Submitted by Most Firefox users don’t realize that Firefox’s current existence is owed almost exclusively to its search partnership with Google wherein Mozilla Corp receives a portion of ad revenue from Google queries initiated from Firefox’s search bar. This revenue amounts to tens of millions of dollars. Internet users the world over, who are currently reaping the benefit of a renewed browser war with exciting innovation instead of Microsoft-dominated stagnation, can thank Google for that state of affairs. But now that Google has itself entered the fray with Chrome, what does that mean for the Firefox/Google relationship?This, of course, was one of the first things that many people who are in the know thought about when they heard Google’s surprise Chrome announcement. In fact, there was a fair amount of hand-wringing among Firefox partisans and Open Source Software fans (since Firefox is arguably the most-visible face of OSS and on the front lines in the battle with Microsoft) that Chrome would harm Firefox or the Open Source movement. As people have settled in to either using or not using Chrome, a lot of the debate has died down. But the real issue isn’t some kind of nebulous issue of “fighting a war on two fronts” or chipping away at Firefox’s market share (since Chrome users are more likely to peel away from Firefox than IE), but a very simple case of economics.
In a recent Computerworld article, John Lilly, Mozilla’s CEO, says that the Chrome project has made Firefox’s relationship with Google “complicated,” but that the state of their partnership is “reasonable.” To the extent that Google’s shot across the bow of the browser world has spurred a renewed interest in advancing the state of the art, consumers will benefit. But what if Google decides to “be Evil?” They could easily opt not to renew their contract when it comes up in 2011, and in one fell swoop eviscerate Mozilla Corp. Now, this hardball tactic would possibly not benefit Google as much as it would benefit Microsoft, and might end up having a net negative effect on Google’s revenues. But it’s hard to say, and it all hinges on how central to Google’s business Chrome ends up being.
Here’s to hoping that Firefox and Google can find a way to co-exist happily, keep the foot on the gas, and force Microsoft to either improve IE or cede browser dominance. In that scenario, the free market works, and all internet users benefit.
I find it strange that no one comments on the seeming fact that it is the same people who originally created Firefox who went on to create Google Chrome.
Disgruntled devs forked teh Mozilla suite to form pheonix/firebird/firefox – a lighter weight browser. When it became popular, the other devs moved over and it seems the originals moved out.
As for the Firefox advertising deal with Google – google needs the realestate. If it pulled out, it would be replaced with Yahoo/Live/{insert new/old competitor} which would benefit vastly from the newly opened up opportunity to prosper. Not all the users would leave Google, but even a 1% of them moving to the competition could be very very good for the competition.
Hmm…
I don’t recall reading about the two guys who started Firefox[then Phoenix] starting Chrome. Infact, I thought one worked for Apple and the other was at a startup.
Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt did.
Some Chrome developer are former Firefox developer and Mozilla employee , not creator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Firefox
“The Mozilla Firefox project was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project.”
“Hyatt and Ross’ browser was created to combat the perceived software bloat of the Mozilla Suite”
Normal People are just gonna reset the defaults to Google … most people won’t notice because Google as deal with OEM to set there browser default search engine as Google.
Note: Hyatt leads the WebKit/Safari team at Apple.
Until there is a Linux version and a way to plug in extensions, Chrome means nothing to me.
Chrome/Iron is not the only WebKit-based browser.
Google must not had developed there own browser because they are replicating the effort for the development of completely new browser.
FF is open source as everyone know so they must participate in the development of FF instead of developing there own browser. That way FF will become better open source browser to compete with IE, Safari and Opera
Except Firefox feels like a relic of the past compared to Chrome. I’ve been a full-time Chrome convert ever since its first release, and I wouldn’t even DREAM of going back to old-fashioned singlethreaded browsing.
For OSNews, I constantly visit heavy ad pages like most other news sites (and I don’t like those anti-ad extensions), and they are quite prone to hanging. With Firefox, they can take every window down – but in Chrome, this won’t happen. I just kill the page in question, and I’m done. To me, any single threaded browser is a total waste of my time.
Even if Google invested its time into Firefox, it would be a futile effort. Firefox is too big a project now to allow for such radical changes like a complete move to user-controlled multithreaded browsing. Google can’t just come marching into Mozilla and make Firefox do a 360.
In addition, I want a web browser, not a platform. A back button, a forward button, reload/stop, and an URL field. I don’t need anything else.
Edited 2008-12-23 19:17 UTC
First of all every browser today is multithreaded but the new thing that Google had done is to create a new process for each tab instead of creating a new thread for each tab.
Do you know that IE8 is doing same thing that Chrome did. I mean creating a new process for each tab. So why not Mozilla and Google can do it in FF if Microsoft can do it in IE?
Because as the post you replied to said, it’s a huge change. I don’t know what MS did for IE, but changing an application to be built on processes instead of threads likely means rebuilding it from the ground up. I don’t mean the rendering engine – that’s probably mostly fine, but all the UI shell would need to be reworked to support communication between processes. It’s a huge effort.
Meaning exactly the sort of thing that Mozilla Corp would never have considered without being shown up by real FOSS competition on their own doorstep. Isn’t it wonderful that they now have such competition? I’m a Linux user, so I can’t use Chrome (natively) yet, and don’t really care for the Codeweavers solution. But I’m delighted that Chrome exists. And I look forward to full integration of Webkit in Epiphany 2.26 or 2.28.
“IE8 uses the Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE) architecture and runs the browser frame and tabs in separate processes”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Performance_and_st…
I’m no MS fan, but it is wonderful to see the thread-mania of the last years finally starting to dissipate. Even the POSIX world has had a pretty good “threading infection” going. There are so many other, better, ways to do concurrency. Processes and the actor model. Fibers. I personally, like the multi-process, multiple fibers per process model. All the advantages of processes and threads while avoiding most of the additional memory/create/destroy overhead of processes and almost completely sidestepping all the nightmares of the “shared all” approach of threads. Message passing is where it’s at. Share nothing, by default, and explicitly pass that which needs to be shared through a clean interface. And use the shared memory (but nonconcurrent!) fibers only where they are needed for performance reasons.
Edited 2008-12-24 18:12 UTC
98% of the time, Chrome does what I need and want, and it does it faster than Firefox does. Its interface is much simpler, and as Thom said,all you need are back, forward buttons, URL field, reload/stop… not to mention integrating the search bar into the URL field (I use this feature constantly). It’s short, sweet, to the point, but if you need more from the browser, you’ve got all the options you need under the nifty wrench icon. The other 2% of the time, Chrome isn’t handling a page well and I’ll start an instance of Firefox for the time being.
I’ve introduced Chrome to maybe a dozen people who are your normal, everyday PC users who have a computer mainly for word processing and email, and possibly several hundred others of these via a small local newspaper. They have no idea what goes on under the hood of Chrome nor do they care. They simply like what they see and like how Chrome handles things, and some notice that Chrome seems to do it faster than their other browsers. Now they don’t even think about using Firefox (or IE7, for heaven’s sake). In the long run, what matters is the end result: the user experience. Sure, I’ll be the first to admit that Chrome has some kinks to work out, but what Chrome does, you’ve got to admit, it does well. It would be nice for Mac and Linux users if Google released a version for them, though.
Thom_Holwerda wrote:
-“For OSNews, I constantly visit heavy ad pages like most other news sites (and I don’t like those anti-ad extensions), and they are quite prone to hanging. With Firefox, they can take every window down – but in Chrome, this won’t happen. I just kill the page in question, and I’m done.”
Or you can use one of those anti-ad extensions and voila, no need to kill the page at all due to misbehaving ads. You don’t say why you don’t like those anti-ad extensions, but given that OSNews relies on ads it’s understandable that you hold that position. However I can whitelist any site I want to help by clicking on ads so it’s not one way or the other.
For me webbrowsing mainly comes down to a comfortable experience. Comfortable experience means different things for different people of course, but for me it mainly boils down to adblock, noscript, flashblock (although there are alot of other nice plugins that I like though I could live without them). If I could use a faster browser like chrome with these features then I’d likely use it, but without their equivalent I find surfing the web much too uncomfortable for me to switch.
I also have to ask about the crashes people talk about, even before I used adblock/flashblock/noscript I can’t recall suffering from pages crashing the browser, although sometimes severly slowing things down. Do you have any examples of such pages?
“Or you can use one of those anti-ad extensions and voila, no need to kill the page at all due to misbehaving ads. ”
adblock is one but just one of the many reasons I won’t even consider using a non firefox browser. Browsing without adblock is like watching tv without a DVR…who wants to sit through all the commercials when you can just record your favorite shows ahead of time and just zip through everything?
I’m using Glimmer Blocker on Mac OS X which is a system wide adblocker that works as a proxy. It is super easy to set up and you can even share your blocklists with other computers via .Mac or your own WebDAV server.
So, I’m now in browser heaven, no matter which browser I use I’m always ad free and I can switch browsers back and forth just as my mood of the day tells me. The thing is that I now cannot really live without some kind of WebInspector/Firebug functionality, so it is Safari/WebKit nightly or at times Firefox for me.
Well, you can scratch one reason then. Epiphany has ad block. IIRC, Opera has good ad blocking. Good proxy-based solutions include Privoxy and Squidguard, among others. I’ve heard the phrase “would never consider” so many times from FF users that I have to wonder what it’s like to live with such blinders on.
“Except Firefox feels like a relic of the past compared to Chrome.”
that’s funny because to me, chrome feels like IE 2
Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox has probably gone through more radical changes than most other software projects. They completely rewrote the rendering engine, invented a new scripting language and then completely rewrote its implementation, putting every tab into a new process would not be a big change compared to these. I think it would have been very possible, and cost much less for Google, and instantly benefit more users.
The reason for writing their own browser is entirely different, it’s more of a market strategy issue than a software engineering one.
This is a sane argument and I often feel Firefox is still too bloated, but I do depend on some extensions and the “platform” is needed so extensions can be written on top of it. You don’t like ad blockers, well many of us don’t like ads, but Google gets their livelihood from ads, and would never put an ad blocker into Chrome, so I still see a future for Firefox.
Apart from that, I have some software engineering type problems with Chrome. Excuse the tech lingo. Full-method JIT is bad enough, but full-file JIT is a complete waste of memory and CPU time, especially on netbooks and mobile phones. (V8 uses full-file JIT while Firefox does tracing JIT). A “stop-the-world” generational GC uses roughly twice as much virtual address space than a reference counting GC. The speedier allocation is moot for most JavaScript uses or on ARM and AMD64. Again mobiles have limited address spaces. (V8 does stopping generational GC while Firefox does refcounting).
Google basically cloned the Sun JVM’s design for V8, and we all know how poorly that thing performs on desktops. Mozilla had a very conservative implementation and is slowly replacing parts with innovative technology while paying attention to retaining the ability to lower resource usage in the future. Firefox is just better engineered. Which means nothing of course for most users, and with enough investment Google can bring Chrome up to Mozilla standards, but so far I don’t like their choices.
Especially since a 360 would have it facing back in the original direction, as opposed to a 180. Maybe Google should pull a Tony Hawk and do a 900 with an Ollie into a McTwist!
They must? Um, no.
I hear everyone bitching about Google creating their own browser instead of contributing to FF. Well, Firefox is not the end-all-be-all of web browsers. It’s going to be replaced by something better, sooner or later.
I, for one, am welcoming Chrome and I am waiting for a Mac-based version. Once that is available, I’ll never look back to Safari/Firefox. Chrome is the BeOS of browsers, IMHO.
Don’t be afraid of change, people.
lols…who’s afraid of change my friend.
I was just thinking that why not improve a current project instead of creating from scratch.
This is one of the biggest problem in open source community that many people start new projects instead of focusing and improving the current one.
So the end result of this is that the effort and ideas become distributed. Suppose a project contains 3 great features and another project stared developing the same sort of app and it may contain 2 good features. So why not combine all those good features in a single app
The truth is that many people do so because of biases or sometimes to get fame or sometimes because of ego that why not this project is running under my name or under my management
Edited 2008-12-23 20:36 UTC
Because maybe, just maybe, the original project (Firefox) is limited in some ways, and some developers feel that they can do better? In the end, if Chrome keeps Mozilla on the edge of their coding seats and bringing on improvements that would have likely not appeared otherwise (or at least as fast), then it couldn’t have been a better win for everyone (especially Firefox users).
Mozilla could certainly learn a thing or two about bloat, memory leaks, memory use, stability, and general responsiveness. If Chrome ends up getting big enough, Mozilla will be forced to do something–just as they forced Microsoft to do something with the crap that was IE5. Or was it 6? It remained stagnant so long I can’t even remember.
What, doomed to have a small devoted following but no real market penetration?
Yeah, probably true… outside of the geek friends who’d always be enthusiastic about something like this, I don’t know anyone who’s even heard of Chrome, much less tried using it. It’s a good browser, no question, but Google will have to do a lot more to promote it if they expect it to catch on.
Really, Google’s browser still needs a lot of polish.
So does FF.
True, but it’s much harder to polish chrome.
isn’t it harder to polish a fox than polish chrome?
You have a point there!
But chrome smudges a lot easier than a fox.
Especially when the fox fans are launching smear campaigns. 😉
Edited 2008-12-24 05:18 UTC
I believe I had a cousin who spent some time in jail for “smudging the fox”.
Google would not be “evil” if they withdrew some or even all support from Firefox. This would be their right and choice. It would make them less benevolent, but not evil.
The point of supporting an open source project is because the supporting company and the project have sympathetic goals. Firefox gives Google a standards based, cross platform browser. This promotes Google’s need for browser platforms in general to be more standards based and thus easier to develop internet applications for. This is a goal of Google for which Firefox is currently the best vehicle so I would expect to see continued support from Google for the time being. This is reflected by the fact that Google extended the deal with Mozilla through 2011.
Chrome is not a competitor for the goal of establishing a drive in mainstream browsers towards standards compliance. Chrome is to further the goal beyond this in the form of Web applications and cloud computing. It is more experimental than Firefox can afford to be. Chrome made a number of choices an established project with such a large user base could make even if the developers were willing. I would not be surprised to see some of the technologies in Chrome ported or emulated by Firefox over time but that would be a prolonged and thought out process.
Eventually though Google’s goals may not be furthered by supporting Firefox and a withdraw of support at that stage would be reasonable. The general consensus is that currently 85% of Mozilla’s current income comes from Google which implies that their continued high presence existence and development are thanks to Google. Mozilla is not a subsidiary of Google though and is responsible for their own future.
I browse a lot with Firefox and I cannot remember last time it froze… you should probably consider that your problem are not Firefox based.
I use a lot of Google stuff.. but Chrome is kinda useless, unstable, lack plugins. May be one day they will be good but Google would be foolish to force Chrome on users too early.
Edited 2008-12-23 19:33 UTC
For my experience that is an understatement. Could not even get it to properly install after multiple attempts. Then, it simply crashes upon trying to open the first page….This on two different computers. The 3rd computer ran it OK, and when I say OK I mean it was simply less problematic. I was simply dumbfounded at how poorly it is at the moment. This does NOT in any shape or form feel like a released product. I have used alpha and early beta software that was hundreds of times more polished. For me it just seems like they rushed out a product without bothering to even test whether it actually worked.
I would say maybe not Firefox per se, but more with the content that is being put out on the web now. There are very few sites that I visit that these days that are not bogging down with high content ads. As a result my browser and computer are paying the price for poor ill founded logic in web design. I compared the code to the Startribune.com to a pages that were saved offline several years back. The code itself has multiplied almost hundred fold, 95% all being ingenious little ad related junk.
The performance hit is sadly not related to just Firefox. Whether it is Safari, IE, or Apple, Linux, and Windows platforms. Quite simply the web developers pushed by management are simply trying to put way too much into a single page. God forbid if I have to visit any Adobe flash related sites (to this day I still can not get over why this has become so popular considering how poorly it performs.).
Note: I did do a side by side comparison of a Apple laptop that has almost the same specs has another HP with Windows/OpenSuse. The Apple was able to load some sites a bit faster, but in the end this unscientific comparison was at least enough to prove this simply was not just a matter of Firefox being a dog in either Windows/Linux.
As long as they stick to the W3C standards it does not matter much to me. For webdesigners this is the only important issue.
I tried Chrome but as it is still not cross-platform with Linux it is no option for me. On windows it does look nice and behaves in an orderly manner but . . . it still is only a webbrowser, like Opera, FF, Mozilla, Avant, Konqueror, IE etc.
but I am scared to even try Google Chrome because of that EULA related stuff about whatever content you view through the browser becomes Google’s or something like that. I recall they fixed the EULA since then because there was an uproad and Google claimed it was copy and pasted from another EULA for another product and that they revoked it…but I guess depending on the answer I might install that on my rig tonight. I will try running both FF and Chrome side by side and see whats what.
Try “Iron”: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php
It’s a spyware-free version of Chrome.
Wow thanks for that link! Most interesting.
Exactly what is it that you are afraid they are going to do with your personal information? I only wish that mine were important enough, by itself, for anyone to care about.
One would think that a company with a business model like Google’s and a marketing motto of “Do no evil” would be more careful. I mean, come on, when truly old school companies go out on the FOSS floor and totally embarrass themselves with cut and paste legal text, it’s one thing. But Google is supposed to be “hip” and “next generation”. Their doing that casts their judgement, attention to detail, and “hippness” into a darker light than their actual intentions.
sbergman27 wrote:
“Exactly what is it that you are afraid they are going to do with your personal information? I only wish that mine were important enough, by itself, for anyone to care about.”
Someone’s getting desperately lonely during christmas time? ;D
Edited 2008-12-24 07:17 UTC
The fact that Google decided not to adhere to basic Windows UI standards is a deal breaker for me.
Bingo. Wake me up when they include a menu. And that’s just for starters.
Whose who think that in future all browsers will “die off” and only the strongest will remain are simply wrong.
Future belongs to all browsers working with same standard web pages. Only ones which fail to work with open web standards will die off.
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Google has simple reason to create one more browser. It can not post in google.com “go and download Firefox” to all IE6 users, but it can post “go and download our latest and greatest browser”.
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Google will stop Firefox funding?
No. Firefox has google homepage in default and every lazy Firefox user (not changing homepage) creates even profit for google not only payoff.
But google do not care about parts in user sum Firefox+Chrome it just tries to increase sum in all possible ways and Firefox fans, Firefox developers have to live with this reality.
I don’t think Microsoft fits to this battle anymore. Microsoft was an enemy to Web in the past but since long time they abandoned this path. Since IE7 (or latest IE6 patches), MS surrendered the centrality of the Web as a channel (but not as a platform, as showed). That also ended partial standards support which was functional to its strategy.
As of today, keeping own browsers in the market is just a way to channel support for its own platform. And that’s the reason why Google made chrome. Mozilla is trying to build its own platform but of course Google has no interest in that and won’t let Mozilla build that with Google’s money.
But that doesn’t relate to Microsoft at all.
Mozilla Corp is trying to build its own platform, but of course Google has no interest in that, and won’t let Mozilla Corp build that with Google’s money.
A slight adjustment that should make things clearer, but likely won’t. Too many people missed that most significant change in the landscape, and/or continue to deny its significance.
Edited 2008-12-24 06:29 UTC
Most Firefox users don’t realize that Firefox’s current existence is owed almost exclusively to its search partnership with Google wherein Mozilla Corp receives a portion of ad revenue from Google queries initiated from Firefox’s search bar.
I’ve been using Firefox for years now but never once used the search-bar (why would you when you can use the address-bar just as fine?). But since I’d like to support the development of Firefox (and Thunderbird, etc.) I’m wondering how Google can tell if they search-bar was used or not so I can configure the address-bar to send the same information.
If I search from the search box the URL contains: &aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
If I search from the location bar then it’s: &sourceid=navclient&gfns=1
I don’t know what is gfns or aq=t for example, but if others could share the URL they get from searching in other browsers we could pinpoint how Google identifies referral info.
I don’t think Google feels any pressure to “own” the browser the way Microsoft does. Even the competition delivers their content. If Firefox continues to be number one Google keeps winning from the ad revenue. Why kill the goose that lay the golden egg? Sure, your new goose *might* earn as much, or more, or it might not.
Google wins by having a good platform to deploy their code on. They don’t care who ‘owns’ the platform, I think. Now that they have Chrome they can experiment and lead by example in the development of the features that they think will help them. This may lead to other browsers, especially Firefox, adopting some of their innovations. If so, Google wins. If not, Google wins anyway through its integration with Firefox.
Google will continue to suppport Firefox and Chrome for the foreseeable future. It would only pull the plug on Firefox support if it becomes unprofitable (i.e., not soon).
To me anytime you are in bed so to speak with a mega corp only concerned about stock price, you can get the rug pulled out from under you and be left high and dry before you know it.
Google to me has become a monopoly of sorts like Microsoft if you do not like it then they will crush and bury you. The searches from Google are based on how much money ads are paying them and a lot of the data generated form a search is rubbish.
The problem with having your eggs in one basket means if the direction they want to go does not match with yours generally you lose. I think this may be going the direction of Internet Explorer and Netscape I could be wrong but it seems a bit familiar.
I for one do not want a Google browser for my Linux distro’s and no lock in.
This whole google vs. mozilla thing is silly. Google is not in the web browser business, they’re in the search / advertising business.
Google doesn’t give a rats ass what browser is being used, as long as they retain their status of number one search engine.
The money they give to mozilla is peanuts compared to the return they get in advertising. There’s (currently) no reason they would stop supporting mozilla, even if Chrome crushed the rest of the browser competition.
Chrome is not about browser wars. Chrome is about having a platform that they control so that they can tailor it to fit their own needs and use it as a launch pad for their web apps.
And if Google, Inc’s web app vision and Mozilla Corps web apps vision (Prism) happened not to coincide? What then? You missed what just happened over the last few months. Firefox is now competition. Google has diverse sources of income. Mozilla Corp has… Google’s monthly checks. In this bad economy, Google might just have to lower their return rates on Firefox hits. Who knows? Maybe next year might be even worse. If I were too tightly anchored to Mozilla Corp, I would (very reasonably) be panicking by now.
Edited 2008-12-25 01:27 UTC