57 ms·

Goodbye, EdgeHTML

• epx 8y ago
  IE deserves to die. It was responsible by the Middle Ages of Internet in the 2000s. Many corp systems still work solely on IE8 or IE6.
  • blattimwind 8y ago
    Chrome deserves to die. It is responsible for the Second Middle Ages of Internet in the 2010s. Many webscale system still work solely on Chrome 167 or Chrome 168.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • wila 8y ago
    That might be true, but the article is about the Edge browser, not IE.
  • tylerhou 8y ago
    Edge is a completely different product based on a new rendering engine which is as spec compliant as Firefox.
    • stefs 8y ago
      i don't believe that for a second - edge being as spec compliant as firefox, that is.
      • yuchi 8y ago
        Please, do some research before judging. It was an incredible product.
        • ghostly_s 8y ago
          Whether or not it is specs-compliant, it objectively is not an incredible product, considering how universally loathed it was and thus the position it's ended up in now.
  • untog 8y ago
    Eh, it was also responsible for a lot of innovation at one point too. AJAX was an IE innovation, no less!
• taeric 8y ago
  I'll confess that hearing MS is giving up on their own browser engine is incredibly surprising to me. I also share Mozilla's concern, but I think I'm past the despair point in feeling there is anything we can do about it. If anything, I'm more convinced that the writing is on the wall for most sites supporting Firefox.
• nightski 8y ago
  It makes me wonder if at any point in the process Microsoft approached Firefox over integrating their rendering engine vs. Chromium and if so, what the factors were in making their final decision. I also wonder if instead of "ceding" control to Google, Microsoft intends to start being a major contributor to Chromium, so much so that it almost becomes a joint effort vs. Google dominance.
  • derefr 8y ago
    I'm wondering the same, and naively, it seems likely. But on the other hand, Google forked Blink away from Webkit specifically so it wouldn't have to share control of the codebase with Apple. Do you think Google is willing to share control over Blink with Microsoft?
    • jhall1468 8y ago
      Google forked Blink because how Apple and Google saw the future of browsers drastically differed. I'm going to venture a guess that Microsoft selected Chromium because their vision is closer to Google's than either Firefox or Webkit.
      • pcwalton 8y ago
        > Google forked Blink because how Apple and Google saw the future of browsers drastically differed. That's not accurate. Google forked Blink for many reasons (WebKit2, dev tools policies, etc.) that collectively added up to a dysfunctional relationship.
        • jhall1468 8y ago
          How is that any different than what I suggested? They both wanted to go in very different directions.
  • _wmd 8y ago
    As I understand things, the Mozilla codebase is a much older, vastly more complex and significantly less embedding-friendly environment than WebKit and derivatives. At least from here, it is easy to see why the choice may have in part been technically driven. (I'm a diehard Firefox user but not gonna lie, side-by-side, I'd prefer surfing through WebKit's repos by a long shot!)
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• babuskov 8y ago
  If anyone told me a decade ago that a day will come when I will feel sorry for Microsoft browser technology going away...
  • nashashmi 8y ago
    10 years ago it was forseeable that MS would lose the browser wars. BTW, this is not the first time MS has considered Chromium. Back before the fork of Edge, they considered using Webkit.
    • jansan 8y ago
      Maybe Webkit would have fewer bugs by now if Microsoft had chosen it for Edge a few years ago.
    • zokier 8y ago
      By 2008 it was fairly obvious that MS wasn't serious contender in the browser market anymore. This was two years after IE7 release which itself was pretty lackluster, and IE8 was still nowhere to be seen. Firefox popularity was pretty much at its peak, and Chrome was just released immediately starting to eat up the world.
  • linuxlizard 8y ago
    Ouch. True. So weird for me to feel that way.
  • dman 8y ago
    Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
    • fixermark 8y ago
      "Do. Or do not. There is no try." ;)
  • kevmo 8y ago
    It's too bad Microsoft didn't get broken up in the 90s. We'd probably have more browser options.
• javajosh 8y ago
  You know why I don't use Firefox? There is only one reason, and its lack of integrated translation. Chrome has it, Firefox does not, and if you travel, or live in a place where you don't fully understand the language, then this tool is a lifesaver. The thing is, I don't see how Moz could even start to build this feature. It's an example of synergy with Google's other products, especially search and communication service, that would be impossible to reproduce without exploding Mozilla's portfolio far beyond it's budget. Maybe Google will open-source it's translation software and data corpus, LOL?
  • nwah1 8y ago
    Microsoft also has world-class translation services. Mozilla could partner with them just for this. That would be a good idea, I think. Surprised they haven't come up with something. There's also various open source projects tackling this problem, which aren't as advanced, but are always improving.
• Quekid5 8y ago
  Well, I'm kind of saddened that even more control is going to Google, but realistically Edge was never really competitive in terms of support for standards[1]. EDIT: typo: Microsoft -> Google. Not sure what happened there :). [1] Yes, this is a very vague concept these days. Google has, what 80%+ market share? They have a lot of people who can influence standards, and the cognitive biases of those people could mean that we end up in a new MSIE6 situation[2]. Anyway, I can certainly understand their fast growth when the browser came out, but these days I don't see much difference between Chromium and Firefox and it seems likely that Firefox is on my side when it comes to privacy. (I realize that I'm a very atypical user, perhaps not in this venue, but certainly in terms of general browser markets.) [2] Through no fault of their own! It's just a combination of institutional/organizational pressure, market forces, etc. This is why I think it's also unfair to foist "securing the freedom of the web" upon Firefox. Firefox is an important piece of the puzzle, but ultimately they are in the market and that's not an objective place to evaluate strategy from.
  • cududa 8y ago
    What do you mean “even more control” what part of tech does Microsoft realistically control now, given the prevalence of cross platform apps and the web being the dominant platform. This seems like some late 90’s derived sentiment
    • Quekid5 8y ago
      Yeah, sorry that was a disastrous typo -- see my edit :/
• trevyn 8y ago
  I still see zero benefit to me, today, to use Firefox.
  • mthoms 8y ago
    This is the exact attitude that is going to doom the open web.
    • trevyn 8y ago
      I state it in the spirit of helpfulness — openness itself is clearly not a compelling feature to the masses, and the masses are who needs to be compelled. So if this is your battle, perhaps a different strategy is in order?
  • idle_zealot 8y ago
    It's all about tree tabs ;)
  • mtrpcic 8y ago
    What are the benefits, _today_, to use Chrome?
    • trevyn 8y ago
      It’s a known quantity — it’s what I’m currently using, and it works.
      • omnimus 8y ago
        Well lets not act like Firefox is not known. Its been pioneering browser for years and it's in no way inferior to chrome. It's also indepedent and you dont have to send all your data to google when you use it.
        • vrazj 8y ago
          It is slower than Chrome. That's enough to me not to consider Firefox, given that speed is everything I care about.
• jchw 8y ago
  I still think this is a bit melodramatic. I'm biased but all the same, Microsoft having major foothold in Chromium seems like a good thing. EdgeHTML didn't really do any good for us because barely anyone used it anyways. It would've been a bigger loss had there been substantial market share, but from my understanding Edge barely took off even with very aggressive behavior to push it on us. (My default browser has been reset to edge nearly every major Windows update. Windows also resets "corrupt" file associations - magically, those "corrupt" file associations work without issue if I just forcibly uninstall the app it wants to reset them to.)
  • tyler_larson 8y ago
    >> This may sound melodramatic... Yeah. A bit. Thing is, Blink is not Chromium, Chromium is not Chrome, neither of them is Google, and BSD-3-clause is a pretty damn solid bulwark against the monopolization of the "control of fundamental online infrastructure", were that to ever become a concern again. And the other bit is that the building blocks that make up Chromium power a lot of technology that is totally independent of anything under Google's influence, including NodeJS, Cloudflare's Workers, Microsoft's VS Code, and Amazon's Firecracker. They use it because it's solid, well-engineered tech. And even though Google wrote it, Google can't control it or stop you from using it against them. Microsoft isn't ceding anything at all to Google, Google's not in control of anything here. The uncomfortable truth is that the role of neither Gecko nor Firefox nor Mozilla is particularly critical in terms of protecting the free and open Internet. What prevents Google from going all IE6 with Chrome isn't Mozilla, it's Chromium. If IE had been a BSD-licensed open-source project since 1995, then all the BS we endured in 2002 could never have happened; explorerium would have been trivially forked to create a sensible competitor with no switching cost. Google tied their own hands from the very beginning, and by ensuring Chromium doesn't lag behind, they're keeping their hands tied. Almost as if they were doing it on purpose. In fact, the fact that Microsoft is switching to Chromium locks both tech giants into an intriguing sort of bargain. Each can benefit from the other's work as long as neither strays too far from the open source codebase, as long as they both push their changes into the open. So you end up with a reasonable guarantee that the future of the Internet stays independent; not because of a nonprofit competitor with a strongly-worded manifesto, but because none of the the main players can afford to make it closed.
• davidp 8y ago
  Seriously, switch to Firefox. It's good again, and prioritizes privacy.[0] After Chrome's forced-sign-in debacle [1] I switched away from Chrome on all my platforms (Windows, Linux, Android) and haven't missed a thing. [0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161
  • kanon 8y ago
    What about Chromium?
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • firethief 8y ago
      Using Google's browser engine still gives them a lot of control, even if you aren't using their trimmings.
      • kanon 8y ago
        True that. I wish they removed all Google stuff from Chromium and only use it in Chrome. Seems like the only fair thing to do imo.
        • ziftface 8y ago
          That kind of exists, but it's still giving Google power because it relies on their software. It basically makes it really difficult for anyone to shape how the web works besides Google, since no one has any browser market share. For example, WebAssembly started out as a Mozilla project. What if Mozilla didn't exist, or Firefox didn't have any market share? It would never have been created. Think of all the accumulated features/innovations that could exist over the next few years that might not if the only browser engine being used is controlled by a single company.
        • deleted 8y ago
• AaronFriel 8y ago
  I'm wondering how, logistically, this make sense. Does Microsoft adopt Chromium/Blink for embedding in UWP apps and Electron? That will reduce memory and storage requirements for the latter, but greatly increases the attack surface of the former. Microsoft is also taking on an _enormous_ maintenance burden in integrating it with their own sandboxing and protection mechanisms. I'm in disbelief that the ongoing cost of maintaining this fork and tying themselves to Chromium will be worth it. And the incentive for Google to now embed more and more ChromeOS/mobile device management into Chromium. For example: Google intends to ship an alternative credential provider for Windows 10 through Chrome. Microsoft will have to painstakingly isolate every feature like that which Google adds, and adopt an aggressive posture of doing code reviews of Chromium. I'm not sure how, given that they are such strong competitors/adversaries, this can work out.
  • stupidcar 8y ago
    Nowadays most enterprise and bespoke intranet apps are targeting Chrome as a platform, not "the web". It's a re-run of the IE6 situation in the late 90s / early 2000s, except this time Microsoft is the victim, not the beneficiary. Whereas it used to be that big IT departments would nix the installation of any 3rd party browser, nowadays almost all accept the use of Chrome. And if you're selling an app into a big company, you always tell them to use Chrome, and never advertise IE/Edge support except as a last resort. If Microsoft want to sell their cloud services into these companies, they need to support Chrome-based apps. Edge won't do. As such, they have little choice but to fork it and build their own browser, tied into their services. I'm sure they recognise the potential problems and downsides, but consider it the least worst option at this point.
    • iamstef 8y ago
      history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme...
• mohsen1 8y ago
  Isn't it better for everyone that Microsoft is now working on an OSS browser engine? https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge/blob/master/README.m...
  • jansan 8y ago
    Wow, this is interesting. Thank you!
• wybiral 8y ago
  When I first got a Windows 10 machine I used edge long enough to download Chrome anyway. The real question in my mind is: how will Mozilla differentiate in such a way that it even makes sense for users to support a different browser platform?
• nashashmi 8y ago
  So much wasted energy: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore RIP!
  • jansan 8y ago
    Is it? I thought it was about Blink, not about V8.
    • chrisco255 8y ago
      Isn't it both?
  • gchucky 8y ago
    Apparently ChakraCore will continue development for "various non-Edge uses".[1] Curious what that actually means.. [1] https://twitter.com/bterlson/status/1070754781822574592 https://twitter.com/bterlson/status/1070754781822574592
    • nashashmi 8y ago
      Funny, reminds me of the Trident engine (IE on Windows) and the Tarzan Engine (IE on Mac). Long after IE on Mac was abandoned, Tarzan continued to be developed for some reason. And then it actually had a use again when MS office on Mac was created.
• chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  Do the Mozilla folks not realize that WebKit still exists? Even as a fork of WebKit, I'd have to imagine they've diverged significantly in the last 4 years. Fears of a monoculture are legitimate, but still overblown at this point.
• jrochkind1 8y ago
  In case you hadn't yet seen the (4-hour-old) news this is responding to, like i hadn't: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-edge-to-morph-into-a-chromium-based-cross-platform-browser/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-edge-to-morph-into-...
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• bithavoc 8y ago
  With Edge using Chromium, is data still going to Google like this blog posts says? Chromium is the open source version minus the proprietary services and codecs[0]. What am I missing? [0] https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what’s-the-difference-between-chromium-and-chrome/ https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what’s-the-difference-betwe...
  • mrschwabe 8y ago
    Not exactly a direct answer, because it is unclear to what degree MS will fork/adapt Chromium for their own, but there is a project called Ungoogled-Chromium which I recommend that does exactly the name implies - evidently there is a need for this because there are a number of services and data exchanges with Google servers in stock Chromium.
  • duskwuff 8y ago
    You aren't missing anything. The author is (deliberately?) confusing Google Chrome, the Chromium project, and the Blink rendering engine. My understanding is that Microsoft is planning on adopting some components of Chromium (certainly including Blink, unclear how much else) for future versions of Edge.
• klodolph 8y ago
  I think “inside baseball” is autological. I had to look it up.
• purple_ducks 8y ago
  What percentage of Mozilla revenues are spent on Firefox development?
  • bzbarsky 8y ago
    Per https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201... the breakdown seems to be as follows, rounding to the nearest percentage point: 50% directly spent on Firefox development. 12% spent on marketing (for comparison, rumor has it that Chrome's marketing spend is comparable to Mozilla's total revenue). 13% general and administrative expenses (this includes things like leases on office space, as far as I can tell from the usual definition of this category). 9% (of revenue; it's 36% of profit) income taxes. Which Mozilla apparently pays, unlike some other tech corporations. 16% money going into the rainy-day fund. Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla; pardon my snark about taxes. It's a sore point.
    • ksec 8y ago
      Why do they pay tax when they are from what I know partly non profits?
      • bzbarsky 8y ago
        The Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit. It is involved in a number of efforts, including policy advocacy, but does not itself develop a web browser. When people make donations to "Mozilla", those go to the Foundation. The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Foundation. It is _not_ a nonprofit and develops a web browser as well as most other software you would associate with "Mozilla". It pays dividends to the Foundation which the Foundation uses, alongside donations, to fund its work. The Corporation pays taxes on its profits, like any other corporation that is not explicitly a nonprofit. Note that I am explicitly not using "for-profit" to describe the Corporation, because profit is not the Corporation's goal. Again, the only shareholder in the Corporation is the Foundation, though they do have separate boards and somewhat separate governance.
• djmashko2 8y ago
  If I'm using Safari as my default browser, does it make sense to switch to Firefox just to support them? Interesting that Safari is not coming up in any of these articles as a third competitor, but maybe the fact that it's limited to Mac means it has very small market share.
  • RandallBrown 8y ago
    The Mac is a relatively small market share of the web, but the iPhone isn't and still uses Webkit as its rendering engine.
  • fooey 8y ago
    Safari is awful on the scale of being a 2nd tier browser like IE. It's the browser people use because they don't know any better, or because they don't have any choice. Safari isn't a competitor with Chrome, Firefox, or Edge
    • kaixi 8y ago
      Safari is the best choice if you care about battery life. I literally get 2 extra hours of battery life when using Safari on macOS vs using Chrome. What's incredible is that Chrome uses more CPU on Youtube than Safari. When playing the SAME video side by side.
      • eppsilon 8y ago
        Maybe something to do with hardware accelerated h.264 decoding? (Assuming YouTube serves VP8-encoded videos to Chrome users and h.264 ones to Safari users.)
    • eppsilon 8y ago
      Safari got a reputation of being "the new IE" a few years ago because it was lagging in standards support. However there's been a lot more progress recently - coinciding with when they started releasing Safari Tech Preview builds. edit: As an example, Safari is 2nd after Chrome in this ES7 support comparison: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/
• everydaypanos 8y ago
  Seems so sad that Mozilla is literally begging people to give Firefox a try. Even if someone believes that the browser Game of Thrones seems to go to Google, I cannot see how anyone would settle for the second-best choice especially when everything is FREE.. They plainly admit that Firefox can just hold it’s own and it is still NOT the fastest and best browser experience out there. When I launch Chrome I just get this feeling that it is a super lightweight desktop app that manages a ton of tabs efficiently.
  • acdha 8y ago
    > They plainly admit that Firefox can just hold it’s own and it is still NOT the fastest and best browser experience out there. The reason why is that those are complex judgements rather than easily measured objective facts. Browsers are extremely complex and what “fastest” means depends on what you're measuring and where it's running. Chrome's memory usage is a great example — if you have tons of RAM and nothing else running, it's often faster but if either of those is true, Firefox being so much more memory efficient more than balances it out, especially for people who keep tons of tabs open — and all of the comparison points are changing regularly as browser development teams adjust.
    • everydaypanos 8y ago
      How much of what you say is due to the “extremely complex” rendering engine and how much to just “simple” app design?
      • acdha 8y ago
        I’m not sure what you’re asking. My point was just that you can’t distill the performance of a complex system down to a single number and each browser is going to have areas where they’re ahead on something which some group of people cares about. As an extreme example, this is far from true but assume that the next version Chrome was faster on every part of the browser from networking to JavaScript, CSS, etc. Firefox might still be faster for most users on the metric they care about the most because its default tracking protection blocks 90% of the page weight on most sites and so every single one of those people would say it’s faster because that’s what they actually experience.
• IvanK_net 8y ago
  Mozilla. What a great, open and free place, where you can't write your opinion under articles.
  • stefs 8y ago
    i feel like it's quite sensible today to offload comments to the various platforms that exist mostly to provide comments on articles. i, for one, usually go for the HN comments even before reading the websites own.
    • IvanK_net 8y ago
      You can write comments at https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/ https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/
    • lostmsu 8y ago
      In many cases there's no point in reading the site itself.
  • dajonker 8y ago
    Comments are a terrible idea. You can respond on your own blof, of course.
• kanon 8y ago
  EdgeHTML felt really great. It was the UX that made me hate Edge. As if they thought I was 65+ years old. Chrome's UX is much better imo, but based on rendering engine I wouldn't have cared much. I just hope they don't think it was their engine that made me (and probably others) switch.
  • Sylos 8y ago
    > As if they thought I was 65+ years old. I think, it was rather that they thought you were using a touchscreen...
• dman 8y ago
  Firefox lost me with the whole XUL fiasco. Breaking peoples workflows before they had a credible alternative lined up was highly unprofessional. I was an enthusiastic Firefox user until the XUL retirement.
  • scrollaway 8y ago
    Dropping XUL was necessary and if anything, should have been done earlier. I disagree they didn't "have a credible alternative lined up". Are you upset over extensions breaking? There was a long, extremely long deprecation period and afaik Mozilla helped addon authors move over. They had to make the cut at some point, tbh.
    • protomyth 8y ago
      Are you upset over extensions breaking? There was a long, extremely long deprecation period and afaik Mozilla helped addon authors move over. Which didn't include 100% replacement APIs. A long period doesn't help if the new thing doesn't actually replace the old thing.
    • dman 8y ago
      I wrote some extensions myself over the years, all my time writing those extensions went down the drain.
      • scrollaway 8y ago
        I'm sorry you feel that way. I've written Firefox extensions as well. Also, I've written software using GTK2, Python 2.4, Django 0.9, a bazillion JS libraries that no longer exist. I've written code for games that have shut down. I've written code that I backed up on CD roms that are no longer readable. Hell I've written plenty of code that never even worked in the first place. I don't feel like any of this time went "down the drain". Why do you? Software doesn't usually last forever.
        • dman 8y ago
• function_seven 8y ago
  I use Firefox exclusively and am not happy with how the browser market is shaping up. For all of you that have a "last 10%" problem with Firefox (i.e. "I'd use Firefox if only it had X or Y feature"), please consider if that's worth contributing to the monoculture of rendering engines, and worth extending Google's monopoly on Internet standards.
  • Klonoar 8y ago
    I mean, it kind of is? You have to understand that there's making a stand on what's right, and then choosing to focus on the rest of your life... which, in this case, means not being annoyed by a browser that isn't keeping up. Firefox is great, many of us have loved it since Firefox 2 (or even before!) but you don't get significant increases in users by being the "more greater good" option. You get them by keeping up in the race. A browser is a tool and I want it to feel like it belongs, let me move, and then get the hell out of my way. Every single time I use FF on Mac there is something weird or buggy about it, and this holds true even if I install it on a freshly bought unpolluted MacBook Pro. The UI stands out like a sore thumb, and it doesn't feel like it belongs. I'll continue using Safari.
    • function_seven 8y ago
      I think Safari is another good choice. It's not Chromium or Blink-based, and so represents more diversity. I get what you're saying, and I don't mean to be sanctimonious. But there are lots of aspects in life where I trade annoyance for doing what I think is right in the larger scheme of things. I recycle aluminum cans even when it would be easier to chuck them in the nearest bin. I used to toss cigarette butts out the window instead of having them stink up the car's ashtray. Yeah, my examples might seem a bit dramatic compared to one's choice of browser. Look at them as analogies and not comparable badness. For me, it's worth whatever edge cases annoy me to know that I'm not working for Google for free. Their incentives don't align with mine. For the most part, Mozilla's do. If Mozilla falls, then we're right back to where we were in 2001. A single company dictating the standards of the web. That horrifies me.
      • 8y ago
• MistahKoala 8y ago
  "If you care about about what’s happening with online life today, take another look at Firefox. It’s radically better than it was 18 months ago" Except it's not 'radically better' if you rely on extensions killed by Quantum and are unlikely to be updated because Firefox has such a small user base now. I want to go back to Firefox and give it a try, but sending a load of extensions to their deaths has made that significantly harder. I'm not up for spending hours finding little hacks and half-baked work-arounds, either.
  • robto 8y ago
    I guess I don't really understand this. Even without the old extension apis, it's still more powerful than anything Chrome has to offer. You don't get the access you want, so you go to something with even less access?
    • MistahKoala 8y ago
      This is the kind of HN response I was expecting (along with the downvotes); everyone who isn't a dev or engineer is wrong/irrational in their choices and experiences. I had some useful extensions that worked with old Firefox. Then new Firefox came along and killed off some of them, so I had even fewer useful extensions. Meanwhile, Chrome has many more useful extensions and hasn't killed off any of them. Chrome fits my workflow, Firefox doesn't/can't. Yet this is somehow understood as me wanting 'less'. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• jniles 8y ago
  I really wonder what it would have been like if MS threw its weight behind Gecko.
• IvanK_net 8y ago
  I don't think that Edge switching to Chromium means, that Edge will become "a slave" of Google. Until now, Chromium has been strongly driven by one huge player: Google. Now, it can become driven by two huge players. It can erase the monopoly of Google over Chromium. Or if they have too many disputes, Microsoft can "fork" Chromium (like Google "forked" WebKit into Blink) and make their own, even better Chromium (Microsoft does have enough money and smart people to do so). The Edge could even beat Chrome, and be a new open-source multi-platform browser, which improves much faster than Chrome.
  • gsnedders 8y ago
    The Edge team is a fraction of the size of the Chrome team.
    • lostmsu 8y ago
      Are these numbers publicly available?
      • gsnedders 8y ago
        No. Even from git history, it's hard to actually quantify for Chromium, as most Google contributors use chromium.org emails, which obscures affiliation. The MS numbers are even less public.
    • IvanK_net 8y ago
      I think that the number of people in Google contributing to Chromium is much smaller, than the number of people in MS working on Edge. Many Chromium contributors are enthusiasts, who don't get paid for it. They would not mind working on Microsoft's fork instead of Google's fork.
      • gsnedders 8y ago
        Almost all the commit volume in Chromium is from Google engineers; even the largest external contributors (Opera and Samsung, last I knew) were a tiny percentage of commits. Individual volunteers practically don't exist: they're well under 1% of commits.
• adontz 8y ago
  I am Firefox user for more than 15 years. I personally would prefer Firefox codebase to be adopted. I think Mozilla is the only big organization left who is pro-customer. But let's be realistic, people want things to "just work". People in general are not bothered by privacy or security, but if funny cat picture can't load that's huge problem. People in general were moving from IE because it's shitty laggish software, not because it was not secure or was sending telemetry. So adopting Blink/WebKit is right business decision, because it makes customers happy, because a lot of sites are developed with only Chrome in mind. Bootstrap and friends support Firefox, it's true, but many actual sites with custom non-framework HTML/CSS do not. Some bugs are negligible, some are not. But what is 0.5% of all web sites for Microsoft? A huge deal, let's accept this. Google Chrome has enterprise version which already supports Active Directory Group Policy, so corporate customers will be happy too. What can Firefox offer today? Frameworks support Firefox and Firefox supports standards well. I genuinely believe that google Chrome in 2020 will be like IE6 in 2010 and rust based codebase will be superior by all means, easier to maintain and faster to execute. But I am very naive and optimistic about Firefox, because I simply love this browser.
  • mixmastamyk 8y ago
    > Mozilla… pro-customer. Microsoft arguably isn't, they still like to force the customer to do things beneficial to itself, and collect lots of telemetry.
• supernintendo 8y ago
  As an aside, does Apple or Google ever contribute to KHTML? Safari and Chrome would not exist without it and yet the last stable release was in 2014. Seems like yet another case of large corporations taking advantage of free software while giving little to nothing back to the community.
  • joshtynjala 8y ago
    WebKit and Chromium are both still open source. While they may not be porting commits back to KHTML specifically, they are certainly making all of their enhancements available for free to the community. Personally, I wouldn't call that little to nothing.
• wvenable 8y ago
  Edge had so little marketshare that this decision, in terms of the web, makes almost no difference at all. I realized recently that I never even bothered to test my sites on Edge; it wasn't even a conscious decision, I simply forgot it even existed.
• Myrmornis 8y ago
  Has anyone noticed chrome making annoying changes to keyboard shortcuts in the URL bar recently? When I do command-l to put focus in the URL bar I expect to be able to use arrow keys to move around the selected URL to edit it, but google seems to have broken that recently. Similarly, with focus in the URL bar I expect to be able to do <RET> to reload a page, but instead I have to hit <RET> 3 times nowadays for it to reload the page.
• iscrewyou 8y ago
  I moved to Chrome when Firefox was bloating up and slowing down (2008?). Now I’ve started using Firefox again because Chrome (and Google) seems to be serving itself but not the customer. Firefox now does what I intend it to do.
• Angostura 8y ago
  I await the response from the Safari team with interest
• stdplaceholder 8y ago
  I’m a Mozilla contributor and user; my name is chiseled in stone on their monument. I’m also a a Xoogler and a Chrome user. I think this screed is pretty ridiculous. Microsoft polluting the web with an inferior browser engine is not helping anyone. For the users it is better that they join another, superior browser effort. But what’s reall absurd here is the tone. Is this really an official Mozilla press release? It seems like they’re just trying too hard to make everyone forget that they get 99% of their money from Google.
• gronne 8y ago
  The comments to this story is the lowest quality ive seen on HN in a long time..
• quickthrower2 8y ago
  I now use FF at home for one simple reason. Two people at home using two different Google accounts and need to switch between them. In Chrome it decides one of those is the 'logged in account' and the name shows in the browser bar. It is then the default every time you open say a new GMail etc. That is so annoying. This doesn't seem to happen in Firefox!
  • crazygringo 8y ago
    That's what the "People" menu is for in Chrome. If you have multiple people at home, then they can get their own bookmarks, search histories, etc.
    • quickthrower2 8y ago
      Yeah I'm crap with new features like that being forced on me. I don't really have the time to read up on it, what it is doing behind the scenes etc, if I can trust it.
  • chrisseaton 8y ago
    This is handled at the OS layer with user accounts - can’t you switch users at the OS level?
    • quickthrower2 8y ago
      I could but this ain't a corporate scenario.
      • chrisseaton 8y ago
        All major consumer desktop operating systems still have user accounts - you don't need a corporate system to do it. You'll probably find that you can permanently log both users in at the same time, and then switching between them is just a shortcut and takes a fraction of a second, so it needn't be a burden. You may find it's even faster than changing the user in Firefox. That's why it's great to do these things at the OS level - it can be done efficiently once for every app and not reimplemented lots of times badly like in Firefox.
• cft 8y ago
  I wonder how soon we will get to filtering content by the browser from here.
• mongol 8y ago
  It is not good news, but I don't think it is that bad. Microsoft is big enough to assert influence over the direction in ways other contributors cannot. It might even make Microsoft more relevant in the web space, and for the future of the web it could be a good thing (while certainly it was very bad in the Balmer era)
• otterley 8y ago
  Doesn't Mozilla get the lion's share of its funding from Google? I'm a bit puzzled as to how they can avoid a conflict of interest if this remains true.
  • carapace 8y ago
    Mozilla gets the bulk of their money from Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• simonh 8y ago
  I am worried about Chromium gaining too much control over de facto browser standards, but bear in mind Chrome started as a fork of WebKit. There’s nothing to stop MS diverging the code base and making it distinctly their own. I wonder if this is about Microsoft making a cross platform browser?
• Daegalus 8y ago
  I tried switching to Firefox twice after Quantum came out. I LOVE LOVE container tabs (which chrome had them, not just profiles). Only reason I came back is their Android browser kinda sucks. Addons constantly crash in the mobile browser, and its not integrated well with the password manager APIs and other stuff. It was a pain in the ass to use. Their auto-fill sucks compared to Google's and just overall if I take out container tabs, Firefox just doesn't work for me like Chrome does. So I switched back, installed SessionBox, and while not perfect, gets close to container tabs.
• Karunamon 8y ago
  Firefox once again holds its own when it comes to speed and performance. Try Firefox as your default browser for a week and then decide. Challenge accepted. A week later, after having set Firefox to default on my systems and working with it, I decided that: * There's still no good replacement for DownThemAll or Tree Style Tabs (the gimped, non-feature-complete alternatives to those are not acceptable alternatives), * That the unfixed dupe SSL cert problem that makes Firefox unusable at work is going on a decade old and has no movement on it, * That Mozilla deciding what I can install in the browser is an infringement on my freedoms as a user in a much more real way than philosophical concerns about licensing (no, running a fork of the browser is not an acceptable alternative) * That they keep making extremely questionable decisions regarding privacy, telemetry, and overall user control over those things, And overall: * That Mozilla's stated commitment to empowering the user cannot be trusted inasmuch as it applies to people with strong computer literacy. -- So for now, I stay on Chrome. Your choice of web browser comes to to functional concerns, not the kind of political wankery that this blog post represents. With that in mind, why would I choose something that's basically Chrome that offers maybe one or two useful additional features, but is basically worse in every other way? Speaking of which: >That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again. This is bald faced fearmongering, edging dangerously close to maliciously lying. The main problem with IE6 of the day is that it is closed source and very difficult to interoperate with, given its rather special take on web standards. Chromium is open source and can be forked given the will to do so - which will happen should this doomsday scenario they're predicting come about. Hell, Firefox was responsible for ultimately unseating IE as the browser of choice a long while ago, and they did not have this advantage. Say what you want about Google/Chrome(ium)'s motivations, but I see very little in the way of things they do that go out of their way to make my life miserable. They're hardly perfect or blameless, but at the end of the day, I've spent a lot more time cursing at Firefox than Chrome. What it boils down to is that firefox is dead to me until they are cured of the dread GNOME disease of deciding they know better than the people who use their software what the people who use their software want and need. You know, priorities. Like making the actual browser better, rather than shoveling in crapware like https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/price-wise https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/price-wise and ancillary, niche garbage like WebVR. There are a hell of a lot of questionable resource allocation decisions being made here. I'm looking at Vivaldi with a great amount of hope: >Your browser matters. Take control with Vivaldi. We live in our browsers. Choose one that has the features you need, a style that fits and values you can stand by. This is a philosophy that is a breath of fresh air to me.
• pickpuck 8y ago
  Which is better: 1 specification in psuedocode that 4 companies implement unevenly, or 1 codebase that 4 companies contribute to?
  • pcwalton 8y ago
    The former, because I don't have to get the other four companies' permission to improve infrastructural things that don't affect web compatibility. (For example, parallel styling and layout, WebRender, etc.)
  • 21 8y ago
    What is better? Having GCC/Clang/MSVC or having a single C/C++ compiler people/companies contribute to?
• jaredcwhite 8y ago
  If NetMarketShare can be believed, the #2 browser across desktop, mobile, and tablets is Safari which uses WebKit. https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options=%7B%22filter%22%3A%7B%22%24and%22%3A%5B%7B%22deviceType%22%3A%7B%22%24in%22%3A%5B%22Tablet%22%2C%22Desktop%2Flaptop%22%2C%22Mobile%22%5D%7D%7D%5D%7D%2C%22dateLabel%22%3A%22Trend%22%2C%22attributes%22%3A%22share%22%2C%22group%22%3A%22browser%22%2C%22sort%22%3A%7B%22share%22%3A-1%7D%2C%22id%22%3A%22browsersDesktop%22%2C%22dateInterval%22%3A%22Monthly%22%2C%22dateStart%22%3A%222017-12%22%2C%22dateEnd%22%3A%222018-11%22%2C%22segments%22%3A%22-1000%22%7D https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options... Not much has changed in the past year, with Safari holding steady at around 19% and Chrome going from 60% to 63%. Firefox is baring holding on to its 5%. So while it's concerning to see MS embrace the Chromium engine from the standpoint of adding fuel to the Google fire, I don't see this having any real effect in the near term on the browser market nor the development of new web technologies. Firefox is certainly right to promote its excellent Quantum-based browser these days, but honestly I only see Firefox as being relevant on Windows. On the Mac, Safari is an excellent browser and one I use personally as well as for web development, and iOS doesn't allow any engine other than WebKit to be used. And with Android, Google has the upper hand on that platform. In summary, as much as I want to cheer for Firefox and the Gecko Quantum engine from a philosophical standpoint, the only real competition to Chrome and Chromium right now is Safari and Webkit. Let's just hope Apple continues to put adequate resources into the development of its browser and keeps pace with Chrome.
  • Sylos 8y ago
    The problem is that WebKit isn't really a competitor to Blink: 1) It holds this marketshare mostly because of the forced monopoly on iOS. It's not technologically particularly far ahead or even has a browser implementing it with good marketing. 2) It exists on platforms other than macOS and iOS, but it is being optimized specifically for those platforms and only there can kind of compete with the other browsers. So, if you're not on macOS/iOS, it is hardly a competitor that you could choose from. 3) Chrome's Blink engine was forked from WebKit, so they are actually very similar in a lot of ways. A Blink-WebKit-duopoly would still have many of the disadvantages of a monopoly, like security vulnerabilities being shared and certain innovations being harder, because they have the same architecture.
• BoumTAC 8y ago
  Honestly I want to move to firefox but there is still so many things wrong. It's a lot better but after trying to migrate for 30min I already find 2 basic missing features from chrome. The first one is the tab research feature. It available for many years in chrome I don't understand why it's still missing in firefox. I can't type "yo [hit tab] my video" to find a video on youtube. And the second feature missing is the search highlight in the scrollbar. It's a mandatory feature for my when searching on a long page (like this one for example) to search for "firefox" and find in the scrollbar everywhere it is. It's a feature available in chrome for the beginning I think.
  • cbrewster 8y ago
    If you use DDG as your primary search engine, you can use ! commands to redirect to search on other sites (like YouTube !yt, Wikipedia !w, etc...). Using your example, you could just do "!yt my video"
  • eCa 8y ago
    > The first one is the tab research feature. It available for many years in chrome I don't understand why it's still missing in firefox. I can't type "yo [hit tab] my video" to find a video on youtube. If I understand you correctly: In firefox you set this up by 1) Create a bookmark 2) Edit it, and a) insert %s where you want "my video" to go, and b) give it a keyword, e.g. "yo". Now you can use it by typing "yo my video" (no tabbing). It's been in Firefox since circa 2006. (To continue the example, the url for the youtube bookmark should be: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s )
    • fireattack 8y ago
      I use Fx as my main browser, but the quick search feature in Fx is miles behind Chrome's. 1. In chrome, you don't need to manually add anything; you don't need to assign a keyword that you have to memorize. All the websites that you frequent that support OpenSearch will be automatically added by Chrome and you use their domain as keyword. I can now type en + tab to search on Wikipedia, as well as hundreds of other websites (no exaggeration) without manually configuring anything. And on top of that, if you want to manually add anything (maybe it doesn't have OpenSearch), or assign a different keyword like Fx, you can still do that in chrome://settings/searchEngines, like Firefox. 2. Chrome's quick search supports auto completion. Firefox's doesn't. It was not a big problem for me before the change of the Search Bar in Fx, since you can very easily add OpenSearch engines there and get auto completion too. But the new "One Click" makes it very hard to use (particularly the auto completion part). Now I have straight up given up search bar.
• shmerl 8y ago
  Well, MS could choose Gecko/Servo, to balance things out. Kind of surprising they didn't. At the same time it's probably good. Having MS influencing Gecko/Servo doesn't sound like a good idea.
• tarruda 8y ago
  One feature I miss in mainstream browsers like Chrome is the ability to completely disable tabs, leaving the window manager in control of browser windows. This is very valuable for advanced users of tiling WM that seek to automate as much of their workflow as possible. I've tried a couple of extensions that "pull" tabs out of the parent window, but it never worked perfectly. If Firefox had native support for this (apparently simple) feature, I believe it would gain the preference of many users of tiling window managers.
  • Siilwyn 8y ago
    Plus it would make browsers accessible for the non-tech people who don't understand tabs. Speaking from experience.
  • chrisseaton 8y ago
    I don’t get it - why do you need to disable the tabs? I’d you don’t want any tabs, then just don’t open any.
    • tarruda 8y ago
      I still want to open multiple websites in the same browser session, I just don't want them all to live in the same OS-level window so I can use my window manager and scripts to reorganize and quickly switch between them
      • chrisseaton 8y ago
        Right, so don’t open pages in new tabs, open them in new windows instead? Literally don’t don’t click ‘open in new tab’ and you won’t get a new tab. Click ‘open in new window’ instead.
    • int_19h 8y ago
      Many advanced window managers on Linux have support for tabs on WM level (so you can combine arbitrary windows into tabbed containers etc). The problem is that even if you have a browser with a single tab, you still get the browser tab bar showing that tab. And then on top of that you get the WM tab bar, wasting space and confusing the user. In older days, a browser with a single tab wouldn't show the tab bar at all. But that has changed ever singe they shoved the tab bar into the window title bar on most platforms.
• firefoxd 8y ago
  There was a great comment i read here yesterday. Developers build stuff on chrome because the console is amazing. So if the user uses chrome, there's a guarantee the website will work. Yes, firebug started it all, but chrome is killing it right now. Mozilla, why don't you start copying the chrome console already.
  • starik36 8y ago
    What exactly is missing in Firefox DevTools? If anything, they are superior. I've switched over to Firefox DevTools for 2 reasons: 1. The box model is on the right instead of on the bottom, so I can mess with it and immediately see results in the Inspector styles window and the browser. https://i.imgur.com/KfxmRQT.png https://i.imgur.com/KfxmRQT.png 2. I can click on the Event bubble next to the element to see events that are bound to it and go to it if I choose so. https://i.imgur.com/UWiMttX.png https://i.imgur.com/UWiMttX.png
    • 75dvtwin 8y ago
      In Firefox, debug breakpoints do not seem to always stay in tact when page is reloaded. Also hoovering mouse pointer over, does not always show variable's value. These problems are not present on Chrome.
    • frankietwenty9 8y ago
      Can't resize columns in 'network' tab Step, Step Into, Resume.. use different function keys than I'm used to on Linux. Edit + Resend doesn't work for me on Linux. It works on Windows for me. Copying headers doesn't work well for me on Linux. I have to click 'Raw Headers' to copy a header. Works fine on Windows. Chrome is still faster than Firefox. I prefer chrome and Edge's download monitor. I prefer Firefox's proxy controls.
    • maple3142 8y ago
      I found that chromium devtools is better at javascript debugging, but firefox devtools wins at css.
• turblety 8y ago
  I really wish Mozilla would work on making their Gecko engine (or whatever backend they use now) more usable to external developers. WebKit always seems very easy for developers to integrate into their apps. Whether you think it's a good or bad move, Electron has made building cross platform desktop applications a lot easier. It's a shame it must use Chromium and V8. In fairness Mozilla used to have XUL [1] until it was stopped [2], presumably because not enough people were using it? 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL 2. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Doesn.E2.80.99t_Firefox_use_XUL_internally.3F https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Doesn.E2.80.99t_F...
  • mavsman 8y ago
    Amen to this. There was the open source project that was essentially a Gecko version of Electron but of course it was very alpha and eventually was deprecated and abandoned. Perhaps the gold standard of Electron would allow you to choose the engine and then build a native/browser app based on that.
  • pseudalopex 8y ago
    > Electron has made building cross platform desktop applications a lot easier For people who have web development experience, yes.
    • derefr 8y ago
      It's made building cross-platform desktop applications that are just wrappers for existing web-apps down-right trivial (and no web-dev experience required there.) And that case applies more often than you'd think. For example, the Spotify app, the Slack app†, the various Facebook Messenger "clients", etc. † the Slack app is built with http://macgapproject.github.io/ http://macgapproject.github.io/, but it's pretty much the same thing.
      • pseudalopex 8y ago
        That's true in a way, but it requires basically no non-web dev experience either. It's a different kind of "building".
• Mistri 8y ago
  shots fired
• sxp62000 8y ago
  The first time I switched from IE to Firefox, and then later from Firefox to Chrome, were all because of speed. The latest Firefox releases do feel faster than Chrome, but it's not a huge difference. Security is important but I don't know if it's a "visible" enough feature to get people to switch to Firefox.
• babahoyo 8y ago
  It's crazy that microsoft got sued for anti-trust because explorer dominated so much of the market, and now they are ceding space so google can do the same.
• schappim 8y ago
  >> This may sound melodramatic, but it’s not. The “browser engines” — Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla — are “inside baseball” pieces of software that actually determine a great deal of what each of us can do online. I thought that Chrome's rendering engine was Blink, a fork of Webkit.
• jeffdavis 8y ago
  Today I am happy to be a monthly contributor to Mozilla. * Mozilla stands up for privacy, user control, and open standards * They back it up with high quality technical products like firefox * They built rust, a language I love Seriously: if you want to buy happiness then supporting an organization like Mozilla is about the most efficient way possible
  • idoubtit 8y ago
    * Google stands up for privacy^W, user control, and open standards like HTTP2 * They back it up with high quality technical products like Chromium * They built Go, a language I love I could have written the same with Microsoft/VSCode/C# and Apple/Safari/Swift. Seriously: Mozilla is good, but they're not saints, they're not totally different from other companies. They sometimes erred, even on the privacy of their users, which is their strong point. They are a commercial entity that sells services. It's easier to to keep enforcing a "Don't be evil" policy when you're not powerful enough to be evil.
    • luislezcair 8y ago
      Mozilla is a non-profit
      • thekyle 8y ago
        Mozilla is both a non-profit and a for-profit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
        • Sylos 8y ago
          And the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. That means their only stakeholder that they could pay out their profits to, is the Foundation, which can't take the money, because it's a non-profit. The Corporation can only really save up the money to reinvest it later. The Mozilla Foundation's legally-binding mission statement is therefore also effectively enforced for the Corporation. The Foundation could throw out the CEO of the Corporation and in general gets to decide what happens in the Corporation, which they're legally bound to tell to follow the Foundation's mission statement, i.e. making the web a healthier place, improving privacy etc. As a result, the only profit-motive that exists in the Corporation is that the employees want to keep their job.
• nuguy 8y ago
  I’m telling all of you, we need a new internet protocol. 90 percent of what’s done on the web is looking at pictures, videos, music and text. Just bake those things and a few others into a bare-bones protocol. No need for js. This way security would be astronomically better and it would lower the bar for browser writers, allowing more browser publishers to compete, which would result in better browsers that align with the needs and thoughts of the people.
• SEJeff 8y ago
  Kind of surprised that Microsoft is doing this. The Trident rendering engine is actually really good, and does a better job with the ACID 2 test than Chrome does today. While I agree with the overall content of this post, it seems dire to the point of hyperbole. Chromium is OSS, and Microsoft has both the incentive and engineering to fork it should Google not ultimately work together with them on it. It is somewhat ironic how Mozilla was basically founded due to Microsoft's monopoly on the browser market and when they (Mozilla) succeeded in breaking that monopoly, they give rise to a new competitor (Chrome / Chromium), which mostly does them in (Do them in being defined as steals most of their userbase). I only really care that the web stays relatively open and vendor neutral, something Mozilla overall has been a real champion of. Microsoft using an open source standards compliant rendering engine is sort of a step in the right direction from where we were 10 years ago even if that rendering engine is primarily maintained by Google.
• tolmasky 8y ago
  I'm honestly confused at the negative attention this is getting, I can't see this as being anything other than all positive. This is nothing like when IE won in the late 90s, there is very little extra "control" this will give Google over the web, quite the opposite if you ask me. Think of it this way: do you think it helps or hurts Google to have every version of Windows come pre-installed with what is essentially already Chrome, except, of course, it will probably have Bing as its default search engine. Do you think the odds of people just using Edge to download Chrome and nothing else go up or down with this move? Do you think it helps or hurts Google to have most tech people not bother telling their parents to download Chrome anymore? There is significantly less control from "owning" an engine than owning an actual browser. I don't think I would have had much of an issue with the dominance of IE 20 years ago if I knew I could compile and modify (and release!) IE myself. This is more akin to most browsers now having a common starting point. The problem with browsers is that if you truly want to make a new one you need to somehow replicate the decades of work put into the existing ones. What that means is that before you can exercise any of your noble privacy/security/UI/whatever goals, you must first make sure you pass Acid 1 and replicate quirks mode float behavior and etc. etc. etc. This is a non-starter. But now, Microsoft can launch from Chromium's current position and have a browser that can actually compete with Chrome. It's as if they've taken "engine correctness" off the table, and can compete on cool features or "we won't track you" or anything else. Websites will work in Edge by default, so if you like that one new feature in Edge, you can feel OK switching to it without compromising devtools/rendering/speed/etc. Now I know that the initial response to this is "but Google will call the shots!". Not if the way this has gone down every other time has anything to do with it. Google's Chromium started as KHTML. When Apple based WebKit off of KHTML, the KHTML team had very little say in anything and they eventually forked of course. Then Google based Chromium off of Apple's WebKit, and once again, there was very little "control" Apple could exercise here. Sure, they remained one monolithic project for a while (despite having different JS engines which just goes to show that even without forking you can still have differentiation), but inevitably, Chromium was also forked from WebKit into Blink. And there should be no reason to think the same won't happen here, and it's a good thing! Microsoft in the past couple of years has demonstrated amazing OS culture. I can't wait to see what the same company that gave us VSCode is able to build on top of Blink, and eventually separate from Blink. Ironically enough, the worst thing that could have happened to Google's search dominance is have Blink win the "browser engine wars": we all agree Blink is the way to go now, so we can all start shipping browsers that at minimum are just as good, and won't auto-log you in, or have their engine set to default, or etc. etc. etc.
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  It seems they're not joking, Firefox feels faster than it was some months ago when I've last tried it.
  • MentallyRetired 8y ago
    Speed isn't everything. I don't like its features, or lack thereof, nor its design. Vivaldi for me.
• skinnyasianboi 8y ago
  The simple design of Chrome on Mac is nice, I'm not a fan of all the lines and shadows in Firefox, I wish they would change it. But I'm still giving it try for the next days. On Android Firefox looks pretty sexy.
• xkgt 8y ago
  I don't know about Mozilla licensing terms... Could Microsoft forked Firefox instead of building its new browser based on Chromium project?
• soheil 8y ago
  I never fully understood the primary differences between Chrome and Chromium. One is open source and supported by Google and the other owned by Google, there are other small differences that I’m aware of, but can someone please list the significant differences and why it’s not a good argument (if not) to support Chromium without fear of Google’s monopoly? Or is it the case that Google has enough influence on Chromium’s direction to render that an unviable alternative?
  • Ndymium 8y ago
    Chromium is the open source project that Chrome the proprietary browser is built on. Chrome is basically Chromium + some proprietary bits, Google branding, and Google features. Chromium, while being open source, is a project run by Google, so they have the final word on what is included in the code. They don't just have enough influence, they control it.
• PinkMilkshake 8y ago
  If it ever got to the point where Google had achieved complete domination of the web, do we just leave? I'm curious as to what point we say screw it and create a new web. Is that even an option? Is it even plausible or desirable?
  • baroffoos 8y ago
    The regular user will not leave but I have seen an increase in power users leaving mainstream teach. There seems to be people turning to gopher for a kind of fun and exclusive web free from corporations.
• dzonga 8y ago
  I read this on Firefox.! :)
• tinix 8y ago
  We only support webkit based browsers for our web application. Multiple fortune 500 companies use it, meaning they are using neither IE/Edge nor Firefox... nuff said. I'm guessing the people complaining here haven't tried to embed Gecko vs Webkit. Webkit is far superior, it's the leading browser engine world-wide, and it would be really strange for Microsoft to choose Gecko over Webkit, as a result. Also, Microsoft would be unable to provide a browser for iOS if they went with Gecko. Why would they try to standardize around a browser engine that is supported across less platforms than Webkit? Webkit's API for engine embedding is far superior to Gecko[0], and that's coming from Mozilla directly. > The “browser engines” — Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla Huh? Sorry Mozilla, but you have to know that "Chromium" is not the engine, it's Blink, Google's fork of Webkit. Chromium is an application that encapsulates Blink, just like Firefox is an application that encapsulates Gecko. Anyway, the complaining from Mozilla is hilarious anyway... Do they seriously want Microsoft influencing them? C'mon... They are just butthurt because Webkit has way more market share than Gecko, and even more so now that Microsoft is abandoning EdgeHTML. [0] https://www.quora.com/Will-Firefox-ever-drop-its-Gecko-layout-engine-to-adopt-WebKit-What-political-mechanisms-are-keeping-Mozilla-from-embracing-such-a-widely-supported-rendering-engine-Is-it-their-escalation-of-commitment-with-Gecko https://www.quora.com/Will-Firefox-ever-drop-its-Gecko-layou...
• vtesucks 8y ago
  What happens to chakra?
• eam 8y ago
  I have been using FF for what seems forever, and I have no plans on stopping... unless they shut it down, finger crossed that that won't happen! I'm a web developer, and it has always been my go to browser, to me it has always felt pretty fast and I actually have never had any problems so I am always baffled how other people always have issues with it, maybe I am just an edge case. AS of now, it has been my default browser for well over 10 years, on both mac and window machines. I will continue to be a loyal user as long as it continues it's current course. I really wish Microsoft had gone with Quantum Gecko.
• ethanpil 8y ago
  I don't understand why Microsoft didn't partner with Firefox instead. Strategically it would have been a super win - lots of good will value to gain, a way to keep themselves and others less reliant on Google, and perhaps even push/use Firefox as a poster child GitHub partner for further value. What gives?
  • romanovcode 8y ago
    Electron and web-based desktop uis.
• kumarvvr 8y ago
  Firefox is very good now. It used to have terrible performance, but after they have made changes to their core, it's much better.
• jeffmcmahan 8y ago
  I switched months ago. No regrets, as a full time js/web developer, the dev tools are good enough. Not better than Chrome, but good enough. You can do the right thing.
• cbsmith 8y ago
  I find it very curious that this is being characterized as Microsoft giving control to Google. Chromium is open source; Microsoft isn't ceding any control of what goes into their browser.
• wyqydsyq 8y ago
  What a load of sensationalist FUD. MS are going to be using Chromium, the open-source project along with it's Blink and V8 rendering and JS engines as the basis for their next default browser. They are not planning to install Google Chrome as the default browser. Microsoft choosing to use one open-source project over another to fork their next browser from does not threaten the health or diversity of the internet. It isn't giving Google any additional control or power over the internet, because Chromium is an open-source project and any integrations to Google's own services exists only in Google Chrome. Basically this article is just Mozilla whinging because their project wasn't chosen and pushing FUD about the health and balance of the internet being threatened as a result. In reality Google does not gain any "power" from this, unless you count the couple of contributions Microsoft have submitted to the Chromium project (which again, is open-source) as an increase in "power", by which logic Mozilla should already have more "power" because they have been receiving decades of contributions as a result of being the default browser in most Linux distributions (leading hackers to write Firefox contributions and addons instead of for Chromium for example).
• hoangdt 8y ago
  Why MS not open sources EdgeHTML instead of adopting Chromium? :think:
• adetrest 8y ago
  Switched to ff when quantum came out, never looked back. It's really fast! And I absolutely love how the dev tools show which elements are grid and flex box containers with a little pill in the DOM explorer. I don't see a single good reason to switch back to chrome/chromium
• vtesucks 8y ago
  I don't want to digress from the discussion but can a typographical expert comment on what are the legibility benefits of wide vs slender fonts? How much or how little does the width matter? What other factors are there? I ask because the "goodbye" headline uses a wide font.
• StillBored 8y ago
  Well, I guess i'm going to miss edge, it wasn't a bad browser. it definitely felt faster than firefox... OTOH, Microsoft did this to themselves. Back when MS actually tried to create a user friendly OS and listened to their users. IE was supported across the entire line of supported OSes. But then under Balmer, they started to use IE and directX (and a few other things) as hammers to force people to upgrade to more recent versions of windows. Combined with a string of moves which pissed of their users and developers has resulted in far more reticence to upgrade windows versions than happened in the win 2.x->windows ME cycle. Now their applications are suffering because windows 10 is still less than 50% of the windows userbase. So, basically 50+% of windows users can't actually run edge. Similarly with games, A developer that exclusively targets directX 12 cuts out 50% of the windows market share (and a similar share of the game console market). OTOH, both firefox and chrome work just fine on windows7/8, and somehow so does vulkan, meaning that a brand new game could just target that and gain the entire supported windows ecosystem, much of the mobile, and game machine markets. Basically there is a layer of management at MS that needs to be fired, because they still think its the 1990's and MS can force any old crap on their user-base and they will suck it up. After all, what are the alternatives (this is sorta still true, both linux and macos are still subpar experiences too)?
• bluepnume 8y ago
  As someone who deals with a lot of browser features which are already a little quirky, like iframes, popups, and cross-window messaging -- I've found Edge makes little to no improvement on IE. The number of corner cases the browser fails to support is astonishing. So I'm absolutely glad to see it being dropped.
• danielor 8y ago
  This is an interesting moment. The browser wars appear to be over and there is a victor! We have a new tech monopoly. We shall see how enduring it is. My sense is that in 20 years something new will be allowing us to browse through humanities info.
• travisgriggs 8y ago
  As a side question, can anyone speak to what the organizational protocol of Mozilla looks like these days. Has that too changed in the last few years? I liked Firefox, but when the drama around Brendan Eich blew up, I was disgusted and walked away. Have they gone back to just working together to build a good browser? Or does it still come with a “must think a certain way” subtext? (FWIW, I want everyone to be able to code; I don’t care who/what/how you look like or sleep with or swear commitment to).
• AngeloAnolin 8y ago
  I like FF stance especially with regards to privacy. It has significantly better as I am using it more and more on a personal level. At work it's a different story though as our organization is heavily baked into Google's productivity suite (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc.) and of course, Google will always recommend using Chrome. FF is far from perfect, and I see a lot of constructive comments here which, if taken by FF, can really improve a lot of aspect in their product.
• sbisson 8y ago
  As much as Mozilla would have liked Edge to replace EdgeHTML with its rendering engine, the odds on that happening would have been a lot higher if Mozilla was at a different point in its engineering cycle: it's in the middle of an ambitious rewrite of its own rendering engine, in a new language... With Servo only just in developer preview, it's not going to be fit for Microsoft's enterprise customer needs for another couple of years, and taking a dependency on Rust would have been hard for Microsoft as it has its own languages that serve much the same purpose. Choosing a mature browser platform written on C and C++ makes a lot of sense when thought of in those terms.
• rock_artist 8y ago
  Firefox is important for internet democracy. I use FF as I prefer that my explicit browsing habits wouldn't also be affiliated with Google that already got enough data on me... It is improving.. Yet, pure performance, both EdgeHTML and Chromium outperform on many of my devices.
• techsin101 8y ago
  Some thoughts.. Chrome Dev tools are way better Firefox Ui looks like 2008. Firefox would win more if it continuesd to support unity. Problem with Firefox is that it sticks to standards too much whereas others experiment and get cool features which then become part of standards and then finally Firefox gets them.. meaning in last. Bookmark manager sucks File menu and other menus are clunky They need to redo their logo it also looks like 2008 If Firefox made their motto "get all chrome features 6 months before chrome" I'll uninstall chrome right now
  • maxyme 8y ago
    Firefox Dev tools are better for some things. Things like debugging webgl (you can live edit shaders!) But I find the UI and icon design difficult to use.
    • hoffs 8y ago
      How many people live edit shaders tho
  • romanovcode 8y ago
    Firefox is also slower on SPA websites. (Slower JS engine?)
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  I use Firefox but I disagree with them that MS switching to chrome is a bad thing. It eliminates from the equation a browser implementation that never really was that popular and at best sort of did what other browsers did without actually doing much different. You have to ask what the point for MS would be to continue to fund that. It wasn't buying them much positive differentiation. They had a little, mainly in the form of some performance benefits. But mostly people ended up using Chrome or Firefox, even on Windows 10. Mostly it was differentiating negatively for them in the sense that it had its own sets of unintentional compatibility bugs that most web developers did not prioritize working around. Several years into the windows 10, it's been largely a success for MS. Edge is the exception however. They made a few strategic mistakes with it (still under Balmer), the primary one being to make it windows 10 only. This made some sense when the plan still was windows 10 on every device but that went out of the window when Satya Nadella unceremoniously killed off windows phone. So while windows did well, Edge did not. Worse, MS now had to support pretty much everything they did on Android, IOS, and Mac OS as well. So, having their own browser engine just made that more complicated for them without offering any benefit. Porting it to other platforms would have been a serious investment, without any clear benefits or a path to success. Arguably, already at the time you could have questioned the logic of putting vast resources into duplicating the efforts of several open source browser engines with the explicit goal to do exactly the same functionally. IMHO it was largely the not invented here syndrome that drove Balmer/MS to do this. The new found pragmatism under Nadella produces different decisions. So, they keep the UI but they swap out the internals for of the shelf OSS that works perfectly fine. Happy users, happy developers, less cost. Not the hardest decision he's had to take I imagine. As to Firefox, they have an ongoing project to re-implement their engine in Rust that is producing clear benefits in addressing pain points in their old implementation that are also common to other C++ based implementations. They've been doing a great job staying on top of web standards and are a good contributor to them, often pioneering features such as wasm or webauthn in Firefox first. So, their implementation and focus on privacy adds value and they have lots of users that appreciate what they do and how they do it. I get their frustration that Google is gaining more power here where MS used to provide some independent voice in e.g. standards committees. But lets be fair here, MS wasn't doing a whole lot on that front and was basically just struggling to keep up without adding much value. Few web developers will mourn the need of having to deal with Edge specific rendering issues. Most users won't be able tell the difference. And having MS scrutinize what Google does with Chromium and kicking their ass in the standards bodies might help in keeping them honest.
• PurpleRamen 8y ago
  Browser Civil War in 3-5 years? Microsoft as a big enterprise will likely push their charm to improve things in chromium. And Google as another big enterprise with good control over chromium till now will proably not like all their changes. So how good is the chance for some friction and later an open conflict of interessts to appear?
• catchmeifyoucan 8y ago
  I'm convinced. I'll use firefox.
• xte 8y ago
  > The interests of Microsoft’s shareholders may well be served by giving up on the freedom and choice that the internet once offered us. No, when you give power without backup (FOSS licenses for instance) you'll be hurt, even sooner than later. Microsoft have a sole interest if it want to compete with Google: keep the desktop up instead of putting anything in the cloud (Google is far superior technically and as per reputation in that) and offer technically superior products. Like offer Firefox bundled and contribute to it, since is a FOSS project not held by a single and competing company. While Microsoft product and reputation are worse Microsoft is still there on most desktop so it have power and interest to react. Try to evolve play the Google game (like in-Windows ads, Office365 etc) is lost at start. > Google is a fierce competitor with highly talented employees and a monopolistic hold on unique assets. IMO it has, right now and not from today Google product are crappy as Microsoft one, people (not only geeks and tech savvy users) start to notice more everyday. Especially on mobile crap. Google of course have the excuse to blame OEMs (with good reasons) but many start to notice that they are not the sole guilty. So Google is still a prominent company in technical terms, but it's a dead one whose big body keep moving a bit due to the fact that death was never instantaneous for such size animals. BTW Mozilla foundation IMO should do different things than complain Microsoft decision, one is looking at Firefox and Firefox users especially when many say "hey, you go in a wrong direction". A thing should be remembered tech savvy users may say things that does not interest vast majority of your users today but quality always win in the long run so if tech savvy user say a thing does not work it may work today and tomorrow but it will crush after. And the more it last the more hard will be the crush. Be open, community will help and there is nothing big as internet community, no company can compete, that's why after years software became open again and that why companies start to trap FOSS code in proprietary jails knowing well that they have no other options. An ancient politician motto: you can make a throne on bayonets but it will start hurting you when you sit on it. We are citizens, even if only few are aware more will come the measure the collar tightens and no Google, nor Microsoft, nor Amazon can exists without consumers. They can try to be as indispensable as possible and it may work for some times but not forever.
• NightlyDev 8y ago
  This sucks, competition is nice. I'd rather want safari gone, cause safari on iOS is a shitshow with no competition. Safari on iOS gives me the IE6 feeling, it's so insanely bad and bug filled. Like, it sometimes fail to render pages properly if hardware acceleration is used, and sometimes one have to restart the browser just to get the keyboard working, or the ability to click any link. iOS Safari must die, especially if we continue like this with no other allowed engine on iOS. Either other engines must be allowed or iOS might as well die and the web would be better off.
• skrebbel 8y ago
  Does anyone know why Microsoft chose to partner with their arch rival and not with Mozilla? Even if Chromium is a bit easier to put a new skin around, that's a few developer years, nothing for MS. But strategically, handing it all over to Google, just like they did in the mobile OS space, what? How does that make any sense? Especially now that Firefox became an _excellent_ browser again?
• nathan_f77 8y ago
  I don't mind being downvoted for this, but Google Chrome is an amazing browser. It's great as a web developer and also as a user. We've come a long way from the browser wars in the 1990s. Things have stabilized and become much better since then, and you don't have to worry about Chrome turning into the next IE6. Sure, some sites only work in Chrome, but the main problem with IE6 is that it sucked and caused a lot of frustration for web developers. I just haven't had that experience with Chrome. Chromium is open source. It's not like Google and Microsoft are conspiring in secret to build a browser and destroy the competition. It's an open source project, and there's the W3C and WHATWG. Even if Chrome had 100% market share, there's nothing stopping people from contributing new suggestions, features and improvements to Chromium, or getting involved with the W3C. I used to be a huge fan of open-source software and the Free Software Foundation, and thought that this anarchist/communist style of project management was the best way forward. Now I've realized that most open source projects are poorly organized, suffer from lack of leadership, and have bad UX and design. The developers are underpaid (or unpaid), unmotivated, and sometimes end up burning out. Some of the most successful open source projects are backed by large companies who can pay the salaries of full-time engineers (Rails, Chromium, React, Red Hat, etc.) Anyway, I think it's great that Microsoft has decided to adopt Chromium, and that many Microsoft engineers will be contributing new features and improvements to the open source engine. Check out Brave [1] if you want a Chromium-based browser with a focus on privacy. Or use Firefox. Anyway, I don't think it's the end of the world. [1] https://brave.com https://brave.com
  • romanovcode 8y ago
    Isn't Brave closed-source? How is it possible to be privacy oriented and not disclose the code
    • nathan_f77 8y ago
      No, it's open source: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser https://github.com/brave/brave-browser I've never used it because I kind of thought it was a weird cryptocurrency project. I honestly don't think it provides much value over Chromium + uBlock + uMatrix. But it's just another option. I personally use Google Chrome, because I actually like signing in with my Google account, and I don't mind the tracking. I already use Google for everything: Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, YouTube, search. And Google Apps for my company. My choice of browser doesn't make a difference.
• gadders 8y ago
  Offtopic, but the on Chrome 67.0.3396.62 the whole first screen of that web page is one third massive header, and two thirds white space with just "moz://a" in it. You have to scroll to see any content. You'd expect a slightly more usable design.
• alexiacob 8y ago
  History seems to repeat itself. This reminds me of the times when a company was the ONLY one competing with Windows. All other companies were already on the windows boat or have plans in place to go follow that route. That company was Sun. Now it looks like the ONLY company that stands against (read competes with)Chromium is Mozilla. You have to pick a side
• timwaagh 8y ago
  the day that mozilla would say something positive about microsofts browser. but they are right, its bad for competition.
• a_imho 8y ago
  By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google. Bit rich coming from an organization funded by Google.
• crispytx 8y ago
  Microsoft is still going to make a browser though aren't they? If there's something that they don't like in chromium they can just change it as it's open source. Doesn't sound like a big deal to me. But that's just my opinion, man.
• krylon 8y ago
  Given that Microsoft used IE to push Netscape out of business, Microsoft adopting Chromium over their own rendering engine that they themselves had written to replace IE's old engine, the irony is so delicious I will feed off it for the rest of the year. Personally, though, I've been a Firefox person since the times when it was still called Firebird, so I'll stick with my favorite browser mostly through inertia. Nobody has given me a good reason to use another browser, except when I want to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime Video on GNU/Linux, that seems to work better with Chromium. And let us not forget the outliers like dillo, which has a terrible rendering engine and no Javascript[1], but it is FAST as lightning, and you can keep 50 tabs open, the browser still just uses about 100MB of RAM. Whereas Firefox, on my work laptop, can easily top 2GB of RAM. [1] Some may consider this a feature - it certainly means you do not need an ad blocker in dillo. ;-)
• jakoblorz 8y ago
  What if the narrative behind Microsoft's decision is not to build a better browser but to hurt Google from a regulatory view? I mean they maneuvered Google into an obvious and significant monopoly position, similar to the one Microsoft found itself before the uprise of Google.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• Slashbot 8y ago
  Goodbye, Firefox (TLRD I switched to Vivaldi.com for a far better browser) I switched to using https://Vivaldi.com https://Vivaldi.com last year after going through a whole bunch of web browsers to find a adequate replacement for my once favorite pre quantum Firefox browser with 70+ core xul based addons... The best I could find was Vivaldi, it's chromium engine based however the developers behind it have really taken to providing power user features and a good level of customization for the front end ... adding at least some of the features Firefox addons used to be able to provide. Not to mention it still allows me to use the garbage chrome store extensions, which while they will never compare to the old Firefox addons, it's at least better than scrap like dummIEs browser, flOpera, and defaulty chrome goolag Garbage and of course whatever fail Mozilla work on. Seriously Mozilla have been making themselves irrelevant, for at least a decade since Firefox 4.0 they have been adding allowing retards to add crap features, mess around the frontend gui while not actually improving anything just causing more work for addon developers and the those who make good theme. The only good thing they did was push the standards for website rendering. Now they have self lobotomized the best product they had by cutting off the addons that kept it being the browser power users and influential users would recommend out to the less techie friends and family who now all just use chrome crap. Firefox(quanturd) has now become what might aswel be a chrome clone that while practically falling to it's knees in supporting and copying all the same crap Goolag does... so basically a whole lot of developer time is wasting just making their version of the same shit, instead of ever getting around to developing useful features for end users. .. at this point MS is smart for just using the chromium backend, ofc MS are even more rubbish these days and will never improve the front end user experience and features even with more time to spend on those areas and they'll probably not update the chromium source thus dragging things behind again. And starting with the garbage web extensions api, that was the death nail for Firefox the moment they thought throwing technology like XUL out, that had allowed third party addon developer to create vastly more powerful addons for the Firefox web browser (NOT every other mediocre noob garbage browser, which is the goal of web extensions, when the best addon you can mak for your preferred browser could be ported to other crap browsers and is also limited by such a poor and limited api as implemented and agreed on by a consortium of morons with agendas of the company they work for ie Goolag, crApple or MicroSuck..) than are possible for Chrome, not to mention the customization and power user features that came with that addon support. These new employeed dolts that started infesting the Moztard organization threw it all away to level the play ground with all the other rubbish browsers like Chrome and Edge, etc.. So now they find themselves competing with zero advantage, and they have such morons working at this place that they don't even bother to implement the best power user addons in the actual browser that they broke.. Which is funny because if they did that, I wouldn't be using Vivaldi.. To this day many addon developers behind very popular addons like TabMixPlus are still trying to get these retards at Mozilla to actually improve the web extension crap format to not only fix bugs but improve on the api's that would help them re-implement the addon that made Firefox any good in the first place... check this thread https://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19942 https://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19942 .. it's a been a whole year, meanwhile Vivaldi practically just implemented most the features that TMP added for Firefox directly into Vivaldi options.. wtf have Mozilla done, nothing like that, they might aswel be the same idiots that work at goolag on chrome with its garbage user interface and feature standards. Stupidity doesn't even begin to describe Mozilla, I have nothing but contempt for the organization for what they have done and the kind of morons they have working at the place. And it is sad because as a power user and someone who used to recommend Firefox as I really do miss having a web browser that had 70+ core addons that all went to making my browser highly customizable so I could have it looking and working the way I wanted, while providing a great experience and interaction with the web that was vastly superior to anything else on the market. Not anymore though, since Quantum wreck came out last year. And now he legacy browser of Firefox that supported all those vastly better xul based addons has ceased to get the updates required to render sites properly, performance issues have increased more bugs and for years Mozilla have been messing with frontend css changes etc and breaking customization for there own crappy visual design and garbage inferior features. So yeah http://i.imgur.com/481pHyo.jpg http://i.imgur.com/481pHyo.jpg ...farewell Firefox (that was an old screen of Firefox, FF versions onwards Moztard broke more of the interface I gave up maintaining any sense of a good theme and more addons started breaking).. Firefox you were once the best, now you are shit, to all those at Mozilla go fuck yourselves. You cater to mediocrity and noobs, you deserve to disappear, followed by the rest that follow and set your direction into oblivion.
• Slashbot 8y ago
  Goodbye, Firefox (TLRD I switched to Vivaldi.com for a far better browser)
• fibo 8y ago
  Having a competitor is a big value for Google, they are smart enought to understand they need Firefox. Think about first WebRTC connection or also WebGL2.