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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
Mozilla, for people to choose you, they have to pick you because you're a good alternative, not just because you're an alternative. The fact that Fred Mbogo is an alternative to my local hospital doesn't mean I'm going to go to him if I break my arm. If I wanted to run Chrome I'd run the actual Chrome, not the crappy second-rate copy of it that you've turned Firefox into.
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.
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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
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 ...
You people talked about Firefox being slow before Firefox 56.
When they re-did parts of their engine in rust, removed XUL extensions support which prevented them from making the browser fully multithreaded, they made the browser significantly faster (comparable to chrome - faster in some tasks, slower in some other) - now you say that it is a clone of Chrome.
I don't like some of decisions Mozilla made in recent times, but still, Mozilla respects my privacy much more than Google ever will.
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.
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.
I don't remember anyone complaining it was slow before Firefox 56, I mean, I'm sure someone did, but it felt in the same ballpark as Chrome et al. Browser makers touted speed, but "Man, Firefox is so slow, it took eleven more microseconds to render this Slashdot thread than Chrome did" was not a thing.
The problem with Firefox was, and to be honest still is, that it's a memory hog, and has been since Firefox 4 (that was when they switched to the current version numbering system and did the first superugly revamp of their UI.)
Mozilla's problem for the most part is they're not interested in fixing the real problems, instead they're mostly concerned with fixing the perceived marketing issues with the browser. That means getting rid of search boxes, which are highly popular with the existing base and a complete non-issue for new users, because Chrome doesn't have one, but not doing anything about bugs and memory usage.
I'm expecting them to fuck up the tabs and copy Chrome's "Just squish them until you can't tell them apart" approach soon.
Someone who understands why people use Firefox and what attracts people to it needs to be put in the charge of the project.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Contractually, Google has no real influence over what Mozilla does with their product beyond being granted the default search engine spot in certain countries. Mozilla has other options available to them as well for funding, and they have saved up enough to be able to survive until they do.
The problem is that every time Mozilla tries to diversify their revenue, people hate the idea more than them just using Google. Adding less invasive ads on their home page for a brief experiment? How vile! Buying and adding a read-it-later service? How vile! A PR stunt with Mr.Robot? How vile! Nothing Mozilla ever does is acceptable to the peanut gallery, who think that just selling T-shirts and working with their preferred niche companies (who have no substantial money) could somehow pay the bills.
Thankfully Mozilla can at least do things like FireTV with Amazon, and their recently-announced collaboration with Qualcomm, otherwise they would simply be stuck on Big Search's teat because nobody will even let them investigate other options without acting like Mozilla is becoming too evil to support.
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/
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.
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).
The problem with Firefox was, and to be honest still is, that it's a memory hog, and has been since Firefox 4
Last week I got notified that a simple resource-exhaustion bug I'd reported some time ago had had its status updated in that someone had reported that it's still present in the very latest release. I traced back through the endless "try the latest release and see if it's magically fixed itself in the meantime because we don't give a fuck" responses from Mozilla devs.
Eventually I got back to the original bug report. When I reported it, the browser was called Phoenix.
That really says it all for Mozilla and their attitude towards their product.
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/