Google is a for-profit company that makes money selling your data and targeted, personal ads.
Mozilla is not-for-profit and just wants to make the web better.
1. disrupt IE/MS - i can say for certain they originally backed Firefox for this effort and only decided to split away to build chrome in the first place because they felt starting fresh they could build a better core and i believe they did.
2. enabling more people to build on the web, enables more of their ads to be shown. Firefox achieves this just as well as chrome. IE was dominating not too long ago and you could argue much of google's ad revenue growth can be attributed to more people having access to a higher quality web.
That said... I don't see why you should believe google would need or desire to sell data from what it might collect from Chrome. More likely they see it as a means to ensuring web dominance by ensuring the web is never locked down by one mega corp. It's similar in away to what they have done in the mobile space. Android is more of a technology to disrupt Apple and ensure it can't be dominate, but really does google have any control over Android?
I wouldn't let Google off the hook so easily.
More like, they want to ensure that if/when it is, they are that one mega corp: https://i.imgur.com/AIxYzl9.jpg
If you ask me, the only reason they haven't moved even faster in this direction is because they're afraid of triggering the same legal action that Microsoft did back in the 90s with IE, but that doesn't mean that they wouldn't love to have that form of dominance - it can only help them.
2) It's not an accident that Google's webservices work best (sometimes only) in Chrome.
They're way past the "disrupt IE" goal. They're into the "tightly couple our web service and Chrome and try to force out other options" goal.
(http://www.asymco.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Screen-Shot...)
Theoretically Google could sell that space. They trade this potential profit to promote their own product, at a loss, of how ever much that space could be sold for. This is like economics 202, opportunity cost.
I can't find a source for the figure right now, unfortunately. And the whole thing is a guess, since Google doesn't release this information. All it releases is overall sales/marketing spending, which in 2012 was about $6 billion if I understand right (see <http://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Google-spend-on-advertisi...). That includes salaries for the marketing folks, etc, not just direct spending on campaigns.
As I recall, the $1b estimate broke down something like 30% actual spend (primetime TV ads, ads all over the London Tube, etc, etc) and 70% in-kind placement (i.e. "every search you do on Google with another browser shoves an ad for Chrome in your face"). I'll see if I can hunt down where I saw that...
> That's 3 times Mozilla's entire budget
Yep.
As for Google Search ads, let's take the number of search requests[1], an example CPC they give[2], an example CTR they give[3], the StatCounter portion of non-Chrome users[4], we get 1216373500000 * (1-0.3) * $0.10 * 0.005.
That's $425,730,725 for a one-year campaign in 2012. Given the prominence of this ad (and its unintentional scare value), the CTR is probably off, so that's a very conservative figure.
If that is indeed 70% of the whole campaign cost, the total is $608,186,750 per year.
[0]: http://www.mediatransports.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Qu...
[1]: http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/
[2]: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375420?hl=en
[3]: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2615875?hl=en
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum...
A web service that only works in Chrome? Maybe you mean web application (web service would be really odd to work in just one browser). Do you have a source for this regardless? I hadn't heard of this.
If there was a web standard way of caching 5GB of files locally then I would be annoyed.
As for concrete examples, Hangouts only works in non-Chrome browsers (including ones with WebRTC support) if you install a Google-provided binary blob. Which you may not be able to do.
Gmail only supports offline access in Chrome (see https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6557?hl=en the "two exceptions" bit). Whether not having offline access to your mail counts as mail "not working" is up to you, I guess; for me it counts as "not working".
Various Google properties use UA sniffing to deliver degraded content to non-Chrome browsers. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=921532#c9 is an example.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=973754 is an example where as far as I can tell they built the feature around non-standard Chrome-only functionality even though Firefox supports the standard version.
Google news menus don't work in standards-compliant browsers because they rely on a Chrome/WebKit bug. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1083932
Google patent search uses UA sniffing and locks out various browsers as a result. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1013702
Google Translate will fail to work in Firefox unless you have Flash installed (good luck on Mobile).... or spoof the Chrome UA string. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=976013
They do fix these bugs sometimes (the UA sniffing ones, where they just got the sniffing flat out wrong, tend to get fixed once someone diagnoses them). And sometimes not.
Then you ask yourself why the goals were set the way they were. Obvious guess at an answer: because they only want to target "mobile" and Android+iOS cover most "mobile" clients. Had iOS had less market share, I will bet the goal would have been Android-only (modulo advice by lawyers based on antitrust worries in that situation, of course).
No malice anywhere along here, but the end result is not so distinguishable from malice, sadly.
Note, not picking on you, just Internet in general.
The old saying was "Windows is not done until Lotus won't run", and the DR-DOS case shows it might not have been an exaggeration
Google/Chrome also works hard to support "what's already out there", which is what you mention, but what we're discussing now is building on your supposedly-open-but-really-proprietary platform _against_ other players, whether that's policy or coincidental with constraints.
Microsoft spent effort making sure Windows itself WON'T run on DR DOS before that. They constantly ignored web standards after they won the browser wars (conveniently working well with Microsoft tools that produced non-standard markup, though) ... up until the moment they lost them again, at which point they started to pay attention to standards again.
With their last few releases, Google seems to be adopting this Microsoft style of evil. Some people defend that, and some don't.
That's the other easy explanation as to "why iOS?"
The Google Hangouts website uses some carefully-constructed language to imply that people must download Chrome to use Hangouts, even though a Hangouts NPAPI plugin supposedly exists:
https://www.google.com/hangouts/
The Hangouts Chrome extension won't work in your current browser. You'll need to
download Chrome before installing the Hangouts Chrome extension. Do you want to
download Chrome now?
That said, I agree that more FxOS bits need to end up on standards tracks. The permissions issue really needs solving to make serious progress there.
Chrome kicked off the browser performance wars, especially javascript. A fast and performant web was important to any strategy Google could have had, regardless of their status as a good or evil company.
But man, Chrome sure got good fast.
http://www.cnet.com/news/browser-war-centers-on-once-obscure...
Besides, Chrome didn't just introduce V8, it also introduced a cleaner UI, sandboxed tabs, and eventually, a much better set of DevTools than any other browser.
To deny that competition from Chrome didn't put pressure on other vendors I think is trying to willfully discount it's contributions for political, not technical reasons.
Chrome obviously put pressure on other vendors in various areas, including performance. What just isn't true is that without Chrome there would have been no JS performance competition. Whether the competition would have been as intense as it ended up being is a debatable counterfactual; I believe it would have been.
One other historical note, since you brought it up: Chrome was first announced publicly Sept 3, 2008. The first public beta of IE 8, with tabs in separate processes, was released on March 5, 2008. These processes ran in a low-privilege sandbox, as in fact did the entire browser starting with IE 7 (released October 2006), on Windows Vista or newer. Chrome did provide the first browser sandbox on Windows XP and non-Windows platforms, which was a big step up, of course. Again, there is a difference here between "introduced a new ground-breaking concept" and "incrementally improved on what was already going on".
Oh, and V8 was clearly considered a "threat" by other browser makers way before Chrome had any market share to speak of, so I'm not sure what your remark about Safari is supposed to mean.
The problem with this discussion is inherent in any counterfactual history, as you point out, and the common issue of what appears to be revolutionary to people outside a domain vs merely implementing things people have discussed for years, as the same "revolution" appears to people inside that domain.
The reality is that circa-2008 JS engines were fairly rudimentary, including (or especially) V8, and your average JIT compiler writer at the time would have been less impressed and more compelled to question why this "revolution" hadn't happened years earlier (and several did ask exactly that).
All that said, "Chrome put pressure on other vendors" has been extremely important to the evolution of JS performance, especially with Crankshaft -- I think it's extremely likely that shipping Firefox would still have a tracing JIT today and would be just starting to move past it without Crankshaft having existed -- but Chrome in that slot vs the other major browsers is really not that meaningful a distinction either, as without SpiderMonkey existing, it's likely that V8's major strides forward would have stopped with Crankshaft in 2010. Performance would have continued to improve in either (especially with JSC making big improvements), but I don't think we'd have seen the major architectural changes as often as we have without that pressure. Competition is great.
That it's a performant browser is a side-effect.
My argument is that nobody would have put that data online in a slow and sucky web. If you think Google wants full control over the audience, surely they also want a large audience.
(Note that I do not think that Google is evil. But if they were, I don't think they would need chrome to get most of that information anyways, given all the other ways they are collecting data. Sure, there are some corner cases they would miss but I don't think the incremental coverage would be worth the effort.)
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/1181035 contains info on how the encryption works.
chrome://terms/ links to https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/privacy/ which links to http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/ to define "how we use information we collect." From that page: "We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads."
Your full browsing history is a treasure trove of information useful for making Google's core services (search and ads) more effective. They would be stupid not to use it to improve the quality of their services. I challenge your assertion that Chrome is an altruistic endeavor.
References:
"Get predictions in the address bar" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95656?hl=en
"Logging policies for omnibox predictions" https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/180655?hl=en
Even Firefox' Mobile Awesomebar doesn't do that[1] unless you click that "Yes" button.
On the other hand, Google's Chrome browser is clear about the fact that it does send everything in the omnibar[2]:
> When you type URLs or queries in the Chrome address bar (omnibox) or App Launcher search box, the letters you type may be sent to your default search engine so that the search engine’s prediction feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for.
If you still believe you are right, I would be interested in seeing your sources.
[0]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-b...
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2013/01/08/search-suggestio...
Obviously, I can't prove that it doesn't send search suggestions by giving you a link to the code, since it isn't there. If you want to make sure for yourself, I advise using Wireshark.
It could be said Google already have your browsing history (of sites that they serve adverts on, or that use their analytics). I doubt Chrome's syncing data would give them any more information than what they have already.
and it's quite easy to block Google from tracking your browsing habits using GA or Ads: just use an Adblocker and something like Ghostery, RequestPolicy or Disconnect to block Google Analytics.
I really like Google, but I want to support open source(and am not quite willing to put up with Chromium). But for me, core usability is still king, and nothing really touches Chrome for that.
I like being able to hit a, see Amazon.com hilighted, hit tab, and have that be searching Amazon.
Or to do the same thing with GMail, Wikipedia, Youtube. It's the core functionality I like most with Chrome.
Firefox has something similar: "Keyword Searches" bookmarks. I define my own search shortcuts, such as "am" for Amazon, "imdb" for IMDB, "nf" for Netflix, and "w" for Wikipedia. Using "am Harry Potter" or imdb or nf or w will use those respective website's own search forms to find "Harry Potter".
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
For example: I have a folder in my bookmarks containing like Youtube which is this url https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s&oq=&gs_l= associated with the keyword "yt" so I can type yt <search term> and it loads the Youtube results. I've also added one for the Mozilla Developer Network (mdn <search term>), Python Documentation (py2 <term> or py3 <term>) and I add others as I use them more.
DDG bangs works with all large website or search engine (!g for google, !w for wikipedia), and with smaller, specialized one as well (I can look up words definition in the Trésors de la Langue Française Informatisé with !tlfi , and a particular protein in the Protein DataBase with !pdb).
If you use the official extension[2], you also get search suggestion out of the search box
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...
To... other advertisers? Google is the advertiser. It not only goes against their Terms of Service to sell that data, but also makes zero business sense.
I swear people just make things up when it suits their world views.
Would you even considered that if that one provider was anyone but Google? No? If so, why do you give Google a free pass?
Mozilla does not respect the rules of my native OS. For over five years, they insisted that double-clicking the upper-left corner of the window should not close the window like every other app on the system. Nope. They insisted on doing it their way ignoring the complaints of thousands of users.
Firefox also makes you press Shift to use access keys. Totally non-standard amongst browsers and OSes and annoying for devs and users.
Is Firefox the only browser left that hasn't switched to multiple processes?
No, Firefox isn't better and I don't trust Mozilla anymore than Google.
I just spent an hour trying to figure out why ff freezes on the partner's computer. Yay 780mb sqlite wal. Who the fuck knows what that's doing. Why on earth does using a browser require vaccuming sqlite files? Dunno, because there's no good reason.
If she'll finally switch to chrome I'll stop hearing complaints the internet is slow.
Most things are retained, even cookies. It does remove some things (often things that can cause problems, like badly out-of-date-unmaintained extensions, clears DOM storage, download history, plugin settings): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...