“I Innovated Before You Innovated!”

Asa blogged about the new Reporter tool, and got comments like “Another feature nicked from Opera. Sigh.”

Can we call it a day on such pointless posturing? Opera had some cool features first, we had other cool features first, and the same for Safari, Konqueror and IE. I don’t care who invented it; if it’s useful to the userbase of your browser, you should be able to include it. User interfaces haven’t been copyrightable since Apple vs. Microsoft, and I would hope no-one in the browser market would stoop so low as to sue another browser manufacturer for software patent infringement. Copying someone else is a sign of respect, not weakness – it means they got it right, and you want to acknowledge that.

In related news

9 thoughts on ““I Innovated Before You Innovated!”

  1. “Can we call it a day on such pointless posturing”

    Who do you mean by “we”? the Opera fans commenting on Mozilla-related blogs and forums? the Firefox fans ? The Mozilla folks doing advocacy (e.g. Asa, Blake) in Mozilla places? The Firefox fans commenting on the IE blogs? The world in general?

    In any case, I would imagine the answer is “no”.

  2. I thought it was counterproductive to have such a viewpoint before you thought it was counterproductive.

    (You know, this would have been even funnier if I actually had a post on my blog I could point to.) :-)

  3. Visitor: I don’t think the blogpost you reference shows Asa claiming we invented spatial navigation.

    michaell: all the places where users of one browser pop up when another browser acquires a feature and says “well, we got it first, so nyer nyer”.

  4. From your related news :
    > Man, there’s no pleasing some people. People can’t seem to request tabs enough
    > when asked “what features do you miss from IE”, but when they are actually told
    > that tabs will be there, they say “we don’t care about tabs, what about
    > standards?!”
    > Sure, I want to hear about standards support as well, but that’s not what this
    > post is about! This post is about tabs support in IE, and I think it’s great!

    ROFL

  5. yep, and you are first man, who write about this :)) Opera fans will be second ;)

  6. Speaking of that, could you guys steal draggable tabs back from Epiphany already? Or is that actually present by now?