14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla, whether it likes to admit it or not, has picked up on a few things from Google Chrome with the upcoming Firefox 4.0. While every developer feels the need to innovate, if one idea is good there’s no reason to go another way just because someone else thought of it first. That said, Mozilla doesn’t think all of Google’s choices with Chrome are the right ones and a couple of them, bundling plugins and running native code inside the browser, are definitely not on Mozilla’s to-do list.
Mozilla vice president of products, Jay Sullivan, makes it clear that the organization believes in web standards above all, with the obvious target being HTML5 and the suite of technologies that have sprung up around it. Having the browser ship with third-party plugins built-in, like Google Chrome now does across the board, goes against the organization’s principles.
Of course, this also has to do with the fact that Mozilla is a true open-source project which is very proud of its roots. The need to protect the ideas on which the software was built upon, like enabling and making it easy for others to build on the source code, has put Mozilla in controversial positions before, notably in the HTML5 video codec debate.
On the matter of native code running in a web page, something Google has been pursuing, Mozilla is equally clear. It believes that everything in the page needs to be open to other web technologies. Google is using Native Client to allow developers to embed binary code into their applications that can be run natively on the device’s processor for a significant speed boost.
"Our idea of the web where you can use these technologies that are scriptable, that interact with the rest of the page, that can be mashed up and linked into and linked out of," Sullivan told The Register. "These native apps are just little black boxes in a webpage. That's not something we're pursuing. We really believe in HTML, and this is where we want to focus."