A Microsoft program manager has caused a stir on Twitter over the weekend by suggesting that Firefox-maker Mozilla should give up on its own rendering engine and move on with Chromium.
“Thought: It’s time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really ‘cared’ about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that’s used by less than five percent?” wrote Kenneth Auchenberg, who builds web developer tools for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code.
This is such a rude and discourteous thing to say to a competitor – a competitor that has played a crucial role in bringing back competition to the browser market back when Internet Explorer 6 kept the web down like an anker. We need competition on the web.
I agree with Thom that competition is crucial for two main reasons. Firstly, it encourages innovation and improvement. Ultimately, better standards will emerge as a result. Secondly, the browser is too important an application to be left to a single ‚project‘, especially one with commercial interests at its heart.
Doing the devils advocate (ignoring the rude comments from the MS dude):
If everyone (or the major players anyway) used the same rendering engine. Not necesarily Chromium as a whole but atleast Blink and V8. Those are opensource. Granted it is controlled by google but it could be moved to a foundation funded by MS,Google,Apple etc.
That way 95% of all users would have the same web. It would be easier for developers to program for it because they only have to handle 1 set of cababilities instead of 3-4. The other 5% are those that also program on the linuxkernel/gnome-project/build reactors at home etc and frankly they know how to handle a browser that is different.
Taking the devil’s argument further… Do we Need competition in this space? Don’t we Want an effective monopoly where HTML standards are fully met and the Internet is a level playing field for all!?
What benefit do we get from competition in this space? What are we gaining as users?
Compatiblity? Certainly not, how many sites don’t look or work right in Firefox/Edge?
Cost? It’s already free in both senses.
When is it OK to say “enough is enough, this bit is done, let’s stop fiddling”?
It’s OK to say enough is enough when one rendering engine is perfect and bug free and without any security concerns whatsoever. Until then, using the non-default is simply good security practice (unless it’s less secure in itself).
Yeah, I agree with some reservations. I would like a single reference rendering engine. However, I do think the experimentation with new features that have become standards is also valuable. Not sure how you keep both though.
Above all rudeness, it’s plain wrong. Diversity and complexity is inherent to this world, we should embrace it instead of creating totalitarian systems. Was it ok when google forked webkit, but it’s not ok for firefox to exist?
Too bad the same people who are pissed with the microsoft guy tomorrow will naively defend RedHat because “distros fragmentation soooo baaaaaaad”.
Maybe Microsoft should open source Edge instead of giving stupid advice to a successful project.
Again for devils advocate, what makes them successful? Their historic user-base that is now just using chromium in some fashion? Some past standards they’ve contributed? Their funding? The cool office in downtown San Francisco?
Technical achievements
FYI, it’s anchor, not anker.
Silly mistake by Thom, because it’s anker in Dutch, his native language. 🙂
anchor.
To be fair, Mozilla doesn’t have much philosophy to stand on anymore. They’re not the champions of the open web they claimed to be (see ads and enforced extension approval), and they don’t have technological superiority either. What this guy said may be rude but, at this point, it’s hard to see it as anything but the raw, unvarnished truth.
Define technological superiority? Mozilla created a new language from scratch to support their browser.
Mozilla is not at all the open web champion that used to be but on the other side we have google, microsoft and apple. I mean, come on.
They can’t take the moral high ground at every step, because that doesn’t keep the lights on. As an example, they couldn’t choose DuckDuckGo over Yahoo because without that revenue, they couldn’t continue.
Compare that with Google. Chromium (not Chrome) once was found to be downloading blackbox binaries that could listen to your microphone. On Debian. There is a huge gap between Mozilla “selling out” by keeping the lights on, and what Google is actively doing.
Coincidentally, if people were to contribute more to Firefox, it would cost less to maintain. And unlike with Chrome, you would be contributing directly to the web browser itself, unlike contributing to Blink/V8, which is then munged up in a process which is not open to create Chrome.
darknexus,
Regarding mozilla, you are right that they’ve lost a lot of the moral high ground and have gotten too power hungry within their own ecosystem. They’ve stopped listening to their users quite some time ago, and I find it to be a shame that they’re not better role models.
Still I would say his conclusion is wrong because we still need competition. Monopolies become complacent and will find a way to hurt us in the end. Microsoft especially is no stranger to embrace, extend, extinguish maneuvers, having all competitors consolidate to one core technology would open up some dangerous power plays.
If we loose mozilla, it doesn’t just put firefox at risk but all of the forks based on firefox including two of my favorites:
https://www.waterfoxproject.org/
https://www.palemoon.org/
If the situation were reversed, I wouldn’t want webkit/blink/etc to go away either.
So create some competition. It’s all well and good to say we need it (a statement with which I agree fully) but very few people want to put fourth the effort to create said competition for something this complex. Mozilla are not competition anymore, whether morally nor with their rendering engine. Failing someone actually creating something to compete with Blink/V8 or other Webkit-based engines, what would you suggest?
So you are saying one organization which has resources to at least be able to maintain a browser code on it’s own but has a hard time maintaining a relevant share and you want to start a new organization maybe even a new code base ? Do you know what a huge task that is ?
Not sure if you noticed but Mozilla’s browser is more efficient than Chrome these days.
darknexus,
But factually they are competition whether you like them or not. If you don’t like mozilla themselves because you think they sold out, then I do see your point, but I suggest you take a serious look at firefox (and even chrome) forks to find one that’s more in line with your values since many of them feel the same way you do.
I really can sympathize with wanting more viable alternates, but as with so many things global consolidation has virtually killed off the so called “long tail” and I don’t think we’re going back. Unless economists find a way to restore this long tail then I fear duopolies (and monopolies if we’re not careful) are the way of the future.
It’s funny cause Microsoft is not building an Desktop OS based on FUCKING LINUX or FREEBSD and thus, contributing with the community instead of keeping it’s Ivory Tower too…
…double standards who?
Sounds good, specially when a security flaw kicks in so that we can use temporarily .. nothing.
I agree that we need competition on the web, but I also am torn: who is going to use it to make it worthwhile to have that competition?
I have tried Firefox, and philosophically, I want to use it. But on the Mac, it looks, behaves, and generally feels wrong. I don’t want to use it, and I understand why others don’t either. So maybe it’s okay if we’re all Chromium as long as there are multiple people pushing it from all angles to keep innovating.
I always thought Microsoft kept building their own rendering engine and browser to keep control, which was smart. Microsoft has now given up on the web. Because Microsoft, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave now ride the Chrome train, Google will drive the web. It doesn’t matter that Chrome/blink is opensource when all websites will only support Google’s rendering engine. You can’t fork it and you can’t add features that Google won’t support.
It is back to IE6 but this time there won’t be a company that will stop updating it for 5 years so Firefox can gain a foothold. This time it will be kept up to date so it will never be a big difference between Chrome and Firefox to get people to switch.
The smartest thing Microsoft could have done is keep working on their rendering engine and browser _and_ support other rendering engines. That way, websites _have to_ support standards and not one rendering engine that can never change. If Microsoft didn’t want to they could have supported one of the rendering engines Mozilla is working on.
This Microsoft guy is just extremely lazy