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Microsoft Project Manager Says Mozilla Should Get Down From Its 'Philosophical Ivory Tower,' Cease Firefox Development (zdnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: 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.
Auchenberg's post referred to Mozilla's response to Microsoft's announcement in December that it would scrap Edge's EdgeHTML rendering engine for Chromium's. The move will leave Firefox's Gecko engine as the only alternative to Chromium, which is used by Opera and dozens of other browsers. Few people agreed with Auchenberg, including engineers from both Mozilla and Chromium. Long-serving Mozillian Asa Dotzler was not impressed. "Just because your employer gave up on its own people and technology doesn't mean that others should follow," Dotzler replied to Auchenberg. Auchenberg clarified that he didn't want to see Mozilla vanish, but said it should reorganize into a research institution "instead of trying to to justify themselves with the 'protectors of the web' narrative."
Auchenberg's post referred to Mozilla's response to Microsoft's announcement in December that it would scrap Edge's EdgeHTML rendering engine for Chromium's. The move will leave Firefox's Gecko engine as the only alternative to Chromium, which is used by Opera and dozens of other browsers. Few people agreed with Auchenberg, including engineers from both Mozilla and Chromium. Long-serving Mozillian Asa Dotzler was not impressed. "Just because your employer gave up on its own people and technology doesn't mean that others should follow," Dotzler replied to Auchenberg. Auchenberg clarified that he didn't want to see Mozilla vanish, but said it should reorganize into a research institution "instead of trying to to justify themselves with the 'protectors of the web' narrative."
"he move will leave Firefox's Gecko engine as the only alternative to Chromium, which is used by Opera and dozens of other browsers."
What about Safari, which uses webkit? It's the default browser on both macOS and iOS, and does not use Chromium.
What a jackass. Sure, everything was made better by decreasing competition and just being subservient to an open source engine that is mainly influenced by one big player. This idiot got a lot more attention than he probably thought he would- good.
You know, restore plug-in compatibility, same with status bar, allow user interface customization, remove pocket, and go fully open source.
Basically take advantage of everything that made them better than Chrome, instead of throwing it away.
Just an idea.
Ryan Fenton
These days Microsoft makes more of their money off of abusing people's privacy then selling software, so of course they are opposed to the browser that still allows savvy users to block that shit.
Microsoft should be broken up by DoJ again in an antitrust action. Maybe their functionaries will stop being so uppity and yipp-yapping about things that don't concern them.
Not I.
Wasnâ(TM)t google just talking about updating Chromium to disable ad blockers in order to make their browsers âoemore secureâ?
Edge failed so cut down anyone who continues to try and compete.
Pathetic.
Chromium is the "parallel universe" here, not Firefox. The Firefox browser is far older and can trace it's origins back to Mosaic. Of course, the tweet was posted by someone from Microsoft, who is clearly biased on the matter. Firefox is the only significant competition left, and it's good that users still have a choice.
It seems at least one Microsoft manager hasn’t learned anything from the company’s past. Hope he’s not in charge of anything important.
#DeleteChrome
no.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Mozilla has a history of innovation. Regularly better than the others.
A single engine is bad for the ecosystem. It's much harder to find an exploit that works everywhere.
Webkit is chromium. Apple is using the chromium engine.
I've used Mozilla since V 0.05. I file the original memory leak bugzilla report. I've forgotten the number, but it was under 100.
I was getting updates on it for over 10 years, until it was finally solved.
As soon as Microsoft fixes Edge or creates a real browser and stops forcing it down our throats is the time Mozilla should developing. Major issues with Edge. #1 Forced to use Bing no way to completely turn it off. #2 50 clicks {sarcasm} to download something. Stop forcing me to use local drive "Downloads" I sort my downloads to go to different network shares!!! #3 Give us a way to TURN OFF download notifications. I don't need to know my 8GB download has finished! or that download number 15 is done. #4 Cannot set new tabs to open my homepage or a specific page. #5 Allow me to set page zoom per window not for the whole tabbed session. #6 Allow me to completely disconnect cortana from Edge.
to commit career suicide by admitting you backed the wrong horse.
Gecko, for all its warts, is now the only non-Safari option (sorry, Tim, I don't own any Apple hardware) to avoid a Google monoculture.
Your enemy is not worried that you will fail. She is worried that you will succeed.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I know Program Manager, and I know that it cannot "say" a thing.
I'd love it if Mozilla stopped spending money on supplementary projects, and concentrated on just paying people who are putting effort into developing the browser.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Microsoft needs to get down from their philosophical ivory tower and start listening to what the customers want vs telling them what they want.
I can clearly imagine his default expression: withered beyond facial recognition as a human male, his visage is now a giant puckered sphincter sitting atop his neck. The folds are so deep that his eyes are pulled far inside; only the occasional glimmer can be seen when the light hits at just the right angle. His facial hair and mane serve to insulate the edges of his countenance from view.
We should all consider ourselves lucky: if he had found the taste of defeat to be any more astringent, we might all have died as his mouth crumpled in to form a black hole.
That's a lot of sour grapes considering the fact Microsoft gave up on edge.
Kick rocks dude, kick rocks.
Microsoft continues to be microsoft, except more pathetic.
Microsoft's switch to Chromium just confirms what everyone already knows : Microsoft is a failing giant. I'd only wish that Firefox has supported Firebug instead of trying to replace it with something that isn't near as good.
No thanks. Firefox is my last hope now!
"Microsoft Project Manager Says OpenSource Programmers Should Get Down From Their 'Philosophical Ivory Tower,' Cease Writing Their Own Software"
Hello?? Fred?! Is this you?
by the same pack of flaming assholes who have wasted 20+ years and billions of dollars designing shitty, bug ridden, non standards compliant web browsers, that have such massive security holes that any 13 year old script kiddie could drive a tank through them.
Yeah M$, you're a real authority on web development *sarcasm*.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Wow, the guy had room for BOTH feet in his mouth.
Three Issues:
1.) Monocultures Suck: Experienced web developers know that no browser is without its deviations from W3C specifications. One of the ways that this becomes evident is when the developer observes inconsistent behavior from one browser to another. Bug reports get filed, and hopefully, just hopefully, if the browser vendor is not overrun with arrogant "WONTFIX" jerks, the behavior is corrected to conform with the standards document. In a monoculture, this doesn't happen as often, and gradually, the sole-surviving implementation displaces the documented standard, creating a significant barrier to the creation of alternative implementations in the event that people start to crave competition again. Instead of implementing the standard, an alternative browser now has to reverse engineer and mimic all of the bugs in the dominant rendering engine, so as to be compatible with the same web content.
2.) Mozilla happens to be a "Protector of the Web", and the "Narrative" is Appropriate: One of the great virtues of Mozilla is that, in addition to being a non-proffit organization, they aren't an operator of any major web properties. As such, they aren't subject to the conflicts of interest that you often see with companies like Google and Microsoft, who are often tempted to tailor their browsers to their commercial interests: interests that may be at odds those of the user.
3.) As of early 2019, Firefox Significantly Outperforms Chromium: Has Auchenberg even tried Firefox in the past year? Ever since the release of Firefox Quantum, Firefox has been blowing the pants off Chrome. Better yet, its Servo rendering engine is written in Rust, a modern language with safety guarantees that aren't achievable in C++. Mozila's leadership with Rust points to the possibility that we will one day be able to have some confidence in the security of our computing environments. Sticking with C++ is not the path forward if we hope to ever fully trust complex software like browsers.
Forking Chromium and customizing it to follow Mozilla's philosophy would free up lots of resources currently dedicated to copying Chrome UX/functionality, and keeping up with the latest W3C standards. It'd also make moot the hand-wringing over issues like AMP, media DRM, and H.264 support.
The main argument against doing so would be leading to a monoculture. However, Chrome has beaten out Firefox in security the last 2 pwn2own competitions, so there's questionable value in that. Maybe the move to Rust will be a silver bullet, but if it's not, maybe that should be the end of the road.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
That Microsoft manager seems to be totally incompetent at observation and analysis. He fails to understand the meaning of "protectors of the web" and the importance of the various threats that the web faces. If he understood that the primary threat above all others is Google owing to its near-complete monopoly of both the search engine space and browser space (while also having its fingers in a thousand other pies that benefit from that dominant position), then he wouldn't be so fast to recommend Chromium.
Or maybe he just wants one less competitor. Either way, he should be ignored.
Wow, what a strange thing to post coming from Microsoft and their overpriced products for decades and their fight against open source and competitors. Seems like Microsoft could take that same advice in the server space
The presence of Firefox on the scene moves the overall state of web browsers just by being there, occasionally introducing new features which others might adopt, and giving the web user more options rather than just the Lucrative Interests. Not at all a bad thing.
It's best to laugh in the face of self-serving cunts like this Auchenberg dipshit.
But if you have some extra saliva, spitting in his face is good too.
Firefox is the most high performance browser I have.
This isn't to do with the underlying rendering engine which may cause up to a second or two difference on most web pages.
Instead it is because Firefox allows me to disable disk cache altogether which has much more of a performance impact relative to hard disk based caching.
With Google Chrome you have two options (that I'm aware of):
1. Run in incognito mode, which affects the user experience in many ways, including web sites that detect the mode
2. Set up a RAM drive or if you have plenty of disposable income, use a solid state drive and expect the frequency of replacement to reflect your browser usage
I'll stick with Firefox, though I wish more web site developers tested against all browsers at or above 1% market share. That's been a problem since the Netscape and Internet Explorer "Browser Wars" era though...
Learn To Code. Jack ass
I think in that case, they meant preserving a line different from Chromium.
Mozilla seem to be exactly where Netscape was. Arrogance, ignoring the community and releasing a sub-par product while their marketshare sinks. Though I am sure just like last time they will have a scapegoat to blame as it can't be their own incompetence that caused firefoxs downfall.
It's the usual case of an IT professional who thinks they know a companies business better then the company itself.
While at it.. middle class folk should stop voting.. case the upper class got this..
Ford should stop trying cause toyota is superior..
In fact.. android shoid cease to exist because apple has a user friendly platform..
Wouldnt it be great if the whole world just bent over for an ass fucking because it made sense from a financially motivated point of view?
'cuz he's John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmit
...from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Linux, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than ? percent?
Cool argument, bro!
"Life is life." --Laibach
"That Microsoft manager seems to be totally incompetent at observation and analysis."
Not only that, he lacks social ability. His idea is apparently this: "If others will be self-destructive, we will find it easier to compete."
The comment immediately above this one says: "Being incompetent seems to be a prerequisite for being a manager at MS."
please ignore that idiot!
We love you. And we love the diversity you bring to the web market and your commitment to internet freedom.
A faithful user.
Or how about we don't give two fucks about "popular" and instead focus on technological superiority!? I'm a life long Opera user (which is now Blink/Chromium based) but seriously considering converting to Firefox *JUST* because of Webrender. I have it in testing on one of my development machines, and it literally is a solid 10x faster. When they say "the web at 60fps" they truly mean it. The web has become a very complex graphical thing, it only makes sense to have high performance dedicated graphics processors handling all of this instead of general purpose processors. THIS is what Mozilla has accomplished that none of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon or other tech giants have been able to muster up yet. Offloading all that work to the GPU also means the CPU is free to do other more important tasks, or in the case of laptops, this means extended battery life.
IF I *had* to use Chrome, I'd quit the Web. And if that'd be too painful, I follow after Stallman and have the pages mailed to me.
*That's* how much use I have for Google and the evil crap it's gotten us all sucked into. Every effing site on the web is pulling crap in from all over, loading on the trackers, even orgs that *ought* to know better. A nasty race to the bottom.
MS is in no position to make comments. Everything they've made lately has failed or is an insanely-rigged pile of used-to-be.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
"Netscape" being alive is still a pet peeve of them.
Aging monopolist argues for monoculture, who woulda thunkit? I on the other hand think that Mozilla should just continue incrementally reimplementing Gecko in Rust as they have been doing rather successfully. I wonder if this guy even knows what Rust is, or why it matters?
Let's keep this in perspective. Firefox is still double the share of Edge and equal to IE, that is still hundreds of millions. My counter proposal: Microsoft should stop shipping IE, make it a download. Kill it faster. It's just one more platform to support, arguably the most problematic one, it just dumbs down the whole internet.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Mozilla is clearly doing something right.
Firstly they have Microsoft telling them they're wrong.
Secondly the latest stats I've found show Firefox market share increased by 10% in the most recent monthly statistics plot the top google search shows (from 9.1% to 10.05%)
See:
https://www.statista.com/stati...
Keep up the good work Firefox devs!
I started hating mozilla will their pencil pushing beuracratic needle dicks cancelled the WebSQL spec and left nothing in its place. If only one of them lived in the real world with any even remotely complex information system they would have seen removing it with the hope that "indexeddb can take its place" was just a retarted idea.
Looking forward to when they have 0% market share.
p.s. i'll take it all back if they start working on WebSQL2
MS announced they would use the new Google rendering engine which was designed to facilitate ad injection.
Go ahead and put FireFox in the spotlight, M$.
Mexico won't pay for FF's advertising, but it looks like M$ will.
Table-ized A.I.
Despite the silliness of his argument. More collaboration on most opensource software would actually be better, but not when there is no alternative. I believe you need at least two open source alternatives, with development teams that can try different approaches, but from this there should be one collaborative project that combines the best of both. The latter should be the de-facto standard. This would be a good thing for the opensource community as it would unite instead of divide a small pool of resources. Further to the point, it would not diminish options as the truly technical savvy can install either variant, or still make their unique version of either. Creativity would still be able to thrive without needing countless options that are essential the same with a small layer of veneer.
Microsoft just lost a few dozen karma points.
While they were slowly gaining one or two over the years. still being negative in totals though, they just managed to loose a few dozen.
Microsoft can not be trusted. Their views are monopolistic as ever. Not hindered by the technical or ethical best solutions they spread their propaganda.
They just may the stupid switch to switch to webkit themselves, and now insist the rest of the world should follow. What possibly could go wrong with such monoculture.
Well I say Mr. Microsoft can go f*ck himself. How about that?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
They should've joined Mozilla and not Google. They'll notice in two years and then it will be too late.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Many people felt the same about internet explorer back when it only had 5% market share, too. In retrospect, perhaps this would have been a good idea after all.
This is in the same newscycle as Google (the web's biggest advertiser) updating their API in a way that breaks most adblockers. Regardless of the reason they did it, Google won't make changes that don't favour Google. This lead inexorably to a Google-centric web and monopolization of power.
Assholes, as ever.
Just Fucking Trust Us!
-- satya nadella
It took the KDE devs years to port over webkit code that made sense in khtml, and Apple hadn't been a good community member and discussed/disclosed what they were doing until release time, resulting in code that was unacceptable to the kde project without reworking, as I remember it. If you look back it is not altogether unlike what happened with GCC when NeXT/Apple's Objective-C patches finally got released, although I think FSF had to threaten/sue over that one?
Having said that, we need Gecko/Servo/Whatever to keep from a single exploit in a browser engine allowing infection vectors on the majority of systems in the world. Homogenization is bad at both the hardware and software level for a large number of reasons. Having said that, perhaps Mozilla is not the stewarding foundation to further develop the engine into something secure, privacy minded, and fiscally responsible.
No, you actually do *not* have the freedom[1] to harm us and take away our freedom[2] from your harm.
(The Romans had two different words for this.)
Also, in factual physical reality, the term "property" cannot be applied to information/data, no matter how much the non-working, thieving Content Mafia leeches try to tell us otherwise.
Ownership is only possible at all, if it is enforced (e.g. by a government). But for information, that is both nonsensical and literally incompatible with the laws of causality. (Simply said: It is physically impossible to prevent information from being copied while showing it exists. The "zero-knowledge proof" actually is a fallacy based on confusing two different definitions of "knowledge" or "proof". The same fallacy that underlies "proof by induction". By showing you know the answer, you only show it *for that one case*. While *leaking kowledge for that one case*. To *actually* prove 100% that you know the answer, you have to show it for *all* cases. Which means you leaked *all* information about it, allowing the listener to 100% reproduce the secret.)
I wonder if this Program manager ever considered to apply this logic to MS Windows and Unix like Apple has.
Seriously. LOL
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
You will take NoScript and AdBlockPlus (or uBlock - names do not matter) from my cold dead hands, Microsoft.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Why did all of us who have data in SQL databases have to convert over to use noSQL type logic in web browsers?
Because every browser used SQLite to implement WebSQL. That's only one implementation, and therefore, w3c dropped it ... so we all had to convert over our code to use IndexedDB instead.
This would basically leave us with WebKit and Chromium ... if they didn't both agree to implement something (and do it differently), you couldn't have a w3c recommendation.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
With Microsoft succumbing to Chromium and Google, and the rest pretty much Chrome clones. I don't see a lot of hope for Mozilla and Firefox simply because without Google's ad support and Google search deals Mozilla would be on death watch today. Granted Firefox is probably the most funded open source projects today. But its also obvious that Quantum never remotely saved the day for Mozilla. For the same reason Edge could not compete against Chrome, Firefox is basically fighting that same fight.
"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?
Competition is important. If there is a dominating force, then that is reason enough to have competition. Otherwise, the dominant force stagnates. It may also go in unpleasant directions. Directions it cannot go now, because that would be handing the web over to the competitor.
Where would we be, if nobody competed with microsoft? Windows would be worse than it is, phones would be windows phones...
Finally, and this cannot be stressed enough: "Market share" is not important for open-source projects. This because such projects does not live off sales. A simple fact that many corporate people stumble over, being so used to "sales being all-important".
Open-source people generally enjoy some market share - it is fun. But all they need is a sufficiently large interested developer base. If market share is low, then you either have a niche product and is satisfied with that - or you figure out what you're missing and make some changes.
They've been in corporate pockets their entire existence.
First AOL's in an attempt to reduce costs on their 'free browser with ads' by having development take advantage of open source (which it didn't due to a combination of the license and the inability of their internal developers to listen to outside voices... still a problem today), then Google while they were trying to erode IE's dominance in the web while trying to spin up their own browser engine, and now today they are just the poisoned chalice of Google, via Marissa Meyer who are folding their organization down as their supply of corporation donating sponsors dwindles and they have to focus on low brow advertising like all those other failed free browser projects of the past (including the Netscape Browser under AOL...)
Maybe if people paid more attention to companies, organizations, and foundations ACTIONS rather than their fluffy do-gooder words, they would see just the sort of corruption, rot, and graft these organizations are involved in. Most non-profits are for-profit for the employees but just don't turn a profit to avoid taxes themselves. And even that is shifting. Just look at the pools of money that Mozilla and Wikipedia have stocked up through tax loopholes and other sleazy things, all while begging for more donations for their already absurd salaries, all while the productive contributors get the shaft.
Microsoft should get down from its philosophical ivory tower and ditch Windows in favor of alternative OSes like Linux or BSD variants. The Linux kernel is already used on a majority of mobile devices and servers, as well as on the top supercomputers in the world. The web (backend anyway) has been dominated by Linux. C'mon, Microsoft, get with the program and dump Windows.
Yeah, if history teaches us anything, it's that you don't really need more than one web browser. Remember the good old days when we only had the Internet Explorer and everything worked fine? Before all the Mozillas and Googles and such messed it all up. We were all happier back then, weren't we? We were young and optimistic and our wives hadn't left us yet... we had it all AND BY GOD WE WILL GET IT ALL BACK! Stopping Mozilla is step one on the way to reclaim the lost paradise!
lets users control ads and scripts as the browser belongs to the user.
Other OS push their ads onto a users computer.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
So m$ is getting into open source. Sounds like they already have an advanced idea about the philosophies behind such things. LOL
And these clown own github now FACEPALM
Let me translate that:
We want to track you and deploy closed source solutions/codecs/whatever and that tiny firefox is always blocking it, pushing open source solutions and allowing people to block ads and tracking ... bastards!
MS kept a broken IE for years, and it still being used (where they disabled many other things, IE they do not disabled), keeping broken sites working still today instead of finally forcing then to upgrade to something that works in all browsers. Those shitty old sites are still blocking many people from using better browsers. MS should not really be talking about other people browsers!
First disable the IE in all windows installs and then you can comment other people browsers!
Higuita
Aww,is poor Microsofty-watsy all butt hurt cause they had to give up on their own browser?
Just cause you guys are incompetent doesn't mean everyone else has to be too, and *somebody* has to challenge IE6 2.0.
Microsoft Should Get Down From Its Philosophical Ivory Tower, and Opensource Edge.
The world already has more than enough lame open sores browsers. In every category the line leader is a closed source application. Stuff like Office, Photoshop, etc lead the way with shitty buggy and slow open sores versions dragging far behind. And so it is with browsers, Chrome is the #1 browser because it is closed source (compare it to the utter garbage that is Chromium, the open sores "fork"). Mozilla should go closed source because that is simply a better way to develop good software.
The entire point of a standards compliant web browser is that it should not matter what browser you use to visit a site. If sites and browsers faithfully adhered to standards every web site would function perfectly in every browser.
Now the company that has produced some of the LEAST standards compliant sites and browsers is complaining about too much diversity in the browser space?
That's a laugh.
I, for one, love Firefox.
I love firefox relative independance; I need it.
And so far, I've nothing against their so called "philosophical" way of doing things.
"The modern web platform is incredible complex. Today it's an application runtime comparable to the Java or .net framework."
Who's fault ? Who asked to a web browser able to serve gazzilions of AD data ? (not me) I doubt google will make a great job fighing this mess, nor microsoft.
"My problem with Mozilla's current approach is that they are *preaching* their own technology instead of asking themselves how they can contribute most and deliver "
Well, I don't have an opinion for this one. Preach is never great to me, but that's not the same as "philosophy".
How much microft listen customers is an interesting question as well (my answer: they don't give a sh..); this is not religion, this is (bad) business. I rather prefer good philosophy.
Crowdfund:
1) The resurrection of the old (XUL) Firefox
2) The preservation of all the extensions from the official website
3) The initial work on fixing the most glaring performance deficiencies and maybe the past UI changes that were for the worse.
Then maybe organize the further Firefox development using the Wine/Crossover model.
They said, "fuck you."
Since this seems to be the season for stupid suggestions: Why don't you MS people commit collective suicide, thus making the world a better place? Come to think of it, this suggestion might not be all that stupid.
cease development on all products. They have seriously went downhill in recent years. Office 365 make lotus notes look like a superior alternative. i cant understand why when i open a document on that is local on my harddrive in the full version of office i have it still needs to go to the internet? office communicator was great, skype sucks. windows 7 was good, windows 10 sucks. windows 10 would not be bad it they removed all the BS they added with telemetry, ads, app store, piss poor untested forced updates,etc.
I remember being so impressed by inline GIF in Mosaic.
Firefox always seems to be behind everyone else on standards support and on security. It was way behind Chrome on sandboxing and quite a few security problems. Maybe Firefox would be well served by moving to Blink, this way it would use less resources reinventing the wheel and could focus more on QA and UI improvements, Firefox would not lose any control, in fact it would still have the same amount of control as it does now with its own Engine becuase it could simply fork and modify Blink however it needs to.
Chromium is not a closed source project no one can modify. If you used Blink engine, you could modify it however you need to so in effect Google nor anyone else is controlling you. If Firefox did move to Blink, they could patch the code base and would have complete control over the browser works. There are no hidden features because its an open source project.
Sing it with me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Oh, the horror!
"There is no zealot like the convert."
Microsoft AND Mozilla are BOUGHT and PAID for.
Entire world would be grateful.
If he is criticizing Mozilla then that is back on him. It's standards compliance that is important -- no necessarily working from a common code base. Having alternatives will keep that alive and could spur innovation. For HTML rendering, I still prefer KHTML. It is lighter, simpler, standards compliant. On the other hand, Chromium's rendered is actually a descendant of khtml...
However, if he is talking about the wisdom of such a move for Mozilla then I could almost agree. Firefox is built on XUL, which was an innovative idea and is still unique. Entire applications may be built on XUL. I personally hate XML but otherwise the idea of this has enormous untapped potential that Chromium lacks. I don't know if this will ever be tapped, though. It seems unlikely.
If I were Mozilla, I might build a successor to XUL based on JavaScript data structures (perhaps calling it JUL). And in this yes, I would probably move to the Chromium HTML renderer. JUL code be a node.js npm package -- although I can understand the argument they'd probably make for going with SpiderMonkey, instead.
JUL could be declarative, like XUL. However, why not simultaneous simplify the difficulties of asynchronous programming in Node.js with JUL? You could do away with software bugs entirely in JUL, using a system of stateful logic. How does that work? In short, you register conditions. If after each asynchronous call, any variables are modified that are used in a condition's logical test expression then test the condition and if true, execute its registered state changes.
So the only bugs possible are in your software requirements. There could be no bugs in your programming itself. There could be syntax errors and system errors outside the scope of your program. Furthermore, such a system would typically work properly under various conditions you did not even anticipate.
You'd specify what your interface looks like. You'd specify what pattern of states cause specific state changes. And you could use JSON or JavaScript object notation to define this.
it worked so well when IE 6 was king
At least firefox didn't broke xml + xsl on file://
It was, in large part, Mozilla which protected the web from the depredations of Microsoft, almost two decades ago. Methinks the lackey doth protest too much.
MS canâ(TM)t beat me join em has some merit for MS but who why is it news that someone cheering for their home team. Surely there is a more objective source elsewhere to evaluate pros / cons of chromium
i am not too sorry but sorry enough to mention that i have modified the user-agent string of my firefox to suggest i am running
windoze X and Edge (for some crazy ass reason javascript can still figure out that the real system is actually linux *sheesh*)
no need to lead the baddies ... the IDS lights up with no harm done.
but seriously, still using firefox here: someone said it already ... everyone on chrome (and blink) leads to dangers like when all are on windoze, the state-of-the-art platform for self-replicating network code.
... your comment is wasted here. You might as well try to explain a smart phone to an indian. Slashdot is chock full of ignorant idiots who see open source as a solution to every problem and will never understand its severe limitations.
So they quit and so everyone else should also quit. Give in to Big Brother and Big Brother's job will be so much easier. Screw these people. Or kill them would be better off.
...which "caring" company it was that pursued a deliberate strategy of "Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish" towards competing standards and products for most of the back end of the 20th century?
My memory is a getting little unreliable these days - but I'm almost sure that it started with an M.
Vulnerabilities are amplified in monoculture. Look at the bananas, there is a single virus that is wiping a whole species of banana we eat. I agree that Microsoft tries to push monoculture, IE as an example.
With out competition, browser technology stagnates, IE as an example.
Yeah, that's just what we need./sarcasm
This is an ex-parrot!
"Look at the projects keeping the old system alive, like Waterfox and Pale Moon. All suffering from being unable to fix the performance issues and being very slow with security patches because their security model is so terrible"
i'm sorry, but this is lies. You misunderstand how browsers get infected because no experience with making malware.
Seamonkey is fast and allows user to control all aspects of browser, down to what CA's user trusts, what scripting languages run and what packets with what fields get sent where.
Currently, as far as i know, that is not possible with unmodified Firefox without a proxy rewriting packets.
And by virtue of being detectable only through timing side channels (with right extensions)... I dare you to write a page that will detect and infect ancient unpatched Seamonkey or Palemoon if they aren't showing their real user agent to you :D
And should you ever write that page (which i believe you are not capable of) then enjoy your 0,001 conversion rate, ahaha.
Things that have less then 1% of market, ain't nobody gonna infect.
Things that target you specifically for infection, won't be stopped by a fully patched browser.
If we follow his logic MS should stop development on IIS...they really should.
Ford says Chevrolet should stop making vehicles.
I agree wholeheartedly with this aspect of it, but it is not enough. The Mozilla Foundation just needs to shut down entirely and cease to exist. It has become nothing more than a collection of hyper-partisan social justice warriors who have run off everyone who had any shred of talent. Firefox has been a steaming pile of manure for a couple of years now, and leaks more memory than ever. It all just needs to go away.
So, because Microsoft failed at creating a workable modern browser, Firefox should just say "fuck it"?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"Thought: It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by IE6, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be encouraging IE6 instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than five percent?"
Hahahahahaha thats just mwahahahaha I mean bwaaaahahahahahaha
They'd be perfect if their spellcheck worked. Must be apple syndrome.
Can we just stop with the outrage after someone says something stupid on Twitter? Honestly, who cares what some random project manager at Microsoft says? Especially on Twitter, the biggest flame-war factory ever created.
The media/world needs to stop paying attention to Twitter, as if it actually matters. It doesn't. The faster we recognize that Twitter is a den of scum and villainy, the better.
Well, of course I'd expect a Microsoft program manager to be stupid enough to suggest we all give in and move to a software monoculture.
The problem is, and Microsoft has never learned this, a software monoculture leads to overall shit software, and a hole in one of them is a hole in all of them.
Coming from a company who has had the worse case of "Not Invented Here", I expect this level of stupid statements from such people.
I, unfortunately, have to point out that my opinion of Kenneth Auchenberg based on no more than this summary, is that I think he's a fucking idiot.
Doesn't microsoft own Sour Grape Vineyards? The home of vaporous failure red, shoddy logic rose, and blue screen of death blush?
In the Free Software World, only a complete fool or an utter dipshit would take advice from, of all entities, Micro$soft, on how best to move their free software project forward.
With the decline of Opera and Chrome (disabling ad blocking, add corporate anti-user misfeatures like crippling useful plugsin etc.), the need for a free and open source browser like Firefox is INCREASED, not decreased. But I'm sure the monopolists and plutocrats like Microsft, Google, Facebook et al would love to see the good folks at Mozilla walk away from their, by far, most successful project. But the rest of us (even someone like me who uses Opera but is considering a move back to Firefox more and more as our privacy becomes suspect on these other platforms) really, really want Firefox to stick around, and continue development.
What possible guarantees could Mozilla obtain that once they begin to maintain a large patchset to rectify oodles of terrible policy decisions in the Chromium base, that the code base underneath them doesn't shake so much that all they end up doing is maintaining this giant patch set?
For a while so many people were touting the whole, 'Microsoft is different now with its new CEO! They are on the FOSS bandwagon! They aren't the same anti-competitive corporation anymore!"
I hope they see stories like this and realize they simply put on a good front (to the gullible and short-sighted). They will always hold money and power above all else, because that's all they have left. They'll always trail behind others in the industry because they're so monolithically structured and slow moving because of their size.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
What would Clippy do?
Signing internet posts.... *cringe*
~Anonymous Coward
Microsoft just killed their own browser development - yes, when Edge goes Chromium Internet Explorer will die - so they very much want everyone to make that move.
Either to make their development easier or to make some monopoly claims against Google, whatever fits the current path of the dark empire best.
Both of you enter a ring and fight to the death. Winner gets the gas.
The mother of all $ucky closed $ource bloatware is deigning to tell a FOSS company how to run their business..
Man, this dude lives deep in the matrix. Being polite to your neighbors is not a philosophical ivory tower.
Put it is the BEST five percent. Catering to the 1337 is a worthwhile effort.
I never thought about that. I'm switching to Firefox right now.
I use Firiefox for everything, even on my Smartphone use Focus; Chrome is fine but sometimes gets slow and creepy.