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It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

blogs.computerworld.com

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Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#121

Post by larsberg »

spanktheuser wrote: post #44
cletus wrote: post #25

I wonder how many people throwing opinions around this were "of age" in the early-to-mid 90s and thus remember what an unstoppable behemoth Microsoft was. This was a time when they had 95%+ of the desktop OS share and you basically couldn't run a home computer with Windows. This was the early days of Linux (IIRC in ~1994 I downloaded SLS running Linux 0.99.x onto ~30 floppy drives over a 2400 baud modem!). Macs were…

I was around and remember it well. Even if some of the HN community missed the OS wars, they've probably dealt with the consequences of Microsoft's OS monopoly - after killing Netscape, Microsoft allowed Internet Explorer to completely stagnate. More than 5 years passed between the release of IE6 and IE7. Anyone who spent late nights/weekends in the last half decade trying to get some web page to render properly in I…

> Microsoft allowed Internet Explorer to completely stagnate

IIRC, after the legal madness, there were some major shakeups. Not least of which included the entire IE team being settlement-forced into other positions in the company (many went on to what would become WPF, which should be obvious if you've ever seen XAML). I don't envy the post-IE6 group, having to take a huge codebase, maintain backwards compatability, and staff an _entirely_ new team.

But, take that with a grain of salt, as I was in DevDiv at the time this happened. I certainly had some peers who had been part of the legal wrangling and were under mandatory document retention the entire time they worked for me.

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#122

Post by randomfool »

sriramk wrote: post #48

My feeling here (ex-MSFT employee, so maybe biased one way or another) is that Mozilla is going after the soft underbelly of Microsoft, because they can . Mozilla is already locked out of iOS and they have failed at getting Apple to budge. If WinRT locks them out, they'll be locked out of two out of the three major tablet platforms (it's a safe assumption that WinRT will get some marketshare at least). Microsoft is a…

"Strategically, it makes a lot of sense to own the browsing experience e2e"

Can you expand on this?

There are a couple of benefits I can think of, but no major ones. - Quality of experience: owning the browser ensures that sub-par browsers don't degrade the overall experience (such as destroy battery life and overall platform impressions). - Controlling innovation: If Microsoft feels threatened by HTML then it can limit certain features until native apps catch up. I believe that this is a double-edged sword though, as Chrome and Firefox steadily push forward people are stil unsure if IE can keep up.

Allowing third-party browsers ensures that your platform always has the best browser and the browser is an incredibly important part of the platform.

Personally, I see not allowing alternate browsers as an attack on the browser ecosystem at a time when Microsoft has been trying to be very standards friendly with IE10. For tablets, I use the browser a ton, and being allowed to run the latest and greatest browser of my choice, with WebGL, Web Intents, etc, and not be tied to IE or Safari, is a selling point.

The cynicist in me says that Mozilla's Boot 2 Gecko Phone project most likely will not support other browsers, and Chrome OS doesn't either, so why should Win8. And I think this really sucks.

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#123

Post by kprobst »

floomp wrote: post #105
cletus wrote: post #25

I wonder how many people throwing opinions around this were "of age" in the early-to-mid 90s and thus remember what an unstoppable behemoth Microsoft was. This was a time when they had 95%+ of the desktop OS share and you basically couldn't run a home computer with Windows. This was the early days of Linux (IIRC in ~1994 I downloaded SLS running Linux 0.99.x onto ~30 floppy drives over a 2400 baud modem!). Macs were…

> you'll note that I left Linux off that list as I believe it will never be a viable mainstream desktop OS and of course I know it powers Android/ChromeOS Why not? The main issues for Linux in this field are QA of releases, and support from third-party application vendors for a small subset of programs. Those aren't unsolvable problems. Even today Linux may be a superior solution to both OS X and Windows for certain…

Surely you must realize that this is the same argument people have been making for close to 15 years, and not much has changed. So that should answer your question about the OPs point.

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#124

Post by kprobst »

azakai wrote: post #118
cooldeal wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mozilla has been critical of Apple too. Care to link to them? I am not being facetious, I am genuinely interested in seeing their official statements on this and if they've publicly called Apple to open up iOS to Firefox. Bonus points if they've alluded to antitrust law.

> Care to link to them? For example, here is criticism from a top Mozilla dev on iOS's closedness, http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/browse_f... > Bonus points if they've alluded to antitrust law. How can criticism of Apple be related to antitrust law? What monopoly do they have?

> What monopoly do they have?

Do they not have what is essentially a monopoly on the tablet space? I'm not up to date on Android tablet market share, but it seems to me that there isn't so much a market for tablets as there is one for iPads. Everything else is pretty much nonexistent. I might be wrong about that, I guess.

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#125

Post by shmerl »

ynniv wrote: post #85
ozten wrote: post #59

(Disclaimers: I work for Mozilla) There is a huge difference between iOS and other platforms. Apple, in legal terms, makes Firefox on iOS impossible. This was not the case with Windows; Microsoft was using covert means to undermine user choice. To make a blanket statement that Mozilla thinks Apple's banning Firefox from iPad and the iPhone is 'not a problem' is wrong and disingenuous. We have active projects around w…

On what grounds is Firefox not allowed in the App Store? Or does the restriction on JIT simply make performance unappealing?

On grounds that Apple bans any non Apple interpreter (which downloads code from the net) to be compiled with iOS SDK. I.e. any JavaScript engine including. It's a pure form of anticompetitive censorship.

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#126

Post by kprobst »

ozten wrote: post #59

(Disclaimers: I work for Mozilla) There is a huge difference between iOS and other platforms. Apple, in legal terms, makes Firefox on iOS impossible. This was not the case with Windows; Microsoft was using covert means to undermine user choice. To make a blanket statement that Mozilla thinks Apple's banning Firefox from iPad and the iPhone is 'not a problem' is wrong and disingenuous. We have active projects around w…

> To apple's credit, they've provided a web standards based browser

If Microsoft did that with IE, would you then be OK with it? Or why give Apple a pass based on that?

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#127

Post by mbq »

Meh, it is just time to accept that Android, iOS and Windows RT are not a serious OSes but an unobtrusive, eye-candy cloud clients for masses. The step ahead is either to waste money on VPSes or just demand the right to have full control of the software on hardware we buy -- say Angstrom will always run Firefox without any doubt.

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#128

Post by rbanffy »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #100
rbanffy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WinRT is not a new product - it's a new API sitting on top of mostly the same Windows kernel they use for Windows 7.

Windows RT = New product meant for ARM devices (the current topic of discussion) WinRT = New runtime API for Metro apps that will run on both Windows 8 and Windows RT.

So, it's as much a new product as were Silverlight, WPF and .NET - all layers that allowed apps written for them to run on Windows-based devices.

The kernel underneath is the same.

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#129

Post by wavephorm »

cletus wrote: post #25

I wonder how many people throwing opinions around this were "of age" in the early-to-mid 90s and thus remember what an unstoppable behemoth Microsoft was. This was a time when they had 95%+ of the desktop OS share and you basically couldn't run a home computer with Windows. This was the early days of Linux (IIRC in ~1994 I downloaded SLS running Linux 0.99.x onto ~30 floppy drives over a 2400 baud modem!). Macs were…

Microsoft has definitely earned their hatred in both the consumer and development communities. They rode their monopoly as far as they could, and they are going to pay for it very dearly. Literally noone I have met in the past 10 years is developing Windows software anymore. Sure, some people use .Net to develop web applications, but it sure seems that nobody develops Windows-only software. So Microsoft, has already lost, and they are on borrowed time. Mobile and Web won, they lost, and it's only a matter of time before this dinosaur finally goes away, like everyone wants them to.

Re: It's OK for Apple to block Firefox, but wrong when Microsoft does it

#130

Post by notatoad »

wvenable wrote: post #42
billpatrianakos wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're missing here is that Apple bans everyone equally while Microsoft does not. What I mean by that is the App Store doesn't discriminate on an individual basis. Apple is generally consistent in their "unfairness". Looking at what Microsoft is doing, their decision to restrict Firefox immediately struck me as an anti-trust monopoly issue. They're not restricting Firefox on the basis of some policy that applies…

> What you're missing here is that Apple bans everyone equally while Microsoft does not. You could not have this more backwards. The fundamental issue that Metro apps cannot write to executable memory pages. This is a fundamental security feature of both WinRT and of iOS. Browsers download code off the Internet JIT compile it to native code and execute it. This is what Firefox needs to do. It's not like Windows 8 is…

>What Mozilla wants is an exception to the normal rules for applications on ARM Windows 8.

i think where the frustration is coming from is that windows gave them exactly that exception on x86 windows 8. they created a special class of applications for third party browsers, that can run JIT'd and native code in metro mode. now, with ARM, they've decided to revoke that exception for no apparent reason other than "because we can", and it seems more than a little unfair.

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