arstechnica.com — In August Microsoft invited members of Firefox's development team to the Microsoft campus. At the time, it was unclear whether the Firefox team would actually accept the invitation. Now we have discovered that a handful of Firefox developers did journey to Redmond, and one member of the team kept track of the experience in his blog.
Oct 5, 2006 View in Crawl 4
forgisteOct 6, 2006
What if Microsoft buys mozilla, closes the source, and then sues anyone who makes their own version of the software?
barlo_mungOct 6, 2006
MS does other cool things that they have no hope of making a dime on.Their research arm is even teaming up with some universities to work on a cure for cancer.No joke.
geronimoOct 6, 2006
Same one who tried to circumvent web standards. They would even fly out janitors at one point to try and vote down standards they disagreed with - that loop hole was of course closed up. MS has a long history of snake-like behavior.
superrcatOct 6, 2006
Remember in 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' when Bill Gates shows up at Apple with a 'Macintosh' t-shirt hoping to work together...similar outcomes?
meneerrOct 6, 2006
Microsoft does this for all software that is heavily used on Windows. Backwards Compatibility (tm) is their thingie. If firefox sux on Vista, where are users going to complain? (it worked fine on Ubuntu, it worked fine on WinXp, so it must be Vista's fault)The leaked source code of Win2000 was full of hacks just to make crappy products from their competitors work. Why do they do that? Because in the end, it is the 'total experience' that people will judge an operating system by. If Half-life2 doesn't work as fast on Vista as it did on XP people will compain. They will not upgrade: they will advise people around them not to upgrade.The day Vista lies in the store, it is crucial for MS the 90% most used programs on XP work as least as good as they did on XP. When 80% of the people are running Vista, then the policies will change (again).Then they will be pushing their own products, etc.Besides, Microsoft does not care that much. THey make money when people use MSN-search and the like. Chaning the default search engine in IE7 is much easier than installing Firefox anyway. So people will be using Firefox because of the extensions. On the other hand, your parents will happily run IE7 since (for them) the most important features are already in IE7 now. (tabs and search box)On the other hand the power-users will want Firefox. MS wants them to have it, they want them to be happy on windows. They are their first line of support in real-life. The real reason people don't run linux: their 12 year old song can't fix their computers for them if they do! You install whatever OS you get immidiate support for from your peers and family. SO it is crucial that the uber-user sticks to the Windows. So firefox has to run, so all of the games have to run. MS is going to do whatever it takes to make Firefox run faster on Vista than on, say, Ubuntu.
aaroncampbellOct 6, 2006
@Anonymonk & @L0t3kActually, they are using mozilla-specific CSS. Look for this in his CSS file:
Closed AccountOct 7, 2006
20 or 30 percent is a *very* generous exageration. Vista being released isn't going to double or triple FF's marketshare. Also, Firefox's performance has been s**thouse for years.