Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
It isn't cross-platform (isn't an option for 90% of computer users) and isn't necessarily all that different from Chromium (whose Blink engine is a fork of WebKit).
No, WebKit was a fork of KHTML from the KDE Project, as used in the Konqueror web browser for Linux.
Also Steam uses WebKit across all OSes andMidori is a WebKit-based browser that runs on Windows and Linux. Qt also used WebKit as its embedded browser widget for numerous years. There are also plenty of other cross-platform apps using it. That you got modded Informative for a completely false statement is laughable.
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.
Firefox is ahead of Chrome in standards. Chrome is catching up.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Clickbait for Nerds.
You might be on to a new tag line for /. there
Clickbait for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!
The old plug-ins and the UI customization were what were holding Firefox back. Go back and try one of the versions from before the change over, comparing performance with current Firefox and Chrome. It's night and day.
And that's before you look at the security nightmare that results from Javascript being able to hook deep into the browser, alter the UI and get executed in critical paths.
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. The developers have realized what Mozilla realized years ago - the fundamental design is flawed, and it can't be fixed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Oh great, Javascript that can write to the filesystem. How could that possibly go wrong?
Lots of ways. But it's also useful, and if you simply chroot then it's not a big deal.
By the way, those web archives are actually just ZIP files and can be extracted with tools like 7zip. The HTML is inside.
What I want is for them to pop up in my browser to be annotated like what happens when I click on them in the Scrapbook sidebar. I don't want to be dicking with them. I have what I want now, and I don't want my browser to have LESS functionality.
Also in Chrome when you save the page you can select between "complete" (the archive) and "HTML only".
Irrelevant, that's not what I'm talking about. Does that preserve the page as currently displayed?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Also Steam uses WebKit across all OSes
No it doesn't -> https://imgur.com/bZa5nWY
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Seriously try 8.1 and Win 7 will feel as low as Win98 running on a 386. Boot times on Win 7 with my current system (FX8320e with 16gb of RAM and 240gb SSD) was around 20 seconds until it was fully loaded, on Win 8.1? Its about 4 seconds! Its literally so fast I never see the Win 8.1 boot screen, it goes from POST to the desktop so the only time I ever see the boot screen is running in safe mode to run DDU when installing a new graphics driver.
I ran in dual boot to compare the two and after 3 days I just tossed win 7, the difference in speed and responsiveness? Like night and day, 8.1 really blows the doors off Win 7.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.