convenience, Mozilla is probably stuck with Google until the day (possibly) comes when Google themselves decide to break it off.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Frosty Piss]

Their revenues are the only thing that lets them stand out from most of the rest of the OSS crowd as a truly professional piece of software.

Yes, the money grubbing does connect Mozilla to "true professionalism". But there is also the code bloat, feature creep.

The only thing that really marks Mozilla os "Open Source" these days is the total lack of interest in what the users want or think...

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

many, many times before.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their revenues are the only thing that lets them stand out from most of the rest of the OSS crowd as a truly professional piece of software. Lose those revenues and it will eventually deteriorate into yet another lame piece of poorly-documented, poorly-maintained piece of abandonware on SourceForge.

No! It's F/OSS - all the Mozilla developers can go and offer paid support, write books, do some TV reality shows, and they'll make plenty of money! That's the whole business model of F/OSS, isn't it?

Or is that Mozilla is a perfect example of how the F/OSS business model isn't viable unless a project has a sugar-daddy like the big Linux distros?

I think we're starting to see the F/OSS model isn't sustainable.

Time will tell.

My captcha is 'discord' - irony?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[jmyers]

Where does the money go? It seems to me that $66 million could fund a lot of development for many years. Put that in the bank and you could easily pay the salary of 10 full time programmers and a decent amount of overhead and never spend a dime of principal and never need additional sponsorship and strings that go with it.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[ZorbaTHut]

And the fact that the source is, you know, open. I feel that's kind of a major point.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[sopssa]

Exactly, it's great for projects that are big. Apache gets huge donations from large companies too. Those random projects, not so much. They really mostly in advertising revenues, like Mozilla indirectly gets from Google. Do you really want more advertising and lost privacy?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[linhares]

I HAVE AN IDEA!!!!

If they sell each copy for $100, then with only (US$66 000 000,00/US$100 =) 660 000 users they could get the same amount of cash.

Fuck; this is a perfect plan... just like Microsoft Office!

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Tamran]

It really boils down to one thing: Quality

When people started switching from IE (on windows anyway), they did so because of the great features. I know a lot of people stay for the same reason, as the plugin library is extensive. However, like the article says the others are catching up.

It's not the F/OSS model that's flawed here. If Firefox was better and faster than what other options are out there, I'd use it now. Two years ago, I used nothing but Firefox ... and loved it.

Tamran

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[HerculesMO]

Couldn't agree more. I love Firefox, I use it daily and the support around it is what makes it great. But Google is making Chrome, which is a faster browser, sandboxed, etc. IE is obviously going down a similar path, and Apple is always out of the running because they don't care about open source unless they can rename it and sell it for profit.

I see a bad future for Mozilla, and for Firefox... it's a great example of WHY open source works, but also an example of what does not work. Look at Chrome -- other than the community support, Firefox pales in comparison to almost everything Chrome does. It's slower, less secure (technically), and not as extensible (Gears and Google APIs). But the community around Firefox developed things like Adblock, Xmarks, Firebug, etc. I live on those things, and love them.

But sadly, Firefox is not necessary in order for me to use those extensions any more. While I still find great utility in the addons Firefox has, I realize more and more than open source does *not* evolve very quickly, or very well. Sure it's open source and you can do whatever you want with it. Great. But as a whole application, Firefox is slowing down while others are speeding ahead (namely Chrome). I worry for its future, but at the same time.... I've never been an O/S proponent more than if it does the job, I'll use it.

When Firefox no longer does the job, or no longer does it best -- I'll move on. Unfortunately for the O/S community, you can't justify the use of O/S just BECAUSE it's O/S. It has to be better, and it has to evolve faster. I simply am not seeing it any more.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Sir_Lewk]

FUD.

That's the whole business model of F/OSS, isn't it?

No, that is only one of many possible F/OSS business models. Other common F/OSS business models include dual licensing and paid support. Examples include Redhat, formerly Trolltech (aquired by Nokia), and many others.

isn't viable unless a project has a sugar-daddy like the big Linux distros?

Of the big linux distrobutions, only one (ubuntu) comes to mind as relying on a so called "sugar daddy". Debian is entirely community run, and Fedora is community run, with support from Redhat (an extremely sucessful and profitable F/OSS company).

Time will tell.

Time has already shown the concept to be quite workable.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[confused one]

I know you're trying to be sarcastic and/or funny; but, there's a history lesson, sitting right there waiting for you... It goes by the name of Netscape.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

why wouldn't yahoo give money to mozzila? it's not really sponsoring, you know... they would get access, clicks and ad revenue in exchange.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[grasshoppa]

I would argue that it is not a "truly professional piece of software". How do I manage it on a network? If I wanted to lock down the color settings, how might I do that? How about updating the software, and plugins? How is that achieved in a corporate environment?

Unless you meant for the home environment, in which case sure, it does have that market.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[TechForensics]

Oh geez, this is bad. If Firefox becomes more Google-dependent THERE GOES ADBLOCK and there goes the whole pleasant web experience. This may be more important than people realize.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora is community run, with support from Redhat (an extremely sucessful and profitable F/OSS company).

Redhat is a sugar-daddy.

and paid support.

As was pointed out, paid support is a very good way to fund a project - actually, there isn't a project that entirely funds itself with paid support.

Dual Licensing? Aside from MySQL (and I have doubts about them), there aren't any successful dual-licensing companies - they all have sugar-daddies.

Sorry, F/OSS is a horrible business model.

FUD - SCHMUD - whatever. I got bills to pay and work to do.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[afidel]

This issue has been discussed [slashdot.org] on /. many times before. Mozilla needs a sponsor. Their revenues are the only thing that lets them stand out from most of the rest of the OSS crowd as a truly professional piece of software. Lose those revenues and it will eventually deteriorate into yet another lame piece of poorly-documented, poorly-maintained piece of abandonware on SourceForge.

Like Apache? Like the Linux kernel?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Sir_Lewk]

Redhat is not a sugar daddy supporting a F/OSS company. They are a F/OSS company.

That you consider them worthy of a "sugar daddy" label only serves to demonstrate just how well a F/OSS business model is working for them.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[frankxcid]

That is a really interesting argument which brings the thought to mind that is Microsoft were to become involved with Mozilla, it would clear up all sorts of issues that Microsoft has and would be a stroke of genius for them (Microsoft).

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[KlomDark]

Maybe you need to think about changing careers. What, if MOM can't do it, you can't do it? It's open-source, I'm sure you can find a way to do what you need.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to lock down the color settings, here are the steps:

1) Before deploying, go to the configuration file.
2) Find a hot curling iron
3) Shove it up your ass

There's no fucking reason you need to lock down the color settings.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Synn]

Or is that Mozilla is a perfect example of how the F/OSS business model isn't viable unless a project has a sugar-daddy like the big Linux distros?

I think we're starting to see the F/OSS model isn't sustainable.

Isn't sustainable? Debian was founded in 1993 and has been running strong ever since. It's the core base for a lot of other distributions out there, including the most popular one around, Ubuntu.

KDE, GNOME, Xorg, the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, Postfix, BIND, Samba, do I really need to list 500 or so open source projects that makes up a significant part of the modern world's IT industry?

Also, the Mozilla project is hardly floundering. 66 million a year isn't peanuts and if they can't run the project on less than that then there's some serious bloat problems over there, and not just in the browser code.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Kijori]

Other common F/OSS business models include dual licensing and paid support. Examples include Redhat, formerly Trolltech (aquired by Nokia), and many others.

Neither of those are possible for Mozilla - why would anyone pay for support for a web browser? Why would anyone pay for a web browser? I don't see any way you could make a profit from the consumer web-browser market.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

If a "Mozilla Exec Urges Switch From Google To Bing", why not just switch the defaults to Bing?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Sir_Lewk]

Well, Opera seems to be doing decently, selling mobile browsers or whatever they do (I don't use Opera browsers, I'm somewhat unfamilar with their products), but in this case I agree with you. No business model can save you if your product is crap people won't buy.

Right now Mozilla's product is users, which they are selling to google. I believe trying to make their browser the product would be a terrible move, regardless of how they do it.

All of this said, calling F/OSS business models bust because one particular company wouldn't be able to do it is particularly stupid. Business models are not "one size fits all".

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

Where does the money go? It seems to me that $66 million could fund a lot of development for many years. Put that in the bank and you could easily pay the salary of 10 full time programmers and a decent amount of overhead and never spend a dime of principal and never need additional sponsorship and strings that go with it.

The money goes to salaries of the executives. A cool half million dollars or more for the CEO to be exact. I wonder how productive should they be to justify such salaries? That money can easily go to hire 5 top notch C++ coders for an entire year to hunt down memory leaks and make the code more efficient. The only reason to give such money should be as a bonus if-and-only-if the executives figure out how to reduce their dependence on Google, it's been 5 years and nothing's being done about it.

Disclaimer: I've seen my university students scrounge their last savings money to pay for the Firefox ad in the NYT 4 years ago, so maybe that makes me sick to the stomach to see Mozilla wasting so much money on administration.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[BZ]

> Where does the money go?

See http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-and-2008/ and the documents linked from it for the 2008 data.

> Put that in the bank and you could easily pay the salary of 10 full time programmers

As of end of 2008, there were about 200 people being paid out of the $66 million, according to the link above. That would include programmers, QA, UI designers, marketing, administration, IT staff.

That's somewhat smaller than the number of people Opera, say, employs, at least last time I checked.

For comparison, by the way, FY 2008 revenues for Opera were about $87 million according to http://www.opera.com/media/finance/2009/2Q09.pdf

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[businessnerd]

So, SHOULD they break away from Google? Probably. CAN they break away from them (and maintain their quality)? Probably not. So, like a bad marriage of convenience, Mozilla is probably stuck with Google until the day (possibly) comes when Google themselves decide to break it off.

Seriously? Mozilla gets $66M from Google every year and you think they should break away from them? I think you let the article irrationally scare you. The issue is not that they have a deal with Google, it's that they may have all of their eggs in one basket. Google is Mozilla's cash cow, and yes, if Google were to decide to change their deal or pull the plug all together, then Mozilla is out $66M in opportunity costs. But until that day comes, Mozilla should milk that cash cow for all its worth, yet be prepared for that day by diversifying their revenue now. It's not about being partners or not being partners with Google, it's about being partners with JUST Google or having multiple partners. The response from Mozilla was that, yes, they do have other partners and other deals, so Google is not their only source of revenue. Partners listed included eBay, Amazon and Canonical. They even stated that they are currently working on more deals. But the concern is still relevent because Google still makes up a vast majority of the revenue.

The article is a little dumb because it is asking a question that has already been asked and answered by Mozilla. No company's business model should rely solely on one single partner and Mozilla already knows that. Mozilla is still dependant on Google, but they are working on changing that.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Dan Ost]

But sadly, Firefox is not necessary in order for me to use those extensions any more.

Sadly? Why "Sadly"? This is a good thing! It means we have competition in the browser market. It might be financially bad for firefox, but it's definitely good for consumers.

Firefox reinvigorated the browser market. We're all better off because of firefox. But if a time comes when firefox can no longer compete, then it will decline and we'll all switch to whatever browser is the most compelling.

That's how things are supposed to work.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what are the expenses for the Mozilla foundation? If they're getting $66 million over 5 years ($13 million/year), that would be a fully paid staff of 130 people, right? (Well, according to the Mozilla Corporation page, about 150.) That's a pretty good-sized company. I would ask, is a corporate organization of that magnitude the right choice for Mozilla as a F/OSS project?

I'm not saying that it's the wrong answer. It seems like there's always going to be one or more companies out there that gains enough from the existence of an independent browser that it can find support. If Google goes away, maybe IBM would be interested. Or, maybe it's not the right model. Maybe the goal should be to move back towards a community model, with a small core staff to direct development and/or to generate some extra revenue from support contracts. Suppose they put half of what they get into an endowment, and try to live off the income. 5% of $33 million would be a budget of $1.65 million/year, say 16 full time staff, or 32 part-time. That's still a pretty respectable company. And (if you're the sort of person who liked The Mythical Man-Month) a smaller staff may not be much less productive.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[FlyingBishop]

Where exactly does Inkscape's revenue come from? Because that's my favorite vector graphics tool right there. What about WinSCP? Apache? OpenSSH?

Great applications, no clear revenue stream (Well, I guess Apache and OpenSSH have a revenue stream. Sort of. But it's just end users' free time / job time going towards making their jobs easier.

And Google will happily continue to pay Firefox to include Google in its search box. Their revenue is quite safe. Google isn't interested in locking you into Chrome, because monocultures yield public, messy security breaches like the most recent one.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat is not a sugar daddy supporting a F/OSS company. They are a F/OSS company.

That you consider them worthy of a "sugar daddy" label only serves to demonstrate just how well a F/OSS business model is working for them.

Sure, but would they be as successful if they had to pay for the development of the system they sell as opposed to mostly packaging software available for free on the Internet? I think not.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Kjella]

Just because Linux always survives doesn't mean that everything is sustainable. Clearly Google not renewing their agreement would be a huge setback for Firefox, likewise if Nokia decided to lay off everyone developing Qt which is the basis of KDE, Sun pulling out of OpenOffice and so on. For all of you remembering the dotcom days, lots of money was poured into open source then as well and went bust just like the rest of the economy. Personally I felt quality went considerably down when Red Hat stopped supporting Red Hat Linux and went enterprise only, for example. I also remember why I switched away from Debian and over to a "suger daddy" funded distro.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's going in the right direction. But I do see that without profitable companies it'll be getting there much slower, and profits can disappear as the market wills it.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[BZ]

In summary, for 2008 and based on http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2008-audited-financial-statement.pdf , something like $17 million taxes, $12 million set aside for future (e.g. if the Google contract doesn't get renewed, say). About $50 million spent, from a total revenue of $80 million or so. That would presumably include salaries+benefits for those 200-ish people, whatever hardware is needed for the developers, the testing infrastructure (see http://atlee.ca/blog/2009/11/02/what-happens-when-you-push/ for example), infrastructure for the various Mozilla web sites (addons.mozilla.org, www.mozilla.org, update servers, etc). Oh, and office space lease, presumably.

How much do you figure it should take to run an organization with about 200 competent (so not necessarily cheap) staff and a fair amount of necessary infrastructure for a year?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Gerald]

No! It's F/OSS - all the Mozilla developers can go and offer paid support, write books, do some TV reality shows, and they'll make plenty of money! That's the whole business model of F/OSS, isn't it?

Not if you're Snort, Asterisk, or Wireshark.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[$1uck]

damn you beat me to it. People are paying for Opera. Granted it's not end users (well wii owners were briefly).

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[sopssa]

Maybe it's just another successful get rich scheme? I mean, they get free advertising from OSS zealots who even pay for such advertising on newspapers like you said, they get OSS community to provide patches and ideas, while the CEO's and shareholders get the millions. It's all about how the marketing and PR makes it look, after all.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[irp]

Oh geez, this is bad. If Firefox becomes more Google-dependent THERE GOES ADBLOCK and there goes the whole pleasant web experience. This may be more important than people realize.

Adblockers are slowly starting to work just fine in google chrome https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?q=adblock :-)

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[icebraining]

How about updating the software, and plugins? How is that achieved in a corporate environment?

Well, Debian can do it: Iceweasel (the Debian version of Firefox) is updated via the repositories (and you can setup your own for internal use) and so are some of it's extensions and plugins.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[geek]

How productive must the executives be to justify the salaries? Seeing as it was them who negotiated the 66 million to begin with I would say there were quite productive indeed.

I'll never understand people like you that constantly whine about other peoples salaries. 1) it isn't any of your business how much they make, 2) if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it, 3) if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss.

Honestly, are people like you so petty that you must constantly whine that you don't make as much as someone else? Be happy they are making money, they will continue to do so and we'll all benefit as a result. If you really must insist on this socialist idea of spreading the wealth then by all means, move to Cuba and see how productive they are there.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Sir_Lewk]

1) Redhat are huge contributers to numerous open source projects.
2) How is that relevant at all? Everybody knows that one of the benifits of running a business like Redhat is that you don't have to do all the work yourself.

At the end of the day, Redhat is both a F/OSS company, and incredibly sucessful. You really can't argue with results like that.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Buelldozer]

I'm replying to an AC, oh well.

Yes, there IS a reason you imagination-less troll. A shared computer and logon. Alternatively a kiosk machine.

Now, let's talk about exactly whose ass that curling iron is going into.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Kijori]

Well, Opera seems to be doing decently, selling mobile browsers or whatever they do (I don't use Opera browsers, I'm somewhat unfamilar with their products)

That's why I said the consumer web-browser market. There is a market for specialized web browsers, but not standard ones; no one would pay for a copy of Firefox. Their only hope would be moving into a niche market, but trying to compete with Opera - which has more experience and a huge head start - seems doomed to failure.

All of this said, calling F/OSS business models bust because one particular company wouldn't be able to do it is particularly stupid. Business models are not "one size fits all".

That's nice to note - but given that I wasn't "calling F/OSS business models bust" it seems a bit tagged-on. There isn't really such a thing as an "open source business model" - some companies charge for the product, others for support, just like software companies always have, and I can't see any reason it would be impossible for open-source programs if it works for closed-source. What I said - and I stick by it - is that there is no money to be made from selling Firefox, nor is there any money to be made providing support for Firefox.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does the money go? It seems to me that $66 million could fund a lot of development for many years.

The money goes to salaries of the executives. A cool half million dollars or more for the CEO to be exact. I wonder how productive should they be to justify such salaries? That money can easily go to hire 5 top notch C++ coders...

Did the CEO help broker deals that generated the $66 million, or did the coders? If the executives were able to talk Google into a deal that brings in $66mil, surely they are worth $.5mil

Welcome to reality, where paying executives and paying coders is not an either/or proposition. In any substantive organization you need people creating the product and you need people monetizing the product. Take away either aspect and you have a poorly-funded organization that, let's face it, won't be able to churn out as much cool stuff because the coders will have to spend most of their time working at jobs to pay for their hobby time.

I know this is rare on /., but a sports comparison: Tiger Woods' endorsement deals pay him about $100mil a year. Sounds obscene compared to what "associates" in the retail locations are making or *gasp* the $6/month (or whatever the number is) that little Asians are getting paid. However, according to this paper (sorry it's a PDF), his indiscretions have cost $5-12bil in wealth. (The numbers are in line with another report that stated Nike's estimated Tiger-driven revenues are roughly 10 times what they pay him, but I couldn't find that link today.) So he gets paid a high amount, but generates much more revenue than that and that revenue is fairly directly attributed to his association.

So... let's say Mozilla pays their CEO $200k, which is a good salary in most parts of the country. And this lesser-paid, potentially lesser-connected CEO can't bring in a fat Google deal. Yay! You saved one third or a million dollars but it cost you tens of millions. Is that a good deal?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Time will tell if the F/OSS model is sustainable."

1997 called, and I bet you can guess what they want back.

You are aware that linux completely dominates the server and embedded markets and has for a long time, aren't you?

You do know that open source has been adopted, leveraged, and improved by corporate giants like Google and IBM, right?

You do realize that desktop linux is the last frontier, not the first, don't you?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Sir_Lewk]

The last part of my comment was more directed at the GGP then your post in particular. I agree with you in that there is no money to be had with Firefox though.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to lock down the color settings, here are the steps:

1) Before deploying, go to the configuration file.
2) Find a hot curling iron
3) Shove it up your ass

There's no fucking reason you need to lock down the color settings.

Well other might call it flamebait but I think its fucking hilarious.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[grumpyman]

So in summary:

1. Pick up on an OSS project
2. Create a company around it and wave the OSS flag
3. ????
4. Profit!

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[whoisisis]

.... So, what options does Mozilla have? Well, they could stay with Google or they could defect to Yahoo or Bing. But MS is even more of a browser competitor than Google. And Yahoo isn't in a financial position to be sponsoring anyone right now. Sure, you could maybe come up with some other more complicated solutions, but $66 million worth? Not many companies, or even groups of companies, have that kind of money to throw around for a little advertisement.

Solution: Mozilla corp. should to make their own billion dollar search engine to sponsor themselves.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I've seen my university students scrounge their last savings money to pay for the Firefox ad in the NYT 4 years ago, so maybe that makes me sick to the stomach to see Mozilla wasting so much money on administration.

Aye, I'll say.

I was one of those students - not one of yours, most likely, but a poor student who chipped in what he could in order to support what he felt was a good cause, a righteous cause.

Nowadays, I'll be honest and say I regret it. Firefox isn't actually as bad a browser as people often make it out to be, I think, but it suffers from some big problems, and I'm not talking about memory leaks. I'm talking about things like the attitude shown to e.g. bug reporters and users in general, and, yes, things like the six-digit salaries for the figureheads.

(For the same reason, I have not donated to the Wikimedia Foundation in quite a while either, BTW. I'm not keen on my donations being used to pay CEOs, or PR companies designing the annual fundraiser for a sizeable sum.)

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Rob_Bryerton]

I think this is what you meant to say:

I would argue that it is not a "truly professional piece of software". How do I manage it on my Windows network? If I wanted to lock down the color settings, how might I do that for my Windows clients? How about updating the software, and plugins? How is that achieved in a corporate Windows environment?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

When organizations ask for public donations, executive salaries become an issue of public concern. Donors deserve to know how their money is being spent, and they may be hesitant to continue their donations if the money is poorly manged.

As you mentioned, the Mozilla CEO salary would be justified if he negotiated the $66mil agreement. The public has a right to debate whether this was money well spent. It's not about jealousy--it's about efficiency.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a decade where failed CEOs get up to $10 million a year (plus bonuses and fancy retirement packages when they leave after five years), and failed bank management gets half a million a year in bonuses... seeing a CEO get paid half a million for being successful doesn't seem bad. I mean, developers that are actually good get paid $80k-$100k, managers that are actually good get paid $100k-$200k per year, and they're worth that. A CEO is both a manager of managers AND a businessman, so doing both successfully really is worth somewhere in the $300k-$600k range. It's in the same pay range that is actually attainable through 'honest hard work', where good doctors and small business owners and public college presidents end up, and I don't think many would begrudge the pay when the position was earned through many long years of somehow doing what everything thought was impossible before then (not only survive, but gain substantial market share vs Microsoft? Do you realize how rare that is?)

IMO, there's a reason why that pay range is the boundary beyond which we tend to think people are jerks and/or totally and permanently detached from reality. Without getting too ranty: the faster a job can get you so much money that you can live well in perpetuity off the savings, the... more different kind of character the position will attract. Whereas while $300k-$600 seems like a lot, and it is a lot, it still takes a decade or more of constant success to hit self sufficiency if you do everything right. It's high enough to attract talent, low enough that the talent has to seriously work towards the long term success of the company.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[grasshoppa]

It's not about me finding a way to do it. I actually know of a couple ways to do what I am after. The problem is they are hacks and are ill behaved. Not good characteristics for large scale deployments in a windows environment.

It comes down to cost-vs-benefit. Managing IE is far easier in a corporate environment than managing firefox, and it can be made relatively secure. How might one argue for the deployment of firefox in this situation? I'll save you the trouble; you can't.

If FF had decent network management tools, I'd have jumped ship in a heart beat. As it is, it is difficult to manage and keep up to date. Neither is good for security.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[IICV]

1) it isn't any of your business how much they make

Seriously, this sort of attitude is part of what makes America so divided. It isn't any of my business how much someone else makes? Then how am I supposed to make a rational decision about my line of work? All compensation for all positions for all companies should be freely available, so I know that if I sign on as a developer with shop A I'm getting a worse deal than if I signed on with shop B. I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.

2) if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it

You know why they deserve it? Because CEO 1 is on the board of company 2, so he says that CEO 2 should have a ridiculous salary. CEO 2 is on the board of company 1, so he says that CEO 1 should have a ridiculous salary.

3) if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss

No real loss, except for the opportunity cost of all that extra money going into improving the CEO's bankroll instead of into improving the company.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[grasshoppa]

Given the vast majority of window installations out there, my statement is still a valid complaint.

Look, I use OSS where and when I can; I think it performs better than the closed source, paid for, solutions. However, for day to day desktop usage it's simply not a feasible replacement, and won't be for the foreseeable future.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Mex]

Didn't Wikipedia run for a couple of years on less than 5 million dollars? I dunno how much they need right now since their donations seem private, but 66 million seems incredible for a free software.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[MrMr]

Only for people who read the source more easily than the compiled code.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[MrMr]

Well google seems to disagree with that. I just checked the chrome download page and still got this:
Not Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora/openSUSE? There may be a community-supported version for your distribution here
Apparently this fast moving and well funded commercial operation is waiting for volunteers to port its code?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[gad_zuki!]

Whats wrong with Mozilla opening its purse for some MOM/GPO integration and suddenly making life easier on a million or so admins and putting smiles on the faces of the bosses skeptical of OSS in business because "its home software and not corporate friendly?" I mean, they have an annual budget of 80 million dollars. If they can pay their CEO 500k, then can certainly fund some basic GPO integration to compete with IE integration.

Instead, a million admins have to replicate the work of their own homebrew hacks for their own environment, which doesnt exactly translate into a product worth sharing. Heck, even if they did, Mozilla wouldnt allow them to patch their browser.

Every day we're reminded about IE6 on intranets and whatnot. Some integration and an official MSI with IE Tab would change everything.

>Maybe you need to think about changing careers. What, if MOM can't do it, you can't do it? It's open-source, I'm sure you can find a way to do what you need.

Its exactly this attitude that loses marketshare to a very inferior browser. Enjoy your high horse. Obviously helping FF make inroads into corporate isnt as cool as being a dismissive prick on slashdot.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

How productive must the executives be to justify the salaries? Seeing as it was them who negotiated the 66 million to begin with I would say there were quite productive indeed.

I'll never understand people like you that constantly whine about other peoples salaries. 1) it isn't any of your business how much they make, 2) if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it, 3) if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss.

Honestly, are people like you so petty that you must constantly whine that you don't make as much as someone else? Be happy they are making money, they will continue to do so and we'll all benefit as a result. If you really must insist on this socialist idea of spreading the wealth then by all means, move to Cuba and see how productive they are there.

Why are you attempting to make this into a capitalism vs. socialism strawman? The issue at hand is the CEO of a for-profit organization backed by a non-profit organization, and hence pays no taxes whatsoever on the $66 million some of which goes into obscene CEO profits. Meanwhile, countless F/OSS supporters are poring in their precious free time to develop, report bugs and develop extensions.

And it is my business how much they make or what Mozilla does with it's money, because that money comes from Google searches that people like me perform on Firefox. If me and other users of FF suddenly decide to switch to Bing on FF or to Chrome, it's Firefox that stops earning millions and fold up since Google pays per search. There are plenty of other competing browsers nowadays that are faster and leaner anyway. If some of that money that goes into executive pay was used in the previous years to make Firefox faster and leaner(notice the number of 'Firefox is bloated' complaints that pop up everytime in a FF story?) Firefox would stop losing users and revenue.

So if the executives start paying themselves $65 million a year because they signed on the agreement with Google, I should be happy for them for making money? And while I am not a fan of socialism, Cuba is a bad example. From the Wiki:

Cuba also has succeeded in reducing poverty and equalizing the distribution of wealth. According to the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin America, the decile ratio (share of total income for the top 10 percent of wage earners divided by the bottom 10 percent) in Latin America was 45 to 1, while that of Cuba was only 4 to 1. Cuba's income distribution was more than 10 times more equal than the rest of Latin America in the 1980s. Before the Revolution, Cuba's decile ratio was 65 to 1.[4]

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[misexistentialist]

An executive who generates money for himself while starving the business he is pretends to be operating is only "productive" in the business of swindling. It is neither petty not socialist to criticize waste. Any capitalist system should be concerned with efficiency, and in a country like Japan executive salaries are more moderate. An American CEO, however, would probably be more at home in the Cuban dictatorship

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

2) if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it

You know why they deserve it? Because CEO 1 is on the board of company 2, so he says that CEO 2 should have a ridiculous salary. CEO 2 is on the board of company 1, so he says that CEO 1 should have a ridiculous salary.

That's actually pretty close to what happened, except that Company 2 is a non profit and CEO 1 & 2 were the same person. Read on.

From http://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/financials-be-damned/

Mitchell Baker is the chairperson of the board of directors for the Mozilla Foundation. She’s also the chairperson of the board of directors for the Mozilla Corporation. She’s also the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. See where I’m going with this? No? You’re a moron. You also failed U.S. history, apparently. You’re looking at Mozilla’s own version of an interlocking directorate, a form of corporate control commonly associated with the robber barons of the Gilded Age, particularly as they sought to get around the restrictions of early anti-trust legislation. Mitchell is, hands down, the most powerful person within Mozilla. Just as with the robber barons, disagree with her and you’re fucked. More importantly for the premise of this post, for each of those positions, she undoubtedly gets paid.

Let’s look closer. In 2005, Mitchell received compensation totaling $115,660 for sitting on the board of the Foundation and leading it (see PDF page 7). But 2005 was the year the Corporation split off from the Foundation. As a result, Mitchell made an additional $181,042 for being the head of that organization (see PDF page 27). Finally, Mitchell received $50,659 from the Foundation for providing back-office support (see PDF page 36). That means, if the Lizard can do math, Mitchell received a total of $347,361 in compensation for the year of 2005. Of course, that amount includes benefit contributions and is not entirely cash in her pocket.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

Did the CEO help broker deals that generated the $66 million, or did the coders? If the executives were able to talk Google into a deal that brings in $66mil, surely they are worth $.5mil

Welcome to reality, where paying executives and paying coders is not an either/or proposition.

What's up with people drumming up this 'fact'? Opera (while sitting all way the across in the Land of the Midnight Sun') was able to broker a deal with Google for pay-per-search. And their CEO gets paid the equivalent of 26K in 2010!

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=11669499&capId=532001&previousCapId=532001&previousTitle=OPERA%20SOFTWARE%20ASA

And what did the Mozilla CEOs do in the meantime apart from inking search deals? Thunderbird is a failure, Fennec is too little, too late. There's absolutely nothing of significance fro Mozilla in 5 years apart from Firefox which the community made a success of, not as much Mozilla which just piggy backed on the popularity to sign on search deals. Bugzilla is the only success to a limited extent. They dropped the ball on LIGHTNING and SUNBIRD too which could've easily supplanted Exchange by now if the funds were properly utilized, but still the executive keep getting paid exorbitant salaries for underperforming.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

I am not a professor or a dean, sorry. I meant to say 'my university friends' not 'my university students'. Mozilla should've offered refunds once it got money from Google, because I remember Ramen-eating students donating money to Mozilla.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

They could've used those funds to dethrone Exchange, Outlook, maybe even Office. But all those highly paid executives oversaw the failure of Thunderbird, Sunbird and Lightning instead of leveraging search money. There's still nothing of value in Mozilla except for Firefox which itself could use some cleaning up and innovation on the lines of Webkit/Chrome/Opera.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[KlomDark]

Dammit boy, back in my day I had to walk around to everyone's desk to do anything. Uphill both ways. By myself. And I liked it.

While you do have a very excellent point about managing a large installed base in today's automated society, I still gotta say I'm kinda smirking at you for thinking it's NOT part of your job as a sysadmin to find a way to do it yourself and instead whining about your lack of skills on the internet instead. Really lame dude.

If you think it's a sin that everyone is re-inventing the wheel, then fine a clean way to integrate the needed functionality into FireFox and then submit it to the FireFox project - it is an OS project, ain't it?

But, then again, how many more people would get laid off if your job fell all the way down to just working from predigested checklists? Oh wait, that's how you must like it since you're afraid of a challenge.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[BitZtream]

Perhaps your university students need a little real world education in retarded investing then? College students do stupid shit all the time, this is a great example of such. They spend more time worrying about 'the cause' than they do thinking about it, and as a general rule, end up facilitating 'the problem' rather than helping 'the cause'.

Yours is a great example. 'Lets help the underdog!', when 'the underdog' needed no help what so ever.

What makes me sick to my stomach is that the idiot professors encourage them on this sort of shit because they are so disconnected from reality that they haven't got a clue whats actually going on in the real world.

While you were getting sick to your stomach, you should have consider maybe enlightening your students about these sort of events rather than watching them. You've pretty much admitted fault for their actions. Good job teach, you stood by and watched them donate time and money of their own and didn't do anything to stop them did you? Probably a good plan. If you made them think about what people are actually worth at their jobs, they'd probably realize they were wasting a lot of money in your class listening to you ramble on.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[zuperduperman]

Here's hoping that's exactly what they are doing. If they can keep it going for just 5 more years they should build able to build up ~$200M in the bank and fund a $5 - $7M development effort (say, 20 developers) into perpetuity. I'd much rather that than blowing $50M a year just because it's raining from the sky right now.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[pclminion]

I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.

You do realize that you CAN see this information, don't you? Go to, for instance, Google finance. Type in a ticker symbol. Scroll down to the "Officers and directors" section. Click on somebody's name. See that "Bio and compensation" link? Click that.

This crap is all required to be reported by the SEC for exactly the reason you are conjuring up here. Chill out. As for anybody who isn't an officer or director of a publicly traded corporation, no, you do NOT have any business knowing that person's compensation level. If you think otherwise, why don't you start the ball rolling by posting your full name and salary in response to this comment?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

All compensation for all positions for all companies should be freely available, so I know that if I sign on as a developer with shop A I'm getting a worse deal than if I signed on with shop B. I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.

I agree that publicly traded companies should publish their books, but what about completely private companies that you can't invest in anyway? I'm also confused as to why you believe your desire to get a competitive salary means other companies and workers should give up their privacy. I'm extremely confused at 4, insightful... but ok.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Chryana]

How productive must the executives be to justify the salaries? Seeing as it was them who negotiated the 66 million to begin with I would say there were quite productive indeed.

What makes you think it wouldn't have happened without them? Google wanted to compete with Microsoft, and it saw that it could only win by making the Internet a viable platform for software development, so it went to the most serious competitor to Internet Explorer and funded it. I don't see any need for some expensive master of rhetoric to convince Google to finance the Mozilla Foundation. It's not like 66 millions is a lot of money for Google.

if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it

I remember a /. poster saying that money is never so poorly spent as when you're spending someone else's money to pay for stuff which is meant for someone else. I think it applies particularly well to this situation.

if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss

When the word gets around that the executives are taking all the money, who will be willing to fund them? I was considering to make a donation to the SSH project, but if I heard that they did something similar, there's no chance in hell I would give them anything. And I don't think I'm the only one who would do that.

If you really must insist on this socialist idea of spreading the wealth then by all means, move to Cuba and see how productive they are there.

That doesn't deserve an answer.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Magic5Ball]

Sourceforge lists 230,000 projects. Taking that as a lower bound for the number of open source projects out there, the list of 500 successful projects you could cite would constitute 0.2% of the listed projects. Wikipedia lists just 16 significant open source organizations. This doesn't scream commercial success or sustainability or robustness of the model in the general case, relative to all the other successful firms who do not operate on the open source model. Even if you made Google an open source company, it's market capitalization of $150 billion would represent 6.5% of the market capitalization of the top 50 NASDAQ companies. A similar argument obtains for Oracle. Clearly, Google is not anywhere near being a primarily open source company, and no combination of the world's open source companies would combine to approach the market capitalization of Google. At $6 billion, Red Hat is only an order of magnitude out.

As with the typical long tail, the top 20 projects look like they account for more external-facing activity than all the remaining projects combined. With respect to internal activity, again the top 50 projects account for more activity than the other 229,950 projects. (Note that my estimates could be off by a factor of 10 in either direction and not affect the substance of the argument.) This doesn't look very sustainable in the repeatability sense, although it might be strongly sustainable in the leaving better things for the future sense.

We would need some kind of objective indicator of strong sustainability (perhaps like a triple bottom line) to be able to meaningfully discuss the sustainability of the open source model.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Magic5Ball]

Gasoline-powered vehicles have been adopted by more and larger companies around the world than F/OSS, and have been around much longer. That does not automatically make any of the technologies or companies around gasoline-powered vehicles sustainable.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[gad_zuki!]

>I still gotta say I'm kinda smirking at you for thinking it's NOT part of your job as a sysadmin to find a way to do it yourself and instead whining about your lack of skills on the internet instead.

Oh I can do it, and can so many others. And No, Mozilla as an organization is not interested in my solutions because they dont want to support GPOs and central management.

Secondly, presenting a solution that involves a hackey script or three to my bosses doesnt inspire confidence. Presenting something that is built-in, is well tested, and has Mozilla-level polish not to mention some things that I might not have the time/resources to do like proper security auditing, testing on oddball systems and configs, etc.

Again, Im using my situation as an example because its fairly universal. You cant wring your hands over lack of marketshare while at the same time calling people who want x feature for corporate acceptance incompetent or lazy. If you want to beat IE, then you must court the world central administration. If Mozilla was a corporation that had to turn a profit then you'd be seeing these features in a week.

>Oh wait, that's how you must like it since you're afraid of a challenge.

Youre a real prick. I hope youre not in some position of prominance in the OSS community because attitudes like yours are just fucking horrible and show a kiddie mentality and a level of ignorance of business that makes all your opinions null and void.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Magic5Ball]

For a $500,000 investment, 13200% p/a is a reasonable rate of return.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[BikeHelmet]

So, SHOULD they break away from Google? Probably. CAN they break away from them (and maintain their quality)? Probably not. So, like a bad marriage of convenience, Mozilla is probably stuck with Google until the day (possibly) comes when Google themselves decide to break it off.

Why do they need to? Unlike some companies, which buy out the competition and stop innovating, ( *cough* Microsoft *cough* ) some companies like to push innovation by encouraging competition.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1484058&cid=30500264

I suspect Google is quite happy to have Mozilla working on Firefox and their internal teams working on Chrome.

Plus, it's a good deal for Google. Firefox doesn't have as much value to Google as a browser - but as an advertising market its value is increasing.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[authority69]

Then how am I supposed to make a rational decision about my line of work? All compensation for all positions for all companies should be freely available, so I know that if I sign on as a developer with shop A I'm getting a worse deal than if I signed on with shop B.

Companies advertise how much they want to pay for particular jobs all the time. Just go look at any job hunting website or newspaper. You can also reference industry surveys that may give you a suggestion as to the value of a particular skill set. But in the end, you earn what you earn, I earn what I earn, presumably based on merit.

If we have the same job and you do better than me, you should earn more than me. If I do better than you, I should earn more than you. If one company values your work more than another company and wants to pay you more, go work for that company. If no one is paying you what you want to earn, maybe your need to re-evaluate what your skills are worth. And if you can convince someone to pay you a million dollars to push some papers around on your desk while your surf the internet and do nothing, good for you. It's none of my business and I congratulate you on your accomplishment.

So what does your compensation have to do with mine or anyone else's? And what does that have to do with your career decisions? If you want to choose a job simply based on pay scale, that's fine, go ahead. But when you lose that job because you suck at it, please don't come whining to the rest of us. Perhaps instead you should choose a job that both fits your skills *and* pays something reasonable. And if you can't find such a job, tough luck. Improve your skills, get new skills, find a new job market, become an entrepreneur, whatever. Just because someone is good at checkers and wants to make $150k a year, doesn't mean such a job has to exist to satisfy them. And if someone does find a job paying $150k for playing checkers, great, let them. Why should anyone stop them? Someone apparently thinks that's worth $150k. The fact that anyone other than their employer may not agree amounts to jack squat.

Frankly, you just need to worry about yourself and how much you're getting paid. Worrying about how much other people get paid is a waste of time and leads to immature whining on the Internet.

All compensation for all positions for all companies should be freely available, so I know that if I sign on as a developer with shop A I'm getting a worse deal than if I signed on with shop B.

Quit being lazy. If you're not going to do the work to find the best jobs, why should you get the best jobs?

I should also be able to see exactly how many zeroes there are in every executive's paycheck, bonuses and stock options so I can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in a given company.

You already can. Publicly traded companies publish such things publicly. Privately held companies have no obligation to do so, but money is a great motivator. If you want to see and they don't want to show you, don't give them your money. If such a private company really wants your investment, just ask, maybe they'll show you to get your money.

No real loss, except for the opportunity cost of all that extra money going into improving the CEO's bankroll instead of into improving the company.

And what's the opportunity cost of losing said CEO to your competitor?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[cheesybagel]

You are dismissing a huge section of the marketplace. Most software is written in-house at large or less than large corporations for their own consumption. For such a corporation open source can provide a great platform to build their next in house custom tool or service or whatever. Google is probably one of the most well known examples because they are an Internet services company. Yet I have seen Linux installed in everything from cash register machines to cellphones to servers, etc.

Obviously you are not going to have the same level of profit if you just do software versus a closed source company. It is much more human resource intensive to do software services. However in the long term that is where most software will be heading towards. Software licensing is an artificial and distorted way to get payment for actual work done. As most general use software gets open sourced, closed source will remain either in niche markets, or as of yet undeveloped markets where there is little competition.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[cheesybagel]

You are comparing a technology with a licensing model.

IMO closed source software in the scale it is done today is unsustainable. It amounts to rent seeking behavior that magnifies barriers to market entry, by both individuals and corporations. Software has close, and converging towards, zero marginal cost.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[recoiledsnake]

Geez. Don't flame me :( It was a typo. I meant to say 'my university friends' not 'my university students'. I am not a professor :/

Anyway, go read http://slashdot.org/articles/04/10/19/1338254.shtml

Maybe your diatribe is better directed against the FOSS supporters that form a good half of Slashdot?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Magic5Ball]

You've neglected much, but especially my last two sentences. I'm not dismissing just a huge section of the marketplace, I'm dismissing the explicitly commercial software marketplace as a validator of the true value of OSS.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Magic5Ball]

A licensing model isn't a technology?

In either case, OSS isn't just a licensing model, it's at least a method of organization and operation, if not a model of how to get things done.

Widespread adoption alone does not make OSS as a licensing model, or as a technology, or as a method of organization, or as a paradigm sustainable or not sustainable. I want to believe that open source is leaving something behind other than added commercial or monetary value to whatever it touches, but it seems despairingly difficult to get that point across on this forum today.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[the_womble]

If I wanted to lock down the color settings, how might I do that?

Why would you want to do that?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[grasshoppa]

We have single purpose machines ( kiosk ). Their primary function is to go to a specific website and use it's functionality. These machines will have multiple users. These users are...."gifted". They like to set everything to 30pt font, high contrast. Then, they call me because they can't read what's on the screen.

Oh, and these are police officers. So they'll change the font to wingdings or something, as a prank to the next shift. So come 2 in the morning, I'm getting a phone call because their critical website is "down" and they are on a high speed chase and need access to that information.

Yes. I would very much like to lock down colors in the browser. And everything else, I might add.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[dveditz]

The issue at hand is the CEO of a for-profit organization backed by a non-profit organization, and hence pays no taxes whatsoever on the $66 million some of which goes into obscene CEO profits.

The Mozilla Corporation pays taxes on everything it earns just like every other taxable corporation. It is not allowed to share money back with the Foundation or risk costing the Foundation its non-profit status.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[calmofthestorm]

Eh I think the truth is something to the tune of all public companies must disclose and all private ones that don't voluntarily disclose don't get donations because people are smart.

Non-profits have a long, long history of "administrative overhead" and embezzlement, which is why you need to be very careful with your charitable donations and do your homework if you want to make a real difference.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[treeves]

So, everyone, then?
Who can *read* compiled code more easily than source code?

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

That money can easily go to hire 5 top notch C++ coders for an entire year to hunt down memory leaks and make the code more efficient.

Another myth from project management. Put 5 more developers on the project, get rid of useless managers, project will run better. Believe me, there's no such thing like a project like this, and only a few (sub) projects scale 100% by resources.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

And it is my business how much they make or what Mozilla does with it's money, because that money comes from Google searches that people like me perform on Firefox.

No, no its not. You may want to know, but legally, morally, ethically, they don't have to tell you squat. Just like you don't have to tell your own customers at wherever you work how much you earn.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

The mozilla foundation has 250+ employees for that size of organization $500k for an executive is probably just about right. Most for profit companies with that many employees would probably pay several times that amount for an executive. You may think that $500k is a lot for an executive, but you are a teacher (you mentioned university students), and to quote ghostbusters "You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*."

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[MrMr]

!(A>B) != AB

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[treeves]

Huh?
Are you saying that GP really meant that people read source and compiled code with equal ease, then? I assume your AB is supposed to be A<B.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[MrMr]

Yes, thank slashdot for that: 'A>B' does show as A>B, but you don't get A
I did mean that most people don't understand source code any better than they understand compiled code (i.e. not at all in either case)

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[badkarmadayaccount]

It would have been tragic, if it weren't so funny.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[KlomDark]

> And No, Mozilla as an organization is not interested in my solutions because they dont want to support GPOs and central management.

No wonder you have such a negative view - you have no confidence in yourself. All you can imagine is some spaghetti scripting. Yes, they'll reject that. Right away.

And you need to drop the Microsoft terminology - GPO is an Active Directory/MOM term.

The source is out there, use it, and you won't need to resort to spaghetti hacks. And even if you do, if you can't sell that to management, then you need to improve your sales skills and quit playing the victim.

Re:Wise or not, what choice do they really have?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, and as such they are not a public company (they have no stock to trade).

Mozilla Foundation is itself a 501(c) and publishes records on what their offices get paid. Mozilla Corporation officers are not on that list; it's more of a skeleton crew on the Foundation side.

Effectively, they have a scheme that conveniently hides the top officers of a non-profit foundation where those officers are, of course, compensated.

ehh .. feature gap?

[Jesus_Corpse]

Its success has forced rivals to raise their game, and the past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly.

When you look at it with a bird's eye view, I think FireFox has closed the gap, feature-wise.
True, add-ons never became really successful in Opera, but it was mostly complete already before firefox gained popularity

Re:ehh .. feature gap?

[Cogneato]

Firefox has been playing catch-up to Webkit on many fronts, from size, to speed, to feature set, to embracing the upcoming standards. There have been many stories about how the (hopefully friendly) competition with Webkit has made Firefox developers rethink their approaches from time to time. While each of the browsers had different specific features before the others, looking at the overall average,there never was a gap between Firefox and Webkit based browsers. As a web developer, I have to say that the competition between browsers, the push towards standards and a better user experiences has been a massive boon to me as a developer and the users of the browsers. The Firefox fanboy claim in the story summary was, at the very least, uninformed.

someone

[Anonymous Coward]

.."seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly"... Firefox is a joke compared to Opera ... for what its worth firefox seems to simply take the direction Opera sets ..

Re:someone

[bunratty]

For example, when Opera started supporting GreaseMonkey scripts as user javascript?

Re:someone

[slyborg]

LOL,this AC has posted about 10 times in this thread.

Opera is an excellent browser overall, and they are way ahead of Mozilla specifically on small footprint devices like consoles and handsets. This was a good strategic move and while I haven't used Fennec, I suspect that Opera will rise as the smartphone market continues to develop. On Nokia devices, Opera is my default browser.

That said, their fanbois are massive fail. One reason Opera has issues with mindshare is that it seems that most of its users' approach to promoting their platform is:

"Your browser does x? Pah, Opera did that back in 1978 on punch card, you're a LOSER for not using the Pioneer Of All Things Browser". My feeling then is, 'Gee, if I start using Opera, I might also turn into a massive message board tool...back to Firefox!'

Also, if legacy counted for anything, Firefox is the heir of Netscape, which antedates Opera and thus Opera is just a johnny-come-lately to this whole WWW thing.
Killer apps? NoScript + AdBlock Plus. Deliver that functionality with the same ease of use in a browser that doesn't come from the New Evil Empire, and I'll consider switching. So far, Opera is still no go there, those two apps on FF are still superior.

Re:someone

[sznupi]

So, who is a bigger message board tool? Those who constantly flood them with false claims about their favorite product or...those who simply point out the first group is in error?

BTW, Opera has noscript built in for a long time...and adblock too (this list www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/opera/ + UI element blocker). You just...don't know that, and flood message board with your lack of knowledge.

Re:someone

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is an excellent company overall, and they are way ahead of Microsoft specifically on small footprint devices like consoles and handsets. This was a good strategic move and while I haven't used Windows Mobile, I suspect that Apple will rise as the smartphone market continues to develop. On Nokia devices, Safari is my default browser.

That said, their fanbois are massive fail. One reason Apple has issues with mindshare is that it seems that most of its users' approach to promoting their platform is:

"Your OS does x? Pah, Apple did that back in 1978 on punch card, you're a LOSER for not using the Pioneer Of All Things Computer". My feeling then is, 'Gee, if I start using Apple, I might also turn into a massive message board tool...back to Microsoft!'

Also, if legacy counted for anything, Apple is the heir of BSD, which antedates Microsoft and thus Microsoft is just a johnny-come-lately to this whole computer thing.
Killer apps? Games + MS Office. Deliver that functionality with the same ease of use in a OS that doesn't come from the New Evil Empire, and I'll consider switching. So far, Apple is still no go there, those two apps on Windows are still superior.

Re:someone

[TeXMaster]

For example, when Opera started supporting GreaseMonkey scripts as user javascript?

Well, Opera's UserJS feature was deployed at more or less the same time as the GM extension for Firefox, so it's hard to say who invented the thing first if you just look at user javascript enhancements, but the UserJS feature in Opera builds on top of an older "browser JS" feauture, an Opera-updated javascript file that is used to fix broken sites (i.e. sites that intentionally misbehave after crappy browser detection), so the UserJS feature roots in Opera are rather older than the inception of Firefox' GM. Obviously, Opera's support for GM scripts via UserJS was implemented _after_ GM. Additionally, due to its roots, Opera's 'native' UserJS can do a range of things that GM scripts cannot do, since it triggers earlier and is not sandboxed the way GM is. So, yep, Opera still got there first, and is still ahead of the competition.

Re:someone

[Rockoon]

For example, when FireFox users created an extension called GreaseMonkey so that they had the same functionality that already existed in Opera known as User JavaScript.

Opera's "support" for GreaseMonkey extends only so far as to support some of the proprietary bullshit that GreaseMonkey introduced due to limitations in FireFox's DOM support.

Some of the proprietary bullshit that isn't implemented in Opera is FireFox specific, such as

allowing a script to manipulate FireFox menus (what could possibly go wrong?)
or outright stupid (no cross-domain protections with greasemonkey's xmlhttprequest, what could possibly go wrong?)

What pisses me off is that some of the failings of FireFox (bugs they were too lazy to fix, after years of being told) have made it into the HTML5 specification... thanks mozilla asshats.. good to see you have so much control over the W3C

Re:someone

[sopssa]

Opera has built-in "NoScript". Disable javascript globally and enable it in site preferences you want to have it. Really easy. (and not just javascript - you can do the same per-site configuration with a range of things)

Re:someone

[hkmwbz]

GreaseMonkey came after Opera's User JS. But GM is an optional extension anyway.

Re:someone

[hkmwbz]

One reason Opera has issues with mindshare is that it seems that most of its users' approach to promoting their platform is:

That's a blatant straw man. That was not the other guy's point at all. His point was that it was claimed that Opera was the one closing the feature gap, when the fact is that Opera has been leading all along.

Even if Opera came after Netscape, it still defined the modern browser: Popup blocking, easy search from the address bar or search field, viewing pages within the main window, etc.

Choices? Really?

[stokessd]

Seriously, who should be the default search provider, payments or not? If I've got a choice, I'm heading to google, not because of some sort of "I love google" sort of thing, but because they have the best search. If firefox defaults to "Bing!" or "aunt martha's internet search and lemon pies", it won't matter as long as I can set it to Google.

It's the ability to choose that I want to protect, not what the default is.

It would be annoying if they switched to a different default, because that would be one more customization step every time I install Firefox.

Sheldon

Choices need to be made.

[Tirith45]

I think it's bad that FireFox, lies in Googles hands, because if Google changes their ideals and shifts into a new direction that Mozilla doesn't like they lose their sponsor and it makes a ton of headaches for both companies. I agree with elrous0 I believe FireFox should break away but at this point they do not have a sponsor so they couldn't break away, unless they wanted to become self sufficent and have to hire a whole new team.But alas even if they do become self sufficent, they would still need the backing of a search engine. Bing, Microsofts creation, is okay, it's not the greatest but I perfer Google to Bing and haven't really had extensive testing with it. Yahoo on the other hand, has dropped out of the race more or less as Microsoft, I believe paid them to drop out.

Re:Choices need to be made.

[mgblst]

Thanks for that, captain obvious. You realise you haven't actually added anything new, and didn't actually say anything.

Re:Choices need to be made.

[Risen888]

I think it's bad that FireFox, lies in Googles hands

It's Firefox. There is only one capital letter. It's in the front.

Lone Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is very dependant on others, just like Linux. There are no islands in the software industry, unless you are Microsoft, in which case you are more like a shitty continent, like Asia. But that is beside the point. I've been in hotels with those interfacse too, and saw the Opera logo.

Re:What ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. But you often hear people who think that Firefox 'invented' tabbed browsing. Oh the ignorance...

Better question

[lenova]

Is it really wise for Slashdot to be so dependent on rehashing the same story over and over?

Re:Better question

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not dependent on this story alone. No, there are other stories it is dependent upon rehashing.

Re:Better question

[Frosty Piss]

No, these are the stories dependent on rehashing: a7544691c62afb529c23486bb82a295d

user's best interest

[farble1670]

it's in mozilla's, and their user's best interest to provide their users with the best search engine by default. that's google as of today. mozilla should be happy that they are getting paid to do the best thing for their users.

as far as i know google isn't doing anything to subvert mozilla. they are just fairly competing with them. mozilla is open source, and open source shouldn't have any pride. if google bests them at some point, they shouldn't take it as an insult. let the best browser win.

Re:user's best interest

[Kijori]

The user's best interest is not very well served by Mozilla going bankrupt and having to stop work on Firefox. Compared to that, having to change your default search engine if you prefer Google doesn't seem too much of a hardship.

Re:user's best interest

[farble1670]

The user's best interest is not very well served by Mozilla going bankrupt and having to stop work on Firefox.

there is no reason to try to subvert chrome indirectly by spiting google search. mozilla should continue to do what's best for the user and compete on those merits. google is the best search today, and that's what most users will want as the default.

yes, it's easy to change the default back to google, but heck, it's also easy to uninstall the MSFT / bing toolbar. maybe mozilla should ship that one out of the box. who cares if it's not what the user's want right? supporting bing hurts google / chrome, and that's a good thing right?

google is more important to most people than mozilla. not having google as the default search engine is not only going to lose them the $$$ from google but will also turn lowbie users away from firefox. "hey, i want the browser that uses google search." ... that's chrome.

Re:user's best interest

[Kijori]

there is no reason to try to subvert chrome indirectly by spiting google search

I don't follow this - how would it "subvert Chrome indirectly"? I don't think Google is really dependant on Firefox toolbar-searches to stay afloat!

mozilla should continue to do what's best for the user and compete on those merits.

If Mozilla don't have any money, they can't pay any developers. If they can't pay any developers, they can't keep their browser up to date. While I'm sure users love having Google as their default search-engine, I think they like new features more, I think they like speed increases more, and I think they like increased security more. If having Google search was the dealbreaker they could have stopped developing years ago with nothing to fear from IE.

yes, it's easy to change the default back to google, but heck, it's also easy to uninstall the MSFT / bing toolbar. maybe mozilla should ship that one out of the box. who cares if it's not what the user's want right?

Ah yes, I'd forgotten we were in the world of black and white, where compromise is impossible and everything must be taken to the extreme. There is a balance to be found; Mozilla want to make a product for people to use. To do that they need to make a product that people like. They also need to find a source of money to pay the people to make it. If they go 100% to the users' corner they will not have a product, if they go 100% to the corporate corner they will not have any users. Somewhere around the middle - say, at the point where a search engine sponsors them to become the default choice - would let them have a product and users. Of course, this isn't the only source of funding, but you get the idea.

supporting bing hurts google / chrome, and that's a good thing right?

You keep saying this; I didn't actually say anything about hurting Google or Chrome. I'm not really sure where you're going with it - software development isn't a zero-sum game, especially when it's not done for profit.

google is more important to most people than mozilla. not having google as the default search engine is not only going to lose them the $$$ from google but will also turn lowbie users away from firefox. "hey, i want the browser that uses google search." ... that's chrome.

Well as I said, if you're right then this isn't a problem - no need for development money, all people want is Google in the top-right hand corner and they will be happy if the project stagnates. Alternatively it's just about possible that people want a variety of things, and possibly even that different people value different things... differently! Internet Explorer didn't lose out to Firefox because it didn't have Google search - it lost out because Firefox was a better browser. These days Firefox is losing out to Chrome because some of its users value speed and reliability over extensions.

Users want a thousand different things each, and none of them want the same thousand. Implementing the "best features" is a balancing act.

Re:user's best interest

[farble1670]

there is no reason to try to subvert chrome indirectly by spiting google search

I don't follow this - how would it "subvert Chrome indirectly"? I don't think Google is really dependant on Firefox toolbar-searches to stay afloat!

i didn't say google was dependent on mozilla. they do pay them $66 million though, so obviously having them there on the default home page is worth something wouldn't you say?

mozilla should continue to do what's best for the user and compete on those merits.

If Mozilla don't have any money, they can't pay any developers. If they can't pay any developers, they can't keep their browser up to date. While I'm sure users love having Google as their default search-engine, I think they like new features more, I think they like speed increases more, and I think they like increased security more. If having Google search was the dealbreaker they could have stopped developing years ago with nothing to fear from IE.

if they can't get funding it's because there's a lack of interest in the project. if there's a lack of interest, let it die a natural death. that's not a bad thing, it's just the evolution of software. are you crying that netscape / netscape browser isn't around anymore?

yes, it's easy to change the default back to google, but heck, it's also easy to uninstall the MSFT / bing toolbar. maybe mozilla should ship that one out of the box. who cares if it's not what the user's want right?

Ah yes, I'd forgotten we were in the world of black and white,

having google the default home page, or not, is black and white.

google is more important to most people than mozilla. not having google as the default search engine is not only going to lose them the $$$ from google but will also turn lowbie users away from firefox. "hey, i want the browser that uses google search." ... that's chrome.

Well as I said, if you're right then this isn't a problem - no need for development money, all people want is Google in the top-right hand corner and they will be happy if the project stagnates. Alternatively it's just about possible that people want a variety of things, and possibly even that different people value different things... differently! Internet Explorer didn't lose out to Firefox because it didn't have Google search - it lost out because Firefox was a better browser. These days Firefox is losing out to Chrome because some of its users value speed and reliability over extensions.

Users want a thousand different things each, and none of them want the same thousand. Implementing the "best features" is a balancing act.

as sad as it makes the average /. user, people do make decisions based on things that might seem silly to you. like whether it's installed by default, what search engine it uses, and whether my neighbor bob uses it. this is pretty well established and it's why IE has a dominant market share.

IE didn't lose BTW, it's beating FF handily. unless you are stating a subjective opinion that it's better. in which case i'd redirect you somewhere other than /. where that can be debated fairly.

Re:user's best interest

[Kijori]

i didn't say google was dependent on mozilla. they do pay them $66 million though, so obviously having them there on the default home page is worth something wouldn't you say?

You said they could "subvert" Google.

Subvert:
1. to overthrow (something established or existing).
2. to cause the downfall, ruin, or destruction of.

So Mozilla are going to "indirectly overthrow or cause the downfall of Google" - I still don't follow how.

if they can't get funding it's because there's a lack of interest in the project. if there's a lack of interest, let it die a natural death. that's not a bad thing, it's just the evolution of software. are you crying that netscape / netscape browser isn't around anymore?

If they can't get funding then there's a lack of funding for the project. 25% of people use Firefox, and it has been downloaded over one billion times. There's interest in the project, and there will still be interest in it if the funding gets cut tomorrow. There isn't a magic relationship between people wanting a software project and someone paying for it - the Firefox developers have to find a way to make it attractive to a sponsor.

having google the default home page, or not, is black and white.

Well, that's true, but it's got absolutely nothing to do with what I wrote. I don't mean to be rude - really I don't - but please read what I write and make sure you understand before you hit reply, because I'm spending a lot of time responding to things I didn't say and explaining what words mean.

I was responding to you when you wrote:
"yes, it's easy to change the default back to google, but heck, it's also easy to uninstall the MSFT / bing toolbar. maybe mozilla should ship that one out of the box. who cares if it's not what the user's want right?",
because you implied that if we make one concession to commercial interests we have to concede everything. This is clearly not the case.

as sad as it makes the average /. user, people do make decisions based on things that might seem silly to you.

No, you know what, they don't. I don't think their reasons are "silly" just because I don't care about them, I accept that people use a lot of different factors to come to a decision and that they won't necessarily agree with me. In fact, I said that pretty explicitly.

You, on the other hand, said "not having google as the default search engine [...] will [...] turn lowbie users away from firefox". Only one of us is generalising about what people want, and only one of us is calling those people silly.

Some people will choose Firefox because it has Google as its default search engine. Others won't care. If Firefox changes its default search engine to Bing then the people that don't care about Firefox and just want Google as the default search engine will all move to Chrome. They won't lose anything. The people that want to use Firefox because they prefer it can use Firefox - whereas they can't if the project goes under.

IE didn't lose BTW, it's beating FF handily. unless you are stating a subjective opinion that it's better. in which case i'd redirect you somewhere other than /. where that can be debated fairly.

The phrase was "lose out" - I refer you to my comment above about reading comprehension.

Re:What ?

[bunratty]

I remember that not long ago Opera didn't support client-side XSLT when IE and Firefox had for years.

well,

[Anonymous Coward]

about time to fork Firefox, isn't it?

Bias Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

"[Firefox] the past two years have seen ... Opera close the features gap significantly." Are we re-writing documented history? Opera is the longest running GUI Web browser, first to use tabs, sessions, customizable skins, ACID 2 & 3 compliant, download management panel, widget support, and a whole host of other features Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google have taken and continue to take from Opera ASA. I suppose when your non-Opera Web browser lacks the security track record Opera possesses, delusive jealousy becomes a factor.

Re:Bias Posting

[bunratty]

Safari was the first to fully pass Acid3.

Re:Bias Posting

[TeXMaster]

"[Firefox] the past two years have seen ... Opera close the features gap significantly." Are we re-writing documented history? Opera is the longest running GUI Web browser, first to use tabs, sessions, customizable skins, ACID 2 & 3 compliant, download management panel, widget support, and a whole host of other features Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google have taken and continue to take from Opera ASA. I suppose when your non-Opera Web browser lacks the security track record Opera possesses, delusive jealousy becomes a factor.

I wouldn't write it off as delusive jealousy, maybe it's just plain ignorance: I'm starting to think that Opera should do a better job at advertising its constant being one (when not several) step(s) ahead of the competition. Firefox, after all, has always had much more aggressive campaigning, which combined with its starting off from the vast Mozilla suite fanbase, and the fact that it's open source, put it in a much more favorable position, so that if and when people actually get to try Opera, they've already seen all the features in FF 'already', even though Opera implemented them first.

Re:Bias Posting

[Rockoon]

Opera did it before that

But I want to be honest here, in that you failed to cite the first instance of safari passing it, and guess who came first? It was a tie. They both announced on the exact same day.

Re:Bias Posting

[bunratty]

No, that was when they reached a 100% score with correct rendering. Safari did not pass the performance aspect of the test until the post I gave. I still have not seen Opera claim they pass the performance aspect of the test. You can see Opera's acknowledgement of this little detail in the post you cite

There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.

Re:Bias Posting

[Rockoon]

Well I can tell you that the Opera 10 alpha rendered it very quickly, well under a second on my 2ghz system, on the day it was announced.

But honestly.. you seem to be claiming that Opera has not passed the test, since you "have still not seen Opera claim [that] they pass the performance aspect of the test?"
Really?

Re:Bias Posting

[bunratty]

I don't know whether Opera does or doesn't fully pass the Acid3 test. I can tell you with certainty that I have never seen Opera Software ASA make that claim. If you could point me to where they do make such a claim, I would be truly grateful.

Re:Bias Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera wasn't first to use tabs. That was NetCaptor. Opera had an MDI interface, but did not have tabs. NetCaptor, written by Adam Stiles.

Re:Bias Posting

[atheistmonk]

More importantly, a lot of features in Opera are in Firefox optionally via extensions. I can have or not have gestures, for example.

Re:Bias Posting

[Tim C]

Opera is the longest running GUI Web browser

If by that you mean that of the browsers currently available, it came out first, then you're wrong; IE was released in late 1995, while Opera was released in December 1996 (from the Wikipedia pages on Internet Explorer and Opera.

If that's not what you mean, then what do you mean?

Re:Bias Posting

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Opera fan boy. Opera is not the longest running GUI browser. Firefox traces its roots back to Mosaic quite directly. We were using that before you were whining in your parents basement about BROWSER SUPERIORITY on the internet.

Re:Bias Posting

[Rockoon]

How about you show someplace where Opera claimed they had trouble with performance on Acid3? I suspect that you jumped to a conclusion when Opera announced *passing Acid3* but that there were "still some issues." You apparently decided what those issues were without evidence.

How about this. Download an run Opera. Now download and run Safari. See how fast Opera is compared to Safari? Notice how there is a noticeable pause at 69/100 on Safari, but not on Opera? Thanks. It seems to me like Safari still fails, even though I accept their claim that they passed.

Re:Bias Posting

[hkmwbz]

You can have or not have gestures in Opera as well. Everything is optional in Opera, and mostly disabled by default.

Google will decide FF fate on my computers

[jgtg32a]

Firefox is not that good anymore, its running far too slow, and does a bunch of short lockups. Chrome finally added extensions, I'm just waiting for my must haves before I say good bye.
Xmarks is good to go, the adblock is about there(it apparently only hides adds not blocks, so eh), I'm just waiting on NoScript then I'm gone.

Re:Google will decide FF fate on my computers

[Malc]

I don't know why you were modded down - too many Mozilla apologists around here presumably. I'm pretty sick of Firefox eating up 1.5GB of memory on my work XP computer, with a restart returning the session at 230MB. It's also out of control on my MacBook, and additionally, if I have more than 5 tabs open, it starts making enough CPU activity just sitting there to put the temperature up.

The whole architecture is getting pretty long in the the tooth - why is it when a Code Collaborator web page is spending several meetings being rendered that I can't use the browser for anything else? Oh yes, that's right: it's a monolithic process. But then getting rid of the monolithic process concept has been a battle since the Netscape days back in the late 90s. Some people are still absurdly sticking with it with Seamonkey. IE8 is beginning to look more appealing, but honestly, I'm just waiting until all of my extensions are available for Chrome, then I'm gone. I installed Thunderbird the other day and downloaded 2 years worth of webmail (since I last used Thunderbird as my main email client). Again, long in the tooth - I'm back on webmail and I'm just waiting for a day when I've got enough time to transfer it all over Apple Mail.

Mozilla Foundation: you've got some work to do.

Re:Google will decide FF fate on my computers

[Ihmhi]

Firefox is currently using about 430MB on my rig, but I have something like 50 tabs open. 3.0, I remember it going over a gig, but that hasn't happened lately. I'm pretty light on the extensions as far as they go; I have less than a dozen.

Re:Google will decide FF fate on my computers

[Malc]

Mine restarted with a restored session yesterday at about 230MB. By early afternoon it had grown to 750MB. It makes a sieve look watertight.

Privacy, and conflicts of interest

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always worried that Firefox is making privacy too low a focus. Many of the privacy features I'd like would to see in Firefox would reduce the amount of data Google and other search engines gather about my WWW habits.

For as long as the Mozilla Foundation is financially dependent on Google, I presume that the Mozilla Foundation is betraying its users privacy in return for Google's money.

Being free software usually prevents projects from betraying their users, but this is a bizare case where those controls haven't worked.

(I know I can solve *my* problem by installing various plugins or changing browsers, but I'm not just looking for a quick fix for me, I'd like the privacy of my family and friends to be protected too.)

Re:Privacy, and conflicts of interest

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Firefox do to send your personal information to Google, the only Google interactions I can think of are the 'Phishing and Malware Protection features' (only downloads a list, doesn't send all sites to Google as it did in the past) and default homepage (not a real problem)?

Re:Privacy, and conflicts of interest

[Anonymous Coward]

For as long as the Mozilla Foundation is financially dependent on Google, I presume that the Mozilla Foundation is betraying its users privacy in return for Google's money.

Why do you think that Mozilla deriving revenue from search (from Google and other search providers) would have any impact on Mozilla's privacy concerns for users? Where have you seen Mozilla doing something that's adverse to user privacy because they earn revenue from Search? Please cite examples where this has happened.

Competitors?

[Goalie_Ca]

Sure, google now has a browser but why do they have a browser. Are they trying to sell the browser? No, they needed a browser for its utility and not for its direct profitability. I think they would be damned happy to continue funding mozilla since mozilla is moving forward and doing a pretty good job. They are also redirecting a lot of traffic google's way!

Re:Competitors?

[PhilHibbs]

Yes absolutely, I agree. Mozilla doesn't lose anything by Google having a browser and some people using Chrome rather than Firefox. Mozilla's aim should be freedom of choice in quality browser software.

Re:Competitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome is an attempt to spur the others into faster javascript and other features that improve user experience on Google sites. If FF and the others catch up there, Google is unlikely to be upset about it. Competition for better performance/stability, even at the expense of their own browser is in Google's interest. Think of it as a brokerage house funding development of multiple financial models so that they can make use of the best one.

Re:What ?

[sopssa]

Features here don't mean some absolutely obscure language. It means the mouse gestures, tabbed browsing, speed dial, customization. things that actually to user.

Opera has always been the leader in this aspect.

Whatever pays the bills, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, if they were making Firefox to merely be "the jewel of Open Source technology" - they wouldn't have accepted money for it being sponsored, right?

Strictly speaking, in business terms, Mozilla has a bunch of applications, and I'll be generous enough to guess that they are competitors in the sectors that they target, (Bug tracking, email, web development). But they aren't making any money off of those, that I'm aware of.

Because of this, they HAVE to be dependant on someone, and given the size of everything, its kind of a large bill. So unless the entire Open Source community is going to pitch in a buck here or there, to cover the costs of producing, hosting, and dealing with these products, I don't see them lasting forever.

If something as simple as "Setting Google as the homepage" covers your bills and then some, thats a smart deal to make. I would renew that contract, most people set Google to their home page anyways. Call it "dependant" if you want, its just good business practice.

And if Google decides they don't want to shell it out because they've started up Chrome, that will be the moment that truly defines whether their Standards can actually stand firm. Either everyone will contribute to keep it alive, or someone will claim ownership of it all and license it with the most expensive lawyers they can find, or the project will slowly but surely fall off of the map.

come on,

[eexaa]

$66 million isn't THAT much. Nothing a good fundraiser couldn't do.

Re:come on,

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's ask Bruce Wayne for help.

One fundraiser with his friends...

Privacy, and conflicts of interest

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

I'm always worried that Firefox is making privacy too low a focus. Many of the privacy features I'd like would to see in Firefox would reduce the amount of data Google and other search engines gather about my WWW habits.

For as long as the Mozilla Foundation is financially dependent on Google, I presume that the Mozilla Foundation is betraying its users privacy in return for Google's money.

Being free software usually prevents projects from betraying their users, but this is a bizare case where those controls haven't worked.

(I know I can solve *my* problem by installing various plugins or changing browsers, but I'm not just looking for a quick fix for me, I'd like the privacy of my family and friends to be protected too.)

Just buy 'em out

[Anonymous Coward]

Google should dump Chrome and buy Mozilla. Make it lean more toward the use of Google applications and web services. As long as they don't try to morph it into Chrome, it'd be cool.

Re:FOSS loses more credibility

[Ossifer]

OT Haiti situation aside, there is no "charity" here -- Google is paying Mozilla for customers, and making money off of this deal.

Mozilla should simply offer up their search defaults to the highest bidder, ka-ching! (Or is it ka-Bing?)

Firefox still winning

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter if it's competing with Google as long as it's stays on top, Google can't afford to lose Firefox until Chrome has picked up more market share, currently despite it's speed Firefox is 5x as popular, until that is reversed Google have to at least match what their competitors would pay and currently I bet MS would pay a fair bit for just 25% of mistyped URLs to go through BING.

Re:What ?

[bunratty]

Oh, you mean like automatic software updating and automatic crash reporting, for example?

Or..

[Thyamine]

They can use that to help push them to be better. They need the money more than they can worry about Google being a competitor. I will say that I used Firefox for many years, but when Chrome came out for OS X I switched. It's faster, and cleaner (cleaner being my relative term for how it 'feels'). I still use Firefox for web development and testing because of the addons, but Firefox has grown sluggish lately. As many have said before, they need to strip it back down, and let a lot of their extras be added in by the users if they really want it. I'm doing without several of my preferred plugins (AdBlock especially) just because Chrome is that much snappier feeling.

Re:Or..

[Anonymous Coward]

The dev channel of Chrome now has extensions for OS X. I now have adblock, flashblock and noscript for Chrome and I'm not looking back to Firefox at all.

Re:Or..

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Last I checked, there is an AdBlock extension for Chrome. In face, there appear to be more and more extensions popping up for Chrome each day. You might want to do some searching about customizing and extending Chrome before you resign yourself to just doing without.

Re:Or..

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean you're going without AdBlock?

So the interesting part is...

[locallyunscene]

Should Mozilla do anything about it?

I doubt Google will forsake FF yet. Their market share plus competition with MS makes them an attractive ally. Until chrome gains substantial share(and I think it will) supporting FF is in Google's best interest.

At that point though, FF will probably need a kick in the butt. Some new forks moving away from the relatively stable and comfortable, but slower to change browser it's become seems to me be a natural part of the life cycle of a project like FF. It has provided a solid foundation for other open source browsers, and has opened up the market in general. On some level, what's left for it to do other than compete like any other browser? If it maintains good market share, Google will want to keep funding it. If it doesn't, then a large change will be needed to make it relevant again.

Re:So the interesting part is...

[DragonWriter]

I doubt Google will forsake FF yet. Their market share plus competition with MS makes them an attractive ally. Until chrome gains substantial share(and I think it will) supporting FF is in Google's best interest.

Supporting FF is in Google's best interest as long as FF is an open-source browser that supports the standard technologies that Google services rely on, even if Chrome gains significant marketshare. Google's services being usable in a wide variety of competing browsers, rather than being tied to a particular (even if popular) browser are a big marketing point for Google's services, after all.

Defaults

[zlogic]

I think that if Google doesn't sponsor Mozilla, they'll probably switch to Bing. Firefox has a large marketshare, if we add IE to the mix (which already has Bing as the default choice), something like 90% of the browser market will be using Bing. Of couse, some people will revert to Google. But Bing is good enough for most search queries, and a lot of users won't care.

Some versions of Firefox already stopped using Google - for example the official Russian version uses Yandex because in CIS countries it's more popular than Google. The Chinese version could migrate to Baidu etc.

Re:Defaults

[elloGov]

I'm with you. I think the competition surrounding Firefox (Microsoft, Google) can also be seen as a positive business leverage. As long as Firefox retains a substantial share of the market by providing a desired browser, they can negotiate revenues and partnerships not only with multinational corporations but also region-specific companies. They are an inter-dealing browser. The important thing for Firefox to never forget is that they are dependent on the competition given their current revenue model. Lastly, someone posted the ignorance of certain issues by the FF developers. The memory usage and leaks need to be addressed. They are real.

Re:Defaults

[recoiledsnake]

I think that if Google doesn't sponsor Mozilla, they'll probably switch to Bing. Firefox has a large marketshare, if we add IE to the mix (which already has Bing as the default choice), something like 90% of the browser market will be using Bing. .

A large chunk of those machines are sold by OEMs, and Google has an agreement with a lot of them to have Google as the search engine(even in IE I think) and Chrome as the default browser.

Re:Defaults

[macshit]

I think that if Google doesn't sponsor Mozilla, they'll probably switch to Bing.

Huh? Why on earth would they?

If nobody's paying them to choose, they'll just default to the best and most popular search engine -- which is google.

Google wont upset mozilla.

[unity100]

for, if they do, they will have upset us. we are the small developers, webmasters, publishers, contributors. we are adsense, we are pagerank, analytics, this that, whatever google has devised in regard to content syndication on the web.

if they do, we will upset google.

Re:Google wont upset mozilla.

[revlayle]

So google has to keep paying mozilla to fund their project instead of promoting their own browser (for better or worse) so they don't upset you guys???

Re:Google wont upset mozilla.

[maxume]

I agree that his logic is tortured, but I bet Google is making money on Firefox referrals. And as long as Firefox has millions of users, I imagine it will continue to make sense for Google to work with them, rather than ignoring them.

Re:Google wont upset mozilla.

[revlayle]

I will agree with this... but even if something happened "overnight" that mozilla went down and no new builds were ever made, the rest of existing installs still operate the way they always have - of course, until they want to switch browsers (because their now non-supported browser is not updated anymore) and switch to a browser that does not benefit Google (and if Google parted ways with Mozilla - we know that Mozillia is not over with, at least not immediately, at they would be gambling on their own browser, while a very GOOD browser, is still a BIG BIG gamble)

Re:Google wont upset mozilla.

[Anonymous Coward]

So google has to keep paying mozilla to fund their project instead of promoting their own browser (for better or worse) so they don't upset you guys???

Google doesn't pay Mozilla to fund its projects. Google pays Mozilla because Mozilla is a great source of cheap search traffic for Google and search traffic is where Google makes about 70% of its revenue.

Re:FOSS loses more credibility

[Archangel Michael]

Google needed Firefox. Well not specifically Firefox, but a browser other than IE. They could have gone to Opera, but Opera was already "corporate" software.

So now that Google has developed Chrome, they really don't need Firefox much longer. And as part of my "default" Firefox install, AdBlock doesn't fit into Google's corporate strategy.

I like Chrome, but as long as I don't have AdBlock for it, I'll keep using Firefox. Once you get used to the Internet relatively free of crap ads blinking in your face, telling you your the One Millionth Visitor, you can't go back to it.

Sorry Google.

What is Google paying for ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are paying for advertisement revenue caused by the default settings in Firefox. Until Chrome is a serious competitor, Google will pay Mozilla just for not including Adblock directly into the browser.

Re:What is Google paying for ?

[drougie]

Yeah, especially given that Google has opened up Chrome to AdBlock and AdSweep and has even welcomed the use of them in spite of being an ad broker, your remark really makes sense.

Re:What is Google paying for ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google says a lot of things. Just compare google privacy statement http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy.html with what Google CEO said: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Do you think they will admit that a stupid extension written in javascript will hurt their revenues or bussiness model?

do me

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Please do a fundraiser for the campaign I'm working on. Thanks.

(It's End Software Patents, bank details when the first 1% is raised.)

Re:What ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you mean like automatic software updating and automatic crash reporting, for example?

Those are only really useful if your program has lots of security holes and crashes often. ;)

Donationware?

[jackchance]

I am a browser slut. I currently use firefox, safari and chrome. I constantly shift around my browser of choice.

That said, I would pay $1 per year to Mozilla to help support their dev team. According to most estimates there are well over 100 million users of firefox.

If each of us gave a dollar, that would be plenty!!

Re:Donationware?

[recoiledsnake]

I, for one, am not going to contribute a cent till they reduce their exorbitant CEO and other executive compenstaion. Last known, it was around $550K for the CEO.

Re:Donationware?

[jackchance]

Is that exorbitant?
I honestly don't know. But i think it is fair for a FOSS company to pay wages that are competitive with for-profit companies.

How much does the CEO of Opera make?

Re:Donationware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad 98% of that income would go straight to the few higher-ups, and maybe a handful of spare change would make it down to the developers, programmers, and other related staff that actually DO work.

Re:Donationware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has ~350 million users worldwide.

FireFox is in Denial

[adipocere]

The developers of FireFox are in a state of denial; that rarely lends itself to dealing with reality-based threats very well.

Take the memory management issue -- the developers routinely say "There's no such thing." Or "you're using too many plug-ins and extensions." Or any number of excuses. I can hit the same pages with Opera as with FireFox, with less memory usage. And I'm not using plug-ins. The reflex nerd answer is "well, stop browsing that way!" That is a foolish thing to say, as it will cause me to switch to a browser where I do not have to alter my habits.

You can see that Internet Explorer's market share continues to drop, but as of late, it is not through growth in FireFox. It's from the adoption of other competing browsers. As long as the Mozilla Foundation is operating with the THERE ARE NO BAD PROBLEMS, JUST BAD USERS mindset, they'll continue to make more and more strategic blunders. Reliance on Google is one of them. Google has no friends, only temporary allies which may be either dispatched or eaten when it is convenient.

Re:FireFox is in Denial

[RebelWebmaster]

*citation please Seriously, show me where the developers have ever said "There's no such thing". And don't start with the ancient blog post by Ben Goodger (a Chrome developer now, BTW) which even Mozilla developers have refuted. Honestly, I keep seeing this tripe posted as fact but nothing to actually substantiate it. Fanboys != Developers.

Re:FireFox is in Denial

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent speaks the truth. Mod him up.

Firefox = not for profit

[proslack]

In ten years, Google will be as despised as Microsoft. In twenty years, it will be just another mainstream company. IBM->Microsoft->Google-> ?. There's always a new gorilla waiting to toss the heavyweight off his perch. As a non-profit, Mozilla has a different set of fears and challenges.

google will continue the deal

[Anonymous Coward]

google's biggest income is your time. the more people that use their search(and consequently their other tools and programs) the more money they get. i don't think that google cares that firefox are competing because it gets them eyes, which is what they depend on.

Re:What ?

[Menchi]

Don't forget user javascript. While it's not a mainstream feature and technically wasn't invented by Firefox but the guy who wrote the Greasemonkey plugin, it's definitely one of the features I don't want to miss with Opera and Firefox had it first. But yeah, "closing the feature gap" is kinda delusional.

chrome is werid

[farble1670]

i tried to move to chrome actually. seemed like the right thing to do since i've swallowed the google pill many times over. it's UI is just odd. every other app has a menu bar, but chrome thinks they don't need one. well, actually it still has menus, they are just accessible from other places in the app where you would not logically look for them.

for example, the "preferences" menu is next to the location bar. it's the little wrench icon. okay, every other app has a menu>tools or menu>edit>prefs. chrome still puts it all under a menu, but they moved the menu into a non-standard location. every other major OS has menu bars. like them or not people are used to them. it's intuitive to start poking around in the menu bar when you want to find something.

Re:chrome is werid

[revlayle]

I prefer this, that way no on screen real estate is used up by a menu bar. I only commonly use a few options in the "wrench" menu and I'd rather have it all hidden there instead of always on screen when i would rarely use it anyways. more space to read and see pages and less ui element always on screen... i guess it is a preference thing.

Re:chrome is werid

[proslack]

F11 = browse full screen.

Re:chrome is werid

[revlayle]

ok awesome, why do i need press a button for that when the browser could give me more screen real estate by default? I bet F11 was designed to hide UIs that were too busy (esp. when mointor resolutions were even smaller). again... however, all preference.

Re:chrome is werid

[Anonymous Coward]

My Chrome has a menu bar... it looks pretty much like FF or Safari menu bar. Hmmm.

Re:chrome is werid

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like the concept of that, either. Internet Explorer tried to do this, too. The difference is, IE allows you to toggle the menu bar, in the UI right click menu.

Re:chrome is werid

[elcid73]

I do usability for a living, and know that consistency and 'expected" behavior/locations are very important. I'm at odds though on things like this- the reason I use Opera is because I like that the UI is a little different. I like that Chrome and Opera are willing to try something different in their UIs- frankly, that's one of the things I really like about Chrome is the absent menu bar. I've turned it off of my Opera installs for as long as I've been able to, (and I have a FF plugin as well doing the same)

Re:chrome is werid

[farble1670]

i appreciate an expert's take on this. my problem wasn't so much that it was different, but the change seemed arbitrary. they still have menus, but they just moved them about places other than the menu bar. the first thing i wanted to do was paw through the preferences, and it took my some time to find them. the icon i needed to click wasn't even labeled with text. why do they think that i'd logically look for preferences to the right of the of the location bar?

and worse, i just booted up chrome for mac, and it *does* have a menu bar. why did they think they don't have to be consistent on linux, but they do on mac? chrome for mac doens't have the preferences icon.

Re:chrome is werid

[largepox]

So am I wrong or does Chrome have no way to open a local file without dragging the thing onto one of the tabs?

Re:chrome is werid

[proslack]

If you really care that much just type about:config into the location bar, scroll down to browser.fullscreen.autohide, rightclick on it, and "toggle" the value. Presto. Instant default fullscreen.

Re:chrome is werid

[proslack]

Whoops, my bad. Looks like you need to add an extension, too... http://www.mouserunner.com/FF_Tips_Full_Screen.html

Re:chrome is werid

[Anonymous Coward]

That's okay, the UI you hate is coming to Firefox. Whatever is hot right now must be better, right?

Speaking of Google

[s122604]

Can somebody tell me why chrome has started to display slashdot so messed up?

Yahoo is the only logical choice.

[keepper]

Out of their possible viable partners, Yahoo is the only one that is not a direct competitor.

Google, with its all gooey-dooey not do evil mantra, has become a bigger competitor, and likely a conflct of interest, to the Mozilla foundation. Kinda like they did to Apple..

Re:Yahoo is the only logical choice.

[sznupi]

Yahoo is just a user of MS search technology.

Chrome?

[Max_W]

Chrome is done with a ribbon, like Internet Explorer. I do not get ribbon instead of a normal toolbar. Why repair what is not broken?

I would say Chrome with its current ribbon design have no chance.

As for a browser in a smart phone, I am not convinced either. The screen is too small. Netbook maybe, a netbook with a flexible screen may work too. Or a smart phone with a flexible attachable screen in a roll. But how to work on a mobile phone screen? It is just too small.

Re:Chrome?

[aflag]

I don't think it's interesting to google to make firefox disapear. They lose nothing by having firefox in the market. On the contrary, most firefox users are google users. In the end what google really wants is for people to use the internet, it doesn't matter if they use chrome, firefox or whatever. I think their goal with chrome is to provide people with more reasons for them to be connected, not to win the browser marketshare game. The partnership with mozilla benefits both parties with or without chrome browser.

Re:Chrome?

[elcid73]

Why repair what is not broken?

Innovation.

As for a browser in a smart phone, I am not convinced either. The screen is too small. Netbook maybe, a netbook with a flexible screen may work too. Or a smart phone with a flexible attachable screen in a roll. But how to work on a mobile phone screen? It is just too small.

I don't do much work on my mobile phone anyway, but browsing the web, and doing quick queries, I do ALL THE TIME and I have my phone in my pocket all the time too. It's a natural fit- I only use my laptop a couple times a week nowadays.

Re:Chrome?

[CannonballHead]

Why repair what is not broken?

And if it's not broken, it obviously cannot ever be improved, either.

I actually like Chrome's UI better. I like the extra page real-estate.

Re:Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am goind to tell you a hard kept secret about Firefox.
Press the F11 key.
Beat that, especially the autohiding address bar - the only place where tabs on top would actually make some sense.

Re:Chrome?

[CannonballHead]

That also hides the taskbar. Which I can't do.

Are FF and Chrome really "competing?"

[ZPWeeks]

Perhaps I don't understand this fully, but I don't see how this works out to be competition from a "dollars and cents" perspective. Google keeps talking about Chrome being a way to "improve the web," and I see them doing that by promoting a browser that's leaps and bounds above the status quo (being IE). Having an officially "Google" product, instead of just a Google-sponsored one like Firefox, allows them to leverage their reputation in a way that hopefully gets people using modern browsers. There are good technical reasons to use both, and aren't crowding the market.

Until Google starts tightly coupling their web services with Chrome-exclusive features (and I don't mean just bookmark sync), Firefox and Chrome will both benefit Google economically by giving them a broader base of browsers capable of running their monetized products - rich web applications.

Firefox will not be an economic competitor to Google until (1) Firefox changes its search defaults or (2) Google elects to make Chrome-exclusive products or features.

Re:Are FF and Chrome really "competing?"

[ChrisMounce]

Someone mod this guy up. Google's funding of multiple browsers makes sense, yet pretty much everyone else assumes it doesn't.

Re:Are FF and Chrome really "competing?"

[b4dc0d3r]

I considered this from another angle in the shower this morning.

Google has to index page data, some of which is in script format. Remember when Google's cached pages showed un-obfuscated e-mail addresses instead of the obfuscated versions from the plain-text HTML? Well, Google had to build a tool to parse HTML in order to index the web, so there's the HTML parser. They had to add a script engine, so there's JavaScript. It has to be distributed, so possible to run in a separate process. CSS-based layout gives context to the page, and they have to detect link farming or other dirty SEO techniques, so parsing and applying CSS (looking for white-on-white text for example) makes sense, there's your rudimentary layout engine.

My conclusion was, Chrome is a byproduct of the optimization of the search engine indexing process. Turning it into a product was probably just a marketing idea to get Google's name always in press releases, and a logical outcome of the "ChromeOS" idea where the web is the platform. If you're going to deprecate hardware and OS by making the browser where everything happens, as they did with GMail, Google Docs, and piles of other offerings, you come to the conclusion of taking your web bot and turning it into a branding opportunity.

No competition with Firefox, yet. Firefox won't switch defaults from the most popular search provider. Also, Google won't be able to keep FireFox from implementing whatever Chrome-specific stuff you are imagining without heavy-handed tactics like wielding patents. ChromeOS is what Google wants, not browser market share. Use Chrome, get used to it, then why not switch to our OS since everything is available through the browser? Competition happens because the platform changes, not because Chrome wins.

Look what happened to Netscape - Microsoft changed the game by making users expect a free, built-in browser with an OS, and the platform changed from a free-for-all open web to IE-only with ActiveX controls seemingly overnight (even in technological time scales). It wasn't really browser competition, they wanted control of the desktop and killing a browser was a side effect. I have the same feeling here - Google's OS might kill Firefox accidentally in its desire to compete with handheld OS makers like phones, of which MS is a little part.

Re:Are FF and Chrome really "competing?"

[grumpyman]

May be a sinister way to look at this:

1. Build a product
1. Fund a competing company/product to make them feel content
2. ????
3. Profit!

Firefox's future is in its own hands

[NaCh0]

And those hands are questionable. The browser doesn't really lead in any area. They are not pushing the standards compliance front (see the ACID tests). They are not leading the speed or javascript fronts. They have been resting on their plugin laurels. The bureaucracy is heavy (see firefox vs debian). The code itself is heavy. (the reason why webkit is chosen over gecko) And Asa, mozilla chief fanboi, thinks microsoft is a more trustworthy partner moving forward than google is. (see the bing recommendation)

If Chrome gets a good plugin API and continues down the multiplatform path, firefox is toast.

nope

[StripedCow]

is it really wise for Mozilla to be so dependent on Google?

Nope. In fact, it would be wise to weaken its links to google. For example, by binding to more than one search engine. What's important, though, is that search results are presented with a consistent interface, so that users will not feel any negative side-effects from switching between engines.

Since google has started commoditizing the browser-industry, it seems that it's now time for the browsers to start commoditizing the search engines...

Firefox Going Away Soon

[BitHive]

Firefox used to be the lightweight alternative. Now when everyone else is focusing on speed and usability, Firefox will take longer to start than any other browser, and do all sorts of things that you probably didn't have in mind when you clicked the Firefox icon (Please wait while we update your extensions....Oops, I couldn't update this extension. Please restart Firefox because I updated this other one. Do you want me to reopen all your old tabs? What about next time? Oh, please update your Firefox! No? Please tell us why! Here, fill out this survey web page which is embedded in this 320x240 pixel window for no reason, and tell us what we can do to improve Firefox.

Give me a break. I only ever use it for Firebug anymore and even that's becoming more rare as the tools for Safari and Chrome improve. Firefox will be irrelevant within 3 years, and still wondering where they went wrong.

Re:Firefox Going Away Soon

[TeXMaster]

Give me a break. I only ever use it for Firebug anymore and even that's becoming more rare as the tools for Safari and Chrome improve. Firefox will be irrelevant within 3 years, and still wondering where they went wrong.

Opera's Dragonfly is definitely on par with FF Firebug, if you're still looking for an alternative.

Re:Firefox Going Away Soon

[hkmwbz]

Firefox used to be the lightweight alternative.

Really? I thought it always had XUL and Gecko...

Firefox developers

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth taking a moment to reflect on the fact that Internet Explorer Is Actually Better Than Firefox At This Point In Time.

Dependency...

[Bert64]

While Mozilla does depend on Google for revenue, and Google are technically a competitor, they are not MS...

Google, like MS are not terribly interested in the browser market and don't make any money from it... The difference is that while MS want to control the browser, stifle the move to web based platform independent applications and lock people in to their platform...
Google want to promote their web based applications, and couldn't really care less what you use to access them. The reason Chrome exists is largely as a competitive push for faster javascript handling and better standards support, with the primary goal being to push every browser maker forwards and thus making Google's webapps more attractive. Prior to Chrome, browser makers weren't really interested in javascript performance.

Well that sucks

[hkdm]

I've been using Firefox since 1.5 so it's been an integral part of my browsing experience. Let's just hope it isn't assimilated into the Chrome project.

Re:What ?

[Dog-Cow]

And you probably think Opera invented tabs in a browser. Your knowledge is no better.

Re:What ?

[rubicelli]

Firefox had one critical feature a year before Opera did: It was free. For years, Opera had been "that browser you had to pay for (or get advertising with)". That kind of stigma stays with you.

Re:Choices? Really?

[Junior J. Junior III]

Seriously, who should be the default search provider, payments or not? If I've got a choice, I'm heading to google, not because of some sort of "I love google" sort of thing, but because they have the best search. If firefox defaults to "Bing!" or "aunt martha's internet search and lemon pies", it won't matter as long as I can set it to Google.

It's the ability to choose that I want to protect, not what the default is.

It would be annoying if they switched to a different default, because that would be one more customization step every time I install Firefox.

Sheldon

It does matter. Sure, you can control your own settings, but the aggregate behavior of the masses who leave their settings at default does have an impact.

1. If the search engine profits from its users, then the default search engine makes a great deal of difference. If traffic goes down, the search engine has less income, and therefore less capital to re-invest into innovation.
2. If the search engine decides to skew its search results, a vast majority of users who don't change their default might not ever see whatever it is that the default search engine doesn't want them to see. Imagine if Google censored search engine results according to the whim of some bad government.
3. If you want to collaborate with anyone else, you'll have to take into account when they do a search, their results page will be different from yours, since you're not using the default.
4. Anytime you're using a computer that is not your own, you're going to have to deal with the default search engine, which isn't your preferred one. Sure, you can just browse to google and search from their homepage, but it's an extra step.

Who needs choice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Insert obligatory K-Fed search engine joke here.

Is there a reason for Google to shaft Mozilla?

[qazwart]

I don't see any reason why Google would try to harm Firefox. Granted Google has a browser called Chrome, but what Google really wants is for people to use Google as their search engine. With Firefox the most popular engine after IE (and Microsoft wouldn't do anything, but make Bing IE's default search engine), I don't see why Google wouldn't simply extend their deal with FIrefox. They certainly wouldn't want Firefox to move over to Yahoo or Bing.

The only thing I can see is Google would use their leverage over Firefox to get Firefox to switch from the Gecko to WebKit. That would give Google a unified JavaScript/Web browser engine to run their applications against.

It's not usually a good thing to have another entity control your future like this, but Firefox really doesn't have a choice now.

Re:Is there a reason for Google to shaft Mozilla?

[tokul]

The only thing I can see is Google would use their leverage over Firefox to get Firefox to switch from the Gecko to WebKit. That would give Google a unified JavaScript/Web browser engine to run their applications against.

1. using same rendering library in all browsers is dangerous. Bigger user base is vulnerable to same exploits.
2. Presto, Trident, Tasman and other browsers. If you replace Gecko with Webkit, you won't get unified rendering engine.

Re:Is there a reason for Google to shaft Mozilla?

[ljw1004]

I don't see any reason why Google would try to harm Firefox... what Google really wants is for people to use Google as their search engine.

What Google wants is to show you ads, and to collect your personal data to show you more profitable ads. Firefox's Adblock strikes directly at their ONLY real revenue source.

Re:Is there a reason for Google to shaft Mozilla?

[BitZtream]

The only thing I can see is Google would use their leverage over Firefox to get Firefox to switch from the Gecko to WebKit.

Doing so would require a 100% rewrite of Firefox, WebKit does not do what Gecko does. WebKit is a rendering engine, Gecko is an application toolkit that is focused around rendering markup languages (XUL, HTML, ect).

If you rewrite Firefox with Gecko ... you've got Chrome or Safari, which is pretty pointless. Every addon and every extension would need to be reworked. This wouldn't happen, and if it did, I'd be the first to stop using a software package produced by such an amazingly dumb group of developers (which they would be if they 'switched to webkit')

Re:Is there a reason for Google to shaft Mozilla?

[PGGreens]

I agree. Google wouldn't have much incentive to cut off Firefox, aside from the ability to control people's online experience more closely. As it stands, Firefox directs tons of traffic to Google, and I doubt that they would be too quick to disturb that flow. That being said, if Firefox were to fall into disrepair, I suspect a large portion of its user base would end up using Chrome.

Re:Is there a reason for Google to shaft Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome uses a different JavaScript rendering engine than Safari.

Chrome?

[cheatch]

The only reason I would see Google to cut their funds would to get more people on Chrome. Chrome is nice and all but its no where near Firefox.

With Bing though, it would hurt Google if Mozilla starts a bidding war over their defaults with Microsoft.

Personally though, I still prefer google and firefox.

Re:Choices? Really?

[melikamp]

I want to see a meta-search engine which runs locally, may be as a plugin or a daemon. It should search Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and more, and then combine and sort the results according to the local preferences, and display them as a local HTML page. The advantages for the Web user are huge. Besides simply having more hits than any one engine will give you, a user can train the meta-engine to favor certain engines (e.g. Google and Wikipedia over Bing), or disfavor certain domains (e.g. about.com). A user can also benefit from increased privacy if the meta-engine strips the referrer information and presents direct links. The engine-served ads also go away.

Re:What ?

[sopssa]

Opera has user javascript build-in.

Re:Choices? Really?

[waitwonder]

I need both IE and Firefox for my work. I set bing as default for firefox and google for IE for every machine I work on. With chrome I think Opera would be a good choice.

game is not over

[swframe]

Google wants browser makers to be more aggressive adding new browser features but the mozilla org was not able to agree with them on the details. So Google went with Chrome to put pressure on the browser makers. Google doesn't need (or want) firefox to die. They just want more innovation at a faster rate and they don't really care which browser is in front. The better the browser, the more time users will spend on-line and the more money Google (and others) will make. As a result of Chrome, I think the mozilla org started paying more attention to new features and are making changes to catch up with Chrome and that is all google really wants. I think browsers (all of them) are far behind where we (web developers) would like them to be. I would like more widgets (tree, table, charts, tab pane, split panes, etc) like what I see in adobe flex so I don't have to build this stuff from scratch. I completely understand that making the current browser features work faster, better and more securely is a high priority. I just think new features to simplify web application development should be a higher priority than it currently seems to be.

Pocket Change

[mattcoz]

That's pocket change for Google, and they get much more in return from ad revenues. In case you forgot, that's what this is all about, ad revenue from their search engine and services. Google's enemy is Microsoft, not Mozilla, and right now Mozilla is Microsoft's biggest enemy in the browser space. So as they say, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Re:Pocket Change

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I changed my home page in Firefox to Bing.

On another note, since X Marks is now in IE I might not even to worry too much about Firefox itself. Let them burn, for all I care.

So?

[keepper]

How does search technology have anything to do with browser wars? ( well, directly )

MS has its own browser
Google has its own browser
Yahoo doesn't

Those are the three big search engines, and they only choices to generate revenue like they do know, as a homepage destination.

Re:So?

[sznupi]

Thye don't generate revenue by directing users "to a homepage", but to a search engine; which sometimes displays relevant advertisements...

Re:What ?

[Rockoon]

Opera had it first. Really.

Chrome and Firefox have different purposes

[Zigurd]

Sponsoring Firefox was a good deal when it was negotiated. However, Google can't easily "own" Firefox as an open source project.

Google does own Chrome, and can be shaped to fit Google's product requirements.

Unless Firefox falls far behind Chrome, there is no reason Firefox can't justify continued support from Google.

Re:What ?

[Rockoon]

Its not such a bad thing to be the last browser to successfully sell copies in a market full of increasing numbers of free alternatives.

Google won't leave Mozilla

[thermal_7]

I think Google is very happy about the existence of Mozilla and its plethora of open source projects.

Google is focusing on breaking up the traditional desktop application way of doing things and moving it all to the web. They also want to loosen Microsoft's stranglehold on the computer industry.

Supporting Mozilla helps to achieve both of these goals. The fact that it also helps decrease the number of users using Chrome is of lesser importance IMO.

Re:Firefox can fuck off and die

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, true

Closing the gap on... Opera?!

[Mex]

I'm sorry, but other than the huge advantage that is all the plugins available for Firefox, Opera has always been lightyears ahead of any other browser's features.
http://operawiki.info/OperaInnovations
Tabbed browsing and Zooming into a webpage are only the two that seem most important and were introduced by Opera, but they have always been incredibly innovative, much more so than Firefox. Yet there's not a big developer following, probably because it is not open source like FF, that's Opera's weakest part I guess, but as a browser, I love it.

Who's really worse?

[JustNiz]

>> is it really wise for Mozilla to be so dependent on Google?

Probably not but how else would Mozilla/Firefox get such big funding than to promote a search provider?

IE continues to be total crap so Firefox is still a big threat to Microsoft. They are also pushing Bing hard now, so it probably makes even more business sense now for Microsoft to try and 'embrace and extend' Mozilla or at least Firefox.

They might just offer more money than Google paid/will pay just to make Firefox default to Bing instead, or they could just try to buy Mozilla. Watch for stupid patent suits from MS against Firefox/Mozilla as a precursor.

I for one would be pretty disappointed if Mozilla accepted any Microsoft deal, so I guess that still leaves me liking Firefox default to Google.

Google will not ditch Mozilla

[matzahboy]

There are only 3 reasons why Google would ditch Mozilla in the future: 1. Nobody uses Firefox anymore (i.e. less than 1% share) 2. Mozilla is charging ridiculously high fees 3. There is a big scandal Google has lots of incentives to keep this deal. Users are by default, lazy. Most do not change any options. That is of course why IE is the dominant browser (pre-installed on Windows). Because Google is the default search engine on FF, many users will use Google instead of a competitor.

It's like this..

[mweather]

Google just wants to be the default search engine. So long as Firefox has significant marketshare, Google will sponsor them. If Google drops their sponsorship, Microsoft or Yahoo or any number or regional search engines will step in.

Re:What ?

[Menchi]

I'm about 80% sure you're just trying to be funny but I looked it up anyway: Opera released user javascript with version 8 which was released on April 19, 2005. I have no idea how old Greasemonkey is but version 0.2.5 was released on March 28, 2005. So, no.

Mozilla foundation achieved its objective

[aurelianito]

The objective is to have better browsers and more choices than Internet Explorer 5. Right now there are several browsers gaining mark-share: Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, Konqueror. If the problem with Firefox funding is a consequence of having a lot of browser choices, I would like to just say:

Congratulations Mozilla Foundation, you made it

Google is not a competitor

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of Chrome was to build something with faster javascript to support stuff like google docs and wave what not. One longstanding thing to cut into productivity/office programs that microsoft dominates in. Firefox assists Google in this because though chrome exists, its marketshare is small and of all other browsers, Firefox is the one giving IE a run for its money.
Mozilla is an asset to google, with or without Chrome and will continue being one even if Chrome surpassed Firefox's market share which it is unlikely to do any time soon.

Re:Choices? Really?

[BitZtream]

It would be annoying if they switched to a different default, because that would be one more customization step every time I install Firefox.

WTF is with you people? How damn often are you installing Firefox? Do you destroy machines that often or do you do it as part of an IT job, in which case you should have customized your own installer by now.

Nothing New

[Anonymous Coward]

FOSS is always dependent on a corporate master. Whether it's Firefux and Teh Googel, or Teh Lunix and either IBM or RedHate (or the NSA), or Star Office and Sun, etc.

How can FOSS be free when it's just suckling off the teet of a corporate donor? It may as well just be honest and whore itself out as a software advertisment.

Re:FOSS loses more credibility

[MaximKat]

News flash: there is adblock for Chrome

Re:What ?

[jamesrskemp]

Woah there.

XSLT is an *absolutely* obscure language?

Sounds like either I need a raise, or you clearly don't know what you're talking about.

Seeing as how you suggest mouse gestures aren't obscure, I'd bet on the latter.

Re:Choices? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to collaborate with anyone else, you'll have to take into account when they do a search, their results page will be different from yours, since you're not using the default.

This one seems a bit odd, I wouldn't trust that someone would get the same search result as me even if they used the same search engine. Search engines are constantly re-indexing the web which can change the results, they also may give you different results depending on your location and perhaps other factors too. So you should be taking into account the possibility their search results may be different to yours regardless of the search engine they use.

Anytime you're using a computer that is not your own, you're going to have to deal with the default search engine, which isn't your preferred one. Sure, you can just browse to google and search from their homepage, but it's an extra step.

And this one is so trivial it is hardly an issue at all.

More then meets the eye

[Anonymous Coward]

There is so much more to the Google/Mozilla relationship then spoken about here. Google won't abandon Firefox because FF is going about doing the Lord's work by grabbing market share from IE. And that to Google is worth more then $66 million easy. Why? Microsoft sees its manifest destiny (or maybe its more subconscious to just the way it operates) is to be #1 in every enterprise level software market. Does the worlds largest maker of OS and office productivity software also need to dominate internet search (Bing) and electronic conferencing tools (LiveMeeting) and so on and so forth. They think so. What I am really trying to say is that Google's relationship with Mozilla is an investment in protecting the "Commons". Microsoft is definitely the lord of the land but there are the commons where Google thrives and challenges them their dominance in other areas. Want more evidence of this ... Silverlight. Think Silverlight is there to challenge Adobe Flash ... maybe a little ... but its going to serve more as a platform for Microsoft to challenge Google Apps. Microsoft doesn't want the challenge of making a Word and Excel work over the Web using Web standards. Silverlight is nothing more then a bypass of the web platform for a company that doesn't like play by any rules they don't make.

Mozilla needs its own Search/Advertising Platform

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla should setup its own search engine and have Firefox default to it- and then have an advertising platform based around it. Cut out the middle man. I'm just wondering how much it would cost to buy and improve a search engine company-and then get it up to the quality and scale of Google. I know it wouldn't happen overnight- but If they could somehow design it so that you got Mozilla's search results first (and advertisements) followed by Google/another search engine it may not be terribly inconvenient for users. If the results they wanted weren't in the Mozilla search results the other search results would be up and waiting. That way users wouldn't get annoyed and go to a second engine- and this would only be necessary until a time when it was really up to snuff.

Re:What ?

[Risen888]

the last browser to successfully sell copies

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Choices? Really?

[Risen888]

Imagine if Google censored search engine results according to the whim of some bad government.

Gee, yeah, imagine that. Hey, wait...

Opera closing the gap? LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

How can Opera close the gap on features when it has them all first? Nub author.

Firefox does not need Google

[randomsearch]

Microsoft would love to pay Mozilla to replace Google with Bing. That's why Google were wise to extend their deal with Mozilla - I'm sure they considered MS stepping up if they didn't.

Firefox is not solely dependent on Google, as it has at least one other alternative sponsor.

RS

Re:What ?

[Rockoon]

Opera 8 was the version where they began calling it UserJS. The functionality, however, was mostly complete and usable in 7 but was there for other reasons (for fixing broken sites.) It is because users started using the feature for things other than fixing broken sites that they evolved it into a complete system.

Re:What ?

[Rockoon]

It means exactly what I think it means. Apparently you think it means something else. Opera is #1 on mobile devices worldwide, and the #1 browser in more countries than any other besides Internet Explorer. Every Wii on the planet has Opera on it, as well.

So pretty much hugely successful. A credit to the team.

PS.

[sznupi]

The only stats I'm familiar with actually seem to suggest that Opera growth is still very healthy, especially in Russian homes (huge spike during recent holidays)

http://www.rankingru.com/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.html

Overall it seems to rise at around the same pace as FF.