It is easy to be confused with your previous post. I’m a fan of Apple consider the step with boosting Safari share with Windows Apple updates very provoke, but I also keep the installation as it is very useful browser. In the other way it is exactly case, when big competition is slowly getting third player additionally to Mozilla and IE.
Good luck for you, since Safari and IE have advantage as they are going preinstalled with most popular OS.

I make no such argument that anyone should switch to anything. I merely suggest that if, upon technical merit (which could be a lot of things, but primarily the ease of development and ability to deliver features) less fragmentation in browser development would probably be a good thing. In that, it would get everyone’s common goal of a superior IE replacement ahead further, faster. The economy of scale would be better.

Microsoft is not sitting idly by anymore. There is a real risk that IE8 may erase much of the gains made by Firefox and other browsers in recent years.

You may argue “how do you get open-source developers to do X, Y, Z” … I am and have been an open-source developer. It takes people like Lilly, Shuttleworth, et al to steer developers in the right direction. They can hire people and put them to work on an idea, something that the community can build on later. Starting a big idea from scratch is rarely something that is executed by lone open-source contributors; it takes some funding and full-time effort. But once something is there, you will see people jump in to work one whatever little bits are important to them.

That even said, the amount of people who put work into these projects (eg Firefox) is still really really low. There’s an illusion out there that all over planet Earth there are all of these hobbyist hackers out there making everything happen. No, it’s really just a small handful of highly productive and overloaded developers doing most of the work. A lot of them are paid to do it.

So in that sense, Mr. Lilly does have a lot of influence if he chooses to exercise it and get the conversation going. To some extent I think he’s doing that here.

I’m not saying that WebKit is the right direction, but everyone coming together for a common renderer would be.

Also, who is “Mozilla” in your question? John is CEO of MoCo, but he doesn’t get to decide what rendering engine the Mozilla project uses for its browser. Even if MoCo decided to do a new Firefox based on Webkit, there’s no guarantee other project contributors would want to join in. It’s a free software project - unless you pay someone, you don’t get control of their time.

But let’s bypass those massive problems with your point and, for the sake of argument, say that “Mozilla” had evaluated Webkit and found it “better”. Your argument would be that they should then switch. Do you have any idea how much work that would be? How much of Firefox would need to be rewritten? How long it would take? Would it be in the best interests of Firefox users for the developers to spend years doing something which basically put them back in roughly the same place they used to be?

Microsoft (almost) has a monopoly in the browser market. Using that monopoly to leverage another product (Live search) would be illegal.

Firefox doesn’t have a monopoly, so there is nothing illegal about Firefox being used to “distribute” another product.

You should also know that Firefox was defaulting to Google way before any commercial bonds were tied, simply because Google was at the time (and still is) the most popular search engine.

On having choices, definitely agreed.

However I do remember the huge stink that Google raised about Internet Explorer 7 defaulting to Live Search, claiming that it was a potential antitrust violation even though the user could easily change it after setup. Even though IE’s had a “search default” ever since it shipped with the Search bar in IE4.

So powerful was Google’s complaint (or, so weak was Microsoft) that Microsoft changed IE’s first-run experience so that you are required to specifically choose a search engine before you can continue using the browser. Of course, Google doesn’t mind that *Firefox* doesn’t prompt the user, since it’s defaulting to Google.

We do indeed have a commercial relationship with Google (and Yahoo, Answers, Amazon, Baidu, etc) — but there’s also an easy opt-out — switch the search engine, or don’t use it. But it was installed at the same time that Firefox was installed.

I appreciate your point, but don’t believe that we’re talking about the same thing.

The answer to these questions is that you have a commercial relationship with Google and pushing this search engine choice is done because you make money doing.

A search engine is separate from a browser, just as iTunes and Safari are separate. I’ll grant the search engine and browser pairing is closer than itunes/safari, but the point remains.

You are doing with Google the same thing for which you criticize Apple, and you’re doing it for the same reasons. I think it’s okay in either case, so long as the user has a clear and simple opt out. However, you might be a bit more restrained in the criticism since you’re guilty of the same behavior.

Firefox stopped playing YouTube videos (they just freeze). To fix it, I have to restart Firefox, but I have too many tabs open to do that right now. So I used Safari to watch the video I wanted to see.

Great blog, too: I’ve added you to my feed reader.