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Microsoft Project Manager Says Mozilla Should Get Down From Its 'Philosophical Ivory Tower,' Cease Firefox Development (zdnet.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the how-to-cause-a-stir-on-social-media dept.

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."

48 of 444 comments (clear)

  1. the only alternative? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    1. Re:the only alternative? by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Informative

      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).

    2. Re:the only alternative? by cheesybagel · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well the BEAST was slayed and their tags shall BLINK until the end of days.
      Book of Mozilla

    3. Re: the only alternative? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      No, WebKit was a fork of KHTML from the KDE Project, as used in the Konqueror web browser for Linux.

    4. Re:the only alternative? by Desler · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:the only alternative? by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Nothing I said was false. I'm talking about Safari (as was the post I was replying to). You're talking about WebKit. Safari is a web browser. WebKit is a layout engine. They are not the same thing.

    6. Re:the only alternative? by jpaine619 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:the only alternative? by markdavis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      >"What about Safari, which uses webkit? It's the default browser on both macOS and iOS, and does not use Chromium."

      Wake me up when it runs on even one of:

      Linux desktops
      BSD desktops
      Android phones
      Oh, and MS-Windows (since dropped 7 YEARS ago)

      Throwing out a closed-source, Apple-only product as an "alternative" is hardly the counter to the Chrome/Google monoculture.

      I believe that Firefox is the ONLY open-source, multi-platform, non-chrome based browser left. And as a bonus, this only true alternative is fast, robust, provides far more customization and user control, community-based, and backed by an organization that cares about standards, security, privacy, and internet freedom.

      So if you want to fight our rapid plunge into to the next dark-age/IE-rerun, then I suggest you install and use Firefox on whatever platform you use and encourage others to do the same.

      It is absolutely SHOCKING to see some sites that are already becoming essentially Chrome-only as their rendering is partially broken in Firefox and their "solution" when you complain is to install Chrome. I never thought we would have to go through this s*** again. But here we are.

    8. Re: the only alternative? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Could you please point out the "completely false statement" you're referring to?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    9. Re:the only alternative? by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A few truths exist, one is that if Microsoft says you shouldn't do a thing, it must be critically important for you to double down on that thing.

    10. Re:the only alternative? by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
    11. Re:the only alternative? by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.
  2. Complete moron by brickhouse98 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Complete moron by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Insightful

      the real reason would be to ask why the f would you choose microsofts chromium browser over anything else?

      besides, wtf would mozilla "research" if they dropped their own rendering engine? would they research how to keep adblockers running on chromium?

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:Complete moron by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Quitters quit. It's what they do, they don't see other options and it seems irrational when other people don't.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:Complete moron by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.
    4. Re:Complete moron by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  3. Or maybe the opposite... by RyanFenton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Or maybe the opposite... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
    2. Re:Or maybe the opposite... by fafalone · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The vast, vast majority of websites load in a couple seconds for me. I'm not interested in a page loading in 1 second instead of 3 in exchange for giving up better plugins and UI, or slightly better security that's better handled by just providing a toggle for people who know what they're doing. That's just not a worthwhile tradeoff. For people who think it is, there's Chrome.

  4. Makes sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Microsoft... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Microsoft... by Pfhorrest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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."
    2. Re:Microsoft... by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.'"
  6. Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Edge failed so cut down anyone who continues to try and compete.

    Pathetic.

    1. Re:Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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)
    2. Re:Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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."
    3. Re:Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Typical Microsoft Employee -- Arrogant by rundgong · · Score: 3, Informative

      Clickbait for Nerds.

      You might be on to a new tag line for /. there

      Clickbait for nerds, stuff that doesn't matter!

  7. Um, WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re: Re:Um, WTF? by bheerssen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Mozilla has been committed to social issues since before there was a Firefox. What do you think the whole "Take back the web" thing was about? They are trying to keep the web free, as in freedom, for everyone. If that's not a social issue, nothing is.

      --
      (Score: -1, Stupid)
    2. Re:Um, WTF? by 4im · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The Firefox browser is far older and can trace it's origins back to Mosaic.

      Not quite... Internet Explorer was Mosaic's bastard child. Netscape, Mozillas predecessor, was independently developed. Chromium is descended from webkit, in turn coming from the KDE project's khtml.

      Yes, I'm old enough to have used Mosaic myself, back in 1993.

  8. Very short sighted by chromaexcursion · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. It takes some bravado by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. Don't take advice from your enemy by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 5, Insightful
    When your enemy tells you you're stupid and you should be doing something else, never do that. She'll always say things like "you're wasting your time on useless efforts" - if your enemy really thought that, she'd rejoice that you were wasting your time.

    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!
  11. Fake News by demon+driver · · Score: 3, Funny

    I know Program Manager, and I know that it cannot "say" a thing.

  12. this piece of FUD brought to you...... by Indy1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!
  13. monocultures suck; long live the open web! by neonman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:monocultures suck; long live the open web! by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      It follows the standards better in my experience, too. Still waiting for Chrome to catch up.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  14. Fork Chromium by mentil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Fork Chromium by roca · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If Chromium becomes the only browser engine then you won't have to worry about "W3C standards", because whatever Chromium does (bugs and all) will *be* the standard and the W3C might as well cease to exist. That is one of the problems with monocultures.

  15. It's time for @microsoft to get down... by Paul+Doom · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...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
  16. Webrender by darkain · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  17. Funny by yusing · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

  18. Aging monopolist argues for monoculture by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  19. Microsoft is scared... by msevior · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  20. MS has a problem. by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  21. Let me translate that... by higuita · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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