6 ms·

I'm still sad they didn't partner with Firefox instead. It would suit the strategy of The New Microsoft very well to ensure competition in the browser market, a

I'm still sad they didn't partner with Firefox instead. It would suit the strategy of The New Microsoft very well to ensure competition in the browser market, and making an Firefox-based Edge plus a Firefox-based Electron clone would've been an amazing way to do that. They've shown competence in embracing, extending, and contributing back to OSS (eg they were instrumental in Nodejs getting to its amazing cross platform support). Plus their browser would be faster.

realusername 8y ago
I don't get it as well, what's the strategy behind that? They just reinforce Google's dominance so one of their main competitor just becomes stronger.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  The license is probably a big reason. Firefox is GPL, so Microsoft wouldn't be able to add any proprietary components to it.
  - l2dy 8y ago
    > Firefox source code is free software, with most of it being released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 2.0. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox, it's released under MPL. But sure it's more restrictive than most code in Chromium.
    - hsivonen 8y ago
      The most restrictive license in both Firefox and Chromium is LGPL. In Firefox, the LGPL bits are carefully walled off in one .so/.dylib/.dll. In Chromium, the most core KHTML bits are LGPL. As for whether there's a lot of MPL or a lot of BSD code probably doesn't have much practical effect for compliance. In order to comply, it's easier to publish all the code than to try to do the minimum for each component on a per-license basis.
- ygra 8y ago
  Chromium has been designed to be embedded in other applications. Gecko, as far as I've heard, is a clusterfuck to get working in anything but Firefox.
  - realusername 8y ago
    There's plenty of community forks of Firefox, if a few devs can maintain a fork on their free time, Microsoft has for sure the resources to deal with it.
    - javagram 8y ago
      I don’t think forks are the issue. MSHTML and EdgeHTML are also used as embedded components in non-browser windows software. (E.g. you can write UWP applications powered by JavaScript and rendering UI using EdgeHTML). Gecko supposedly doesn’t work well for embedding in that context.
  - _ZeD_ 8y ago
    khtml was designed to be embedded. I don't know about webkit/chromium stuff
    - bwat48 8y ago
      I'm not a programmer myself, but it's my understanding that chromium is pretty well suited to being embedded. Just look at how successful chromium has been in this space, stuff like Chromium Embedded framework, Electron, the myriad of chromium based web browsers etc...
  - hsivonen 8y ago
    WebKit was designed to be embedded. Chromium not really despite the CEF and Qt efforts.
sequence7 8y ago
I'm sad too but the reality is Firefox is being slowly smothered by Chrome's ubiquity. Only a tiny minority of Web developers test on anything other than Chrome and mobile safari. Firefox is my favourite browser, I use it every day but I often have to work around bugs in websites caused by this lack of testing. I think Microsoft don't have a choice if they want their browser to be popular it has to just work and the only way that is possible is basically for it to be Chrome.
- tinus_hn 8y ago
  That can change in a heartbeat. It has changed many times before.
  - sequence7 8y ago
    Maybe it could if Google didn't own so much of the web and it's surrounding ecosystem. I'm not aware of any challenger to Chrome in the browser space.
    - stevenjohns 8y ago
      It could change via legislation. The more Google owns, the more it’s opened to potential anti-trust drama.
      - hopler 8y ago
        We already went down that dead end road with Microsoft in the 1990s. What's different today?
      - chmod775 8y ago
        So far only the EU is putting their foot down on that front, leading to mostly localized responses by the likes of Google.
- Gikoskos 8y ago
  > Only a tiny minority of Web developers test on anything other than Chrome and mobile safari I work in a web dev shop and nearly everyone here uses Firefox as their main dev browser. We do run tests on other browsers as well but we mainly develop with Firefox and its tools. Although part of the reason could be that we know most of our customers use it instead of Chrome. Don't ask me why, but if I had to venture I'd guess it's because Firefox is quite popular in my country for some reason.
gnode 8y ago
Not even Mozilla like Gecko though, hence their effort to replace it with Servo, and for the time-being to replace components of Gecko with stable Servo components in Firefox (the Quantum project).
- Vinnl 8y ago
  They're not actively planning to replace Gecko with Servo, but rather to incorporate improvements from Servo into Gecko.
  - lugg 8y ago
    It's a strangler pattern. They're going to replace gecko piece by piece until it's all servo. I'm not sure why people are saying they like or don't like gecko. It's just old tech and they're replacing it from the ground up but doing it in a sustainable way. In the end servo will be dropped and gecko will just be gecko newer version.
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      There are no concrete plans for that either.
      - lugg 8y ago
        Thats literally the point of using a strangler pattern. Concrete plans lead to making hard to change decisions before you need to.
        Vinnl 8y ago
        Well, then there's no way to tell whether they're using the strangler pattern, or simply not replacing Gecko with Servo at all. I find the former to be highly unlikely though, given the amount of work that would entail.
Vinnl 8y ago
They might just have stayed with Trident then. The problem they're solving with this move is developers not testing in Edge, and Firefox is facing that problem more and more as well.
PedroBatista 8y ago
Haha you drank the kool aid didn’t you? :) Ms just adopted a more pragmatic approach to their business model. They are not a charity or the do-gooders their marketing dept says they are.
lowercased 8y ago
I had a chat with an MS guy who had some insight on this issue. There was some internal discussion about it, but there were 2 issues re: firefox which led them against it (and they're somewhat related). Firstly, I'm paraphrasing here, but FF isn't as much a business as it is a religion (re: privacy). You can read a lot in to that, but I understood the gist of what they were getting at. Secondly, somewhat relatedly, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google. MS building on FF could mean Google would reduce their search deal, meaning MS might end up being forced in to increasing their funding for FF to help keep it an entity capable of operating at its current size. Or, FF simply becomes smaller, and MS has tied themselves with a shrinking partner. However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors, and ends up losing share, so why fight that?
- Fnoord 8y ago
  You could argue Google is a religion for some people. Google Chrome is the popular browser. And doesn't #2 apply on Google Chrome as well? > However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors [...] Recently, yes. Because they screwed up their MSIE market dominance with embrace & extend. With which market dominance they put the WWW in a dark age of incompatibility. From which Mozilla and Firefox (and Konqueror, Safari, and Google Chrome) eventually flourished.
  - lowercased 8y ago
    > You could argue Google is a religion for some people It's also concurrently a massively profitable business.
- realusername 8y ago
  > Secondly, somewhat relatedly, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google I don't get that one because Chromium IS Google, it's not even a primary funding, there's just no separation between the two. They just handed the web business directly to their competitors, no matter how they try to spin it. At least with Firefox, MS could still have influenced the web, with Chromium, there's just no way, they are insuring that MS will have no influence whatsoever and Google is even closer to a monopoly.
magicalhippo 8y ago
How easy is it to embed the Firefox core though? I know several projects embedding Chromium, such as Steam for example. Haven't seen anyone doing the same with the Firefox core.
- noisem4ker 8y ago
  Making Gecko embeddable is admittedly not on Mozilla's priority list. Certainly not since they abandoned the idea of XUL. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Usage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Usage Other web browsers using Gecko include Airfox, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox, HP Secure Web Browser, Oxygen and Sylera (for mobile). Other products using Gecko include Nightingale, Instantbird and Google's picture-organization software Picasa (for Linux).
- classichasclass 8y ago
  TenFourFox dev. It's not. Mozilla used to support embedding, and this is what largely powered Camino and K-Meleon back in the day (embedding Gecko within a native widget toolkit), but disabled this in 4.0 due to maintenance concerns in the service of making it a brave new XULRunner world. Virtually all of the remaining Firefox and Mozilla derivatives are still essentially XULRunner applications even though XULRunner itself has gone by the wayside. Also do note that many on the list someone else posted are actually forks. TenFourFox, for example, is a heavily modified Firefox 45; Waterfox, Pale Moon and the UXP project are based on Firefox 52. Even K-Meleon today is XUL-based.
sametmax 8y ago
The New Microsoft is just PR due to the fact they are not the top dog anymore. It's good for us, but it's important to remember that it can change at any moment, or sometimes, that because it's not really part of their core value but just the way they want to look like, they won't make the best decisions according to openness and standards.

realusername 8y ago

I don't get it as well, what's the strategy behind that? They just reinforce Google's dominance so one of their main competitor just becomes stronger.

nicoburns 8y ago
The license is probably a big reason. Firefox is GPL, so Microsoft wouldn't be able to add any proprietary components to it.
- l2dy 8y ago
  > Firefox source code is free software, with most of it being released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 2.0. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox, it's released under MPL. But sure it's more restrictive than most code in Chromium.
  - hsivonen 8y ago
    The most restrictive license in both Firefox and Chromium is LGPL. In Firefox, the LGPL bits are carefully walled off in one .so/.dylib/.dll. In Chromium, the most core KHTML bits are LGPL. As for whether there's a lot of MPL or a lot of BSD code probably doesn't have much practical effect for compliance. In order to comply, it's easier to publish all the code than to try to do the minimum for each component on a per-license basis.
ygra 8y ago
Chromium has been designed to be embedded in other applications. Gecko, as far as I've heard, is a clusterfuck to get working in anything but Firefox.
- realusername 8y ago
  There's plenty of community forks of Firefox, if a few devs can maintain a fork on their free time, Microsoft has for sure the resources to deal with it.
  - javagram 8y ago
    I don’t think forks are the issue. MSHTML and EdgeHTML are also used as embedded components in non-browser windows software. (E.g. you can write UWP applications powered by JavaScript and rendering UI using EdgeHTML). Gecko supposedly doesn’t work well for embedding in that context.
- _ZeD_ 8y ago
  khtml was designed to be embedded. I don't know about webkit/chromium stuff
  - bwat48 8y ago
    I'm not a programmer myself, but it's my understanding that chromium is pretty well suited to being embedded. Just look at how successful chromium has been in this space, stuff like Chromium Embedded framework, Electron, the myriad of chromium based web browsers etc...
- hsivonen 8y ago
  WebKit was designed to be embedded. Chromium not really despite the CEF and Qt efforts.

sequence7 8y ago

I'm sad too but the reality is Firefox is being slowly smothered by Chrome's ubiquity. Only a tiny minority of Web developers test on anything other than Chrome and mobile safari. Firefox is my favourite browser, I use it every day but I often have to work around bugs in websites caused by this lack of testing. I think Microsoft don't have a choice if they want their browser to be popular it has to just work and the only way that is possible is basically for it to be Chrome.

tinus_hn 8y ago
That can change in a heartbeat. It has changed many times before.
- sequence7 8y ago
  Maybe it could if Google didn't own so much of the web and it's surrounding ecosystem. I'm not aware of any challenger to Chrome in the browser space.
  - stevenjohns 8y ago
    It could change via legislation. The more Google owns, the more it’s opened to potential anti-trust drama.
    - hopler 8y ago
      We already went down that dead end road with Microsoft in the 1990s. What's different today?
    - chmod775 8y ago
      So far only the EU is putting their foot down on that front, leading to mostly localized responses by the likes of Google.
Gikoskos 8y ago
> Only a tiny minority of Web developers test on anything other than Chrome and mobile safari I work in a web dev shop and nearly everyone here uses Firefox as their main dev browser. We do run tests on other browsers as well but we mainly develop with Firefox and its tools. Although part of the reason could be that we know most of our customers use it instead of Chrome. Don't ask me why, but if I had to venture I'd guess it's because Firefox is quite popular in my country for some reason.

gnode 8y ago

Not even Mozilla like Gecko though, hence their effort to replace it with Servo, and for the time-being to replace components of Gecko with stable Servo components in Firefox (the Quantum project).

Vinnl 8y ago
They're not actively planning to replace Gecko with Servo, but rather to incorporate improvements from Servo into Gecko.
- lugg 8y ago
  It's a strangler pattern. They're going to replace gecko piece by piece until it's all servo. I'm not sure why people are saying they like or don't like gecko. It's just old tech and they're replacing it from the ground up but doing it in a sustainable way. In the end servo will be dropped and gecko will just be gecko newer version.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    There are no concrete plans for that either.
    - lugg 8y ago
      Thats literally the point of using a strangler pattern. Concrete plans lead to making hard to change decisions before you need to.
      - Vinnl 8y ago
        Well, then there's no way to tell whether they're using the strangler pattern, or simply not replacing Gecko with Servo at all. I find the former to be highly unlikely though, given the amount of work that would entail.

Vinnl 8y ago

They might just have stayed with Trident then. The problem they're solving with this move is developers not testing in Edge, and Firefox is facing that problem more and more as well.

PedroBatista 8y ago

Haha you drank the kool aid didn’t you? :) Ms just adopted a more pragmatic approach to their business model. They are not a charity or the do-gooders their marketing dept says they are.

lowercased 8y ago

I had a chat with an MS guy who had some insight on this issue. There was some internal discussion about it, but there were 2 issues re: firefox which led them against it (and they're somewhat related). Firstly, I'm paraphrasing here, but FF isn't as much a business as it is a religion (re: privacy). You can read a lot in to that, but I understood the gist of what they were getting at. Secondly, somewhat relatedly, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google. MS building on FF could mean Google would reduce their search deal, meaning MS might end up being forced in to increasing their funding for FF to help keep it an entity capable of operating at its current size. Or, FF simply becomes smaller, and MS has tied themselves with a shrinking partner. However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors, and ends up losing share, so why fight that?

Fnoord 8y ago
You could argue Google is a religion for some people. Google Chrome is the popular browser. And doesn't #2 apply on Google Chrome as well? > However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors [...] Recently, yes. Because they screwed up their MSIE market dominance with embrace & extend. With which market dominance they put the WWW in a dark age of incompatibility. From which Mozilla and Firefox (and Konqueror, Safari, and Google Chrome) eventually flourished.
- lowercased 8y ago
  > You could argue Google is a religion for some people It's also concurrently a massively profitable business.
realusername 8y ago
> Secondly, somewhat relatedly, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google I don't get that one because Chromium IS Google, it's not even a primary funding, there's just no separation between the two. They just handed the web business directly to their competitors, no matter how they try to spin it. At least with Firefox, MS could still have influenced the web, with Chromium, there's just no way, they are insuring that MS will have no influence whatsoever and Google is even closer to a monopoly.

magicalhippo 8y ago

How easy is it to embed the Firefox core though? I know several projects embedding Chromium, such as Steam for example. Haven't seen anyone doing the same with the Firefox core.

noisem4ker 8y ago
Making Gecko embeddable is admittedly not on Mozilla's priority list. Certainly not since they abandoned the idea of XUL. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Usage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Usage Other web browsers using Gecko include Airfox, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox, HP Secure Web Browser, Oxygen and Sylera (for mobile). Other products using Gecko include Nightingale, Instantbird and Google's picture-organization software Picasa (for Linux).
classichasclass 8y ago
TenFourFox dev. It's not. Mozilla used to support embedding, and this is what largely powered Camino and K-Meleon back in the day (embedding Gecko within a native widget toolkit), but disabled this in 4.0 due to maintenance concerns in the service of making it a brave new XULRunner world. Virtually all of the remaining Firefox and Mozilla derivatives are still essentially XULRunner applications even though XULRunner itself has gone by the wayside. Also do note that many on the list someone else posted are actually forks. TenFourFox, for example, is a heavily modified Firefox 45; Waterfox, Pale Moon and the UXP project are based on Firefox 52. Even K-Meleon today is XUL-based.

sametmax 8y ago

The New Microsoft is just PR due to the fact they are not the top dog anymore. It's good for us, but it's important to remember that it can change at any moment, or sometimes, that because it's not really part of their core value but just the way they want to look like, they won't make the best decisions according to openness and standards.