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Sorry, that’s just not what happened. I think there’s an important lesson in what happened to Mozilla, so I think it is worth clarifying. Chrome didn’t start f

Sorry, that’s just not what happened. I think there’s an important lesson in what happened to Mozilla, so I think it is worth clarifying. Chrome didn’t start from scratch (they used WebKit to start) and they didn’t overtake them overnight. Mozilla couldn’t decide what their focus should be for many years, and in that time Chrome grew thanks to Google’s infinite wallet. They made worthwhile risks that didn’t work out in the end, and during this period their core product stopped improving and they eventually needed an extensive and expensive rewrite. I think the lesson here is this: if you’re going to invest in experimental products, don’t forget about keeping your core technology up to date.

pasbesoin 9y ago
Both Chrome and Safari started with extant, open-source projects. A rich set of lessons in what tends to happen with corporate uptake of a "common good".
bigbugbag 9y ago
And webkit did not start from scratch either, it started from KHTML. They had considered using firefox rendering engine gecko but it was too cumbersome and got dropped.
zmix 9y ago
First, many years ago, they should have made an XUL IDE. Then they should have focused on XML and giving the world an XML based web-browser, trying to drive XML further. XML would have had a much better chance on the web, if web-servers could have responded to URL encoded XPaths (or even XQueries in POST/GET), serving back XML Fragments which could have been XMLIncluded by the browser. They could have lobbied that. Now we've got HTML5...
- nitrogen 9y ago
  That sounds rather unpleasant from a user or non-XML-loving developer perspective. Such a heavy focus on XML for XML's sake would have guaranteed Firefox's decline into obscurity.
- koffiezet 9y ago
  XUL was a horrible idea, certainly at the time. Firefox's UI felt sluggish due to it, certainly since I was used to Opera's blazing fast and responsive UI, which I stuck to for exactly that reason. I only had Firefox installed for compatibility reasons. People seem to forget that while IE was a mess, Firefox was only "better", not "amazingly fantastically better". With computers having become faster, together with development thrown at it, that's not really an issue anymore, but developers have also realized these days that XML is far from human readable, and for the majority of applications it has been used for, simply a bad idea.

pasbesoin 9y ago

Both Chrome and Safari started with extant, open-source projects. A rich set of lessons in what tends to happen with corporate uptake of a "common good".

bigbugbag 9y ago

And webkit did not start from scratch either, it started from KHTML. They had considered using firefox rendering engine gecko but it was too cumbersome and got dropped.

zmix 9y ago

First, many years ago, they should have made an XUL IDE. Then they should have focused on XML and giving the world an XML based web-browser, trying to drive XML further. XML would have had a much better chance on the web, if web-servers could have responded to URL encoded XPaths (or even XQueries in POST/GET), serving back XML Fragments which could have been XMLIncluded by the browser. They could have lobbied that. Now we've got HTML5...

nitrogen 9y ago
That sounds rather unpleasant from a user or non-XML-loving developer perspective. Such a heavy focus on XML for XML's sake would have guaranteed Firefox's decline into obscurity.
koffiezet 9y ago
XUL was a horrible idea, certainly at the time. Firefox's UI felt sluggish due to it, certainly since I was used to Opera's blazing fast and responsive UI, which I stuck to for exactly that reason. I only had Firefox installed for compatibility reasons. People seem to forget that while IE was a mess, Firefox was only "better", not "amazingly fantastically better". With computers having become faster, together with development thrown at it, that's not really an issue anymore, but developers have also realized these days that XML is far from human readable, and for the majority of applications it has been used for, simply a bad idea.