Ha, we're totally not building a browser, nope, not us!
I suppose perhaps that was true at that moment. When did they start making Chrome?
I suppose perhaps that was true at that moment. When did they start making Chrome?
> I don't think we should let that determine our hiring strategy but thought I would let you know.
> Basically, he said "if you hire a single one of these people that means war".
I'm guessing the idea for Chrome started to crystallize right about here...
> on another note, it seems silly to have both firefox and safari. perhaps there is some unificaiton strategy that we can get these two to pursue. combined, they certainly have enough marketshare to drive webmasters.
Would be absolutely hilarious if these series of calls and emails led to the development of Chrome
Although Chrome eventually diverged years later with the development of Blink, Chrome was the result of a multi-company, industry-wide unification strategy on WebKit, the core of Safari.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
>WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE, and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia, and others. WebKit supports macOS, Windows, Linux, and various other Unix-like operating systems. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome and the Opera web browser, under the name Blink.
And as we all know, Android is as important to Google as iOS is to Apple.
So there was really no chance of either of them (or any other of the many companies interested in mobile and embedded devices, like TomTom for example) ever building on top of Mozilla/xulrunner.
Probably true at the time (anno 2007), but since ~2014, FirefoxOS which is an entire mobile OS based on Gecko (called boot2gecko) I think proves that at least the browser engine (not UI) could be used for more than just simple webpages, and on mobile devices.
The OS itself was relatively fast, but the public perception of the performance of the OS was very low, as most (if not all devices) running FirefoxOS was very low powered compared to the contemporary flagship models for Android and iPhone.
I remember a rigorous article where he dissected Mozilla vs Webkit and explained by why the latter was superior (= less abstractions and no XPCOM). I wouldn't be surprised if that article was the basis for the decision to not go with Mozilla at Apple.
Nothing to be held against him for sure, if you have been in this business for this long you are sure to have created stuff that you realize was not optimal. Particularly over-abstractions.
Also I would not be surprised if it is that person they are talking about in the mail conversation.