11 ms·

As a firefox fax, I hope this isn't true. The dominance of chrome isn't good for anyone. This will lead to (even more) sites not bothering to be made compatible

As a firefox fax, I hope this isn't true. The dominance of chrome isn't good for anyone. This will lead to (even more) sites not bothering to be made compatible with Firefox. We are headed back to the "designed for IE" days.

samspenc 8y ago
My understanding is that they'll be using the Chromium engine underneath, but still their own Edge "browser" and UI on top. IMHO, I personally think it's a good thing to consolidate on one engine to render HTML cross-platform for these two reasons: 1. Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines. 2. The Chromium engine itself is open source. There are other browsers (Vivaldi, Opera, etc) that run on top of it. 3. While I think it's great the engine underneath is the same, I think it's equally great that there is a variety of UIs and browsers built on top of the same engine - the innovation happens in the browser space, not the engine, anymore.
- kibwen 8y ago
  > The Chromium engine itself is open source Being open source is a red herring in this instance. Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. You fork the browser and remove that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so your fork doesn't work with those websites. Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. You fork the browser and add the feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use your feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and your fork is no better off. The insidious part of a web monoculture is allowing Google to dictate the standards of the web platform. Being able to fork the codebase only gives one the power to change things that are strictly client-side.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - joesb 8y ago
    Your examples have nothing to do with whether you use Chrominum engine, though. Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that doesn't have that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so MS Edge doesn't work with those websites. Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that has that feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use MS Edge feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and MS Edge browser is no better off.
    - kibwen 8y ago
      Not sure what this is attempting to refute. Your comment is about why monocultures are bad for competition, which I happen to agree with. My comment is about why Chromium being open-source doesn't alleviate any concerns about monoculture.
      - cortesoft 8y ago
        How is the situation better if there are two browsers with 50% market share? You still can’t add a new feature the other side doesn’t want, because 50% of users won’t be able to use it. Any feature that requires a site owner to do something to support it isn’t going to be added.
        viraptor 8y ago
        > You still can’t add a new feature the other side doesn’t want That's not quite true. This happens all the time with things not standardised (yet). With time those either get wide adoption because people want them, or get dropped, or get standardised in a different widely agreed form.
        kibwen 8y ago
        You've just illustrated the advantage of a polyculture: changes to the platform are not unilateral decisions, and therefore require discussion, communication, and documentation. Furthermore, if one actor tries to do something out of blatant self-interest that would be a detriment to the platform as a whole, that action can be blocked. With a Google monoculture, at the end of the day, the web will be whatever the CEO of Google allows it to be. Imagine how little control users have over the Android platform; envision a future where that's the web's model as well.
  - jayd16 8y ago
    Microsoft using Chrome only somewhat reduces Microsoft's power in this regard. In no way does that change your ability to project your will on the internet through Chrome forks. Small devs have little power now and that will stay unchanged if Edge goes Chrome. Web devs will have to build for the lowest common denominator so this change improves that slightly. An actual downsides is it increases the power of the Chromium team to make defacto changes. It might also reduces innovation but I can't really see Microsoft deciding to drop a feature because it would take them further from the chrome trunk.
- nl 8y ago
  Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines. So, as the OP said - back to the bad old days of IE6 dominance.
  - taf2 8y ago
    Not even close. IE6 was a browser that was set in stone. It only ran on Windows. It's legacy that we live with today is the ActiveX controls that are basically parts of Windows. MS stopped innovating on the browser part of IE6 and focused on ActiveX e.g. native Windows components that you could use in the browser. You can't talk about IE6 and not mention how embedded it was with Windows. That is what made IE6 bad. You could not use your Mac or Linux environments to browser the internet. Lots of great ideas came out of IE6 XMLHTTPRequest. Access to the native desktop devices. Storage APIs, realtime communication anything you can do on the desktop you should be able to do through the Web. That is what we see happening today with Chromium and Mozilla. These two teams and now with MS being more involved as well. There is a huge amount of collaboration it's nothing at all like IE6 days.
    - nl 8y ago
      This reaction is pretty interesting. I was doing some webdev back then, and whilst everything you said was true it was the lack of cross browser CSS and Javascript testing which led to the real frustration. Back in 2002/03 IE6 had over 90% marketshare, and justifying testing in anything else was a constant battle.
      - taf2 8y ago
        As developer back then I had the same experience but with some reflection ie 6 was the better browser in 2002 - Firefox css got better but that was more like 2005 after many years of zero development on IE6. Reflecting back to that time period the most lasting damages were active x. There are still governments and corporations that can’t migrate from IE 11 because of this legacy.
        8y ago
- SllX 8y ago
  If open web standards are to matter at all, it is more important for there to be multiple viable implementations of the same standards than it is for the lives of web developers to become easier. Using the same engine across multiple browsers, open source or not, just doesn’t cut it.
  - err4nt 8y ago
    People in web standards community kind of anticipate browsers (there are 4 main browsers now) eventually kind of consolidating down to 2 engines. This seems like a step in that direction. Who knows, Safari might be next :D
    - xg15 8y ago
      Interesting. What is the other engine?
      - connicpu 8y ago
        At least Firefox has no intentions of throwing in the towel and adopting webkit/blink yet
    - SllX 8y ago
      Anticipate or hope?
- pcwalton 8y ago
  OK, how do I get the Chromium team to integrate parallel layout written in Rust? Sometimes innovation is at odds with whatever Google's Chrome team feels like doing. That is why engine diversity is a good thing.
  - jhasse 8y ago
    Suggest it to them?? If it's really faster, why wouldn't they merge it?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - nordsieck 8y ago
      >> OK, how do I get the Chromium team to integrate parallel layout written in Rust? > Suggest it to them?? If it's really faster, why wouldn't they merge it? How many major software projects do you know of that will casually add a programming language?
      - jhasse 8y ago
        It wouldn't be casually if the parallel renderer brought in some real benefits.
        pcwalton 8y ago
        Every time I've suggested something along those lines to the Chromium folks I've gotten "we're doing it in C++ ;)" I mean, it makes sense—Google has an enormous team on Chromium and they don't want to have another language to support. But that is precisely why it's important to not have the entire Web under Alphabet's reporting structure.
- damnyou 8y ago
  3 is just completely untrue. Firefox Quantum came out just a year ago.
  - jhasse 8y ago
    Which just caught up with Chromium. And hardware acceleration on Linux is still disabled by default.
- hkai 8y ago
  Your argument is similar to saying that one party rule in politics is good for the country (because the party is nice, has competent people at the top, and helps people a lot).
  - ako 8y ago
    Well, it's better than two parties that are putting all their energy into fighting each other, instead of governing a country in hot best way possible for its citizens...
    - hkai 8y ago
      It definitely is not.
    - welly 8y ago
      North Korea, Soviet Union, China, Syria, East Germany. Take your pick.
      - ako 8y ago
        That doesn't mean that every single party government is worse than 2 parties...
        welly 8y ago
        Then perhaps you can suggest a single single-party government that is better than a two (or more) party government? I look forward to this...
- Despegar 8y ago
  The web works best when there's a European-style balance of power with actual balance [1]. Microsoft, Apple and Google are like France, UK and Germany. Each of them have their own interests. Microsoft had their own interests when they actually had a native developer ecosystem that was thriving, but now that it's gone they have deprioritized Windows as a business [2], made Windows 10 a data sucking "OS as a service" (that doesn't even have QA people anymore other than beta testers), and is now all in on PWAs for their app story. They are in fact more like Google than ever before. That just leaves Apple as the only opposing source of power. Mozilla is Poland and is destined to get f*cked as their market share drops and any negotiating leverage they have to get Google TAC money disappears (they're more like Saudi Arabia is to the US, a vassal state, rather than a Great Power). These are dire times for the web. Only Vestager can save us now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_balance_of_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_balance_of_power [2] https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
  - deleted 8y ago
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    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- happymellon 8y ago
  Which is a shame, because it is the interface that is one of the worst aspects of Edge. Not that I know that well, my work that forces my Windows usage still makes me use IE.
- Sylos 8y ago
  Mozilla is by the way also of the opinion that a monoculture would be horrible for the web. Arguments that I've heard from Mozilla employees: - Without competitors, innovation is dead. If there was only one web-engine, why bother improving it further? Given that it's open-source, it could theoretically be forked, but in that moment you again have two different web engines or more. Also, Mozilla would have to fork Blink from day one, because many things in it, they do not consider acceptable. - A monoculture means one security problem makes everyone vulnerable. - Multiple implementations challenge standards. You still would want a definition of a standard, or an API if you will, to point web developers to. But those are only going to point problems out after you've already implemented it, and likely also after other websites are already using the feature productively. They also can't point out stupid specifications that aren't going to allow you to update your browser engine in the future. So, you'd be much more likely to have to break compatibility, which doesn't play well with the web.
mushu999 8y ago
WTF do you mean "lead to sites not bothering to be made compatible with Firefox"?? If Firefox follows the published HTML standards then there wouldn't need to be any special compatibility effort made by us web devs! That is exactly what made I.E. (and Edge) so cr@ppy in the first place!! /facepalm
- hashhar 8y ago
  Oh the irony. I bet you can find more non-standard behaviour and features and APIs in Chrome than in Firefox. There is a reason why people regard the MDN docs to be the best documentation for web technologies.
- lvh 8y ago
  That’s only true if Chromium does everything correctly, and even then it ignores the chilling effect where nobody cares unless Chrome does it. Right now I have perfectly valid SVG and HTML5 that straight up does not work correctly in Chrome.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Chrome doesn't follow the published HTML standards either.
- xg15 8y ago
  The "published HTML standards" change all the time and are themselves constantly negotiated between the browser vendors.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  How can you refer to yourself a "web dev" and be seemingly completely unaware that the web standards themselves are an absolute shitshow!?
snickerman 8y ago
Firefox seems scummy, trying to shove the service pocket on us. Despite firefox's recent improvements, I find chrome a better experience overall. If you want to browse without google monitoring everything, then Vivaldi seems like a great option.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  Chrome users benefit greatly from firefox's existence. One company/product owning everything is good for no one but the managers of that company.
JohnBooty 8y ago
Yeah, this is just depressing and honestly a little baffling. Seems contrary to Microsoft's interests - why let Google control this aspect of the Web? (Obviously, MS will maintain their own fork and can permanently fork away whenever they want/need to, I guess, so it's not like they've locked themselves in forever, but still) I actually wasn't aware of the problems with Edge. This is the first I've heard of them... I hadn't heard much about it from either devs or users, so I assumed lots of people were more or less happily (or at least uneventfully) using it as Windows' default browser. Never thought I'd be sad to see Internet Explorer (or its descendant) bite the dust, given what a plague upon humanity IE was for so many years, but I'm not sure this is the happy ending we might've wished for.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
  >I actually wasn't aware of the problems with Edge. This is the first I've heard of them... Same, but neither of us actually use Edge. Just like nearly everyone reading this comment.
  - JohnBooty 8y ago
    Browser market share isn't decided by people like us. It's decided by people who use the default browser in their environment.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >Yeah, this is just depressing and honestly a little baffling. Seems contrary to Microsoft's interests - why let Google control this aspect of the Web? Chromium != Google. Chromium is the FOSS project that Chrome is based off of.
  - pcwalton 8y ago
    An overwhelming majority of the committers to Chromium, as well as the leadership, are in the Google reporting structure.
    - 8y ago
Osiris 8y ago
It's interesting, I don't see this argument made against other open source projects that are dominant, such as the Linux kernel. I rarely see people saying that there need to be competing kernel projects with completely separate code bases but all trying to conform to the same ABI, etc. (Yes, I know there are other kernels out there, but my point is that people don't complain that Linux is so dominant like they do about Chromium vs Firefox)
- satyenr 8y ago
  Linux is not dominated by a single company. Developers working for many companies contribute heavily to it, but as long as Linus Torvalds is at the helm, it is unlikely to be dominated by any one of them. So you don’t have to worry about the Linux Kernel tracking every keystroke to harvest data for adverts.
- happymellon 8y ago
  Dominant on server or generally? Windows is pretty big generally, and it isn't obscure enough on servers that I don't have to deal with vendors daily who require me to inter-operate with windows.
  - Osiris 8y ago
    I see your point. I suppose I was thinking the dominant open source kernel.
  - mr_toad 8y ago
    It’s dominant enough that every cloud vendor has to support it. Even Microsoft.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  And the OS kernel monoculture is to the open source world's detriment. I think it's fantastic that Fuchsia is going to give Linux a run for its money: Fuchsia is fundamentally better architected in numerous ways than Linux is.
  - 8y ago
torgian 8y ago
I never knew Firefox faxed ;)
greenhatman 8y ago
At least the Chromium base is open source and usable by anyone. If I had my way I'd test on Chromium and Firefox only. And only the latest versions. I already don't bother with Egde. Safari is the only pain I still have to bother with. Apple should just make a Chromium browser as well.
rplnt 8y ago
Headed? We've been there for quite some time and this was piloted by Google itself. It's been years since they started to do the "works better in Chrome" and blocking features if you are not in Chrome (or, to be more specific, if you are not using chrome UA).
ek750 8y ago
A large percentage of enterprises still use windows and some sort of Microsoft browser. For the ones that’ll switch, I wonder if they’ll switch to chrome or Firefox?
snarfy 8y ago
I've been using the Nightly build as my daily browser for a couple years now. It's really good. I rarely need to open chrome for anything.

samspenc 8y ago

My understanding is that they'll be using the Chromium engine underneath, but still their own Edge "browser" and UI on top. IMHO, I personally think it's a good thing to consolidate on one engine to render HTML cross-platform for these two reasons: 1. Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines. 2. The Chromium engine itself is open source. There are other browsers (Vivaldi, Opera, etc) that run on top of it. 3. While I think it's great the engine underneath is the same, I think it's equally great that there is a variety of UIs and browsers built on top of the same engine - the innovation happens in the browser space, not the engine, anymore.

kibwen 8y ago
> The Chromium engine itself is open source Being open source is a red herring in this instance. Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. You fork the browser and remove that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so your fork doesn't work with those websites. Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. You fork the browser and add the feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use your feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and your fork is no better off. The insidious part of a web monoculture is allowing Google to dictate the standards of the web platform. Being able to fork the codebase only gives one the power to change things that are strictly client-side.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- joesb 8y ago
  Your examples have nothing to do with whether you use Chrominum engine, though. Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that doesn't have that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so MS Edge doesn't work with those websites. Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that has that feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use MS Edge feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and MS Edge browser is no better off.
  - kibwen 8y ago
    Not sure what this is attempting to refute. Your comment is about why monocultures are bad for competition, which I happen to agree with. My comment is about why Chromium being open-source doesn't alleviate any concerns about monoculture.
    - cortesoft 8y ago
      How is the situation better if there are two browsers with 50% market share? You still can’t add a new feature the other side doesn’t want, because 50% of users won’t be able to use it. Any feature that requires a site owner to do something to support it isn’t going to be added.
      - viraptor 8y ago
        > You still can’t add a new feature the other side doesn’t want That's not quite true. This happens all the time with things not standardised (yet). With time those either get wide adoption because people want them, or get dropped, or get standardised in a different widely agreed form.
      - kibwen 8y ago
        You've just illustrated the advantage of a polyculture: changes to the platform are not unilateral decisions, and therefore require discussion, communication, and documentation. Furthermore, if one actor tries to do something out of blatant self-interest that would be a detriment to the platform as a whole, that action can be blocked. With a Google monoculture, at the end of the day, the web will be whatever the CEO of Google allows it to be. Imagine how little control users have over the Android platform; envision a future where that's the web's model as well.
- jayd16 8y ago
  Microsoft using Chrome only somewhat reduces Microsoft's power in this regard. In no way does that change your ability to project your will on the internet through Chrome forks. Small devs have little power now and that will stay unchanged if Edge goes Chrome. Web devs will have to build for the lowest common denominator so this change improves that slightly. An actual downsides is it increases the power of the Chromium team to make defacto changes. It might also reduces innovation but I can't really see Microsoft deciding to drop a feature because it would take them further from the chrome trunk.
nl 8y ago
Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines. So, as the OP said - back to the bad old days of IE6 dominance.
- taf2 8y ago
  Not even close. IE6 was a browser that was set in stone. It only ran on Windows. It's legacy that we live with today is the ActiveX controls that are basically parts of Windows. MS stopped innovating on the browser part of IE6 and focused on ActiveX e.g. native Windows components that you could use in the browser. You can't talk about IE6 and not mention how embedded it was with Windows. That is what made IE6 bad. You could not use your Mac or Linux environments to browser the internet. Lots of great ideas came out of IE6 XMLHTTPRequest. Access to the native desktop devices. Storage APIs, realtime communication anything you can do on the desktop you should be able to do through the Web. That is what we see happening today with Chromium and Mozilla. These two teams and now with MS being more involved as well. There is a huge amount of collaboration it's nothing at all like IE6 days.
  - nl 8y ago
    This reaction is pretty interesting. I was doing some webdev back then, and whilst everything you said was true it was the lack of cross browser CSS and Javascript testing which led to the real frustration. Back in 2002/03 IE6 had over 90% marketshare, and justifying testing in anything else was a constant battle.
    - taf2 8y ago
      As developer back then I had the same experience but with some reflection ie 6 was the better browser in 2002 - Firefox css got better but that was more like 2005 after many years of zero development on IE6. Reflecting back to that time period the most lasting damages were active x. There are still governments and corporations that can’t migrate from IE 11 because of this legacy.
      - 8y ago
SllX 8y ago
If open web standards are to matter at all, it is more important for there to be multiple viable implementations of the same standards than it is for the lives of web developers to become easier. Using the same engine across multiple browsers, open source or not, just doesn’t cut it.
- err4nt 8y ago
  People in web standards community kind of anticipate browsers (there are 4 main browsers now) eventually kind of consolidating down to 2 engines. This seems like a step in that direction. Who knows, Safari might be next :D
  - xg15 8y ago
    Interesting. What is the other engine?
    - connicpu 8y ago
      At least Firefox has no intentions of throwing in the towel and adopting webkit/blink yet
  - SllX 8y ago
    Anticipate or hope?
pcwalton 8y ago
OK, how do I get the Chromium team to integrate parallel layout written in Rust? Sometimes innovation is at odds with whatever Google's Chrome team feels like doing. That is why engine diversity is a good thing.
- jhasse 8y ago
  Suggest it to them?? If it's really faster, why wouldn't they merge it?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - nordsieck 8y ago
    >> OK, how do I get the Chromium team to integrate parallel layout written in Rust? > Suggest it to them?? If it's really faster, why wouldn't they merge it? How many major software projects do you know of that will casually add a programming language?
    - jhasse 8y ago
      It wouldn't be casually if the parallel renderer brought in some real benefits.
      - pcwalton 8y ago
        Every time I've suggested something along those lines to the Chromium folks I've gotten "we're doing it in C++ ;)" I mean, it makes sense—Google has an enormous team on Chromium and they don't want to have another language to support. But that is precisely why it's important to not have the entire Web under Alphabet's reporting structure.
damnyou 8y ago
3 is just completely untrue. Firefox Quantum came out just a year ago.
- jhasse 8y ago
  Which just caught up with Chromium. And hardware acceleration on Linux is still disabled by default.
hkai 8y ago
Your argument is similar to saying that one party rule in politics is good for the country (because the party is nice, has competent people at the top, and helps people a lot).
- ako 8y ago
  Well, it's better than two parties that are putting all their energy into fighting each other, instead of governing a country in hot best way possible for its citizens...
  - hkai 8y ago
    It definitely is not.
  - welly 8y ago
    North Korea, Soviet Union, China, Syria, East Germany. Take your pick.
    - ako 8y ago
      That doesn't mean that every single party government is worse than 2 parties...
      - welly 8y ago
        Then perhaps you can suggest a single single-party government that is better than a two (or more) party government? I look forward to this...
Despegar 8y ago
The web works best when there's a European-style balance of power with actual balance [1]. Microsoft, Apple and Google are like France, UK and Germany. Each of them have their own interests. Microsoft had their own interests when they actually had a native developer ecosystem that was thriving, but now that it's gone they have deprioritized Windows as a business [2], made Windows 10 a data sucking "OS as a service" (that doesn't even have QA people anymore other than beta testers), and is now all in on PWAs for their app story. They are in fact more like Google than ever before. That just leaves Apple as the only opposing source of power. Mozilla is Poland and is destined to get f*cked as their market share drops and any negotiating leverage they have to get Google TAC money disappears (they're more like Saudi Arabia is to the US, a vassal state, rather than a Great Power). These are dire times for the web. Only Vestager can save us now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_balance_of_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_balance_of_power [2] https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
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happymellon 8y ago
Which is a shame, because it is the interface that is one of the worst aspects of Edge. Not that I know that well, my work that forces my Windows usage still makes me use IE.
Sylos 8y ago
Mozilla is by the way also of the opinion that a monoculture would be horrible for the web. Arguments that I've heard from Mozilla employees: - Without competitors, innovation is dead. If there was only one web-engine, why bother improving it further? Given that it's open-source, it could theoretically be forked, but in that moment you again have two different web engines or more. Also, Mozilla would have to fork Blink from day one, because many things in it, they do not consider acceptable. - A monoculture means one security problem makes everyone vulnerable. - Multiple implementations challenge standards. You still would want a definition of a standard, or an API if you will, to point web developers to. But those are only going to point problems out after you've already implemented it, and likely also after other websites are already using the feature productively. They also can't point out stupid specifications that aren't going to allow you to update your browser engine in the future. So, you'd be much more likely to have to break compatibility, which doesn't play well with the web.

mushu999 8y ago

WTF do you mean "lead to sites not bothering to be made compatible with Firefox"?? If Firefox follows the published HTML standards then there wouldn't need to be any special compatibility effort made by us web devs! That is exactly what made I.E. (and Edge) so cr@ppy in the first place!! /facepalm

hashhar 8y ago
Oh the irony. I bet you can find more non-standard behaviour and features and APIs in Chrome than in Firefox. There is a reason why people regard the MDN docs to be the best documentation for web technologies.
lvh 8y ago
That’s only true if Chromium does everything correctly, and even then it ignores the chilling effect where nobody cares unless Chrome does it. Right now I have perfectly valid SVG and HTML5 that straight up does not work correctly in Chrome.
saagarjha 8y ago
Chrome doesn't follow the published HTML standards either.
xg15 8y ago
The "published HTML standards" change all the time and are themselves constantly negotiated between the browser vendors.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
How can you refer to yourself a "web dev" and be seemingly completely unaware that the web standards themselves are an absolute shitshow!?

snickerman 8y ago

Firefox seems scummy, trying to shove the service pocket on us. Despite firefox's recent improvements, I find chrome a better experience overall. If you want to browse without google monitoring everything, then Vivaldi seems like a great option.

baroffoos 8y ago
Chrome users benefit greatly from firefox's existence. One company/product owning everything is good for no one but the managers of that company.

JohnBooty 8y ago

Yeah, this is just depressing and honestly a little baffling. Seems contrary to Microsoft's interests - why let Google control this aspect of the Web? (Obviously, MS will maintain their own fork and can permanently fork away whenever they want/need to, I guess, so it's not like they've locked themselves in forever, but still) I actually wasn't aware of the problems with Edge. This is the first I've heard of them... I hadn't heard much about it from either devs or users, so I assumed lots of people were more or less happily (or at least uneventfully) using it as Windows' default browser. Never thought I'd be sad to see Internet Explorer (or its descendant) bite the dust, given what a plague upon humanity IE was for so many years, but I'm not sure this is the happy ending we might've wished for.

SlowRobotAhead 8y ago
>I actually wasn't aware of the problems with Edge. This is the first I've heard of them... Same, but neither of us actually use Edge. Just like nearly everyone reading this comment.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  Browser market share isn't decided by people like us. It's decided by people who use the default browser in their environment.
aphextron 8y ago
>Yeah, this is just depressing and honestly a little baffling. Seems contrary to Microsoft's interests - why let Google control this aspect of the Web? Chromium != Google. Chromium is the FOSS project that Chrome is based off of.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  An overwhelming majority of the committers to Chromium, as well as the leadership, are in the Google reporting structure.
  - 8y ago

Osiris 8y ago

It's interesting, I don't see this argument made against other open source projects that are dominant, such as the Linux kernel. I rarely see people saying that there need to be competing kernel projects with completely separate code bases but all trying to conform to the same ABI, etc. (Yes, I know there are other kernels out there, but my point is that people don't complain that Linux is so dominant like they do about Chromium vs Firefox)

satyenr 8y ago
Linux is not dominated by a single company. Developers working for many companies contribute heavily to it, but as long as Linus Torvalds is at the helm, it is unlikely to be dominated by any one of them. So you don’t have to worry about the Linux Kernel tracking every keystroke to harvest data for adverts.
happymellon 8y ago
Dominant on server or generally? Windows is pretty big generally, and it isn't obscure enough on servers that I don't have to deal with vendors daily who require me to inter-operate with windows.
- Osiris 8y ago
  I see your point. I suppose I was thinking the dominant open source kernel.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  It’s dominant enough that every cloud vendor has to support it. Even Microsoft.
pcwalton 8y ago
And the OS kernel monoculture is to the open source world's detriment. I think it's fantastic that Fuchsia is going to give Linux a run for its money: Fuchsia is fundamentally better architected in numerous ways than Linux is.
- 8y ago

torgian 8y ago

I never knew Firefox faxed ;)

greenhatman 8y ago

At least the Chromium base is open source and usable by anyone. If I had my way I'd test on Chromium and Firefox only. And only the latest versions. I already don't bother with Egde. Safari is the only pain I still have to bother with. Apple should just make a Chromium browser as well.

rplnt 8y ago

Headed? We've been there for quite some time and this was piloted by Google itself. It's been years since they started to do the "works better in Chrome" and blocking features if you are not in Chrome (or, to be more specific, if you are not using chrome UA).

ek750 8y ago

A large percentage of enterprises still use windows and some sort of Microsoft browser. For the ones that’ll switch, I wonder if they’ll switch to chrome or Firefox?

snarfy 8y ago

I've been using the Nightly build as my daily browser for a couple years now. It's really good. I rarely need to open chrome for anything.