Mozilla and WebKit, browser platform wars.

This post began as a comment on Matthew Gertner’s blog post The Browser Platform Wars. It’s a rant not an article, don’t take it personally. 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 …

I told you so

Six months ago I predicted: 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 …

Mozilla’s missed opportunities

In the past couple of months Mozilla Corporation has sought to narrow its scope. First there was the announcement that at least for the next year and a half or so the focus of platform development will be on developing the Firefox browser as the platform. This primarily means no standalone XULRunner. And since being standalone was kind of the whole point. Now there’s the announcement that they’re dropping Thunderbird because they think it’s a distraction from building their web browser.

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