In my experience (8 years building Mozilla based products and playing with WebKit since it was first released as WebCore in 2003) there are a few clear technical and social differences that can make WebKit a more attractive platform for developers than Mozilla. There are plenty of reasons that Firefox is a better product than Safari (I definitely prefer Firefox over Safari on my Mac), but that’s a different story.

The scale and complexity of the Mozilla codebase is daunting. Mozilla advocates will say that that’s because Mozilla provides more functionality, but the reality is that even if you don’t want all that functionality you still have to dig through and around it to get your work done. Much of the Mozilla platform is poorly documented, poorly understood and incomplete (the C++/JS binding security stuff was the most recent example I’ve looked at) while WebKit is smaller, simpler and newer. They use common c++ idioms instead of proprietary systems like XPCOM.

The scale of the Mozilla organization is also daunting. Mozilla’s web presence is vast and is filled with inaccurate, outdated content. Their goals are vague and mostly irrelevant to developers. By contrast WebKit’s web site is simple and straight-forward. Its audience is developers, it sets out goals that matter and make sense to developers, it explains clearly the process for participating and contributing in the project.

WebKit is designed for embedding. Within Apple there are several customers for the WebKit library – Desktop Safari, iPhone Safari, Dashboard, AppKit and more. Since WebKit already serves a variety of purposes it’s likely to work for other applications which third party developers will want to build. By comparison the Mozilla platform really only has one first-class customer – Firefox.

The WebKit community has welcomed non-employee contributors. They’ve even welcomed contributors who work for Apple’s competitors. There are WebKit reviewers from Google, Nokia and the open source community. By comparison, Songbird and Flock don’t have any Mozilla committers or reviewers who weren’t previously Mozilla Corporation employees even though they are two of the largest non-MoCo platform customers.

Perhaps I’m short-sighted, but I don’t see a clear path forward for Mozilla in competing with WebKit as a platform for web content display. The long history of Mozilla have left them with a large, complicated codebase that’s not getting smaller. The rapid growth and defensive attitude of the organization (probably brought on by the Netscape / IE wars) has left it without a culture that welcomes friendly competition. I think that Mozilla’s focus on the product above the platform is the right decision for them. I’m just glad we have an alternative web content platform.

Now I’m doing some web stuff. It’s a challenge but in different ways. I’m working a lot with Flash and AIR right now, I’ve just successfully evangelized jQuery to the other developers and about to head back into cross-browser html + css development. The project I’m working on is still under wraps but it’s really exciting and I’m working with some pretty amazing people. I can’t wait to be able to brag about it.

In the mean time I might start talking about more web-y things here.

This kind of bundling is often done by the bad guys. If you install Apple’s Quicktime codecs on Windows every update will trigger an iTunes install, even if you haven’t installed iTunes. I’m sure they’ll do the same thing for Safari on Windows. I’m not sure what iTunes’ market share on Windows is but it seems to be significant. If all those users suddenly have Safari installed that could potentially cause a big shake-up in browser market share.

On Friday there was a minor shitstorm on planet.mozilla.org about Apple pushing down Safari to all Windows iTunes and Quicktime users.

If only we had a reusable system-wide XULRunner it would be really easy to do similar but less evil promotion of our growing XUL-based free software suite. Songbird could suggest to users that they might like Firefox – and it would take just a single click and a tiny XPI download to have users running Firefox. We could even get intelligent and suggest Thunderbird to heavy email users or Flock to heavy social networking users.

iTunes’ US market share is around 27% (according to the best numbers I can find). If Apple flips the switch and makes Safari the default browser for all those users Firefox will start looking irrelevant fast.

When I look at this graph from Janco Associates I see Firefox’s market share’s growth slowing:


After all, how many people are going to download and install a new web browser. How many people really care enough? How many distribution channels can you find with just a web browser? Mozilla Corporation’s closed minded attitude to XULRunner as a platform and non-browser application might limit the spread of Free Software internet client software.

If we had set of application that could all run against a shared XULRunner runtime it would be easy and cheap to piggy-back them on each other. If a user downloaded Songbird so that they could listen to MP3 blogs on their phone it would be easy to offer them Firefox as a browser alternative, even if they hadn’t been interested in downloading and installing a replacement for Safari or Internet Explorer. If an ISP wanted to bundle Thunderbird to make it easier for their users to access email it would be cheap and easy for them to also offer Firefox because on top of any other XULRunner application Firefox is a small download.

This kind of bundling is often done by the bad guys. If you install Apple’s Quicktime codecs on Windows every update will trigger an iTunes install, even if you haven’t installed iTunes. I’m sure they’ll do the same thing for Safari on Windows. I’m not sure what iTunes’ market share on Windows is but it seems to be significant. If all those users suddenly have Safari installed that could potentially cause a big shake-up in browser market share.

We’re not trying to lock users into proprietary software and proprietary services. We’re trying to show them the potential of free software and open standards to make their lives better. We have the opportunity to do this better by embracing our platform and our ecosystem of applications, but the people holding the purse strings in the community are taking an overly conservative approach. I hope it doesn’t cost us victory and our users freedom.