Let the New Browser Wars BeginLet the New Browser Wars Begin

Will Google and Mozilla drift apart due to the warming relations between Samsung and Mozilla?

If you have been following WebRTC, you know that Google and Mozilla are quite the buddies. They already have a form of interoperability in WebRTC. But I think things are going to change in the near future. The reason? Samsung.

Samsung has been the main benefactor of Android. It is the dominant vendor selling Android devices, but at the same time, Samsung is trying to kill the Android brand and use their own Galaxy brand instead. Richard Windsor lays it out best on his blog Radio Free Mobile, comparing the two companies to Game of Thrones: "For Samsung to maintain its leadership in the handset market, it must become Google's competitor and attempt to move in on its patch."

Displacing Google means providing replacements for its services on Android devices--or even replacing Android altogether. And Mozilla has assets that enable just that--their browser and Firefox OS.

To that end, Samsung and Mozilla are cooperating to bring a new browser engine called Servo that's suitable for multi-core chipsets.

This has nothing to do with optimizing browsers and everything to do with providing unique capabilities unrelated to Google. The shift to an ever increasing cores count on mobile devices is imminent. We now have quad-core chipsets in phones, with 8 and 16 just around the corner. The ability to utilize these extra cores from single applications is becoming more and more important--and hard to achieve (multicore programming is no fun--believe me). By having the browser handle the heavy lifting of multicore and taking care of the optimization, app developers can make better use of HTML5 instead of native code.

This gives an edge to both Samsung and Mozilla:

* Samsung gets to increase its core count faster than anyone else and show its fruits in better performing smartphones

* Mozilla gets the strongest erstwhile Android partner in town--and probably get its browser preinstalled in all Galaxy branded devices in the future

* Samsung gets a high performance Firefox OS-based smartphone, due to optimization for its chipsets done by Mozilla

* Mozilla gets the backing it needs for Firefox OS

Where does that leave Google? Or even WebRTC on mobile, with the shift of focus towards Firefox.

It is no wonder that Google has decided to ditch WebKit browser engine in favor of Blink--a fork of the WebKit UI engine for browsers. Their first step? Clean up the code there to make it easier to innovate and add features.

Let the new browser wars begin.