Mozilla CEO uncertain about future relationship with Google

Mountain View (CA) - Google was widely speculated to sacrifice Mozilla’s existence, which it supports quite extensively, in its quest to launch another assault at Microsoft. The simple fact that Google is now pursuing its own browser could leave Mozilla scratching its head. And quite apparently, Mozilla has not quite figured out how its relationship with Google will work out over the next few years.

But Mozilla CEO John Lily said that “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, and smart people thinking about how to make things better.” Lily believes that Chrome “will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.”

The executive agrees that Google’s Chrome will have a competitive effect on Mozilla. “As much as anything else, it’ll mean there’s another interesting browser that users can choose,” he wrote in a blog post. “With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc — there’s been competition for a while now, and this increases that. So it means that more than ever, we need to build software that people care about and love. Firefox is good now, and will keep on getting better.”

That being said, Lily noted that” Mozilla and Google have always been different organizations, with different missions, reasons for existing, and ways of doing things.” While they are tied together in certain collaborative efforts such as security features as well as a financial commitment from Google until 2011, the executive hinted that the future relationship between the two organizations is not ironed out yet. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the coming months and years. I personally think Firefox 3 is an incredibly great browser - the best anywhere - and we’re seeing millions of people start using it every month,” he wrote in his blog 

“It’s based on technology that shows incredible compatibility across the broad web - technology that’s been tweaked and improved over a period of years.”

Lily’s blog is carefully worded, but it surely seems that Google will be aiming to gain the upper hand in this relationship and at least ask Mozilla to adopt key features of Chrome features for Firefox. Mozilla could be caught between a rock and a hard place: Play with Google or compete against them and the mighty Microsoft? There is no need to answer this question immediately, as the first version of Chrome seems to be very rough around its edges and appears to be lacking key features that would let Google compete with Firefox 3 and IE8 in a much more serious way.

Source: TGDaily.com

New Firefox JavaScript engine is faster than Chrome's V8

One of the most impressive features in Google's open source Chrome web browser is V8, a high-performance JavaScript virtual machine that was developed by a team of specialists in Denmark. Although Chrome's performance beats the current stable version of Firefox, benchmarks show that Mozilla's next-generation JavaScript engine actually outperforms V8.

Mozilla is using tracing optimization techniques and Adobe's open source nanojit to increase the execution speed of SpiderMonkey, the JavaScript runtime engine in the Firefox web browser. The new engine, which is called TraceMonkey, delivers unprecedented JavaScript performance. The new optimizations have already landed in the latest Firefox nightly builds (but still have to be manually enabled) and will likely be included in Firefox 3.1.

JavaScript creator and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks against Chrome and the latest TraceMonkey-enabled Firefox build, which includes some recent improvements. The benchmarks show that TraceMonkey is clearly faster than Google's V8. Mozilla believes that the optimization technique used in TraceMonkey has the potential to unlock even more performance improvements.

 
Data source: Mozilla

"As we continue to trace unrecorded bytecode and operand combinations, we will only get faster," Eich wrote in a blog entry. "What spectators have to realize is that this contest is not a playoff where each contending VM is eliminated at any given hype-event point. We believe that Franz & Gal-style tracing has more 'headroom' than less aggressively speculative approaches, due to its ability to specialize code, making variables constant and eliminating dead code and conditions at runtime, based on the latent types inherent in almost all JavaScript programs."

Eich also praises Chrome. He says that the V8 JavaScript engine is "very-well engineered" and he describes the multiprocess design as "righteous".

The results of the benchmark show that Mozilla is still a powerful force to be reckoned with in the browser space and that they will continue to innovate and remain relevant as new companies enter the market.

Source: ArsTechnica.com

Mozilla Not Worried About Google Browser

In response to today’s news that Google is releasing its own browser, code-named Chrome, I decide to call John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corp., the folks behind the fast-growing Firefox browser. My intention was to find out what Lilly thought about this development, especially since Mozilla has been viewed as close personal partner of Google’s.

The open-source browser maker depends heavily on a lucrative financial deal it has signed with the search company. The pair recently renewed the deal to last through 2011. Was Lilly worried about yet another browser in the market?

After all, the emergence of Linux has had an equally deflationary impact on the UNIX market. Can a Google browser, promoted on Google homepage and pushed through Google’s mobile OS, become a sticky wicket for Mozilla Firefox?

“We collaborate with them on a bunch of things and we have a financial relationship,” Lilly says. “So there is another browser and that makes for a more competitive world. Of course we would have to compete.”

Given that Microsoft still controls about 72 percent of the browser market, Google can’t afford to leave that business to chance. Web is its business, and the browser is a necessary weapon for the company. “It is not surprising that they are doing a browser. Google does many things (servers, energy) that touch their business,” he said. “They feel that they can make a better browser by starting from scratch…advances in browsers are good.”

Lilly pointed out that most of the other browser vendors — Microsoft, Apple and now Google — have other businesses and thus another agenda. For Mozilla, Firefox was the only agenda. “Our only agenda is to make web better — it is our single mission,” Lilly says. With over 200 million users worldwide and a development team made up mostly of volunteers, Lilly says he isn’t worried about Chrome just yet. “I really don’t know how it will impact us,” he says.

He is right to take a wait-and-see attitude. For one, browser market share doesn’t change overnight. Google, despite its awesome reach, has a history of launching products that tend to lose steam. It has yet to hit home runs that rival its search and contextual advertising businesses.

Not having seen Chrome, I will withhold any final judgement myself, but I would look at the privacy implications of Chrome very, very carefully. I have long since stopped buying into the “do no evil” drivel the company keeps espousing.

This tussle between Mozilla and Google is going to get more gripping in coming years. Mozilla has a services strategy — Project Weave – that could eventually compete with Google’s suite of services. Whatever it is, it seems like Mozilla is ready for the challenge. And just when we thought the world of browsers was getting boring.

Source: GigaOM.com