Mozilla: Google's not trying to kill us

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 2 Sep 2008 at 12:04

I really don't think so. I'll take another example: just before Microsoft launched Vista, it invited us [to work with it] so that Firefox works better on Windows Vista. Because for it, Firefox being a top-tier application that was very successful - we now have 200 million users around the world - it could not afford to have Firefox run slowly on Vista. Therefore, it helped us improve Firefox for Vista.

That's just the same for Google. It wants Firefox to perform well with its applications, that's for sure. Indeed, it even wants IE to perform well with Gmail and the rest. It's just that it has very limited control over this. That's why Google's been frustrated and it is launching this Chrome browser.

Finally, Chrome appears to be focusing on web app performance. Is that still your focus with Firefox?

We focus on user experience and performance. But also we have a community writing Extensions that make Firefox unique for everybody.

We recently announced something called TraceMonkey, which is a very significant improvement in terms of performance techniques for Javascript. That puts us really ahead of our competitors, particularly Internet Explorer.

I don't know how we compare with Chrome, because we haven't been allowed to run tests. It's the kind of thing that Google really likes about us - our ability to innovate in terms of performance.