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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.
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.
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!
Some random dude at Microsoft is butthurt that Mozilla beat Edge.
Clickbait for Nerds.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Microsoft should be broken up by DoJ again in an antitrust action
That implies that they were broken up by the DoJ once before. They were found guilty of antitrust violations, yes, but before any action could be taken against them Bush took office and his DoJ declined to follow up on the matter.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
firefox is pretty much doomed at this point as they will almost certainly never recover marketshare at this point and it only gets worse from here as no one tests sites for firefox anymore.
Why don't you put a "Best viewed with IE" blinking-GIF on your homepage?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
firefox is in its death throes. It is bad for all of us, but you can't blame companies, sites and developers for dropping testing for it. The user population just doesn't justify the investment in many cases. Really though mozilla has no one to blame for this but themselves, rather than innovating they tried to clone Chrome, rather than listening to their userbase they dictated to them, rather than helping the developer community they fucked them over.