Also, Google is a lot better off having an ally in Mozilla. Not so much because they don't want Bing to get a lot of users, but because together with Mozilla they have over 50% of the browser market share, and since the whole total of that market share includes very modern browser versions(Chrome always on latest version, Firefox not too far behind with the old ones), Google and Mozilla can pretty much dictate where the web is going now. I wouldn't be surprised if for those $300 million they also got Mozilla to accept using Native Client in Firefox later on. I think this part of the partnership matters more than just stopping Bing from becoming the default search on Firefox.
We're not going to implement things that we think are bad for the web just because Google says so. You can look around to see what Brendan Eich (CTO of Mozilla, a higher up by any definition) has to say about Dart and NaCl. Google's money doesn't buy our cooperation on these kinds of issues (and it's worth noting that we work with plenty of people who aren't paying us money, such as Facebook, the same way that we work with Google).
I don't think you can accuse Mozilla of caving in to Google demands at all :)
Which, while annoying for you if you happen to want to push one of those things, is a fantastic thing for the Web. We all simply want to build a better web - and out of the disagreements, we get clarity how to do that.
If you're suggesting that Mozilla would do something bad for the web for money, then I think you couldn't be more wrong. Mozilla is a nonprofit exactly for this reason.
(Worth noting that the for-profit Opera opposes Native Client too - it isn't just nonprofits that have values.)
Imagine how much easier it will be in the future when ever very intensive programs can be written, and run, on the web.
There is some work to try to make it portable, but it is unclear how it will end up (how portable, how fast, how secure, etc.).
Partly because of this, NaCl is not standardized or even a proposed standard, which is another problem for the web.
I do admire the NaCl technology though - it's very neat. Although it's bad for the web, it is good for lots of other things.
So it is in fact one of the worst things that could happen to the web.
I think...
Chrome is an extension of that effort and has played a large part in driving adoption of new web technology.
But I don't buy the part about Google not being as interested in having users. Chrome is the operating system that runs the Google applications. They have increased their marketing spend this year by 69% to $4.9 billion dollars.
Google, marketing, something they never used to do and were known for not spending on. A lot of that marketing is for the chrome brand. The reason so many average PC users know about chrome is because of the market. They even hired Lady Gaga to do a Chrome ad, and I don't think they would go to the trouble of doing that if they were not interested in attracting users.
It is ok that Google want users for Chrome - nothing wrong with it. They have done so much to help users and the web with their investment in browser technology that there is no shame in marketing the product and wanting the world to use it.
Chrome advances the web. It does this because it's damn good. It's forced others to be good. None of this has anything to do with the point being made in the OP he's responding to.
Everything between the user and the monetization mechanism (advertisement) is strategic to Google. To believe otherwise is to be delusional. It's like the people who thought they could partner with Microsoft in the 90s and it'd be good for them.
I can see why a guy on the Chrome UI team would dismiss a valid business strategy of hedging against the IE + Firefox user-base that uses the search bar and address bar for 100% of their searches (vs. going to http://www.google.com directly) ... having their default search engine switched on them.
To him, owning a share of the browser market is not really important to Google, in that way, because he has this image of himself and Google being the good guys and doing to no evil.
Someone drank the kool-aid.
This is actually a bit frustrating. There's a bunch of people writing sub-optimal web-pages; not understanding the features or the security; and then there's a bunch of browser engineers trying to keep up.
Security still needs huge amounts of research and energy to progress beyond the broken model (username and pass everywhere / single weak social media login for everything) to something that most users can cope with.
I sound like a luddite, but I miss the days when you could do a Google search for something and the first page would be people who knew a lot about that subject, and who'd written some great text about it, and given it a bit of markup.
Honestly, ideal web pages for me are those but with CSS.
A lot of the web now feels like it's been designed by people who grew up with Geocities and <blink> and <marquee>.
Unfortunately i'm not sure people will adopt it. It's only good for the user. It doesn't bring money.
So unlike Mozilla Google is not practically irrelevant on mobile platforms, why then should they invest more money?
Mozilla, on the other hand, seems to be making mobile a priority with all of the work they are doing in WebAPI. Their browser is updating a lot faster than Android's, which I believe still only updates with OS upgrades.
iOS users are in the same boat, but Apple has been providing much more support to older devices.
the point, right there.
And it always remember all my sites so to go to hacker news i just write an "n" and it writes the rest... and i can even delete the suggestions with shift+delete.
So yeah, i also don't have any idea what the parent comment was triyng to say.
Also one small way to improve the search experience, is easy search in multiple search engines. Firefox's search box is one way of doing so, But it has been removed in chrome. Does it really improve the web ?
Does limiting the power of adblocking relative to firefox for example , really improves the web ?
Do giving better/faster experience for youtube and google(no data but few anecdotes from me and friends) , for chrome users is improving the open web ?
And if we talk about moving the web forward , privacy is one of the biggest issues the web currently has. privacy from big companies , privacy from advertisers , privacy from other people doing searches on you and privacy from being needed to show your real name publicly on the web.
Privacy is probably much more important than technical issues like current javascript speed.
Does google really help "move the web forward" on the issue of privacy ?
Business is not warm and fuzzy. For that, you need to go non-profit. Look at these and you can see that Mozilla is really warm and fuzzy: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefoxlive/
Making sure the web is an open platform make sure no one control the technology, therefor Google have more opportunities to display ads. And also people have more opportunities to compete with Google too.
Nothing forces you to visit Google properties, etc.
A:yes
Q: does google donatethis money?
A: no.
Q: what is TFA worth then?
A: oh, wait.
so.yeah. right.
