They sure as hell don't want people to switch Firefox and Chrome either!

I'll bet that was on ME. Works fine on 2k.

What?

You are talking about AOL, Apple, and Google, right? "embraced a wide variety of other engines"? AOL stuck with Internet Explorer's engine in their product, and Apple and Google are both using the KHTML-derived WebKit in theirs. How is one company sticking with IE and the others using ONE other alternative engine in any way a "wide variety" of engines? You make it sound like they went "anywhere but Gecko" when in reality they just went to WebKit.

MSN???

"Google makes their own browser now, competing with ours! Quick, switch our default search engine to one that's not made by a competing browser vendor! Yeah, MSN, that's a good choice!"

Uh...

May I ask if you have tried/considered Camino (formerly Chimera), the Mozilla project's native Mac OS X browser? (Same engine, just a native GUI)

http://mozilla.org/projects/camino/

I think we'll have to conclude that "Perl or Python?" is really just like "Perl or Python?". :-)

>> >> Why should one single product satisfy the needs of everybody?

>> Because everybody wants to share documents without "converters".

Sorry, but you're either a troll or an idiot. Those two things have nothing to do with each other. You are claiming that there is no way there could be different products that used the same document format, and that claim is obviously wrong. Practically every office suite other than Microsoft's has standardized on ODF by now, and even Microsoft has promised to implement support for it.

/.'s very own Roblimo gives another very good reason in this article: Why proprietary software is dangerous for business-critical applications

You're not the only one with that experience.

A tip, try reading some Terrence McKenna.

He's the one posting lies. I'd say the burden of proof is on him to back up his statements. I'll gladly refute any argument he tries to make in support of what he wrote.

(Actually I tried to point out what was wrong in his statement, but it was so absurd that I didn't know where to start, and gave up. Honestly.)

Gecko is "Mozilla's" in the same way that the Linux kernel is "Red Hat's". They contribute to it, but not a whole lot, they concentrate on building the browser. I.e., the bits that bring in their dollars.

Note to everyone, parent is a troll, and the above statement is an outright lie. (I felt that I had to post this and point this out so people didn't get misled into believing that statement.)

Google and Mozilla are part of a 'you scratch my back, I'll pay your bills' sort of agreement with the Google search bar firmly placed in the toolbar, and on the default homepage.

Actually it's more like an "I'll pay your bills and even scratch your back a little as well" sort of agreement. Firefox had Google as the default selected search engine since before they made any agreement and before they got any money from Google, simply because the Firefox developers happened to think that Google was the most useful search engine to set as the default for their users. As for the default homepage, AIUI it's more a case of Google helping Mozilla by volunteering to save Mozilla lots of bandwith by hosting that page for them, than a case of Mozilla helping Google...

...*who* exactly are making megabucks riding on the backs of developers? Mozilla is a non-profit foundation. There are no stock holders. NOBODY privately profits from the money generated by the Mozilla project. They pay salaries to employees, that's it. Noone is getting rich from it.