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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."
Edge failed so cut down anyone who continues to try and compete.
Pathetic.
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.
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.
...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
I think that you have figured it out - the nail in the eye of many ad providers is the strength of Firefox/Gecko when it comes to allowing ad blocking tech.
Without ad blocking the web would be useless and we could as well just look up the small waterholes that run no or very limited ads.
By driving development to a single rendering engine you allow a very limited number of people in control of what we are served.
As long as the rendering engines follows the standards declared by the World Wide Web Consortium then we don't have a problem. If they have "hidden features" as IE had for a long time, then we are as users in the hands of the major corporations.
We are in a Max Headroom world. Hello Blank Reg!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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
I think that you have figured it out - the nail in the eye of many ad providers is the strength of Firefox/Gecko when it comes to allowing ad blocking tech.
In nature, differentiation of a species often means that what kills some, does not kill all. Software monoculture is just a bad idea, for much the same reason. Sure it makes things more compatible, but you also loose the edge that competition fosters, and in the event some serious problem is found with one, you have no alternative ready to go.
For instance, it is not inconceivable that a zero day worm would get in the wild that would easily infect any variant of the standard engine, but have firefox be completely unaffected.
Basically Firefox is important not just for being able to install things like u-block.
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!
Holy crap. I actually used Midori today (long story), and legitimately wondered "How many people can possibly be using this butt-ugly browser?". I didn't think I'd actually ever hear of anyone else using it.
It's ugly as sin but performs as a "different" browser when I need to ensure some weird result I'm getting isn't a glitch in Chromium. Firefox (which I'm glad is around) is much more memory intensive than Midori. I can launch Midori in a few seconds versus tens of seconds for Firefox.
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
Yeah, what about Webkit, that Chromium forked from Safari, which Apple forked from KHTML?
It's a bizarre irony in that the most popular used web browser was basically forked from a LGPL project known mostly to Linux nerds.
Firefox was beating MSIE in every Metric and then google just did the obvious thing, stole Safari, rebranded it Chrome and now the highest quality Mac Web Browser became the best web browser overnight and Google didn't have to much at all.
But the sad fact is that Google uses their monopoly power on Chromium and it results in Google dictating web standards (like HTTPS everywhere) to the detriment of the global web, even if the intentions might be good. See a few days ago about Chromium going to depreciate the dangerous extension api's and the collateral damage is that plugins won't be able to spy on network data, only after they're loaded into the browser, thus neutering the shittiest of the Ad blocker extensions.
If there really was only four web browsers (eg Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge) and all four were available on ALL platforms, not just iOS, then an entirely different story would be playing out with Safari dictating the mobile web and Chrome only being able to leverage it's Android install base to fight back. The desktop would be a different animal as Chrome and Firefox are the only browsers available on all desktop platforms, so it makes sense to just develop against Chrome since it also covers mobile Chrome.
That's why Google is where it is. If Firefox ruled the desktop and Chrome was only Android's shitty browser, Firefox would be making the decisions, not Google. Google simply ate Firefox's share of the non-MSIE world by osmosis.
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.
Could you please point out the "completely false statement" you're referring to?
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
I'm glad you got modded up to 5, I only wish that the more than 5 comments I've posted over the years 'twixt then and now saying the exact same thing hadn't typically been downmodded by butthurt microsofties. Microsoft was found to have acted in basically every anticompetitive way possible, and Bill Gates was implicated personally. That's why I make sure to describe him as a career criminal in every discussion about how fucking wonderful his charity work supposedly is (even though it never actually is — he's just doing Big Pharma's work for them, spreading IP law while actually failing to eradicate anything.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"