Firefox will not be one of the top two browsers, as it currently is, by July 4, 2015. This one I’m pretty confident on. The power structure in MoCo could be more accurately described as a power struggle. The amount of bugs hidden from the public for security reasons that do not actually deal with security is nonzero, and that alone is a bad sign.

My less sure predictions include a mobile browser (mobilesafari if Apple continues domination of smartphones like they did with PMPs) surpassing a 10% usage share, and that Google will not continue their partnership with MoCo (it ends in just one year). I can’t say for sure, but if things continue like they are now, Google Chrome should be the browser that surpasses Firefox. It’s too simple, doesn’t require a reboot for addons (something jetpack is attempting, but will likely fail at, much like personas), and has great sandboxing.

The real brains behind Firefox are now behind Chrome, and Google has the balls to throw money behind R&D, whereas Mozilla has more money than they know what to do with and they’re hoarding it (as far as I can tell). With government organizations, for example, if you don’t spend your allotment, you lose it. This encourages departments to spend all their money at years end, usually on upgrades for various things, which keeps them up to date and helps the economy. Mozilla’s just sitting on a nice pile of cash and not acquiring smaller companies which could benefit them. Hey guys, CoolIris is neat, buy the damn company. Google’s smart enough to do it, Apple’s smart enough to do it, Microsoft’s famous for it.

Buy Opera Software ASA, they’re only worth $392 million USD on the open market.

I know this may come as a shock to many diggers (as that seems to be where the inaccurate story was popularized), and I know they’ll bury this story because it doesn’t play up to their fanciful notion that Mozilla is a rogue crew of hackers subverting Steve Jobs control on the Mac OS X platform, but Mozilla didn’t reverse engineer shit. If you belive a random unsourced blogger, I’ve got some WMDs in Iraq for you to tell congress about. Let’s go into detail, with sources this time!

Let’s look at Bug 412486, the Mozilla bug for adding support for multi-touch trackpad gestures. In particular, let’s check out comment 3:

Comment #3 From Samuel Sidler (:ss | :sps) 2008-02-05 10:26:52 PST

See also: http://cocoadex.com/2008/02/nsevent-modifications-swipe-ro.html

Check it out, a post on Cocoadex from February, 2008, shortly after the new macbooks with multi touch were released. Pay attention to the bolded portion especially of this quote:

So, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Macbook Air and it’s revolutionary multi-touch trackpad, borrowed from the iPhone technology. The basic gist of it is that it provides application specific gestures that can be triggered by performing some gestures on the new trackpad. With that in mind, every Cocoa developer should be asking themselves this question: What has Apple done to NSEvent [and friends] to facilitate gestures in their own applications and how can I do it in mine?

With the help of my local Apple Store’s Macbook Air, and some NSEvent knowledge, I’m going to answer exactly that.

Yes, he went to the Apple Store and did his own digging to find out how to code multi touch support shortly after the new Air came out. Unfortunately, Elliot of Cocoadex does not work for Mozilla nor on Firefox. To make super sure that I was getting this correct, I contacted Tom Dyas, the person the bug is assigned to and the author of the patch adding multitouch support. He responded early this morning:

Nobody from Mozilla had to reverse engineer the undocumented API as the information had already been discovered by someone in the Mac OS blogging world. Go to
http://cocoadex.com/2008/02/nsevent-modifications-swipe-ro.html for the blog article that had the information. This is the same link that is listed in Bug 412486 and in comments in the patch itself.

I know this won’t quell the massive spread of this complete lie, but did you know who Edward Lee was and why TG Daily didn’t link to their source? Because Edward Lee said nothing of the sort about Mozilla REing it! Here’s what he actually said:

From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private Apple API, so things might change at any time!

He doesn’t know for sure (he’s right, though), but he definitely didn’t say Mozilla did the reverse engineering.

TG Daily is taking facts, turning them into lies, and then not citing sources to hide this. I’m really not surprised, and what’s even less surprising is how the lie spreads. A good reporter would do a LITTLE bit of research, it took me barely any and I only e-mailed Tom Dyers to make absolutely sure I was getting it right. He didn’t take long to respond at all, only a few hours. I hope this inspires other journalists to do more investigation before posting.

So, Chris, Tom, and I were talking about this post at Blogoscoped. Aside from the fact that IMO the entire thing smells more than a little hinkey (a paper comic shows up in this guy’s physical mail box, but no where else?), we were studying information contained within the comic. By the way, I’m not saying it’s all fake, but something’s not right; maybe I’ll talk more about that later.

Writing a Javascript engine is hard. Writing a brand new one from the ground up is going to take very smart people. The only names we found for the V8 Javascript VM team were Lars Bak and Kasper Lund. We were able to find some info about these guys. Kasper has a Linked In profile, and a very interesting master’s thesis. His thesis even mentions work by Lars Bak, the co-founder of OOVM, speaker at this year’s JAOO Conference. Lars’s profile doesn’t reflect his Google employment status, but that conference page shows us that is indeed an employee of Google, and a preview of Kasper’s Linked Profile shows us he is too.

So we can confirm that the only people explicitly identified as the V8 team are both very smart, and Google employees. I find it credible to think these guys led a team to create a new JS VM.  How well it’s going to run right now is another matter.

As for their use of Webkit versus Gecko, while I find their reason for using webkit (small footprint, easy embedding, easy learning curve for the codebase) to be entirely believable, I don’t think that was the only factor. I think they chose not to use Gecko also for political reasons. It would become a direct competitor to Mozilla’s Firefox, which whom they just renewed their deal for 3 more years instead of the previous 2 year deals. Chris put it in a way I agree with 100%, that Google would rather fail miserably with a browser and let Firefox become dominant than splinter the Firefox market and allow IE to retain control. By using Webkit, they introduce another OSS browser into the mix to chip away at IE and help put more pressure on web developers to create standards compliant, cross platform code. It’s not great news for Web Devs who now will have yet ANOTHER browser to work with (yes it’s Webkit, but a new JS engine, so you can’t just check against Safari or Konqueror and be done with it), but it’s good news for users, and Google, who wants to keep Microsoft from choking the web as they have the desktop.

We have no idea when Google Chrome will be released, nor even when it will officially be announced. A dead-tree comic in a blogger’s mail box is a funny way to announce things. Did Blogoscoped ignore an embargo? Did someone at Google send this out ahead of time? Why does Blogoscoped say that the comic is CC licenced? Why don’t we get a scan of the cover, or authorship information? We can only take his word for it on who created the comic, although some of the facts seem to line up. why don’t we get a scan of the envelope, or anything to help confirm this source? No answers to these questions yet, but we’re still looking.

Update: Google’s official announcement. Also, an apology to Blogoscoped. While I was right that something was hinkey, it turns out that it was Google, not Blogoscoped. The one possibility I didn’t think about seriously was that someone at Google simply screwed up and sent it out early. Occam’s Razor had cut me again.