20 ms·

Browsers

341 points by indysigners 8y ago

chrisweekly 8y ago
Yeah. This stuff matters. Firefox is more important than it's ever been.
awinder 8y ago
The last time I enjoyed using the Firefox rendering engine on a Mac was back in the Camino days. I’d almost say that that browser is a better Mac experience than Firefox is today. I’ve started using Safari and it’s actually pretty OK and the resource utilization is a lot better than Chrome (no fans blowing!). I empathize with Firefox making a big deal out of avoiding a monoculture but i really hope they’re figuring out how to do a better job on things like the Mac internally, because I don’t think that people are really going to use an inferior product as some moral statement.
- vSanjo 8y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, by all means, but I recently read somewhere that Firefox is genuinely trying to improve it's MacOS performance in one of the new releases. No sources, it was just in passing somewhere, but I distinctly remember it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    It may do, but there's still a long way to go. Multi-touch gestures that use system animations (or at least approximate them), certain aspects of UI design made to fit the macOS aesthetic and workflow better, and other things. My personal hope is that once the newest UI implementation settles down, there'll be some more love added to it. Stuff that Chrome got pretty damned fast, I hasten to add. Whether people like Safari or not, it does set the standard for browsers on macOS because, unlike IE or Edge, it's actually a very good and __very__ well-loved browser.
  - Klonoar 8y ago
    This has been said about a litany of releases, and they don't really ever make a dent.
    - kup0 8y ago
      I cannot remember the number at this point, but there was one specific release recently that did seem to make a significant improvement for me on MacOS. I used to have heavy pages hang here and there and really burn some CPU (Facebook, etc) and sometimes even freeze without loading completely. Now on the same machine, the latest Firefox works just fine and avoids those states completely. It's still a long way from perfect, but I once thought Firefox unusable on MacOS and went back to Chrome, but now that I've tried the latest FF releases, I'm happy enough with the performance that I'm staying with FF this time around The only remaining sites with poor performance are Google products, and I blame Google for that and am trying to slowly remove myself from all of their products.
  - r3bl 8y ago
    According to the latest poll within Mozilla, over 50% of the developers use a Mac. I suppose they're experiencing the same issues first-hand, and that it's only the matter of time before they iron out the performance.
wyqydsyq 8y ago
Honestly I just see all this, even despite the author claiming taking time to "mull it over", as a knee-jerk reaction. There is little evidence that MS changing to Blink/V8 will have any tangible impact on the web. Microsoft has hardly offered much as far as competition and diversity goes since IE6, basically the only web "innovations" they're responsible for is a bunch of IE-specific APIs that didn't work in any other browser. The garbage rhetoric that Mozilla and their supporters have been spreading is pure FUD: > By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google. MS' new default browser being based on Chromium does not give any additional control of online life to Google. They're open-source projects that, while Google manages, does not have absolute control over the consumption of. If Google did ever try to muscle control on Chromium like they've been doing with Android, Microsoft could simply fork it without the hostile Google changes. If anything I see this whole thing being beneficial for the web in the long run - now instead of MS engineers pissing their time and effort down the drain on a dead browser and needlessly fragmenting the market with engine differences, even if people don't use the default Windows browser Microsoft's engineers can contribute to and benefit the web by contributing their improvements upstream to the Chromium/Blink/V8 projects.
- mcny 8y ago
  Downvoters, please stop and think. > If anything I see this whole thing being beneficial for the web in the long run - now instead of MS engineers pissing their time and effort down the drain on a dead browser and needlessly fragmenting the market with engine differences, even if people don't use the default Windows browser Microsoft's engineers can contribute to and benefit the web by contributing their improvements upstream to the Chromium/Blink/V8 projects. This is absolutely spot on. Keep in mind that Microsoft's EdgeHTML team went as far to almost declare that any difference from Chrome is a bug that Microsoft intends to fix. I mean I get it if Edge was free and open source, there would be some value in seeing reimplementation of a browser that is compatible with Chrome but I doubt making Edge free and open source was ever in the works (I think, I am not sure if Edge was actually a clean slate. It might just have been removing "bad" code from IE tbh). I simply don't understand why we should mourn Edge when the Edge team pretty much says any difference from Chrome is a bug.
- 8y ago
stupidcar 8y ago
I find it kind of hilarious that people seem to think the solution to the Chrome monoculture is them personally switching to Firefox and then writing a blog post / comment / tweet about it. It's like saying we need to get serious about climate change, so you're going to start cycling to work, and encourage your friends to do the same. If that salves your conscience, then great, but your individual actions are statistically irrelevant. There are systemic trends and market forces at play here involving billions of people. And nowhere amongst the significant forces and trends will you find "there are insufficient nerds evangelising Firefox". Hacker News can upvote as many as these kinds of articles as it likes, but Chrome's market share will continue to grow until there is something far more substantial to stop it than philosophical objections by tech insiders.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  So when MS controller the browsers we threw our arms in the air. But when google controls it we just sit here and go meh?
  - stupidcar 8y ago
    I didn't say the concerns are wrong, just that repeating them again and again, mostly within an echo chamber of tech people, will do nothing to change the facts. I don't think people should sit there and go meh. They should just be realistic about what actions will and will not make an actual difference.
  - wyqydsyq 8y ago
    How does the next default Windows browser being forked from Chromium mean Google controls it? You know what open-source is, right? People threw their arms in the air because IE was substantially behind other browsers in stability and capabilities, and all their new features were IE-specific APIs that didn't work anywhere else. Chromium is an open-source project that largely follows IETF/W3C/ECMA standards. The two are not even remotely comparable.
    - albru123 8y ago
snarfy 8y ago
Firefox has one feature the other browsers will never have - privacy.
- mixedCase 8y ago
  Brave seems to go for the same, but with a Chromium base (currently in beta). They seem to de-claw whatever's left by Google.
  - Sylos 8y ago
    Firefox has still some clear advantages over Brave, thanks to owning their engine. A trivial example is the battery API. It's nowadays mainly used for tracking, but is an official webstandard. Mozilla decided to fuzzy it, so it lost its usefulness for tracking. Google didn't. And I imagine, there's hundreds of similar examples at this scale, which as an average user you'll just never hear of. One bigger feature is Firefox's Containers. It's based on work from the Tor Browser. Which also just illustrates what this partnership sometimes brings forth. Tor Browser is going to always be there, checking the Firefox code for privacy problems, and will suggest better ways of doing things, which Mozilla can just adopt. For Chromium, there exist in principle similar efforts, like Brave, Iridium Browser, ungoogled-chromium, but these will always fight an uphill battle against Google and obviously Google isn't going to adopt and maintain their fixes.
  - M2Ys4U 8y ago
    Brave is an advertising company mixed with blockchain snakeoil. Why should we trust them?
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  Why wouldn't Safari have the same feature? I'm not a huge fan of Apple's generally closed ecosystem, but acknowledge that they have unusual respect for user privacy.
  - Mikeb85 8y ago
    > respect for user privacy No US based entity can offer user privacy, as the government can force any of them to cooperate while requiring non-disclosure. The fact they don't use anonymous user data to offer internet services doesn't negate the fact that where most of us actually care about privacy, they don't have the power to actually offer it.
21 8y ago
Sometimes I still browse Digg (it's different now). Since the last Firefox update from a week ago which disabled Symantec certificates the site doesn't work anymore. I bet the day Chrome disables Symantec certificates they will immediately notice and fix it. It's sad that in one week not even one of their people opened it in Firefox, and not many of their users either (there was just a couple of mentions on Twitter about this issue)
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > Since the last Firefox update from a week ago which disabled Symantec certificates the site doesn't work anymore. Is this the fault of Firefox or Digg though?
  - m3talsmith 8y ago
    It's pointing out the mindshare and impact that Chrome has.
- ryuuchin 8y ago
  Chrome distrusted Symantec certs when 70 got pushed to stable (at the end of October)[1]. Digg shows NET::ERR_CERT_SYMANTEC_LEGACY error when I navigate to it. Firefox was supposed to remove the Symantec certs in 63 (also to be released at the end of October) but I guess they pushed it back a version[2]. All major browser coordinated to distrust the certs at the same time. [1] https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-dist... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/07/30/update-on-the-distrust-of-symantec-tls-certificates/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/07/30/update-on-the-d...
- lern_too_spel 8y ago
  Chrome also shows an error. The reason nobody at Digg noticed is that Digg is not https by default, so only people using certain extensions would hit that error.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
revskill 8y ago
I still remembered when i first time used Firefox in 2004, and it's like a life-saver to me to get out of the terrible Internet Explorer. What i want now, maybe from 2020, i could use Firefox, but as a replacement for Mobile App container.
- IntelMiner 8y ago
  I still remember when my Dad marched me over to his laptop, to boldly proclaim the new Internet Explorer 7 had TABS He legitimately looked as though he'd unlocked some kind of arcane technology that mortal man should never have wielded I still feel a little bad when I casually shrugged it off with "Firefox has had that for years". He looked legitimately shattered
tolmasky 8y ago
The biggest danger to the web in terms of control right now is browser monopoly, not engine monopoly. And this move is probably the most effective way at combatting that. I think this is the right move at this time not just for Microsoft, but for the web. Borrowing from a previous comment I made, 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. If you care about the state of search monopoly, out of control ads, and identity on the web, then you should be happy with this move. 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.
koboll 8y ago
Meh. I don't buy it. First of all, individual boycotts will never, ever overcome a collective action problem, so a fundamentally futile solution is being proposed here. Plus, this is only bad if Google act destructively evil and no one steps in to change it. If the endgame is control of Chromium being passed from Google to a neutral foundation -- which I suspect it will be -- then everyone wins. It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out. This is the way of all web technologies. Should we go back to competing variants of (proto-)JavaScript to prevent web monoculture, too?
- swalladge 8y ago
  > It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out. I think it should be that one competing _standard_ will win out. Ideally we can have infinite number of browser engines, as long as each one implements all widely used standards correctly. We already see this with most websites working fine whether in chromium or firefox. The only incompatibilities (in theory) should come from bugs or new standards/experiments which haven't been widely adopted or implemented yet. The same for javascript - multiple implementations of a js engine is fine, as long as they all implement the ES* standard. Also if everyone moves to a Chromium engine monoculture, what will happen to innovation? eg. Mozilla has made some major progress with it's work with Servo.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  > If the endgame is control of Chromium being passed from Google to a neutral foundation -- which I suspect it will be -- then everyone wins. There is zero chance of that happening. Like all public companies, Google acts in its own self-interest. Google controls Chromium, and there is absolutely no benefit to Google to hand control of Chromium over to an outside entity. 98% of all patches to Blink are reviewed by a Google employee. If establishing a foundation were going to happen, then it would have happened when Apple and Google were still collaborating on WebKit.
  - EvilTerran 8y ago
    I wouldn't say the chance is exactly zero - if Google's monopolistic behaviour surrounding Chrome (the "install our browser!" nags on their web properties come to mind) get too egregious, they may be forced to divest via antitrust law.
NoPicklez 8y ago
Did we really need the stupid viewpoint on non-disclosure agreements? Like cmon, don't take it too personally that a company might want to try and cover its own arse when giving you access to sensitive information. It still shouldn't change your character with regards keeping secrets so why does it matter?
michalstanko 8y ago
I'm not going to use Firefox for development and I'm not going to install Firefox for my family members, simply because Chrome is better for both scenarios. Firefox is pretty good, but Chrome is just better. Instead, I send Mozilla some money every month (a small amount), because I still care that Firefox continues to be developed.
- lwansbrough 8y ago
  What would Mozilla have to do to make their browser better than Chrome?
  - michalstanko 8y ago
    For me, as a developer, it boils down to the Web Dev Tools (Elements, Console, Network panels), which keep getting better and better. For my family, Chrome is on desktop and their phones, everything synchronized. Chrome autoupdates without bothering them. Chrome is simple and it just works for them, and everything works in Chrome. Please don't downvote me, I've been supporting Mozilla with monthly donations for years, and after Edge switches to Chromium, I'll probably increase the amount ;-) And I invite more of us to do the same. :-)
    - lwansbrough 8y ago
      All of those things are available on Firefox, which is why I asked. There are a diminishing number of features not available to Firefox users at this point.
sys_64738 8y ago
This move is actually genius by Microsoft. They will negate the need to install Chrome on Windows. Microsoft will gain control of the browser market.
- dmethvin 8y ago
  I don't think they want control over the browser market, just the browser users on Windows. People are less likely to ditch Edge if it is more compatible with the way Chrome and Safari work (including the ability to run Chrome extensions). That means they have more visibility and control over those users.
  - sys_64738 8y ago
    They’re also releasing Edge for Mac and Linux so sounds like they’re all in on their strategy.
- krackers 8y ago
  How so? I don't believe the layperson really cares all too much about the underlying engine, it's more a marketing thing. And the IE brand is forever tainted.
  - sys_64738 8y ago
    Word of mouth. Ads. The media. Plenty of avenues will quickly frame why Installing Chrome is so yesterday.
- eddieroger 8y ago
  One of the linked posts spent a great deal of time differentiating between the browser interface and the engine itself. The average user doesn’t understand the difference, so being told “Edge is more like Chrome now” doesn’t actually make it Chrome for them. Other than tricking user agent checkers from putting up the inferior browser warning (is that still a thing?) this won’t stop people from using Edge to install Chrome.
- culot 8y ago
knowingathing 8y ago
Why is this such big news? No-one I know uses Edge as their daily browser. Based on the Google Analytics data of the various apps I work on, the usage for Edge is so small that it is basically irrelevant. If we are concerned about a lack of browser diversity, why weren't more people using Edge to being with? Or is it all the people who are now chanting "Use Firefox" are the ones who used Edge and feel cheated somehow?
- r3bl 8y ago
  It's not about the browser, it's about browser engines. Edge will still exist, but EdgeHTML will not. We're down from four major browser engines to three, with one clearly dominating the market.
EGreg 8y ago
Can I question the orthodoxy on this one? Suppose WebKit or Blink are the one engine that everyone uses. Do you know how much uncertainty and effort that will save around the world that goes into browser compatibility and quirks? Look at the x86 architecture or POSIX as well. Here is my serious practical question: this is open source, so if you want to make some extension, you should be able to distribute it. And if it becomes so popular as to be merged into the core, or included with the main distribution, then it will be. It seems on balance, this would be a good thing.
- sdwisely 8y ago
  it's more complicated than that though. Nobody is lamenting the loss of the edge engine. Things like choice of video codec, drm module, etc have shown is it's a good thing to have a few different vendors with a seat at the table for standards. Most important of those is Firefox.
- ben-schaaf 8y ago
  x86 and POSIX are actually great comparisons to the current state of browsers. They all have well defined standards that everyone should follow in theory. In practice CPUs have bugs[0] that kernels and applications make a lot of effort to work around. There are also enough implementation/non-compliance quirks in POSIX[1][2] implementations to matter when porting. Just like all of the web standards, x86 and POSIX don't solve the compatibility problems that come from innovation. [0] https://wiki.osdev.org/CPU_Bugs https://wiki.osdev.org/CPU_Bugs [1] https://personal.opengroup.org/~ajosey/tr28-07-2003.txt https://personal.opengroup.org/~ajosey/tr28-07-2003.txt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base
eddieroger 8y ago
I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made by the OS manufacturer). Chromium is open source - the only lock in is the decision to use it. Sure, Google may be at the reigns of where the project goes, but then differentiate on features, or fork it and make it different. Differentiate on the user interface, or integrations with other services, or go hard on privacy. Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows? One operating system would be bad, but one kernel has spawned many, many Linuxes. I guess I’m doing my part by using Firefox, but that’s more because I am worried about just how much Google knows about me, and not because I think Gecko is remarkably better than Chromium.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  > Sure, Google may be at the reigns of where the project goes, but then differentiate on features, or fork it and make it different. And if the fork diverges, then what? This is not a theoretical concern: Blink and WebKit are now quite different, and it's best to regard them as two different rendering engines. Is that bad? > Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows? This presupposes that the Linux kernel is at an optimum point in the design space. It's pretty clear to me that it isn't. In fact, I think the monoculture around open source kernels has been bad for OSS. I look forward to Fuchsia providing some much-needed competition, much in the same way LLVM provided much-needed competition to GCC.
- austincheney 8y ago
  IE, at its height, was available outside windows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac At that time, 2001-2002, IE6 was highly praised. You don’t get to 96% marketshare by being something everybody hates. The hate came later when CSS demand ramped up and it became clear IE6 used a non-standard box model. Worse still MS essentially abandoned the browser, the result of total marketshare dominance, and tied it directly to the operating system. The reason people are complaining about this is the lack of diversity. This has proven very bad in the past. It essentially makes the platform a proprietary space even if the dominant browser is open source. The key here is who directs the technology and direction of the platform.
sarcasmic 8y ago
People don't download Chrome because EdgeHTML-Edge sucks; they download Chrome because it's familiar, and ironically doesn't nag the person to enable half a dozen Microsoft's services one by one. There's two greater truths here: that some people are more comfortable using Google's services over those of Microsoft, and that the power of defaults matter, even when they feel skeevy to a part of the population. Google proved that defaulting to all the services enabled by default is reasonable not just with a discretionary application (like Chrome) but also when the user barely has any other choice on the device (like Android), and years of these defaults have resulted in a userbase that relies on them and seeks out the product for this reason. It also shows that past precedent can lead you down a gauntlet of bad PR: Microsoft has tried to be pushy with many features of Windows 10 (telemetry, inking, online login, Cortana, always-online search) in the same vein that we've long seen from Google, but their strategy contrasts unfavorably against long legacy of a less invasive Windows. Google has pursued a policy of opt-out from the beginning, and by doing so they escape a fair bit a bad press. Firefox has the worst of it: their users are the most discriminating, the hardest to please -- even if some of Mozilla's controversies were poor choices, the level of uproar was immense. Posts like this just encourage the migration of users driven by causes. This would be less of an issue if it were entirely community-supported, but Mozilla has paid developers and evangelists, and deriving revenues from a discriminating userbase is a challenge.
- AaronFriel 8y ago
  As a counter-point, I've had to set up Chrome with ad blockers even for computer illiterate family members and friends because they eventually have it installed anyway. Why? Not because they knew they were installing it, but because every time you visit "google.com" in Edge, you get an intrusive message that says: "Switch to Chrome Hide annoying ads and protect against malware on the web [No Thanks] [Yes]" And that then appears on every single search. And if you click no thanks, it reappears. And then when they go to youtube, they see this: "Watch YouTube videos with Chrome Google recommends using Chrome, a fast and secure browser. Try it? [Yes] [No Thanks]" Again, every page load. It's a dark pattern. What about Gmail? "Google recommends using Chrome Try a fast, secure browser with updates built in [No Thanks] [Yes]" EVERY PAGE LOAD.
admax88q 8y ago
The web browser vendors have too much money. They have no incentive to keep the platform small. Google in particular, the cost to implement Blink is essentially meaningless to them, but it is beyond affordability for almost anyone else.
- Jyaif 8y ago
  MS could easily shell the bill, but there's 0 reason for them to do that; by leveraging Chromium they get 500 millions USD worth of development for free every year.
- gsnedders 8y ago
  What's the total money passing through the web? Billions, trillions? The amount of money that is spent on browsers is such a tiny fraction of web-derived profit it is, in my opinion, surprising that browser vendors don't have more money.
  - bobajeff 8y ago
    Well they do give away browsers for free.
dak1 8y ago
I'm not sure this changes as much as people keep saying. Microsoft isn't completely abandoning browser development, and it will still have (sometimes strong) opinions on the development of the web. The conversation though will shift from conversations in external organizations between stakeholders, to conversations in a shared codebase between stakeholders. In some cases this could be better, as it means we will have fewer occurrences where there's agreement on a feature, but implementation lags in 1 browser. Instead, adoption of many features should now be quicker, while debate about larger or more controversial features will still exist.
newscracker 8y ago
This move by Microsoft may probably help Microsoft have Windows users using its browser, but I seriously doubt if it's good for the web. There are people claiming that Microsoft could easily fork from Chromium, but honestly, do you see that happening in the next few years? Having read that Microsoft's Edge team was a very small one, I don't believe Microsoft will fork Chromium anytime in the next two or three years (no financial incentive, which could be a big motive, to do so)...and that's a long time to keep pushing the Chrome/Chromium way ("what Google wants for the web"). As an aside, I very much liked this article linked within, titled "The ecological impact of browser diversity" by Rachel Nabors. [1] To all those who evangelize Firefox, please also see if you can donate money to Mozilla. It may seem like Mozilla has a lot of money (more than 90% coming from Google for being the default search engine added in the browser), but this is not enough, and could turn to be nothing if Firefox's market share becomes next to nothing and Google decides to pull the plug when the current contract expires. Partnerships with Bing (or other search engines that not many people use) may not bring in as much money to Mozilla. Read about all the work that Mozilla does (aka "not just Firefox") in its "State of Mozilla 2017" annual report. [2] The audited financial report is here. [3] [1]: https://css-tricks.com/the-ecological-impact-of-browser-diversity/ https://css-tricks.com/the-ecological-impact-of-browser-dive... [2]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/ [3]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...
- oooglaaa 8y ago
  So the only competitor to Google’s monopoly on web browsers is... funded almost entirely by Google? Yikes
  - scarface74 8y ago
    While Safari’s desktop market share is minimal and it really only competes with Chrome directly on Macs. No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.
    - 8y ago
Santosh83 8y ago
There are several comments on this post wondering why a browser monoculture is bad or speculating that a browser engine monopoly is inevitable and ought to be accepted. Let's just replace 'browser' with OS (ironically the similarities are becoming more with each passing day) above... would we still say the same? Is an OS monoculture good, regardless of whether it is inevitable? Have we forgotten the power that MS had with Windows during the 90s and early 2000s before Linux, MacOS and Android became viable alternatives? Given that browsers are becoming the new OS and VM, we need competition in this space more than ever, going forward. Let's not accept Chrome/Google as the One Ring.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  Unfortunately that's not really a valid comparison at all. Browsers all try to stay compatible with each other. OSes do not in any way try to stay compatible with each other. Programming apps for Linux, Mac, and Windows requires entirely different code. Programming for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari do not (or at least not supposed to unless you're used new APIs or edge cases) You can't currently make an alternative browser in the same sense that you can make an alternative OS. An alternative browser would not use HTML, CSS, JavaScript. It would use something else in the same way that MacOS/iOS push ObjectiveC and Swift where as Android pushes Java/Kotlin and other OSes other languages and each OS as it's own UI API
  - gronne 8y ago
    I disagree. MS has recently pushed the “linux on top op windows” solution. Making windows programs run on linux has attracted plenty of ressources (commercial and unpaid): open framework clones, wine, steam play vm’s. The same can be said for osx. iOS and Android not so much though.
  - rincebrain 8y ago
    As people have observed historically, browsers have competing incentives - to support the most use cases, and to be better in some way than their competitors. Supporting the most use cases is where you get the compatibility from. Being better than your competitors is where you get browser-exclusive functionality from. If something (e.g. ActiveX, Java, Shockwave, Flash, some new CSS that's not standardized yet, a new feature on some top 500 website, ...) works in your browser, that's a win for both goals - and if it works only/best in your browser, that's also a win. Monocultures can be toxic in part because the disincentives to adding lockin (e.g. losing users and other negative feedback sources) get weaker/less likely as one participant becomes more dominant. I'm old enough to remember the fun with "works only/best in IE/Netscape/...", and Microsoft's old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish policies. While I do not have any reason to believe any of the parties involved in browser development would behave pathologically, history suggests that monopolies in any space tend to eventually become pathological. (I work for Google, not on anything browser related, all opinions above are mine personally, etc.)
virtualwhys 8y ago
OT, but I was and am still pretty steamed that Mozilla spearheaded the effort to deprecate WebSQL back in 2010 [1], while providing a replacement that left many disappointed [2] (see comments in both threads universally deriding the decision). The idea was that javascript libraries would be created that would replicate SQLite in the browser (albeit horribly inefficiently with terrible APIs compared to shipped-with-the-browser native C implementation that is SQLite). Anyway, now that Firefox has become less relevant than ever with Microsoft's adoption of Chrome, I wonder if there's any chance that WebSQL will live on despite its deprecation? After all, it's still available in Chrome and Safari, which dominate the browser market. IndexedDB is fine if NoSQL is how you store your data, but an absolute PoS if you want to work efficiently in a relational model with joins, grouping, etc. Such a shame, every server-side language under the sun compiles to javascript now; imagine being able to share SQL statements between client and server; being able to aggregate data, count & sum with reckless abandon. Instead we have to do it all by hand in javascript, such a step backward [3] /rant [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9978540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9978540 [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-and-the-road-to-indexeddb/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis... [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/comparing-indexeddb-and-webdatabase/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/comparing-indexeddb-and-we...
- swsieber 8y ago
  You couldn't share SQL statements between the backend and the frontend. It's for the same reason it was shot down: SQL implementations are incredibly varied.
  - virtualwhys 8y ago
    Limited to a certain subset you most definitely could use the same statements (obviously not CTEs and the like). Ideally you'd have a translation layer, so instead of writing error prone string-y SQL, you'd have a type safe DSL in the vein of LINQ to SQL, Esqueleto, Slick, Quill, etc. that generates approriate SQL based on the target driver. That way you write the same query once, with the same model, and dispense with the inefficient square wheel that is IndexedDB + javascript.
lwansbrough 8y ago
If there’s anyone at MS reading this, I’ll once again implore you to push for Edge to be open sourced, as it should have been before the initial announcement was made.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
fastball 8y ago
People keep telling me that Firefox is super fast! But it's slower than Chrome and my laptop runs hotter. Sorry.
Annatar 8y ago
I grew up using NetScape under CDE on Solaris and IRIX. I ran a LiveWire (NetScape) web server professionally when the webmaster job was something root did and was an honorable thing to do. Even with all of that, I boycott Firefox because they no longer support Solaris or his descendent, illumos, and because the Firefox 48 ESR I do run on there crashes all the time, and because Mozilla is extremely aggressively pushing Rust, which is an overcomplicated piece of crap. So long as all these conditions are true, Firefox can go to hell for all I care, and I sure won't be recommending it to anyone. May Chrome and Safari keep winning. Thanks Mozilla for being sellouts and good luck.
protomikron 8y ago
What I would like to see is some kind of "white-list" browser - I think it's our best chance to keep an ad-free environment. Maybe it is a bad idea in general to allow a remote page write pixels to your screen: images, videos, text and now applications It is nice that the web is open (at least reasonably), but maybe raw JS, HTML and CSS is too general? The most valuable webpages have simple designs and are liked because of their content, like - wikipedia.org - HN - stackoverflow.com - maps.google.com - ... These pages could implement - Knowledge-Base - Topic-Comment-Community - Answer-Response-Community - Interactive-GIS specifications, that obviously do not exist. E.g. if a newspaper implements a hypothetical "Newspaper-Specification" it would have to provide original, sourced content containing text, images, audio and video via some API (which is often already the case when single page apps fetch content client-side via e.g. JSON). There would be no visual difference between reading "The Guardian" vs. "USA Today" or browsing "OpenStreetMap" vs "Google Maps" as content would be rendered on the client.
- krapp 8y ago
  >Maybe it is a bad idea in general to allow a remote page write pixels to your screen: images, videos, text and now applications Computers have been doing this since the 60s, at least, in some form or another. I don't think you want to live in a world where the very idea of networks is considered harmful. Where all of the software you consume has to be loaded from physical media and the internet and any network connected device just doesn't exist. You couldn't even have cellphones. We don't need a "whitelist" browser - you simply choosing not to visit sites you don't want to visit is already a sufficient whitelist. Having "specifications" that websites and authors would have to enforce based on content would make the web less free. Websites are software. Software authors have the right and the freedom to write whatever they like, any way they choose, up to and including the UI. The Guardian being able to make their own decisions about how to implement the web versions of a "newspaper" - including design choices which might differentiate them from USA Today, is part and parcel the same sort of freedom that any author of any work, software, literary, music, what have you, enjoys. That HTML, CSS and JS don't step over the line from describing content to making editorial decisions about content is a feature, not a bug.
zimbatm 8y ago
Why? Because the W3C is a factory the never stops churning out specs. It's quite telling that even Microsoft was not able to keep-up with the complexity and decided to piggy-back on the biggest investor. If we want less mono-culture, the first thing to do is to bring the complexity down to something manageable.
bprasanna 8y ago
Well, Microsoft opting for Chromium will be a big win for Google. As Google has a strong hold on Android mobile user base, for many non-technical users what comes by default is the first browser (may be best browser). Google taps that privilege/monopoly/advantage to their use. Those who comfortably use Chrome in mobile device will obviously opt for Chrome in desktop as well. Because it simplifies their mental model of browser comfort. Microsoft might have done the same thing for decades, but it has been trying to come out of that image for the past of couple of years. IMHO Microsoft is no more an evil. I won't blame Google if it plays fair with respect to its Chrome browser in Android. In many Android phones we can't uninstall Chrome. If we use Chrome actively in Android, it pushes lot of notifications (they will say serving the user with relevant content, but to me its a ad/handle which intend to make me see pages where ads are again controlled by Google). Even in Desktop when i open Google's any of the services using browser other than Chrome, at least in the third world where i live, it suggests me to "Switch to Chrome". Nobody is forcing anyone. But it is very essential to tell the world that there is something better available. The recent better one from Firefox: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.rocket&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.ro...
- onion2k 8y ago
  Those who comfortably use Chrome in mobile device will obviously opt for Chrome in desktop as well. You make it sound like users know, or care, which browser they're using. Most of them don't. Most don't actually know there's more than one browser. They use the stock browser that's installed on their device, and they don't switch unless there's a reason to - eg their favourite websites and apps don't work. In the case of Edge with EdgeHTML there are popular sites that don't work properly, and that means users seek out Chrome instead. Microsoft switching to Chromium will mean those users continue to use Edge because "it works properly" for the user regardless of the actual problem being the developers of those sites failing to write cross-browser compatible code. I'm a bit sad that the choice and market for browsers is shrinking, and I think it's going to slow progress in web tech, but let's be honest here - the blame for Microsoft's very sensible business decision lies with web developers who fail to test their code in more browsers than just Chrome. If web developers did a better job there'd still be business value in developing a competing browser engine.
almostarockstar 8y ago
How many billionaires have made their fortunes through the web? Surely some of them care enough about preventing a monoculture to foot the bill for an independent browser development team - if not for profit, for the greater good. Consider it philanthropy.
- cyborgx7 8y ago
  >an independent browser development team So Mozilla?
  - almostarockstar 8y ago
    Well maybe another Mozilla? The point is the ecosystem needs variety and there are people who could afford to create that.
mclightning 8y ago
Author starts by saying NDAs are useless, and he keeps secrets better without them... Then in the right next sentence, he shares how he learnt about a big secret from a friend at Microsoft without any NDA!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
jlpicard 8y ago
Didn't sign any NDA. Waited a week post-announcement to talk about it.
voryzen 8y ago
The biggest mistake we've ever made is not realising that Google used to be called.. SkyNet. Just my two cents
romeisendcoming 8y ago
Google is another evil empire. Amen.
holtalanm 8y ago
oh look, another fear-mongering firefox ad masquerading as an article that actually warrants reading. no thanks, I'll pass. edit: I'll add that I am pretty tired of reading these "Microsoft Edge is dead, long live Firefox" articles like this, where they start with a title that sounds like it is worth reading and in the end it boils down to "Pleeeeeease use Firefox, its betterrrrrr, pleeeeeease!." They are opinion pieces and provide NOTHING of substance or value other than pandering to the current base of firefox users. They won't convince me to switch, and probably never will (in fact, they make me dislike firefox even more than I already do).
ksec 8y ago
I know there is a lot of hate for Safari on HN ( Still don't understand why ) But I wish Microsoft worked with Apple and bring Safari / WebKit to Windows, and invest in Webkit instead. ( Blink and Webkit are now pretty much different Engine )
- scarface74 8y ago
  In the distant past, Safari was officially available for Windows.
ecthiender 8y ago
I think Microsoft just wants to give up on the browser market/share/innovation (for business reasons ofcourse </snark>). They just needed to have a default browser installed on their system and hence just wants to rebrand chromium and drop it in their default installation. If they really cared, they could have adopted Gecko/Spidermonkey atleast.
mastrsushi 8y ago
Firefox and Gecko are going to die because the vast majority of people do not care about layout engine monopolies. Corporations rely on the vast majority of people. What will probably happen is as Mozilla goes bankrupt, they will spin off Firefox's development structure to a more community driven approach. Then, Firefox and all of its derivatives will continue to live in Linux/Unix Open Source world. Let's face it, political software issues are developer centric. From there, Firefox will end up like Galeon and Gnome Web, slowly losing relevance, lacking modern browser features, and lose development support over the years because a layout engine is very complex and MUST have a corporate backing. Microsoft proved this themselves with their decision. All of these articles love to fear their listeners by warning them of another IE monopoly situation. None of them seem to mention why monopolistic browsers are an issue, or even how history will repeat in this crazy modern internet world. The only point anyone's made is that security vulnerabilities will span across all browsers. With that logic we might as well write all programs in different languages, and use 20 different operating systems. Obviously that isn't efficient and neither is wasting development money on yet another layout engine. But hey, it's fun to worry about petty issues, so I'll keep reading these blogs.

341 points by indysigners 8y ago

Yeah. This stuff matters. Firefox is more important than it's ever been.

The last time I enjoyed using the Firefox rendering engine on a Mac was back in the Camino days. I’d almost say that that browser is a better Mac experience than Firefox is today. I’ve started using Safari and it’s actually pretty OK and the resource utilization is a lot better than Chrome (no fans blowing!). I empathize with Firefox making a big deal out of avoiding a monoculture but i really hope they’re figuring out how to do a better job on things like the Mac internally, because I don’t think that people are really going to use an inferior product as some moral statement.

vSanjo 8y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, by all means, but I recently read somewhere that Firefox is genuinely trying to improve it's MacOS performance in one of the new releases. No sources, it was just in passing somewhere, but I distinctly remember it.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  It may do, but there's still a long way to go. Multi-touch gestures that use system animations (or at least approximate them), certain aspects of UI design made to fit the macOS aesthetic and workflow better, and other things. My personal hope is that once the newest UI implementation settles down, there'll be some more love added to it. Stuff that Chrome got pretty damned fast, I hasten to add. Whether people like Safari or not, it does set the standard for browsers on macOS because, unlike IE or Edge, it's actually a very good and __very__ well-loved browser.
- Klonoar 8y ago
  This has been said about a litany of releases, and they don't really ever make a dent.
  - kup0 8y ago
    I cannot remember the number at this point, but there was one specific release recently that did seem to make a significant improvement for me on MacOS. I used to have heavy pages hang here and there and really burn some CPU (Facebook, etc) and sometimes even freeze without loading completely. Now on the same machine, the latest Firefox works just fine and avoids those states completely. It's still a long way from perfect, but I once thought Firefox unusable on MacOS and went back to Chrome, but now that I've tried the latest FF releases, I'm happy enough with the performance that I'm staying with FF this time around The only remaining sites with poor performance are Google products, and I blame Google for that and am trying to slowly remove myself from all of their products.
- r3bl 8y ago
  According to the latest poll within Mozilla, over 50% of the developers use a Mac. I suppose they're experiencing the same issues first-hand, and that it's only the matter of time before they iron out the performance.

wyqydsyq 8y ago

Honestly I just see all this, even despite the author claiming taking time to "mull it over", as a knee-jerk reaction. There is little evidence that MS changing to Blink/V8 will have any tangible impact on the web. Microsoft has hardly offered much as far as competition and diversity goes since IE6, basically the only web "innovations" they're responsible for is a bunch of IE-specific APIs that didn't work in any other browser. The garbage rhetoric that Mozilla and their supporters have been spreading is pure FUD: > By adopting Chromium, Microsoft hands over control of even more of online life to Google. MS' new default browser being based on Chromium does not give any additional control of online life to Google. They're open-source projects that, while Google manages, does not have absolute control over the consumption of. If Google did ever try to muscle control on Chromium like they've been doing with Android, Microsoft could simply fork it without the hostile Google changes. If anything I see this whole thing being beneficial for the web in the long run - now instead of MS engineers pissing their time and effort down the drain on a dead browser and needlessly fragmenting the market with engine differences, even if people don't use the default Windows browser Microsoft's engineers can contribute to and benefit the web by contributing their improvements upstream to the Chromium/Blink/V8 projects.

mcny 8y ago
Downvoters, please stop and think. > If anything I see this whole thing being beneficial for the web in the long run - now instead of MS engineers pissing their time and effort down the drain on a dead browser and needlessly fragmenting the market with engine differences, even if people don't use the default Windows browser Microsoft's engineers can contribute to and benefit the web by contributing their improvements upstream to the Chromium/Blink/V8 projects. This is absolutely spot on. Keep in mind that Microsoft's EdgeHTML team went as far to almost declare that any difference from Chrome is a bug that Microsoft intends to fix. I mean I get it if Edge was free and open source, there would be some value in seeing reimplementation of a browser that is compatible with Chrome but I doubt making Edge free and open source was ever in the works (I think, I am not sure if Edge was actually a clean slate. It might just have been removing "bad" code from IE tbh). I simply don't understand why we should mourn Edge when the Edge team pretty much says any difference from Chrome is a bug.
8y ago

stupidcar 8y ago

I find it kind of hilarious that people seem to think the solution to the Chrome monoculture is them personally switching to Firefox and then writing a blog post / comment / tweet about it. It's like saying we need to get serious about climate change, so you're going to start cycling to work, and encourage your friends to do the same. If that salves your conscience, then great, but your individual actions are statistically irrelevant. There are systemic trends and market forces at play here involving billions of people. And nowhere amongst the significant forces and trends will you find "there are insufficient nerds evangelising Firefox". Hacker News can upvote as many as these kinds of articles as it likes, but Chrome's market share will continue to grow until there is something far more substantial to stop it than philosophical objections by tech insiders.

philliphaydon 8y ago
So when MS controller the browsers we threw our arms in the air. But when google controls it we just sit here and go meh?
- stupidcar 8y ago
  I didn't say the concerns are wrong, just that repeating them again and again, mostly within an echo chamber of tech people, will do nothing to change the facts. I don't think people should sit there and go meh. They should just be realistic about what actions will and will not make an actual difference.
- wyqydsyq 8y ago
  How does the next default Windows browser being forked from Chromium mean Google controls it? You know what open-source is, right? People threw their arms in the air because IE was substantially behind other browsers in stability and capabilities, and all their new features were IE-specific APIs that didn't work anywhere else. Chromium is an open-source project that largely follows IETF/W3C/ECMA standards. The two are not even remotely comparable.
  - albru123 8y ago

snarfy 8y ago

Firefox has one feature the other browsers will never have - privacy.

mixedCase 8y ago
Brave seems to go for the same, but with a Chromium base (currently in beta). They seem to de-claw whatever's left by Google.
- Sylos 8y ago
  Firefox has still some clear advantages over Brave, thanks to owning their engine. A trivial example is the battery API. It's nowadays mainly used for tracking, but is an official webstandard. Mozilla decided to fuzzy it, so it lost its usefulness for tracking. Google didn't. And I imagine, there's hundreds of similar examples at this scale, which as an average user you'll just never hear of. One bigger feature is Firefox's Containers. It's based on work from the Tor Browser. Which also just illustrates what this partnership sometimes brings forth. Tor Browser is going to always be there, checking the Firefox code for privacy problems, and will suggest better ways of doing things, which Mozilla can just adopt. For Chromium, there exist in principle similar efforts, like Brave, Iridium Browser, ungoogled-chromium, but these will always fight an uphill battle against Google and obviously Google isn't going to adopt and maintain their fixes.
- M2Ys4U 8y ago
  Brave is an advertising company mixed with blockchain snakeoil. Why should we trust them?
tomjakubowski 8y ago
Why wouldn't Safari have the same feature? I'm not a huge fan of Apple's generally closed ecosystem, but acknowledge that they have unusual respect for user privacy.
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  > respect for user privacy No US based entity can offer user privacy, as the government can force any of them to cooperate while requiring non-disclosure. The fact they don't use anonymous user data to offer internet services doesn't negate the fact that where most of us actually care about privacy, they don't have the power to actually offer it.

21 8y ago

Sometimes I still browse Digg (it's different now). Since the last Firefox update from a week ago which disabled Symantec certificates the site doesn't work anymore. I bet the day Chrome disables Symantec certificates they will immediately notice and fix it. It's sad that in one week not even one of their people opened it in Firefox, and not many of their users either (there was just a couple of mentions on Twitter about this issue)

chrisseaton 8y ago
> Since the last Firefox update from a week ago which disabled Symantec certificates the site doesn't work anymore. Is this the fault of Firefox or Digg though?
- m3talsmith 8y ago
  It's pointing out the mindshare and impact that Chrome has.
ryuuchin 8y ago
Chrome distrusted Symantec certs when 70 got pushed to stable (at the end of October)[1]. Digg shows NET::ERR_CERT_SYMANTEC_LEGACY error when I navigate to it. Firefox was supposed to remove the Symantec certs in 63 (also to be released at the end of October) but I guess they pushed it back a version[2]. All major browser coordinated to distrust the certs at the same time. [1] https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-dist... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/07/30/update-on-the-distrust-of-symantec-tls-certificates/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/07/30/update-on-the-d...
lern_too_spel 8y ago
Chrome also shows an error. The reason nobody at Digg noticed is that Digg is not https by default, so only people using certain extensions would hit that error.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

revskill 8y ago

I still remembered when i first time used Firefox in 2004, and it's like a life-saver to me to get out of the terrible Internet Explorer. What i want now, maybe from 2020, i could use Firefox, but as a replacement for Mobile App container.

IntelMiner 8y ago
I still remember when my Dad marched me over to his laptop, to boldly proclaim the new Internet Explorer 7 had TABS He legitimately looked as though he'd unlocked some kind of arcane technology that mortal man should never have wielded I still feel a little bad when I casually shrugged it off with "Firefox has had that for years". He looked legitimately shattered

tolmasky 8y ago

The biggest danger to the web in terms of control right now is browser monopoly, not engine monopoly. And this move is probably the most effective way at combatting that. I think this is the right move at this time not just for Microsoft, but for the web. Borrowing from a previous comment I made, 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. If you care about the state of search monopoly, out of control ads, and identity on the web, then you should be happy with this move. 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.

koboll 8y ago

Meh. I don't buy it. First of all, individual boycotts will never, ever overcome a collective action problem, so a fundamentally futile solution is being proposed here. Plus, this is only bad if Google act destructively evil and no one steps in to change it. If the endgame is control of Chromium being passed from Google to a neutral foundation -- which I suspect it will be -- then everyone wins. It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out. This is the way of all web technologies. Should we go back to competing variants of (proto-)JavaScript to prevent web monoculture, too?

swalladge 8y ago
> It's always seemed inevitable to me that one browser engine will win out. I think it should be that one competing _standard_ will win out. Ideally we can have infinite number of browser engines, as long as each one implements all widely used standards correctly. We already see this with most websites working fine whether in chromium or firefox. The only incompatibilities (in theory) should come from bugs or new standards/experiments which haven't been widely adopted or implemented yet. The same for javascript - multiple implementations of a js engine is fine, as long as they all implement the ES* standard. Also if everyone moves to a Chromium engine monoculture, what will happen to innovation? eg. Mozilla has made some major progress with it's work with Servo.
pcwalton 8y ago
> If the endgame is control of Chromium being passed from Google to a neutral foundation -- which I suspect it will be -- then everyone wins. There is zero chance of that happening. Like all public companies, Google acts in its own self-interest. Google controls Chromium, and there is absolutely no benefit to Google to hand control of Chromium over to an outside entity. 98% of all patches to Blink are reviewed by a Google employee. If establishing a foundation were going to happen, then it would have happened when Apple and Google were still collaborating on WebKit.
- EvilTerran 8y ago
  I wouldn't say the chance is exactly zero - if Google's monopolistic behaviour surrounding Chrome (the "install our browser!" nags on their web properties come to mind) get too egregious, they may be forced to divest via antitrust law.

NoPicklez 8y ago

Did we really need the stupid viewpoint on non-disclosure agreements? Like cmon, don't take it too personally that a company might want to try and cover its own arse when giving you access to sensitive information. It still shouldn't change your character with regards keeping secrets so why does it matter?

michalstanko 8y ago

I'm not going to use Firefox for development and I'm not going to install Firefox for my family members, simply because Chrome is better for both scenarios. Firefox is pretty good, but Chrome is just better. Instead, I send Mozilla some money every month (a small amount), because I still care that Firefox continues to be developed.

lwansbrough 8y ago
What would Mozilla have to do to make their browser better than Chrome?
- michalstanko 8y ago
  For me, as a developer, it boils down to the Web Dev Tools (Elements, Console, Network panels), which keep getting better and better. For my family, Chrome is on desktop and their phones, everything synchronized. Chrome autoupdates without bothering them. Chrome is simple and it just works for them, and everything works in Chrome. Please don't downvote me, I've been supporting Mozilla with monthly donations for years, and after Edge switches to Chromium, I'll probably increase the amount ;-) And I invite more of us to do the same. :-)
  - lwansbrough 8y ago
    All of those things are available on Firefox, which is why I asked. There are a diminishing number of features not available to Firefox users at this point.

sys_64738 8y ago

This move is actually genius by Microsoft. They will negate the need to install Chrome on Windows. Microsoft will gain control of the browser market.

dmethvin 8y ago
I don't think they want control over the browser market, just the browser users on Windows. People are less likely to ditch Edge if it is more compatible with the way Chrome and Safari work (including the ability to run Chrome extensions). That means they have more visibility and control over those users.
- sys_64738 8y ago
  They’re also releasing Edge for Mac and Linux so sounds like they’re all in on their strategy.
krackers 8y ago
How so? I don't believe the layperson really cares all too much about the underlying engine, it's more a marketing thing. And the IE brand is forever tainted.
- sys_64738 8y ago
  Word of mouth. Ads. The media. Plenty of avenues will quickly frame why Installing Chrome is so yesterday.
eddieroger 8y ago
One of the linked posts spent a great deal of time differentiating between the browser interface and the engine itself. The average user doesn’t understand the difference, so being told “Edge is more like Chrome now” doesn’t actually make it Chrome for them. Other than tricking user agent checkers from putting up the inferior browser warning (is that still a thing?) this won’t stop people from using Edge to install Chrome.
culot 8y ago

knowingathing 8y ago

Why is this such big news? No-one I know uses Edge as their daily browser. Based on the Google Analytics data of the various apps I work on, the usage for Edge is so small that it is basically irrelevant. If we are concerned about a lack of browser diversity, why weren't more people using Edge to being with? Or is it all the people who are now chanting "Use Firefox" are the ones who used Edge and feel cheated somehow?

r3bl 8y ago
It's not about the browser, it's about browser engines. Edge will still exist, but EdgeHTML will not. We're down from four major browser engines to three, with one clearly dominating the market.

EGreg 8y ago

Can I question the orthodoxy on this one? Suppose WebKit or Blink are the one engine that everyone uses. Do you know how much uncertainty and effort that will save around the world that goes into browser compatibility and quirks? Look at the x86 architecture or POSIX as well. Here is my serious practical question: this is open source, so if you want to make some extension, you should be able to distribute it. And if it becomes so popular as to be merged into the core, or included with the main distribution, then it will be. It seems on balance, this would be a good thing.

sdwisely 8y ago
it's more complicated than that though. Nobody is lamenting the loss of the edge engine. Things like choice of video codec, drm module, etc have shown is it's a good thing to have a few different vendors with a seat at the table for standards. Most important of those is Firefox.
ben-schaaf 8y ago
x86 and POSIX are actually great comparisons to the current state of browsers. They all have well defined standards that everyone should follow in theory. In practice CPUs have bugs[0] that kernels and applications make a lot of effort to work around. There are also enough implementation/non-compliance quirks in POSIX[1][2] implementations to matter when porting. Just like all of the web standards, x86 and POSIX don't solve the compatibility problems that come from innovation. [0] https://wiki.osdev.org/CPU_Bugs https://wiki.osdev.org/CPU_Bugs [1] https://personal.opengroup.org/~ajosey/tr28-07-2003.txt https://personal.opengroup.org/~ajosey/tr28-07-2003.txt [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base

eddieroger 8y ago

I feel like I’m missing something, because I keep seeing blog posts that tell me a browser monoculture is bad (and the irony of Microsoft saying this is nearly too much), but none of them tell me why. I understand that it was bad in the IE6 days, but IE6 was also closed source and could only be run on Windows (see also the irony of Microsoft discontinuing IE on Mac, not wanting to compete with Safari, a browser made by the OS manufacturer). Chromium is open source - the only lock in is the decision to use it. Sure, Google may be at the reigns of where the project goes, but then differentiate on features, or fork it and make it different. Differentiate on the user interface, or integrations with other services, or go hard on privacy. Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows? One operating system would be bad, but one kernel has spawned many, many Linuxes. I guess I’m doing my part by using Firefox, but that’s more because I am worried about just how much Google knows about me, and not because I think Gecko is remarkably better than Chromium.

pcwalton 8y ago
> Sure, Google may be at the reigns of where the project goes, but then differentiate on features, or fork it and make it different. And if the fork diverges, then what? This is not a theoretical concern: Blink and WebKit are now quite different, and it's best to regard them as two different rendering engines. Is that bad? > Maybe the rendering engine should be more akin to the Linux kernel and less akin to Windows? This presupposes that the Linux kernel is at an optimum point in the design space. It's pretty clear to me that it isn't. In fact, I think the monoculture around open source kernels has been bad for OSS. I look forward to Fuchsia providing some much-needed competition, much in the same way LLVM provided much-needed competition to GCC.
austincheney 8y ago
IE, at its height, was available outside windows. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac At that time, 2001-2002, IE6 was highly praised. You don’t get to 96% marketshare by being something everybody hates. The hate came later when CSS demand ramped up and it became clear IE6 used a non-standard box model. Worse still MS essentially abandoned the browser, the result of total marketshare dominance, and tied it directly to the operating system. The reason people are complaining about this is the lack of diversity. This has proven very bad in the past. It essentially makes the platform a proprietary space even if the dominant browser is open source. The key here is who directs the technology and direction of the platform.

sarcasmic 8y ago

People don't download Chrome because EdgeHTML-Edge sucks; they download Chrome because it's familiar, and ironically doesn't nag the person to enable half a dozen Microsoft's services one by one. There's two greater truths here: that some people are more comfortable using Google's services over those of Microsoft, and that the power of defaults matter, even when they feel skeevy to a part of the population. Google proved that defaulting to all the services enabled by default is reasonable not just with a discretionary application (like Chrome) but also when the user barely has any other choice on the device (like Android), and years of these defaults have resulted in a userbase that relies on them and seeks out the product for this reason. It also shows that past precedent can lead you down a gauntlet of bad PR: Microsoft has tried to be pushy with many features of Windows 10 (telemetry, inking, online login, Cortana, always-online search) in the same vein that we've long seen from Google, but their strategy contrasts unfavorably against long legacy of a less invasive Windows. Google has pursued a policy of opt-out from the beginning, and by doing so they escape a fair bit a bad press. Firefox has the worst of it: their users are the most discriminating, the hardest to please -- even if some of Mozilla's controversies were poor choices, the level of uproar was immense. Posts like this just encourage the migration of users driven by causes. This would be less of an issue if it were entirely community-supported, but Mozilla has paid developers and evangelists, and deriving revenues from a discriminating userbase is a challenge.

AaronFriel 8y ago
As a counter-point, I've had to set up Chrome with ad blockers even for computer illiterate family members and friends because they eventually have it installed anyway. Why? Not because they knew they were installing it, but because every time you visit "google.com" in Edge, you get an intrusive message that says: "Switch to Chrome Hide annoying ads and protect against malware on the web [No Thanks] [Yes]" And that then appears on every single search. And if you click no thanks, it reappears. And then when they go to youtube, they see this: "Watch YouTube videos with Chrome Google recommends using Chrome, a fast and secure browser. Try it? [Yes] [No Thanks]" Again, every page load. It's a dark pattern. What about Gmail? "Google recommends using Chrome Try a fast, secure browser with updates built in [No Thanks] [Yes]" EVERY PAGE LOAD.

admax88q 8y ago

The web browser vendors have too much money. They have no incentive to keep the platform small. Google in particular, the cost to implement Blink is essentially meaningless to them, but it is beyond affordability for almost anyone else.

Jyaif 8y ago
MS could easily shell the bill, but there's 0 reason for them to do that; by leveraging Chromium they get 500 millions USD worth of development for free every year.
gsnedders 8y ago
What's the total money passing through the web? Billions, trillions? The amount of money that is spent on browsers is such a tiny fraction of web-derived profit it is, in my opinion, surprising that browser vendors don't have more money.
- bobajeff 8y ago
  Well they do give away browsers for free.

dak1 8y ago

I'm not sure this changes as much as people keep saying. Microsoft isn't completely abandoning browser development, and it will still have (sometimes strong) opinions on the development of the web. The conversation though will shift from conversations in external organizations between stakeholders, to conversations in a shared codebase between stakeholders. In some cases this could be better, as it means we will have fewer occurrences where there's agreement on a feature, but implementation lags in 1 browser. Instead, adoption of many features should now be quicker, while debate about larger or more controversial features will still exist.

newscracker 8y ago

This move by Microsoft may probably help Microsoft have Windows users using its browser, but I seriously doubt if it's good for the web. There are people claiming that Microsoft could easily fork from Chromium, but honestly, do you see that happening in the next few years? Having read that Microsoft's Edge team was a very small one, I don't believe Microsoft will fork Chromium anytime in the next two or three years (no financial incentive, which could be a big motive, to do so)...and that's a long time to keep pushing the Chrome/Chromium way ("what Google wants for the web"). As an aside, I very much liked this article linked within, titled "The ecological impact of browser diversity" by Rachel Nabors. [1] To all those who evangelize Firefox, please also see if you can donate money to Mozilla. It may seem like Mozilla has a lot of money (more than 90% coming from Google for being the default search engine added in the browser), but this is not enough, and could turn to be nothing if Firefox's market share becomes next to nothing and Google decides to pull the plug when the current contract expires. Partnerships with Bing (or other search engines that not many people use) may not bring in as much money to Mozilla. Read about all the work that Mozilla does (aka "not just Firefox") in its "State of Mozilla 2017" annual report. [2] The audited financial report is here. [3] [1]: https://css-tricks.com/the-ecological-impact-of-browser-diversity/ https://css-tricks.com/the-ecological-impact-of-browser-dive... [2]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2017/ [3]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...

oooglaaa 8y ago
So the only competitor to Google’s monopoly on web browsers is... funded almost entirely by Google? Yikes
- scarface74 8y ago
  While Safari’s desktop market share is minimal and it really only competes with Chrome directly on Macs. No one is going to use Chrome only features that don’t work on iPhones.
  - 8y ago

Santosh83 8y ago

There are several comments on this post wondering why a browser monoculture is bad or speculating that a browser engine monopoly is inevitable and ought to be accepted. Let's just replace 'browser' with OS (ironically the similarities are becoming more with each passing day) above... would we still say the same? Is an OS monoculture good, regardless of whether it is inevitable? Have we forgotten the power that MS had with Windows during the 90s and early 2000s before Linux, MacOS and Android became viable alternatives? Given that browsers are becoming the new OS and VM, we need competition in this space more than ever, going forward. Let's not accept Chrome/Google as the One Ring.

tokyodude 8y ago
Unfortunately that's not really a valid comparison at all. Browsers all try to stay compatible with each other. OSes do not in any way try to stay compatible with each other. Programming apps for Linux, Mac, and Windows requires entirely different code. Programming for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Safari do not (or at least not supposed to unless you're used new APIs or edge cases) You can't currently make an alternative browser in the same sense that you can make an alternative OS. An alternative browser would not use HTML, CSS, JavaScript. It would use something else in the same way that MacOS/iOS push ObjectiveC and Swift where as Android pushes Java/Kotlin and other OSes other languages and each OS as it's own UI API
- gronne 8y ago
  I disagree. MS has recently pushed the “linux on top op windows” solution. Making windows programs run on linux has attracted plenty of ressources (commercial and unpaid): open framework clones, wine, steam play vm’s. The same can be said for osx. iOS and Android not so much though.
- rincebrain 8y ago
  As people have observed historically, browsers have competing incentives - to support the most use cases, and to be better in some way than their competitors. Supporting the most use cases is where you get the compatibility from. Being better than your competitors is where you get browser-exclusive functionality from. If something (e.g. ActiveX, Java, Shockwave, Flash, some new CSS that's not standardized yet, a new feature on some top 500 website, ...) works in your browser, that's a win for both goals - and if it works only/best in your browser, that's also a win. Monocultures can be toxic in part because the disincentives to adding lockin (e.g. losing users and other negative feedback sources) get weaker/less likely as one participant becomes more dominant. I'm old enough to remember the fun with "works only/best in IE/Netscape/...", and Microsoft's old Embrace/Extend/Extinguish policies. While I do not have any reason to believe any of the parties involved in browser development would behave pathologically, history suggests that monopolies in any space tend to eventually become pathological. (I work for Google, not on anything browser related, all opinions above are mine personally, etc.)

virtualwhys 8y ago

OT, but I was and am still pretty steamed that Mozilla spearheaded the effort to deprecate WebSQL back in 2010 [1], while providing a replacement that left many disappointed [2] (see comments in both threads universally deriding the decision). The idea was that javascript libraries would be created that would replicate SQLite in the browser (albeit horribly inefficiently with terrible APIs compared to shipped-with-the-browser native C implementation that is SQLite). Anyway, now that Firefox has become less relevant than ever with Microsoft's adoption of Chrome, I wonder if there's any chance that WebSQL will live on despite its deprecation? After all, it's still available in Chrome and Safari, which dominate the browser market. IndexedDB is fine if NoSQL is how you store your data, but an absolute PoS if you want to work efficiently in a relational model with joins, grouping, etc. Such a shame, every server-side language under the sun compiles to javascript now; imagine being able to share SQL statements between client and server; being able to aggregate data, count & sum with reckless abandon. Instead we have to do it all by hand in javascript, such a step backward [3] /rant [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9978540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9978540 [1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-and-the-road-to-indexeddb/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis... [2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/comparing-indexeddb-and-webdatabase/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/comparing-indexeddb-and-we...

swsieber 8y ago
You couldn't share SQL statements between the backend and the frontend. It's for the same reason it was shot down: SQL implementations are incredibly varied.
- virtualwhys 8y ago
  Limited to a certain subset you most definitely could use the same statements (obviously not CTEs and the like). Ideally you'd have a translation layer, so instead of writing error prone string-y SQL, you'd have a type safe DSL in the vein of LINQ to SQL, Esqueleto, Slick, Quill, etc. that generates approriate SQL based on the target driver. That way you write the same query once, with the same model, and dispense with the inefficient square wheel that is IndexedDB + javascript.

lwansbrough 8y ago

If there’s anyone at MS reading this, I’ll once again implore you to push for Edge to be open sourced, as it should have been before the initial announcement was made.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

fastball 8y ago

People keep telling me that Firefox is super fast! But it's slower than Chrome and my laptop runs hotter. Sorry.

Annatar 8y ago

I grew up using NetScape under CDE on Solaris and IRIX. I ran a LiveWire (NetScape) web server professionally when the webmaster job was something root did and was an honorable thing to do. Even with all of that, I boycott Firefox because they no longer support Solaris or his descendent, illumos, and because the Firefox 48 ESR I do run on there crashes all the time, and because Mozilla is extremely aggressively pushing Rust, which is an overcomplicated piece of crap. So long as all these conditions are true, Firefox can go to hell for all I care, and I sure won't be recommending it to anyone. May Chrome and Safari keep winning. Thanks Mozilla for being sellouts and good luck.

protomikron 8y ago

What I would like to see is some kind of "white-list" browser - I think it's our best chance to keep an ad-free environment. Maybe it is a bad idea in general to allow a remote page write pixels to your screen: images, videos, text and now applications It is nice that the web is open (at least reasonably), but maybe raw JS, HTML and CSS is too general? The most valuable webpages have simple designs and are liked because of their content, like - wikipedia.org - HN - stackoverflow.com - maps.google.com - ... These pages could implement - Knowledge-Base - Topic-Comment-Community - Answer-Response-Community - Interactive-GIS specifications, that obviously do not exist. E.g. if a newspaper implements a hypothetical "Newspaper-Specification" it would have to provide original, sourced content containing text, images, audio and video via some API (which is often already the case when single page apps fetch content client-side via e.g. JSON). There would be no visual difference between reading "The Guardian" vs. "USA Today" or browsing "OpenStreetMap" vs "Google Maps" as content would be rendered on the client.

krapp 8y ago
>Maybe it is a bad idea in general to allow a remote page write pixels to your screen: images, videos, text and now applications Computers have been doing this since the 60s, at least, in some form or another. I don't think you want to live in a world where the very idea of networks is considered harmful. Where all of the software you consume has to be loaded from physical media and the internet and any network connected device just doesn't exist. You couldn't even have cellphones. We don't need a "whitelist" browser - you simply choosing not to visit sites you don't want to visit is already a sufficient whitelist. Having "specifications" that websites and authors would have to enforce based on content would make the web less free. Websites are software. Software authors have the right and the freedom to write whatever they like, any way they choose, up to and including the UI. The Guardian being able to make their own decisions about how to implement the web versions of a "newspaper" - including design choices which might differentiate them from USA Today, is part and parcel the same sort of freedom that any author of any work, software, literary, music, what have you, enjoys. That HTML, CSS and JS don't step over the line from describing content to making editorial decisions about content is a feature, not a bug.

zimbatm 8y ago

Why? Because the W3C is a factory the never stops churning out specs. It's quite telling that even Microsoft was not able to keep-up with the complexity and decided to piggy-back on the biggest investor. If we want less mono-culture, the first thing to do is to bring the complexity down to something manageable.

bprasanna 8y ago

Well, Microsoft opting for Chromium will be a big win for Google. As Google has a strong hold on Android mobile user base, for many non-technical users what comes by default is the first browser (may be best browser). Google taps that privilege/monopoly/advantage to their use. Those who comfortably use Chrome in mobile device will obviously opt for Chrome in desktop as well. Because it simplifies their mental model of browser comfort. Microsoft might have done the same thing for decades, but it has been trying to come out of that image for the past of couple of years. IMHO Microsoft is no more an evil. I won't blame Google if it plays fair with respect to its Chrome browser in Android. In many Android phones we can't uninstall Chrome. If we use Chrome actively in Android, it pushes lot of notifications (they will say serving the user with relevant content, but to me its a ad/handle which intend to make me see pages where ads are again controlled by Google). Even in Desktop when i open Google's any of the services using browser other than Chrome, at least in the third world where i live, it suggests me to "Switch to Chrome". Nobody is forcing anyone. But it is very essential to tell the world that there is something better available. The recent better one from Firefox: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.rocket&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.ro...

onion2k 8y ago
Those who comfortably use Chrome in mobile device will obviously opt for Chrome in desktop as well. You make it sound like users know, or care, which browser they're using. Most of them don't. Most don't actually know there's more than one browser. They use the stock browser that's installed on their device, and they don't switch unless there's a reason to - eg their favourite websites and apps don't work. In the case of Edge with EdgeHTML there are popular sites that don't work properly, and that means users seek out Chrome instead. Microsoft switching to Chromium will mean those users continue to use Edge because "it works properly" for the user regardless of the actual problem being the developers of those sites failing to write cross-browser compatible code. I'm a bit sad that the choice and market for browsers is shrinking, and I think it's going to slow progress in web tech, but let's be honest here - the blame for Microsoft's very sensible business decision lies with web developers who fail to test their code in more browsers than just Chrome. If web developers did a better job there'd still be business value in developing a competing browser engine.

almostarockstar 8y ago

How many billionaires have made their fortunes through the web? Surely some of them care enough about preventing a monoculture to foot the bill for an independent browser development team - if not for profit, for the greater good. Consider it philanthropy.

cyborgx7 8y ago
>an independent browser development team So Mozilla?
- almostarockstar 8y ago
  Well maybe another Mozilla? The point is the ecosystem needs variety and there are people who could afford to create that.

mclightning 8y ago

Author starts by saying NDAs are useless, and he keeps secrets better without them... Then in the right next sentence, he shares how he learnt about a big secret from a friend at Microsoft without any NDA!

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

jlpicard 8y ago

Didn't sign any NDA. Waited a week post-announcement to talk about it.

voryzen 8y ago

The biggest mistake we've ever made is not realising that Google used to be called.. SkyNet. Just my two cents

romeisendcoming 8y ago

Google is another evil empire. Amen.

holtalanm 8y ago

oh look, another fear-mongering firefox ad masquerading as an article that actually warrants reading. no thanks, I'll pass. edit: I'll add that I am pretty tired of reading these "Microsoft Edge is dead, long live Firefox" articles like this, where they start with a title that sounds like it is worth reading and in the end it boils down to "Pleeeeeease use Firefox, its betterrrrrr, pleeeeeease!." They are opinion pieces and provide NOTHING of substance or value other than pandering to the current base of firefox users. They won't convince me to switch, and probably never will (in fact, they make me dislike firefox even more than I already do).

ksec 8y ago

I know there is a lot of hate for Safari on HN ( Still don't understand why ) But I wish Microsoft worked with Apple and bring Safari / WebKit to Windows, and invest in Webkit instead. ( Blink and Webkit are now pretty much different Engine )

scarface74 8y ago
In the distant past, Safari was officially available for Windows.

ecthiender 8y ago

I think Microsoft just wants to give up on the browser market/share/innovation (for business reasons ofcourse </snark>). They just needed to have a default browser installed on their system and hence just wants to rebrand chromium and drop it in their default installation. If they really cared, they could have adopted Gecko/Spidermonkey atleast.

mastrsushi 8y ago

Firefox and Gecko are going to die because the vast majority of people do not care about layout engine monopolies. Corporations rely on the vast majority of people. What will probably happen is as Mozilla goes bankrupt, they will spin off Firefox's development structure to a more community driven approach. Then, Firefox and all of its derivatives will continue to live in Linux/Unix Open Source world. Let's face it, political software issues are developer centric. From there, Firefox will end up like Galeon and Gnome Web, slowly losing relevance, lacking modern browser features, and lose development support over the years because a layout engine is very complex and MUST have a corporate backing. Microsoft proved this themselves with their decision. All of these articles love to fear their listeners by warning them of another IE monopoly situation. None of them seem to mention why monopolistic browsers are an issue, or even how history will repeat in this crazy modern internet world. The only point anyone's made is that security vulnerabilities will span across all browsers. With that logic we might as well write all programs in different languages, and use 20 different operating systems. Obviously that isn't efficient and neither is wasting development money on yet another layout engine. But hey, it's fun to worry about petty issues, so I'll keep reading these blogs.