Mozilla’s response to Microsoft adopting Chromium.
Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet. By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google.
This may sound melodramatic, but it’s not. The “browser engines” – Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla – are “inside baseball” pieces of software that actually determine a great deal of what each of us can do online. They determine core capabilities such as which content we as consumers can see, how secure we are when we watch content, and how much control we have over what websites and services can do to us. Microsoft’s decision gives Google more ability to single-handedly decide what possibilities are available to each one of us.
The question is now how long Firefox will be able to survive. The cold and harsh truth is that Firefox usage hasn’t exactly been trending upwards, and with even Microsoft throwing its full weight behind Chromium, even more web developers won’t even bother to test against anything other than Chromium and Apple’s WebKit. How long can Mozilla and Firefox survive this reality?
I switched back to Firefox when Chrome started to crash my desktop. It is fine when I deactivate hardware acceleration, but then it has baaad tearing. So I really hope Firefox will survive for long. Really hope many people will use Firefox.
I was an intern at Mozilla in 2014, when Chris Beard was first appointed CEO. He gave an all employee speech, which I watched from the second floor of the Mountain View office’s inner lobby with the other interns.
I only really remember one thing he said, but I think it was important because I still believe it’s true.
Google is the Evil Empire, and Mozilla is the Rebel Alliance.
Are pesky VPN services part of that rebel alliance?
It is on Opera, no one seems to be crying.
I don’t really understand why it’s a bad thing for the web to standardize on a single engine when that engine is open source?
Is it really better for developers to have to test a bunch of random browsers for every application they write instead of knowing what platform matters? I think maybe we need to see if Google will release some influence so others can contribute on an equal footing, but if web standards are supported in an efficient way then what is the problem?
The apparent competition is just duplication of effort, you’re wasting your valuable time doing what someone else has already done. Surely it is better to compete within the single code base for the best implementation of a given standard than have 5 different implementations that are slightly different that everyone has to try to support? It just results in really ugly code.
It is not better to have a lot of engines, for me the only tangible thing Mozilla has offered recently is its attempt to provide a web API for every hardware requirement a user might want. Certainly, it is not in implementing standards in a different way.
I don’t even think developers should pay attention to WebKit, all should be centering their efforts around Blink. This depends on less control from Google, but they have been willing to cease control of Kubernetes, so why isn’t that the approach we’re taking here?
If Blink and V8 can be released in a similar way to Kubernetes, I think the whole developer community benefits, but as long as we value having 20 implementations of everything we will just keep wasting our time, and it is limited, we’re all going to die… so why is doing the same thing repeatedly valued at all?
This, for me, is the real value of open source… we can work together on everything instead of doing the same thing they did all the time.
Edited 2018-12-08 05:01 UTC
I accidentally up voted you. Ceding control of the web entirely to an advertiser for a slightly easier life is the sort of idea I’d expect from a lazy developer and no-one else.
You have some funny ideas about open source. First, many things have competition. Why do you think there are so many linux distros?
That leads me to the primary problem. Google picks winners and losers. Google has chosen the big 3 operating systems to support with chromium only. Other patches are regularly rejected. Browsers are fast moving targets. You can’t keep a patchset going for very long against a moving target for other systems. Mozilla is bad at supporting other operating systems too, but has a slightly better track record. If you conform to their will on branding and can finance a dedicated developer on it 24/7, they will let you in.
I’m sure with your attitude you think that only one linux distro should exist too. Let’s bow to systemd, redhat/ibm and never have choice in desktop environments either. Whatever you like is the only one.
One of the key features of open source is that you can fork something, take it in another direction and see where it goes. Sometimes you merge things back like the GCC fork way back when. Other times, you get new software like OpenBSD.
We need more than two browser engines so that we don’t get stuck with HTTP/3 UDP browsing like google wants or cloudflare controlled DNS like mozilla wants.
I’m hoping that interest in webkit will happen. It’s too similar to blink still to be truly diverse but at least it wouldn’t be one company controlling everything. Maybe the devs behind one of the gecko browsers will fork it and take patches. We can dream.
It doesn’t help that stuff like Electron uses WebKit/Blink. I think we need more diversity than branches of WebKit. I would rather Mozilla revive XULRunner than another engine off WebKit. Gecko is plenty good as it is. Try the latest FF.
I can’t. It requires rust to build. Rust is not easily ported.
What platform are you using to browse the web that doesn’t support rust, but is supported by Chromium (particularly V8)?
This is exactly why concentrating on Blink isn’t a problem. If it takes a wrong turn, fork and move away.
I don’t think you realize how complex a web browser is. It’s also a fast moving target in terms of security.
There might very well be open source bits in a browser but you really don’t know what else has been added that will slurp your data and send it to one or more Big Brothers (Google, MS, FB etc) who just love to get data on each and every one of us.
I don’t trust Google or Microsoft and this alliance is IMHO a marriage made in Hell for us mortals.
I’m so glad that I’ve left MS behind. I have one Server left running Windows but that is Air-gapped from the internet.
I’ll stick with Firefox and carry on giving them a few $$ every once in a while.
It is pretty obvious that Google wants to own the internet and for everyone to become beholden to them and their services.
Just say No to them all. (As much as you can that is)
Monocultures are bad no matter how open it is.
Internet Explorer 6
One can only hope you are so young that you haven’t been on the web before 2004.
My only reservation against Firefox that keeps me from using it regularly is performance. I think Mozilla needs to revisit their priorities and work on the performance side of their aging engine. They should no longer see themselves as desktop browser for the masses, and actually deliver good performance that does not rev up fans and drain the battery.
That’s precisely what they’ve been doing with Quantum.
Typically FF tries to be conservative on system resource usage. If you would like to try speeding stuff up, please check this out:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/performance-settings
A time traveler! The first speedy release of Firefox was in november of 2017. Ever since they have been integrating OMTC and a new rendering engine that uses multiple cores and your GPU. Firefox is fast and keeps getting faster.
I’m switching back to FF. I’ve been using the latest Opera for the built-in ad blocker, built-n VPN and messaging side bar apps. Recently there have been Blink changes that do some really stupid stuff on Ryzen/Radeon systems. If you were to check opera:gpu or chrome:gpu, you will see stuff that is commonly enabled on Intel systems but not AMD. Force enabling these features work fine on AMD. I could understand if these were due to driver black listing, but it was non of that. Getting tired of this sidelining by Google.
I use Edge at work and as my back-up browser. Guess it will be FF and Edge(Blink) moving forward.
I work as a back-end developer… who is increasingly doing front-end with vuejs.
I’ve swapped back to firefox from chrome because google has been getting really creepy, and of the 7 web devs at my agency, there are now 4 of us that are on firefox.
Firefox quantum really did help with convincing some others to swap, and the chat around the office in response to this news has been that it’s quite important we support mozilla.
I know hacker news is very anti-google as of late, but there’s strong support for firefox there too. It does seem like there is a significant base of technical users that are choosing firefox for philosophical reasons (even if it is a vocal minority, it’s still relatively considerable).
I have been using Firefox (and Waterfox) exclusively (well, at least when given a choice, and sometimes when given none) on all platforms (sans Symbian) for more than 10 years.
Controversial choices by Mozilla Foundation and their outright blunders in recent years has been nuisance to me and made me question their intentions and / or sanity (e.g. due to broken backward compatibility on at least one of my workstations I’m staying with 56 ESR – despite very tangible performance gains on more recent releases).
Despite all that Microsoft decision to abandon EdgeHTML made me set up a recurring donation to Mozilla Foundation.
A cautionary tale – a few months ago an issue on PostgereSQL mailing list surfaced (https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/1cdedaf455c4f326f31b103ab…). As a result of *upstream vendor* decisions, PLv8, a PostgreSQL procedural language based on Google’s v8 JavaScript engine, is no longer considered viable to maintain. A solution has been proposed: switching to Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey.
Chrome hasn’t give a flip about security for many years. I’ll admit, Firefox sat on their thumbs for years, but they got up and started to do good things several years back.
In short, and it makes sense, if you want security avoid the browser base that Microsoft chooses.
I’m sick of sites that only work on Chrome…does that remind anyone of any other time in browser history?
It’s not clear to me why some people seem so sure that things are trending in Chrome’s direction? It’s got a big share, certainly, but Firefox is still significant and the organization seems committed and active. WebKit is also significant.
If anything, (just as a subjective sense of things) Google and Chrome seem to be losing the reputation of being the best or even good, which isn’t nothing…
I use both Firefox and webkit browsers, though I increasingly like the feel of Firefox. And yes, all around less creepy feeling. Firefox is using Rust, which also shows they are pretty interested in getting the tech right.
I still use firefox. How much is browser engine testing a thing these days since much of the web has been standardized…..apart from the horrid mess that represents java. But, maybe java is the reason for all the testing. And java needs to die, much like flash.
You’re conflating Java with Javascript? They don’t have much in common apart the name / and JS is too usefull to die (Java too, though it isn’t much used on todays web)