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Google, Mozilla, and Opera React To Microsoft's Embrace of Chromium (venturebeat.com)
With the news earlier today that Microsoft is embracing Chromium for Edge browser development on the desktop, VentureBeat decided to see what the other browser companies had to say about the decision. From the report: Google largely sees Microsoft's decision as a good thing, which is not exactly a surprise given that the company created the Chromium open source project. "Chrome has been a champion of the open web since inception and we welcome Microsoft to the community of Chromium contributors. We look forward to working with Microsoft and the web standards community to advance the open web, support user choice, and deliver great browsing experiences."
Mozilla meanwhile sees Microsoft's move as further validation that users should switch to Firefox. "This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice. We are not going to concede that Google's implementation of the web is the only option consumers should have. That's why we built Firefox in the first place and why we will always fight for a truly open web." Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web. Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge) all have their own corporate interests.
Opera thinks Microsoft is making a smart move, because it did the same thing six years ago. "We noticed that Microsoft seems very much to be following in Opera's footsteps. Switching to Chromium is part of a strategy Opera successfully adopted in 2012. This strategy has proved fruitful for Opera, allowing us to focus on bringing unique features to our products. As for the impact on the Chromium ecosystem, we are yet to see how it will turn out, but we hope this will be a positive move for the future of the web."
Mozilla meanwhile sees Microsoft's move as further validation that users should switch to Firefox. "This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice. We are not going to concede that Google's implementation of the web is the only option consumers should have. That's why we built Firefox in the first place and why we will always fight for a truly open web." Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web. Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge) all have their own corporate interests.
Opera thinks Microsoft is making a smart move, because it did the same thing six years ago. "We noticed that Microsoft seems very much to be following in Opera's footsteps. Switching to Chromium is part of a strategy Opera successfully adopted in 2012. This strategy has proved fruitful for Opera, allowing us to focus on bringing unique features to our products. As for the impact on the Chromium ecosystem, we are yet to see how it will turn out, but we hope this will be a positive move for the future of the web."
so doing what they always have done. use someone else stuff. its litterly how dos/windows came to be.
The concern now is that Google has all the power. It's not that they are particularly malicious (as Microsoft proveably was), but rather when one company controls everything, they can get apathetic and make bad design decisions. Ideally, there would be three or four major browsers, all competing.
That is why I lament the loss of Edge, not because I liked it (or Microsoft) at all.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A non-trivial percentage of them are ex-IE devs. Assuming any teammates from 10 years ago are still there, of course.
If it were the olden days I would be more concerned about the EEE approach of old.
But these days? Microsoft really seems committed to a more standards based approach. Probably in part because they want to, but in large part because they no longer have the power to truly pull off the Extend/Extinguish part of the dance. If they go too far people will just keep using Chrome.
If anything I think having Microsoft on board will help keep Google more honest as Microsoft will have a vested interest in the Chromium engine being more reliable, and probably bring in new ideas for development of their own.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There are multiple browsers. Using a common core that everyone can make good.
No difference than multiple linux distributions. They all use the same core and all fix it. And then add their stuff outside of the core system.
No difference than multiple linux distributions. They all use the same core and all fix it. And then add their stuff outside of the core system.
If Linux becomes the dominant system, that will begin to be a problem, just like it was when Windows was the dominant system. Monoculture is a bad thing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Fix Firefox so that it does useful things again and tons of people would be glad to switch back.
"Chromium is an open-source browser project that forms the basis for the Chrome web browser. But let’s take a little deeper look at what that means.
When Google first introduced Chrome back in 2008, they also released the Chromium source code on which Chrome was based as an open-source project. That open-source code is maintained by the Chromium Project, while Chrome itself is maintained by Google.
The biggest difference between the two browsers is that, while Chrome is based on Chromium, Google also adds a number of proprietary features to Chrome like automatic updates and support for additional video formats. Google also took a similar approach with the Chromium OS, which is an open-source project that forms the basis for their own Chrome OS—the operating system that runs on Chromebooks....."
It can be dangerous...
Chromium is an open-source web browser project. Although Chromium project itself is legitimate, it is often misused as a platform for malicious web browsers categorized as adware and potentially unwanted programs (PUP). ... Clicking these ads is risky and may lead to high-risk adware or malware infections.Feb 20, 2018 How to uninstall Rogue Chromium Browsers - Virus removal instructions...
What is Chromium? Chromium is an open-source web browser project. Although Chromium project itself is legitimate, it is often misused as a platform for malicious web browsers categorized as adware and potentially unwanted programs (PUP). Most infiltrate systems without users’ permission. In addition, these apps continually track Internet browsing activity, generate intrusive advertisements, and cause unwanted browser redirects.
https://www.pcrisk.com/removal...
Not sure I'm entirely comfortable with pretty much everyone except Mozilla jumping on to the Chromium bandwagon.
Lack of choice has never been a good thing, and if everything is running with Chromium at it's heart, there's no choices anymore.
How much data is Google slurping from every Chromium based browser install is another problematic issue.
I'm not a big fan of Edge, but it was an alternative choice from Firefox, Chrome or others. I think choice and diversity in web browsers is ultimately a good thing, since it keeps everything fairly open and sane, since everyone has to cooperate on the standards. If Chromium's engine dominated the web, they can start making tweaks and changes, not telling Mozilla about it, effectively shutting out existing and future competitors. Hmmm. It's play right out of Microsoft's playbook, and you'd be a fool to think Google won't do it.
None of this can ultimately be good for users.
It's literally how Microsoft came to be, with MS Basic based upon listings grabbed from the litter bin.
It's not that they are particularly malicious (as Microsoft proveably was)
Uhm, Google of a few years ago wasn't malicious. They're getting to Monsanto levels these days.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The best web browser 2018: faster and more secure
Mozilla Firefox.
Google Chrome.
Opera.
Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Vivaldi.
Tor Browser.
Sep 24, 2018
The best web browser 2018: faster and more secure |
https://www.techradar.com/news...
I know there's a lot of people going "Waheyyy!", because microsoft are axing Edge, but this isn't a positive thing in the grand scheme of things.
Back in the IE6 days, nearly every browser was IE6, with nearly 95% market share at it's height. Despite this incredible monopoly over browser share that microsoft had, we still had plenty of competing rendering engines. We had Firefox (Gecko), Safari (Webkit), Opera (Presto), as well as multiple smaller browsers with their own rendering engines, such as KHTML, NetPositive, etc .
Now we're in an era where there's a near monopoly on rendering engines. With Chrome being based on a fork of webkit (blink), Opera using a fork of blink, and Microsoft now also using Blink, we're in an era where there's really only 3 rendering engines now, and 2 of those (Webkit and blink) are nearly brothers. The only true non-related renderer is Firefox's Gecko.
So surely this is a good thing? If everyone uses the same renderer, the web will look much more consistent right? Yes, that's true. But consistency and standards compliance are not the same thing. In the age of IE6, the web was very consistent, as every website was written for the quirks in Trident, but now we're going to see an era where websites are designed for Chrome, because every browser uses the Blink/webkit rendering engine.
This change isn't a positive one, oh no. Quite the opposite
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice.
Funny, all the modern anti-features of Firefox seem to be put there because they are partly owned by Google and other third parties. They are definitely not there because they listened to the actual users of Firefox, nor did they listen to their original mission to build a lean, standards compliant and extensible browser. It is quite standards compliant, but not exactly lean and "extensible" is quite an interesting word if you disable the entire extension ecosystem.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
There will be a transition period where Microsoft will be supporting three different browsers and Internet Explorer is to get security updates until 2029 in LTSC versions. Will the old code be thrown away or will it be preserved some how? What will happen to enterprise web apps now edge is avalible on Windows 7?
If Linux becomes the dominant system, that will begin to be a problem
Nope. Unlike windows (or the Google search engine), anyone can fork Linux. If the world standardize on Debian, then Arch will be an alternative for those finding Debian too stale. And if Arch too gets stuffy, some hackers will roll their own and eventually become the expert's choice. If the Linux kernel gets bloated, there is BSD.
IE6 was closed source, controlled by one company and was allowed to stagnate for 5 years. How is that in any way similar to the current situation?
Why wouldn't Microsoft just open source the Edge HTML engine and let the community participate in its development? We need more browser engines, not less.
From now on we'll basically have Chrome (>90% of the market) and Firefox. Palemoon and others are used by a handful of geeks ...
Even kittens?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
What it tells me today is that Microsoft has actually lost a lot of knowledge and that they are basically re-skinning their stuff when they realize that they don't know how to fix it.
Also look at the quite "interesting" problems that appears each time Windows 10 gets an update. It makes me even less inclined to "upgrade" from Windows 7.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The concern now is that Google has all the power. It's not that they are particularly malicious
Actually, yes, it is, and yes, they are.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
EEE, that's exactly what this is.
I fear something coming that may be even worse than having one browser: having one "base" that is been tweaked by each vendor and the results are just slightly incompatible with each other. Use Chromium and Chrome back and forth enough times and you'll see what I mean. Google has done some slight tweaking that makes it not 100% totally identical. Imagine now we have 4 "Chromium" browsers, but each one takes the Chromium code and just adds or tweaks something or adjusts compiler settings to "make it faster" or "make feature X" work. Now what you have is 4 browsers that report to be identical and are treated as identical, but are actually more like 99.98% identical, and that tiny fraction of a percent difference is enough to not prevent things from working at all but just not working right.
I'm picturing a future of Chromium in stock, Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Vivaldi "flavors" - all of which have their own little incompatibilities, something a lot harder to design for and test against than different rendering engines entirely.
The concern now is that Google has all the power. It's not that they are particularly malicious (as Microsoft proveably was), but rather when one company controls everything, they can get apathetic and make bad design decisions. Ideally, there would be three or four major browsers, all competing.
That is why I lament the loss of Edge, not because I liked it (or Microsoft) at all.
Yes, competition is good. But, a competitor that everyone ignores and who has negligible market share (Edge) isn't really a competitor and is meaningless. Nobody is working a little bit harder because they're afraid of losing customers to Edge.
There hasn't been any meaningful competition among browsers since the old IE vs Netscape days.
Internet Explorer is still used by a few people who don't know any better, and a few corporate users who are forced to use it or locked into custom-designed systems that won't work with anything else.
Safari and Opera . . . . . lol
Everyone else uses Chrome.
Everyone used to use Firefox, but once Chrome started becoming popular Mozilla's response was to destroy everything that made Firefox popular in the first place, driving Firefox into single digit market share.
Dude i feel ya but your hardware going to fail You cant find a full install disc of win 7 and even if ya did it wont work on a new PC that's a board and Possessor,Ram placement,. I know, i just had my beloved 7 die and yes it takes days to figure out all the setting and tricks they use to steal your use of the PC they mine EVERYTHING. Although when MS asks for permission from my firewall for access to the web for a telemetry spying program to call home i say no. hope its working..but Dude, your doomed your either going to have to switch to linux of break the bank and get apple. Im a gamer so i am paying the privacy price to be one and its sucks. And for those who been saying 10,s faster thier FN lieing. The new hardware makes all the difference 30 second boot with a SSD HDD
Jack of all trades,master of none
This is true, but they can't, because Firefox elected instead to embrace the Chrome add-on model.
They had no choice. Go back and use a pre-change version of Firefox. The performance is terrible. It's single threaded, one thread dying takes down the whole browser, like it's the 1980s again. Can't even be properly sandboxed.
And the add-ons were a security nightmare. Bugs in the add-ons could be exploited by web sites to steal info from the browser or underlying OS.
The add-on API was holding the whole browser back. They could make necessary fixes because it would break add-ons. A clean start was the best of a bunch of bad options, and at least they selected an API that was familiar and allowed porting of many existing add-ons on day one.
Firefox is actually decent again now.
What add-ons are you missing, by the way? Maybe we can suggest some alternatives.
Firefox is making a comeback.... but it's yet to win me back. I moved to PaleMoon a couple years ago and love it. The time I use FF now is when I need to use the add-on Video Download Helper. If something ever goes horribly wrong with PaleMoon, I would likely go back to FF over Chromium. I just don't care for Chrom(e/ium). There are too many things about FF/Palemoon that I find very useful. For instance... for the MANY sites where I have accounts, I like to keep a password hint in the bookmark description. If I forget my password, just right-click on the bookmark, properties, and I see my hint. Years ago when I tried using Chromium for a while, I really missed that feature. I tried one of the encrypted password managers available, but after loading in all my passwords it barfed on something and lost them all. Simple and functional is good... FF got away from that, and Chrom(e/ium) is a bit too simple for me.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web
From this bit of news which states that Google pays Mozilla 300m per year, no they aren't independent like they claim. But I do understand what they mean though. 2 big companies using the same engine means less "competition". THen again, Microsoft's IE was always problematic and the devs that took care of it didn't seem to know what they were doing most of the time. When you ask any webdev to work on a webpage and request them to be 100% compatible with IE, firefox and google, they started to rip their hair off because they had to get IE compatible with their webpage. So yes, IE was very problematic.
Will Outlook still use Word's rendering engine or Chromium? So sick of coding my emails for the "Outlook Factor".
I think surface is your problem. I use firefox daily on ubuntu at work and at home and am very happy with it.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
To me it's irrelevant that I, and most other people, (almost) never used Edge, I liked the fact that there were at least two non-Chrome browsers out there. That helps keep Google honest. A little competition is always a good thing, and now we're heading back to the days of IE6, only replace IE with Chrome and Microsoft with Google.
That's not the point. IE 6 was used because web developers only trageted it because their users only used IE 6 and this is because only IE 6 was targeted etc.
It took almost 12 freaking years and WinXP eol to break this cycle! Not that webkit is opensourced as this is irrelevant.
If Chrome has a bug which breaks a standard in every other browser you code to that bug and tell everyone Firefox isn't supported. Open sourced or not your users don't care nor will run your patches. Only Google dictates and matters
http://saveie6.com/
"Remember IE4/5/6? "Part of the OS and can't be removed?"
Well if there had been anybody trying to compete with MS back in the day things might have went a different direction. The only competitor in the browser space was Netscape and they completely imploded due to technical and product managerial incompetence. It took nearly 10 years for Firefox to resurrect the dead ended Netscape codebase to come up with an alternative. And if the only thing you can say about your browser is that is open source and beholden to no overriding corporation than that's not really a big selling point when it comes to user adoption. 99% of the users would rather have the browser that provides the best user experience. And contrary to what a lot of so called technical people claim every browser has exploitable security flaws. And they are the type of flaws you will never find just by looking at the source code. The low hanging fruit is long gone and pretending otherwise is idiotic. The same 99% users don't give a shit about who built the damn thing. Open source is not the panacea of software development. Most of the applications are poorly made clones at best. Open source solutions in the business space is not cheaper than proprietary solutions. Licensing costs are a pittance when compared to the cost of implementing and maintaining open source solutions across the enterprise. The biggest cause of security issues is not the software but the installation and configuration of the software. For instance if people have a hard time configuring a secure Windows environment what makes people think setting up a Linux environment is any easier? Unless you are going to argue that anyone working on Linux are some how smarter than their counterparts in the Windows environment. The only successful and widely used open source applications are maintained by a few professional developers working for the same corporations who pump out proprietary products. MS alone has over a thousand open source developers on their payroll and Google has even more than that.
You get that with Firefox. Chrome fails at all three of them (although for the most part the speed issue is negligible). It definitely fails privacy and security in every way you look at it.
What substantial difference exists between free Chromium and proprietary Google Chrome other than Flash Player, supported CDMs for EME (HTML5 video DRM), and how crashes are reported? Two years from now, Google plans to drop Flash Player from Google Chrome, leaving even less difference.
They failed in all new tech, except in cloud-computing, but where they had to actually offer Linux. As such, MS is not just an ordinary computing company, no better than its competition. Past experience shows however that MS has consistent sub-standard quality and could only survive on a monopoly. That monopoly gone, MS is dead. As any giant, it will take quite a while to die though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They're not going to extinguish linux. See my sig.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
so doing what they always have done. use someone else stuff. its litterly how dos/windows came to be.
Doing what just about all companies and groups do, It's also how Linux came to be (clone of UNIX), how macOS came to be (BSD + UNIX clone) and how WebKit itself came to be (was previously an open source browser engine called KHTML).
Remember Microsoft's old informal motto: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
Yes I'm pretty sure everybody remembers that but how exactly do you think that applies here?
I remember when IE6 was the only choice for the web and how it held it back by a good few years.
Aside from some internal line of business applications that used ActiveX there wasn't really anything that didn't display just fine in any of the alternatives.
The rendering engine is just one piece of what makes a browser. You know they will have to make major tweaks to it to implement the corporate Active Directory security policies. Then they'll try to find a way to make it compatible with SharePoint, and ActiveX. By the time they're done, it won't look or act anything like Chrome.
You're forgetting Safari which is also not based on Chromium. Web devs are not going to ignore iOS / macOS users. This situation is nothing like the days of IE6. The Chromium source is there and if Google start fucking about, it can be forked. You couldn't do that with IE6.
It doesn't make sense to develop 2 websites one for Chrome and one for open standards when safari owns 4% of the market. You put a disclaimer with a link to Chrome. Remember 2005? Mac users needed Windows XP in virtualPC to use the web as IE 6 was required for many sites.
Also khtml and Firefox were opensourced but bosses didn't care and forced IE 6 only site testing. Hell no.
W3C is dead too as only Chrome decides what's used and how it's implemented. We freed ourselves only to hand our keys in for a new pair of shackles. ... Oh and webkit and blink are from the same codebase. I am sure Apple takes code from blink all the time like they do with FreeBSD
http://saveie6.com/
It's not who controls the source that matters, but who controls the standard.
Why would web devs support Apple devices? Is that what you're saying?
Don't choose to take a proprietor's side or believe that monopoly power is somehow outside the realm of possibility. Monopolists (which every software proprietor is for that software) have the power to choose what that software does, leaving users out. Decisions like what Opera, Microsoft, and Google are embarking on with their proprietary derivatives of Chromium put those proprietors in power.
It took the world's largest antitrust trials to make Microsoft behave a little better in some respects, but by other perfectly reasonable measurements nothing substantive has changed—Windows, MSIE, and most of the software Microsoft has released remain proprietary (nonfree, user-subjugating). The software most computer users use on their own computers is proprietary. Thus there's no clear signal that proprietary power over the user is now undesirable.
Digital Citizen
Their market share is solidly under 5% now. When they decided to kill the chrome/xul-based addons last year, they have been losing what little market share they had. What they say really doesn't matter anymore.