I have trouble reading criticisms of Mozilla from just about every person who jumps on the "Google can do no wrong" bandwagon. There's a definite benefit to the user to have a separation of control over the data that various tech entities have on it. Firefox isn't selling anything; it is the only browser that truly allows users to decide what data websites gather from them as visitors.
Google developed Chrome because, for some reason, they thought that there's just _not enough_ "Google Advertising" online already, and they wanted to make sure that people can't easily disable advertisements, tracking cookies, etc. I tried Chrome on Linux, and really . . . was not that impressed. Firefox revolutionized the "tabbed browsing" concept, and that's the main fancy feature of Chrome. In a way, Chrome kinda just stole all the great things about Firefox (things that have taken years to develop), put those things into a shiny blue curvy-cornered UI, and slapped the Google name on it.
> Firefox revolutionized the "tabbed browsing" concept,
> ... Chrome kinda just stole all the great things about
> Firefox (things that have taken years to develop)
Yes, Mark Pilgrim had an interesting blog post about that:
Recently, someone did the unthinkable: they published their own version of Dive Into Python and got it listed on Amazon.com. This apparently caused a small firestorm within Apress, the exact details of which I am not privy to, but which (I am told) became a somewhat larger firestorm after the Apress executives realized they had no legal recourse, and asked my opinion on the matter. You see, the book is published under the GNU Free Documentation License, which explicitly gives anyone and everyone the right to publish it themselves. (I was about to write “gives third parties the right,” until I realized that there are no third parties because there are no second parties. That’s kind of the point.)
Google developed Chrome because making the web as a viable application platform is in their best interest. They tried working with Mozilla for Firefox 2 development, but realized that Mozilla is a dysfunctional project with questionable leadership and insular development practices, so working with them really wasn't tenable. Hence, Chrome.
And honestly, process-per-tab, a proper security model, and plugins running as a separate process so the buggy Flash plugin doesn't bring down your browser are things that Firefox is considering copying from Chrome, not the other way around.
"They tried working with Mozilla for Firefox 2 development, but realized that Mozilla is a dysfunctional project with questionable leadership and insular development practices, so working with them really wasn't tenable."
No, they realized that the Mozilla project could not be bent to Google's whims, so they took their ball and went home. Mozilla has quite a healthy development community and welcomes outside contributors.
I don't think it's fair to say that google developed chrome to prevent users from blocking ads - adblock users make up such a small percentage and likely non-optimal demographic of Internet users that I don't think google's worried abot that.
Eric Schmidt said in an interview about chromeOS that google's goal is to improve user experience on the Internet as a whole; google's revenues are directly correlateable with total hours spent on the Internet. If you look at google's efforts from that point of view, they don't seem quite so scary ;)
Take a look at the note from the NoScript developer that was posted here yesterday:
Maybe Google plans to implement the missing stuff later,
maybe they’re still trying to figure out whether it can be
done without enabling effective ad blocking, but in the
meanwhile the pale AdBlock and FlashBlock imitations which
have been hacked together by overwhelming popular demand, are
forced to use a very fragile CSS-based hiding approach,
ridiculously easy to circumvent.
Edit/clarification: @InclinedPlane This does not mean I have a "disrespect" of Google; it's more that I'm siding with the benefits of "separation of control," just like any good accounting information systems analyst would do.
Your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
Your friends are too important to be owned by any one company.
A Solution
The browser is your personal and trusted agent to the web. It’s the only actor on the Internet stage which both knows everything you do on the web, and never has to let that data leave the privacy of your desktop. Your browser knows you (or, at least, should).
So if Google goes into the Operating System realm, too, people will have real reason to worry; it'll be even easier for it (Google) to erase those lines between public and private data. And it all starts in the browser. If Microsoft didn't illustrate this, I don't know what did.
Maybe Firefox should counter-move and develop its own search engine.
I agree, the thought of the entire end-to-end internet experience (OS, browser, ISP, DNS, search, hosting, etc.) all within the smothering confines of a single company is something I don't look forward to, regardless of whether that company is MS or IBM or Google or Apple or anyone.
To Google's credit, they've open sourced some of the work they've done (GWT, Chrome, Chrome OS, etc.) so in theory there's a pressure relief valve there. One of the great boons of open source is that it does provide that pressure valve so that people have alternatives if mainstream software becomes too oppressive (though this is a side benefit, a lot of OSS is as good as or better than the commercial alternatives).
It's really a shame that nobody has yet figured out how to compete fully with Google. There have been a lot of attempts, but there is still such a huge gap that's it's somewhat disheartening. Google revolutionized server management, data center management, and web application development nearly a decade ago and nobody has really caught up to them on all counts yet. I'm not sure whether that's a testament to their genius or to the sad state of the rest of the industry, but it looks like it's likely to be a controlling factor in the nature of the internet for some time to come.
Chrome doesn't support the API calls needed to do proper ad blocking.
And as for cookie handling, XPCom is a delightfully complete API. It's a platform. Chrome isn't nearly there yet. And there's not much evidence that they want to be.
I'm certainly not a Google fan-boy (read some of my other posts if you want to check, I'm very skeptical of google), but Chrome really is a great achievement and it's silly to disrespect what Google has done with Chrome considering the difficulties so many other development teams seem to be having with browsers.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing features from a competitor, that's how progress is made. Chrome is not some sort of anti-consumer "forced ad consumption" monstrosity that you seem to make it out to be. By every measure it very much seems to be an attempt by Google to raise the bar for web browsers. Key indicators of this being: they have leveraged existing open source software (webkit); have put a lot of effort into standards compliance, javascript performance (v8), and forward looking standards adoption (html5 and css 3 features, web sockets, etc.); a drastically open development process (even more so than firefox, with much easier access to dev builds); an incredibly fast development pace (Chrome is barely 1 year old); and have made the vast majority of their work open source with the Chromium project. To every indication they want to prove what can be done with browsers and very much hope other browsers copy them.
If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.
> There's absolutely nothing wrong with stealing features from a competitor, that's how progress is made.
Not pointing any fingers (cough Microsoft cough Apple cough) but the problem that most people have with 'copying features' is when the copier tries to claim that it was their 'innovation' or that they've got some claim to fame because they 'copied it better.'
They took a rendering engine, made some changes to allow tabs to be run as their own process, and took a year to implement an underwhelming and feature-sparse extension system.
What is the big achievement? Mozilla created their own rendering engine. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we'd be worse off in a world where the sole choices are Trident and WebKit.
There is no browser as fast as chrome anywhere for javascript, not even safari, not by a factor of 2x. The "omnibar" in chrome is a legitimate innovation, every browser should work that way in my opinion (it's not too difficult to tell the difference between a search string and a url automatically). How many browsers implement web-sockets? Hrm, not too many. The Chrome dev team's amazing pace of development has been spent in the last year putting together a solid, full-featured browser (extension support is almost there, that's the only real lacking element), it looks like they will continue that pace into implementing state-of-the-art features (like web-sockets) before anyone else.
If you look at Chrome and all you see is yet-another-tabbed-browser then I question whether or not Hacker News is the correct community for you to hang out in.
Ironic, since indiejade has been here about 10x as long as you. Perhaps if you can't stick to the issues and avoid childish flamebait like that, this isn't really the community for you.
Google developed Chrome because, for some reason, they thought that there's just _not enough_ "Google Advertising" online already, and they wanted to make sure that people can't easily disable advertisements, tracking cookies, etc. I tried Chrome on Linux, and really . . . was not that impressed. Firefox revolutionized the "tabbed browsing" concept, and that's the main fancy feature of Chrome. In a way, Chrome kinda just stole all the great things about Firefox (things that have taken years to develop), put those things into a shiny blue curvy-cornered UI, and slapped the Google name on it.