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Why would they have considered Firefox over just improving Edge? The problem is that Chrome is extremely dominant, especially on mobile and tablet. And everyone

Why would they have considered Firefox over just improving Edge? The problem is that Chrome is extremely dominant, especially on mobile and tablet. And everyone tests against Chrome but not everyone tests on Firefox or Edge(especially web devs on MacOS). If things don't work or look broken, it causes more people to switch to Chrome over Edge/Firefox, turning this into a vicious cycle. The only way to break the cycle is to act like Chrome, so either chase Chrome's behavior with Edge or Firefox. Both of which entail a lot of effort and money with less than stellar results. Adopting Firefox will get them some development help but the fundamental problem of chasing a speeding train still remains.

unethical_ban 8y ago
In political terms: Web browsing dominance is a single member district. Firefox and Chrome are the two major parties, and IE/Opera/Safari are third parties. IE could have gone to Firefox to promote open standards and "back the opposition" so to speak. They chose, instead, the corporate behemoth behind the mobile OS they want a foothold on (presumably).
- belltaco 8y ago
  And if big web properties like Youtube, GMaps and Gmail etc. don't work properly, are slow or missing features on Gecko then the dominance of Chrome will increase further anyway. The market of web browsers has become "who gets to set the default search engine makes the moolah". Bing marketshare and revenue is driven by how well Edge works and how it can stop the bleeding to Chrome. Changing the engine to Quantum does not solve the problem they were having in the first place very well.
- alwillis 8y ago
  Firefox and Chrome are the two major parties, and IE/Opera/Safari are third parties. There’s no way this can be true. Apple owns various platforms that ship Safari/WebKit and it’s the only option on iOS and watchOS. They’ve shipped more than 2 billion (and growing) iOS devices. And hundreds of thousands native iOS apps use WebKit views. So there’s no way Safari is a fringe 3rd party browser and has a better privacy story regarding fingerprinting and tracking than any of the other major browsers, including Firefox. Unless you’re on the W3C mailing lists and GitHub repos, you wouldn’t know how active the WebKit team is on the development and implementation of web standards.

unethical_ban 8y ago

In political terms: Web browsing dominance is a single member district. Firefox and Chrome are the two major parties, and IE/Opera/Safari are third parties. IE could have gone to Firefox to promote open standards and "back the opposition" so to speak. They chose, instead, the corporate behemoth behind the mobile OS they want a foothold on (presumably).

belltaco 8y ago
And if big web properties like Youtube, GMaps and Gmail etc. don't work properly, are slow or missing features on Gecko then the dominance of Chrome will increase further anyway. The market of web browsers has become "who gets to set the default search engine makes the moolah". Bing marketshare and revenue is driven by how well Edge works and how it can stop the bleeding to Chrome. Changing the engine to Quantum does not solve the problem they were having in the first place very well.
alwillis 8y ago
Firefox and Chrome are the two major parties, and IE/Opera/Safari are third parties. There’s no way this can be true. Apple owns various platforms that ship Safari/WebKit and it’s the only option on iOS and watchOS. They’ve shipped more than 2 billion (and growing) iOS devices. And hundreds of thousands native iOS apps use WebKit views. So there’s no way Safari is a fringe 3rd party browser and has a better privacy story regarding fingerprinting and tracking than any of the other major browsers, including Firefox. Unless you’re on the W3C mailing lists and GitHub repos, you wouldn’t know how active the WebKit team is on the development and implementation of web standards.