Mozilla CEO: Chrome was inevitable
Mozilla CEO John Lilly on Tuesday waxed philosophical about the release of Google's new Web browser, Chrome, despite it signaling an attempt by the search giant--and Mozilla's major financier--to become its biggest competitor.
Mozilla CEO John Lilly
(Credit: Mozilla)Chrome, Lilly says, was inevitable.
"It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here: their business is the Web, and they've got clear opinions on how things should be," Lilly wrote in his blog Tuesday. "Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important."
The beta version of Chrome, to be available later Tuesday for Windows systems, is an obvious alternative to Firefox for those Web surfers fed up with Microsoft's long-reigning Internet Explorer browser.
Mozilla and Google have had a long and very fruitful relationship. Google is the default search engine on the Mozilla Firefox browser, and the company pays Mozilla large sums for the privilege: $56 million of the $66 million that Mozilla Corp. made in 2006.
But Lilly, writing in his blog, said he welcomed the competition posed by Google. Lilly said Mozilla would continue its financial relationship with Google until 2011 and would continue to work with the search giant on technical collaborations such as crash reports system Breakpad.
Paul Kim, vice president of marketing for Mozilla, said that Google staff would be allowed to continue to contribute to the Mozilla Foundation's projects. "As a 100 percent open-source project, we welcome contributions to Firefox from everyone," he said.
"More smart people thinking about ways to make the Web good for normal human beings is good, absolutely," Lilly said.
"Competition often results in innovation of one sort or another: in the browser you can see that this is true in spades this year, with huge JavaScript performance increases, security process advances, and user interface breakthroughs. I'd expect that to continue now that Google has thrown their hat in the ring."
Brett Winterford reported for ZDNet Australia, based in Sydney.
- Topics:
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Browsers and extensions
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Google,
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Chrome,
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browser,
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open source
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Also, any one remember google Talk? Didn't work too well.
But hey, who knows. Maybe Moz will take over Chrome from google when they are bored.
Google is now like the good old mafia Don's, who just come up and make you an offer you can't refuse.
Google to Mozilla: "its our way, or the cement shoes and trip to the bottom of the sea."
Personally, I don't think we need another dang browser, even if it is Google.
Oh well, it will be interesting to see how many googlers get joind from Mozilla.
The multi-process idea seems to come from ERLang where it spawns a separate VM for each process.
Look where the funding is going for Ubuntu server. ... Optimization for virtualization. VMWare has hired Cloud Computing "pros" ....
I see the day coming where you have a 'stock install' of some sort of minimal debain based linux os to use as your own - with out the complexity of the Amazon E2C.
Its always a great time to be in the business... Its fun to watch the great brains at work.
As for the demise of Mozilla, I wouldn't count on it. What I would love to see is Mozilla go back to it's roots, go back to the original magic that existed in Netscape before the scummiest company on the face of the Web bought out Netscape and trashed it's good name(AOL for those with short memories). I will continue to use Netscape products for as long as they will work. I do use Flock, rarely use Firefox and I'll try Chrome, but I doubt it will get much use.
The interesting questions to me are not if Chrome (beta) is ready for prime time (it is not) or which established browser will suffer more (they all will.) Much more
interesting is that Chrome has all the trappings of a disruptive technology hiding in plain sight. Established browser vendors may publicly downplay Chrome... but I can
guarantee that they are (or at least should be) taking this very seriously.
I wrote more about this idea here:
Google Chrome: Disruptive Technology
http://faseidl.com/public/blog/212172
Chrome is spyware mascaraing as a browser.
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by proudmdf
September 5, 2008 8:17 PM PDT
- I personally believe that Chrome will not really take off for a while. It seems to not only have a bad visual style, though poor functionality also. I can also assure everyone here that Microsoft would never buy Mozilla; and Mozilla would never sell the open source project anyhow.
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