The Week in Your Words: Google fashionably late for Opera

• 
• 

 1 of 2

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 27 Feb 2009 at 15:49

In a week that saw The Week in Your Words wake from a three-month coma, Google kick Microsoft in the shins, and Firefox try to fire the monkey, we take a look back to see what you've been saying.

Google weighs into EU case against Microsoft

This week Google is mostly not being evil by meddling in Opera's feud with Microsoft. Opera reckons the fact that Microsoft gets to bundle IE with Windows is unfair and, despite their initial apathy, other companies are now descending on the case like repentant sinners at a tent revival.

neilwar1 wasn't buying it: "Opera brought this case because nobody wants its browser. I'm surprised to see Google jumping on this bandwagon - if the product is any good it will make it on its own, but then, I'm not convinced it is..."

Neither is Google by the looks of things, but most litigious foot forward and all that.

"To my mind this whole antitrust case is farcical," says fence-hater Hjlupton. "I don't honestly see the problem with Microsoft providing IE with Windows, it's no different to Safari with Mac OS X or other browsers being bundled with Linux."

Not so, cried SwissMac: "Whether or not IE or Safari or Firefox is the best browser is not as relevant to this case as the fact that Internet Explorer cannot be deleted from Windows without deleting part of the OS.

"What should happen is for this dovetailing to be replaced with a system of publicly documented hooks so that any browser company can access the required API calls to access those bits of the OS that currently IE only has access to."

Yeah, good luck with that.

Developers want Tracemonkey off Firefox's back

Looking in from the outside, it's easy to believe that Mozillaland is full of smiling engineers, sipping life's bounty from hollowed-out unicorn horns, their clever, bearded heads full of nothing but happy. Not true. The developers are revolting and the cause is TraceMonkey - the clever JavaScript rendering engine that will one day go whoosh, if only they can get the damn thing going. They want to sacrifice it to get Firefox 3.1 out on time. The humanity.

"Why doesn't Mozilla release it now, and then release an update when its sorted out the problems with TraceMonkey? Gosh, I'm clever," says willgimmence painting a lovely big bulls-eye on his back.

Jstairmand wasn't entirely convinced by this declaration.

"Release a buggy browser in a competitive market Mozilla is making good headway in and bugger it all up? Why not wait till it's finished properly? Releasing software with the intention of fixing it at a later date has always proved to be a disaster."

Vista. Vesuvius. It's not a coincidence you know. C6ten also had his doubts.

"From what I can gather without being a Firefox developer this is a pretty important upgrade. Firefox is basically a rendering engine and the whole UI is constructed from XUL and Javascript + a plug-in architecture. It could change the whole user experience if Mozilla could just work out a way to boost Javascript. Tracemonkey is supposed to do that."

And we're supposed to change our socks every morning, doesn't mean we do... erm, disregard that.