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A few interesting facts:
You can take these facts many ways. Here are a few theses you could claim:
I say this…
Mozilla: a group of developers gave you something great that you'd never have achieved via your own Mozilla Suite, and then you let them go, failed to learn from what they did, failed to use the heaps of cash flying around to compete properly as a software developer, invested in lots of irrelevant pet-projects, and now you can see the result. You've lost your secure income, most developers see you as a joke, and you're now second to Google who aren't even primarily a browser company.
Mozilla, you screwed up
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A few interesting facts:- Firefox was the best browser in the world
- It was created by some developers who saw that Mozilla Suite was slow and nasty to use, worse than IE6
- Mozilla signed an advertising deal with Google for Firefox, bringing in $100 million per year
- The early Firefox developers were hired away by Google, to write Google Chrome
- Meanwhile, Mozilla did not invest much of the money into Firefox – they invested it externally, or they spent it on pet side projects (most of them bat-crazy, such as making a browser-based IDE, as if they were going to be the new Eclipse Foundation), or they just spent it on endless marketing-led iterations of the design of their own sprawling website
- And rather than seeing what the Firefox team had done, the Mozilla guys let it drift slowly away from some of the original design goals of those early developers
- Less inspired in-house developers made small improvements to Firefox for a number of years, including some horrible populist stuff like 'personas' that harked back to the bad days of Mozilla Suite (often regular users will see an idea as 'good' whilst serious designers or software developers can see very clearly that it shows a bad direction)
- Meanwhile, there are bugs in basic standards compliance that had existed in their bug tracker (Bugzilla) for 10 years – all browsers have bugs, Firefox had fewer than IE, but they tended to be ignored for eternity too
- And big usability gaffs like the list-based cookie management tool with a button that doesn't delete what cookies you've selected, but deletes all cookies and cannot be undone
- Grade-A developers like our own Philip Withnall tried to help do bug triaging to guide the core Firefox developers, in the false belief that Mozilla had no money and it was important to help the great time-stricken developers (who had already left)
- Recently Firefox has done a good job of playing catch-up with Google Chrome in terms of performance – but it should not have been necessary given this is what Firefox was when it was created
- But now Google Chrome has surpassed it in market share, in a few short years
- And as of this month, apparently the advertising deal with Google has expired, with 80% of Mozillas income
- Will it get renewed at the last minute, or will Mozilla be forced to go crawling to Microsoft, to integrate Bing?
You can take these facts many ways. Here are a few theses you could claim:
- Mozilla was mismanaged (not replacing good developers, not maintaining important design goals, not investing back into development in a properly focused and managed way, not seeing the obvious need to compete with Google Chrome until too late)
- Google, as the new Microsoft, use anti-competitive tactics (funding Mozilla to kill IE, then hiring the developers, then cloning it under their own brand, then cutting off the air supply)
- Mozilla kept a lot of their users in the dark (not by hiding things, but possibly by being intentionally non-explicit in what the true drivers behind the project has been – Google's money, and the original developers, and which people being on the payroll)
I say this…
Mozilla: a group of developers gave you something great that you'd never have achieved via your own Mozilla Suite, and then you let them go, failed to learn from what they did, failed to use the heaps of cash flying around to compete properly as a software developer, invested in lots of irrelevant pet-projects, and now you can see the result. You've lost your secure income, most developers see you as a joke, and you're now second to Google who aren't even primarily a browser company.
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Copyright © ocProducts Ltd, 2011
The only major difference is that the majority of useful add-ons aren't yet compatible.
What a shambles!
Using Google Chrome atm.. but miss Firefox.
It's a shame really… I remember the old days, back during the original browser wars… And I remember fondly what a breath of fresh air firefox was when it first came it (who here knows that firefox wasn't the original project name, but became it I think with the first stable release).
Firefox started out as a fast, capable, and powerful browser, very much holding true to its namesake. Having only the base browsing functions default in the browser, with an add-on system so that you could put in more functionality if you needed it was an excellent idea for a web browser. Tab browsing, though not an original idea of Firefox or Mozilla, was still wonderful! With the original firefox versions (1 and 2) you could have a fast and lean browser, a typical browser, or a browser that could do anything and everything but ran slowly. Now days, you get a slow browser that does lots of things you might not care about, or an even slower browser when you go to add some missing functionality that you do care about…
Luckily there are plenty of other worthy web browsers these days, and most website designers and web browsers now practice good developing standards. But still, it is sad to see such a powerful symbol of open source programming fall like that.
In some ways, I wish that all browsers were based on WebKit until someone does a really great job with a new foundation. This would make rendering more consistent with developers to differentiate their products based on speed and browser features.
Bob
However, I must say that its number of add-ons makes it a very useful browser for specific tasks.
I run with 6 windows open with a total of 17+ tabs in Safari. While Safari has it's own issues with memory, it is always faster for me than Firefox. If I need another browser, I use Chrome but the layout just feels "wrong" to me.
Bob
Bob
Bob
I doubt it will be addressed until the next major release, whenever that is.
That's why it's nice to have Chrome handy - it makes quick work of JS-heavy websites.
Bob
Bob
Wrong Info
(i.e. webkit is heavily influenced by the Chrome team nowadays)
WebKit was originally derived by Apple Inc. from the Konqueror browser's KHTML software library for use as the engine of Safari web browser, and has now been further developed by individuals from KDE, Apple Inc., Nokia, Google, Bitstream, Torch Mobile, Samsung, Igalia, and others.[2] Mac OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, and some other Unix-like operating systems are supported by the project.[3]
and
Initial release: November 4, 1998; 13 years ago (KHTML released)
June 7, 2005; 6 years ago (WebKit open sourced)
Look, it's true, the hired firefox guys helped modify the engine, and I totally agree with you about the fact that mozilla has screwed up. Mozilla guys have made us all disappointed, the performance sucks, the js engine is even slower than ie8 in some benchmarkings, and chrome is really fast.
But the false impression about the history of chrome is not something to accept. These are two totally different things.
Interesting
But my point isn't really about that, I'm not saying that Webkit is built by the Mozilla developers – just that Mozilla was foolish to not hold on to their best developers.
But anyways, on the point of the relationship between Chrome and Webkit – Chrome has a completely different implementation of Javascript, and a lot of other technology. I think it's kind of like comparing ocPortal and Drupal and saying they are both basically PHP+. Both projects owe a lot to PHP, but they bring a lot to the table themselves also.
In terms of Mozilla losing talent, people should remember that Apple hired Dave Hyatt, one of the founders of the Mozilla Project as I recall, in the early 2000s to head up Apple's Webkit development, but Mozilla has been bleeding talent as the people, I think quite reasonably, question its viability in sight of the fact that its primary sponsor is also its primary competitor.
Bob
So actually Mozilla have done quite well after all.
So they have a stay of execution, but their market share continues to erode.
I suspect Google will 'terminate' this agreement when it comes up for renewal in 3 years.
It is one more reason they should have adopted Webkit at some point so that they could focus on JS and UI instead of delivering a rendering engine that doesn't cause headaches for web designers and developers.
Mozilla is dying the death by 10,000 cuts and I see little way forward for them long-term. It's not like they can even attempt the monoploy argument any more.
Bob