Mozilla welcomes arrival of Chrome

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Mozilla has welcomed Google’s new foray into the browser market with open arms, suggesting that the more players is better for online innovation.

While the arrival of Chrome – which is capable of running complex web applications more quickly and easily than previous browsers - yesterday will create more competition for users’ affection against Firefox, this is not necessarily a bad thing, according to John Lily, Mozilla’s chief executive.

Coupled with the recent IE8 beta, the release of Chrome and the ongoing work by Mozilla developers mean there’s a lot going on in the world of browsers at the moment, he added.

“More smart people thinking about ways to make the web good for normal human beings is good, absolutely. Competition often results in innovation of one sort or another — in the browser you can see that this is true in spades this year, with huge Javascript performance increases, security process advances, and user interface breakthroughs. I’d expect that to continue now that Google has thrown their hat in the ring,” he wrote in a blog post.

“It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they’ve got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimised for the things that they see as important, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.”

The release of Chrome has thrown up some interesting questions around Google and Mozilla’s relationship which is a long standing one. As far as that history of working together in certain areas and on different agendas in others, it will be a case of business as usual, according to Lily.

Furthermore, Chrome makes use of components from both Apple’s WebKit and Firefox, showing it’s still an open source ally.

“As much as anything else, it’ll mean there’s another interesting browser that users can choose. With IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc — there’s been competition for a while now, and this increases that. So it means that more than ever, we need to build software that people care about and love. Firefox is good now, and will keep on getting better,” he said.

“So even in a more competitive environment than ever, I’m very optimistic about the future of Mozilla and the future of the open web.”

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