Mozilla CTO: Why Firefox wins over Chrome

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There are some people that believe that Google’s Chrome is winning the browser war for the fastest and possibly best browser — Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich is not one of them.

Chrome is one mighty slick, minimal browser in my view and it’s certainly one that gives all other browser vendors something they need to look at. Eich has looked at Chrome and he sees where Google will always be better and where Mozilla will always offer a different choice.

“Google has more engineering resources (people, money, etc.) than Mozilla,” Eich wrote in a mailing list posting. “This is not something where we can hope to “win”, anyway. Even if we were “fastest”, there’d be some other quality that we traded off in order to be fastest.

Mozilla has stronger community than Google chromium.org or webkit.org, IMHO, but this does not equate to “fastest”.”

Eich noted however that the upcoming Firefox 4 release will compete well in the speed category against Chrome. But speed and a minimal user interface alone are not what will continue to make Firefox a great browser. He added that at one point Google approached him to try and get the Chrome engine into Firefox, but that didn’t work out due to both technical and philosophical reasons.