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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
At least, someone should tell them to "learn to code."
Have gnu, will travel.