Chrome's objective: to speed up the Web for Google

If these and other new Chrome features seem strangely familiar, you may be a Mozilla Labs contributor. The desire to endow the address bar with greater functionality is the inspiration behind Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity project, which it officially launched only last week. Chrome's decision to endow the default "New Tab" page with thumbnails of frequented Web sites, rather than blank area, seems oddly parallel with Aza Raskin's "Conceptual New-Tab Actions" project, which he kicked off -- again, just last week -- with this note: "Right now, when you open a new tab, you get a blank screen. While clean, it has a 100% probability of not getting you where what you want to be."

The ability to run Web browser-driven JavaScript apps as independent programs on the desktop, is the subject of Mozilla Labs' Prism project, launched last year. And while Firefox 3 was at one time destined to be the home of the organization's latest JavaScript engine, just a little over a week ago, developer Brendan Eich announced TraceMonkey was coming for Firefox 3.1, with possible double-digit performance improvements across the board, if not triple-digit in some categories.

Chrome's "Incognito" feature, which opens separate browser windows with their own tab rows for sessions the user does not want permanently recorded, resembles someone else's major project: Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8, with its InPrivate feature. Curiously, IE8 Beta 2 was also released last week.

In the open source world, it's technically not supposed to be possible to steal someone else's ideas. However, when you take into account the fact that the Chrome project (which has also gone by the name "Chromium") may have started over four years ago, the question becomes, just who would have stolen their ideas from whom?

Today, Mozilla tried to maintain the most altruistic attitude it possibly could, seeing as how Google remains perhaps the organization's single biggest source of revenue.

"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," wrote Mozilla CEO John Lilly in a blog post this afternoon. "Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it'll be interesting to see how it evolves."

As far as how Chrome impacts Firefox development going forward, Lilly added, "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."

Mozilla chairman Mitchell Baker's blog post this afternoon was far more introspective and cerebral, only mentioning Google and Chrome in its title. Baker's most poignant comment was this: "Competition is seldom comfortable, but it forces us to do our best."

"We really, as computer scientists, want to live in a world where the platforms are really advancing," stated Google's Larry Page, who took a similarly altruistic viewpoint, "where they can be improved, where people can add new functionality, where the pace of change and improvement's really rapid. We don't want to live in a world where all that's locked up and kept secret, and nobody can improve it. The open source model has really allowed people to do that. It allows any developer in the world anywhere, who's connected to the Internet, [to] make an improvement to an open source project like Chrome, and that can really make the world a lot better. It also means that other projects, like Mozilla and so on, can take some of the advancements we've made and the hard work that's been done on things like V8, and they could actually choose to incorporate those things pretty easily, potentially."

Sundar Pichai's explanation was more direct: "We've always believed in extending other browsers. We contribute a lot to other open source projects, including Firefox. We have built toolbars to extend other browsers. In the case of Chrome, we saw an opportunity, given how much the Web has evolved -- a chance to rewrite the browser from scratch. So it's not something you can layer onto existing browsers, and we did not want to impose our views on anyone else. Our goal here was to bring our point of view, but do it in a very open way, so that we can provide more choice for users, but at the same time, the whole of the community can benefit from it."

Co-founder Sergey Brin, however, was the most poignant of all. "It's probably worth noting that they're across the street," he said, "and they're over here all the time for lunch. We have a great collaboration with the Mozilla team, we've talked with them about lots of Chrome things, lots of browser things. I hope that big chunks of Chrome can make it into next generations of Firefox."

If Mozilla Labs' projects pick up steam, that may indeed become possible. But in a race to catch up in the browser wars, despite all of Google's warm and open language, the company was very successful today in making the "3" beside the word "Firefox" appear to mean something else.