Comments on: Mozilla and WebKit, browser platform wars.

By: Nathan Bird

Nathan Bird — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:48:39 +0000

To nitpick just a bit, they do remove code from Mozilla as well, (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/SOAP_in_Gecko-based_Browsers). We had used that in a previous project and had to go update our code. That’s why it doesn’t happen very frequently: a lot of that stuff is used somewhere.

By: Nadya Suleman

Nadya Suleman — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:04:30 +0000

IE 8 rocks. Everything else is teh suck! l053r5!!!!

By: Ian McKellar

Ian McKellar — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:30:04 +0000

@William, Dave Hyatt wasn’t the only ex-Netscaper on the Safari team, but he was the most visible, probably because he’d been more involved in the post-Netscape Mozilla stuff. I agree that that was the time for Mozilla to look at themselves and ask why their code hadn’t been chosen, but at the time, like now, they were focused on getting a product out. Remember, Mozilla 1.0 wasn’t out till mid 2002 and and Firefox wasn’t out till the end of 2004 while Safari development began before that – the Safari development team joined Apple in 2001.

By: Joost

Joost — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:15:38 +0000

I think Firefox on the Mac is a user interface nightmare… plus Safari/Webkit is much, much faster.

By: Priit Laes

Priit Laes — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 07:35:08 +0000

I have filed a few bugs in mozilla bug tracker and noticed that it is really hard go get even some trivial fixes (for “unsupported” platforms, in my case Gentoo Linux) in unless they are evangelized by their marketing guys.

I also noticed some total ignorance from at least one of their guys who seem to be just windows oriented and couldn’t even bother to figure out what the bug was about (in this case it was xulrunner should install pkg-config file)…

By: William

William — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 05:00:20 +0000

There was a lot of elation from the Mozilla crowd when Apple hired Dave Hyatt in mid-2002. It could mean the end to IE for Mac. And since Mozilla had an open-source, cross-platform user interface browser engine (via XUL) and since Dave Hyatt contributed to Netscape, Camino, and was a co-creator of Firefox there was heavy anticipation on what role Mozilla tech would play in Apple’s new browser.

But Dave chose to build off of KHTML instead. That was not very well received. There was concern and puzzlement and frustration on a lot of Mozilla blogs. There were messages of reluctant welcome to another open source browser engine. Apple’s effort only had to be good enough to keep Apple from running back to Microsoft, and many would still flock to Camino and Firefox on the Mac. It wasn’t as good building off of Mozilla code, but it was still good.

That friendly competition stopped completely when Apple released Safari for Windows. In retrospect, Safari on Intel seems like just an excuse to cloak the work being laid for Apple’s Intel transition. “Intel optimizations? Oh, that’s just to improve Safari on Windows.” Since then Webkit has become a direct foe rather than a comrade.

Whatever trends Apple flirts with are only of marginal concern to Mozilla, but a knowledgable and well-respected contributor’s switch to KHTML should have triggered more than just a public relations effort. Mozilla should have taken that as a serious reason for honest introspection and refocusing of their goals (if not their code).

By: Nathan

Nathan — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:37:02 +0000

Safari 4 Rocks!!!

By: David Boswell

David Boswell — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 04:08:18 +0000

You’re certainly right that Mozilla’s scale can make things challenging and there is also a lot of historical content that needs to be cleaned up.

This isn’t much of a segue, but I didn’t realize that Mozilla had been used with the hiptop. Do you know if they’re still using it? If so, I’d be interested in talking to someone there about using the Powered by Mozilla logo. If you’re still in touch with anyone there, I’d be interested in hearing more. Thanks.