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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.

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.