Comments on: Google and Apple should join the Firefox party

The Mozilla browser's rising market share should induce Google and Apple to pool resources to focus on Microsoft, rather than creating their own "Unix"-like browsers.

[ewelch]

Oh please, this is such nonsense. Open source wonks can get so worked up about such things. It's like the principle of the instrument. "Give a child a hammer and everything he encounters requires hammering.

Apple and Safari have nothing to do with IE. They are simply doing what they can to make browsing the best it can be. And even though Firefox has commendable features, I would never give up Safari for it. I have yet to find a website recently that Safari can't do that any other browser can.

I think the opposite. It would be way easier and better for Mozilla to switch to Webkit. This would really mount a considerable challenge to Microsoft. It's unreasonable to expect Apple and Google to switch to Firefox.

[barbose]

First of all, what makes you think Firefox is a better browser than Webkit?
Second of all, there was a study that showed Hackintoshes outnumbered Linux Desktop installs, so being the "Linux of browsers" is at best a dubious honor.

Why don't you get firefox to drop its efforts and adopt Webkit? Get Firefox developers to port all of its plugins to Webkit?

Then you remove the splintering and everyone's happy! (that was sarcasm)

[sdfisher]

I think Mozilla adopting WebKit would make a lot more sense at this point. WebKit is the more modern, more standard renderer with a cleaner code base.

But why bother? What's wrong with two open source browser back ends? What would be wrong with twenty?

[Quinn Taylor]

I don't see how "common investment in Linux has [left the community better off]" carries over to browsers, or even if it's as true as the author might believe. Does this imply that "the community" would be better off without Apple's contributions to an operating system other than Linux? Sure, Linux is great and all, but beating the drum that Firefox and Linux must be the best because they're pure open-source is getting old. Just read Ivan Krstic's comments about OLPC and the idea that people might find it slightly more valuable for the software to *just work* than to be able to fix it oneself. How many Firefox users out there would actually care (or even know how to) fix a rendering bug, or customize their browser beyond adding extensions? I'm a programmer, but I know that writing software for an audience that is presumed to be as technically savvy as the authors is a dismally flawed premise. Open-source collaboration works extremely well at times, but does not in and of itself imply higher quality.