Mozilla cites “Windows monopoly power” in ARM browser debate

In a statement issued last week, Mozilla criticized some of the restrictions that Microsoft plans to impose on the ARM version of Windows 8. The platform is not designed to support conventional native third-party applications, including rival browsers, in the classic desktop mode. Mozilla and Google say that the policy is detrimental to competition and user choice.

As we pointed out in our coverage of the issue, Microsoft’s policy is consistent with the that of other mobile platform vendors, including Apple. Modern mobile platforms increasingly confine developers to a platform-supplied API stack so that the operating system can more tightly control application behavior as needed to accommodate the limitations of a resource-constrained computing environment.

Mozilla’s recent objection to such policies focused entirely on Microsoft, ignoring the similar conditions that are present on Apple’s iOS platform. Harvey Anderson, Mozilla General Counsel, addressed that issue on Friday in a statement published by ComputerWorld. According to Anderson, the relevant factor is Microsoft’s monopoly status on the desktop.

“The difference here is that Microsoft is using its Windows monopoly power in the OS market to exclude competition in the browser market,” he said. “Given that IE can run in Windows on ARM, there is no technical reason to conclude other browsers can’t do the same.”

Of course, the dominance of Windows doesn’t extend to the mobile space or ARM architecture. In the tablet market, which is the principle target of Windows on ARM, Microsoft will face an uphill battle against Apple’s entrenched position. It’s not clear that competition and choice are materially harmed by Microsoft’s decision to block rival browsers in the legacy desktop mode on ARM devices.

Bullets

Mozilla’s concerns about Windows on ARM attracted a lot of interest last week, but there are number of other bullet points to include in our roundup.

• Google published a post on the official Chromium blog that demonstrates the Web Worker debugging features included in the Chrome developer tools. The feature can be used to simplify debugging multithreaded Web applications.
• A new experimental project called *JS seeks to create a low-level flavor of JavaScript that has a type system and memory management model similar to that of C. The developers have created a transpiler that converts *JS code into very memory-efficient JavaScript that can run in regular browsers.
• The developers behind PhoneGap, a runtime for deploying HTML5-based applications on mobile devices, published a philosophy statement that describes their goals. They want to drive forward open Web standards that expose device capabilities to Web applications, eventually eliminating the need for custom runtimes like PhoneGap.
• Google has been working on some improvements to V8 that will help the JavaScript engine make better decisions about when to perform code optimization. The improvements, which primarily involve using counters to track frequently-used functions and loop blocks, reportedly offer a 25 percent boost in JavaScript execution speed on the SunSpider benchmark.
• Mozilla is preparing for the release of Firefox 13, which is scheduled to occur on June 5. The browser’s developers recently documented how the new release and its new features will impact add-on compatibility. Mozilla also recently wrote about performance improvements that are arriving in the new version.