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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.
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
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.
Chromium is open source. Nothing stops somebody using it as the basis for their browser from doing something different there.
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
The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
This is a 3rd option for OSS: The Corporate Tower. It's the Cathdral with just occasional releases, but all the real development and control is done by those in ivory tower.
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.
"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!
A quick look at Chromium's github shows regular updates every few minutes. That doesn't sound much like a cathedral or a corporate tower to me. Even if Google is maintaining control of the project (and they seem to do so to a much lesser degree than Torvalds controls the Linux kernel), the development is clearly happening in the public, with every individual check-in available to merge.
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.
I think in that case, they meant preserving a line different from Chromium.
That Microsoft manager seems to be totally incompetent at observation and analysis.
Being incompetent seems to be a prerequisite for being a manager at MS.
...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
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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"
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.
Christ, you have some bad dreams.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
What do you mean? I don't mind [BUY XBOX ONE TODAY!] having ads shown randomly in every day tasks!
#DeleteFacebook
At least, someone should tell them to "learn to code."
Have gnu, will travel.
...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.
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.
Ford says Chevrolet should stop making vehicles.
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?"
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.
Agreed. Don't see why you were downvoted, at least you're expressing your opinion.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
They then stand a chance to be #2 behind Google.
TFS says MS is giving up its own engine and switching to Chromium's. Leaving Firefox/Gecko as the only major alternative. It would then be a team of Microsoft/Google against Mozilla (skipping the minor players. I'm sure Microsoft would rather have a two way stand-off once Mozilla is gone (embrace, extend, and exterminate) than get caught in a three-way competition. You never know who's got your back.
Have gnu, will travel.
Both of you enter a ring and fight to the death. Winner gets the gas.
> Ford should stop trying cause toyota is superior..
Actually Ford will stop making most sedans/coupes for North America https://techcrunch.com/2018/04... and give up that marketshare to Toyota.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
And I thought dreaming about a 50 ft woman was weird!
But look, what makes you think it was a bad dream? This is slashdot, that was probably just somebody's deepest fantasy. At least he didn't tell us the part about the hot grits this time.
That's not the point.
Let's say you're a web developer or just a user who hates ads. You fork chromium but Google ads a feature that 99.95% of people use by default.
The site admins tell you to run chrome and don't care. No one cares or uses your browser as it's not Chrome compliant. Only Google decides which standard to use. Your boss tells you to make it work only in Chrome if you're a developer.
Welcome to the past of 2003 when IE 6 mattered only.
http://saveie6.com/
I see that you want to surf the web, let me start Mosaic for you!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.