14 ms·

Why we Forked Firefox and Not Chromium

483 points by nikbackm 7y ago

tyingq 7y ago
Does Google still provide a "significantly worse" experience if the user agent is Firefox? I recall that was true on Gmail and Youtube for a while.
- tsukurimashou 7y ago
  they did it on purpose, I don't see why they would stop doing this, it basically means less money for them, not that I agree it should be a thing.
- Wheaties466 7y ago
  I just downloaded their browser 10 min ago and I can't really tell any difference in search. Haven't really tried any other g products yet. They claim to be open and most things are opt in but im not sure why their "human web" is not opt in.
  - big_chungus 7y ago
    Have you tried a re captcha yet? They're awful on firefox (read: non-chrome), especially if not signed into a google account.
    - true_religion 7y ago
      Is there any good alternative to recaptcha?
      - ben509 7y ago
        That question has come up a few times, lots of good discussion in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058697 And the back and forth on whether you really need it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20158386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20158386
    - bifrost 7y ago
      Recaptcha works fine on FF...
      - vorticalbox 7y ago
        Sure it works be Google will make ff do more steps and even load the images slower on the "click till non match" ones
      - jcranmer 7y ago
        It's not that it doesn't work, it's that there is an anecdotal bias towards making you do more work to prove you're not a robot. I don't use Chrome, so I can't tell how bad it is on a comparative basis, but (especially in private browsing mode) Recaptcha can make you cycle through a half-dozen different images looking for the traffic lights or what not before letting you continue.
        __jal 7y ago
        > Recaptcha can make you cycle through a half-dozen different images That's when I just leave. If I'm feeling nice, I'll drop the site owner a note explaining why, but usually not. Nobody's site is that great.
        boring_twenties 7y ago
        I had to stop ordering from Newegg because they wanted me to recaptcha just to log into my account. It seems to be fixed now, though.
    - Wheaties466 7y ago
      This seemed to work well. I can't find a better test. https://patrickhlauke.github.io/recaptcha/ https://patrickhlauke.github.io/recaptcha/
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- whelming_wave 7y ago
  It is very different on mobile. I just took some screenshots of Google search on Firefox on Android before and after enabling an addon that sets my user agent to Chrome on Google sites: https://imgur.com/a/P9zDn7B https://imgur.com/a/P9zDn7B
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Oh wow. That seems very deliberate.
    - notatoad 7y ago
      It looks deliberate but it's also not clear to me which is the "better" version. It doesn't look like one has more features or is obviously newer or better. (i personally like the second screenshot better, but i think the rounded boxes in the first screenshot is actually google's latest design fad) You can sometimes trigger similar changes in appearance to the search results view by switching to incognito or clearing your cookies - Google often A/B tests or performs slow rollouts of changes like this, a difference in appearance could just be because a new user agent string got you placed into a different release group.
      - tyingq 7y ago
        I was reacting to "just today's stock price" versus "today's price plus some history".
        bagacrap 7y ago
        In the first screenshot you see third party news stories above the fold and in the second story there's nothing but knowledge cards above the fold. Both are presenting relevant information (and no ads) but which format is preferable? My guess is that certain knowledge cards (like stock price history) are subtly less functional on FF so they are omitted.
        emn13 7y ago
- gsnedders 7y ago
  Depends on the Google property and depends on device type (there's many more differences between Chrome on Android v. Firefox on Android compared with Chrome on Windows v. Firefox on Windows). Mobile really is still diabolical.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  There's still breakage in small areas: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601831 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601831 https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25270 https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25270 IIRC though the main issue with YouTube was a slow polyfill library which has been fixed since they updated to the standardized version of Shadow DOM.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Ah, that's good news then. I am somewhat worried about the Chrome monoculture with Edge going that direction and Chrome marketshare continuing to grow.
    - Dolores12 7y ago
      Vivaldi reports itself as Chrome now, making Chrome numbers even higher
    - The_rationalist 7y ago
      Firefox will eventually die in 5 to 10 years if the marketshare trend continue. Firefox for Android already has a negligible number of users and as a consequence webmasters stopped to worry about making their mobile websites compatible with the limitations of Firefox.
      - staplers 7y ago
        I would reckon a lot of those statistics are based on analytics rather than polling. In which case Firefox blocks a lot of trackers so naturally their marketshare appears less than reality.
        The_rationalist 7y ago
        Adblock plus + uBlock == 6.5 millions of users for Firefox. While this is not nothing, this should be a few 0.x % of global browser marketshare
- mauvehaus 7y ago
  I switched to the basic HTML version of gmail a year or so ago for that reason. If you don't need the advanced features, I highly recommend it, especially for occasional use. I do most of my email through Thunderbird.
- StuffedParrot 7y ago
  It’s certainly clear they haven’t spent an oz of effort improving it outside of chrome, that’s for sure.
- alpaca128 7y ago
  Considering YouTube(comments, notifications etc.) has had bugs constantly in recent years I don't think using one browser or the other would make a big difference on that site. Even after more than one year you can still not make a one-line space between paragraphs in YT comments without editing the comment afterwards because YT will always insert additional empty lines for whatever reason.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    "don't think using one browser or the other would make a big difference on that site[YouTube]" It did though. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826191
- bifrost 7y ago
  Every time I retry chrome/chromium I switch back to FF. Its just not worth it, turning off all the background pinging home/etc is really annoying too. I ended up DNS blackholing a bunch of stuff. I use user agent switcher sometimes to poke around on sites, YT is totally broken and I ditched using google search about a decade ago due to their policies.
  - vorticalbox 7y ago
    I'm the same I used brave for a while and fully support what they are doing just wish they had forked from firefox so it would actually have a functional sync rather than the pipeline rubbish they have current
- bonestamp2 7y ago
  I use Chrome and Firefox and I've never noticed a problem with youtube. That said, I love how firefox actually prevents youtube from autoplaying (not even the youtube autoplay switch can seem to do that 100% of the time).
  - wolco 7y ago
    Have you tried vimeo? Doesn't work on firefox.
    - aidenn0 7y ago
      I've been using firefox for years and never had a problem with vimeo; is the vimeo breakage recent? [edit] picked the first video from "staff picks" on vimeo and it worked fine in FF: https://vimeo.com/378423659 https://vimeo.com/378423659
    - blacksmith_tb 7y ago
      Hmm, I just got a Vimeo video to play in FF Dev, but I had to solve two recaptchas to get there (probably because I am coming from my VPN endpoint, not just because they want to torture FF users).
    - catalogia 7y ago
      [right click] -> Open With -> mpv https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/ (If your desktop environment supports drag and drop, you can also drag and drop vimeo or youtube URLs into mpv.)
- mhd 7y ago
  If I remember correctly, the big Youtube issue were with the "recent" redesign that involed a lot of web components code using the Polymer Material Design framework. And Firefox just wasn't as performant with that (polyfills required?) I've always found the old design better (just like reddit), so I disabled polymer for YT and got both more performance and better UX out of that deal. To try it out, just append &disable_polymer=1 after any YT video url.
- abaga129 7y ago
  play.google.com/books can't be used from Firefox at all last time I checked.
mikece 7y ago
"Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does—a majority of Firefox “application” code is written in JavaScript." While it makes hacking on Firefox easier, isn't this a liability for performance? Is this, perhaps, partly why WASM is such a focus for Mozilla?
- Ygg2 7y ago
  Yeah, but when you look at it what is the alternative? To write the same thing as JS in Chromium, right?
- jraph 7y ago
  My intuition is that most of the code for which performance really matters is written in Rust and C++ (the web engine, Gecko, and the Javascript engine, SpiderMonkey).
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    I personally consider UI responsiveness to also be something that really matters. It's great that part of the UI handling code is fast, but that doesn't mean all of it shouldn't be fast.
    - kevingadd 7y ago
      When it comes to responsiveness, raw compute throughput (the thing you get most out of say, vectorized C++) is not especially important. You care about latency and JavaScript can provide good latency if it's been JITted. If part of your flow is already in JavaScript, porting more to JS can actually improve latency because it cuts native<->JS transitions out of the call stack, so you're running less code in total even if the code you run is a bit slower (due to being JS instead of C++). In general Chrome and Firefox have both moved a lot of stuff from C++ to JS (this is referred to as 'self-hosting') because it allows inlining across more calls and eliminates native<->JS transition overhead.
- paulintrognon 7y ago
  Why is this question downvoted? I thought that was an interesting question.
tommywiseausmom 7y ago
but why???
rasvj 7y ago
I urge the mods to take a look at how often the "0x65.dev" domain, which is just Cliqz, ends up on the front page. Of special note (and I bow to them) is how they've used such a domain name to spam their services. If they had used "cliqz.com" or whatever their actual domain is, fewer people would click, but when I see this I'm inclined to think this is some personal blog of a fellow software developer, and not blogspam of a shady ads company.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- kick 7y ago
  If you have concerns with Hacker News moderation, please send them a message at hn@ycombinator.com. They'll see it faster, and it's better than polluting the site with accusations. Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Speaking as a person who's done as much, and definitely is no fan of Cliqz: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21724844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21724844 They're really responsive, and they're very proactive about these things.
  - thedaemon 7y ago
    One must know what "astroturfing, shiling, brigading" are to follow that rule. As such, astroturfing is the labor in putting fake grass down. Shiling, I'm guessing is giving the money item, a shilling, to someone. Brigading, I guess is starting a brigade. My point is that making up, or using new words(not in the dictionary) and using them in a guideline without defining them, nullifies the rule to most of the populous. Also, dang is super responsive to HN comments that he finds incongruent with the rules. He'll be here shortly to chastise OP and me.
    - kick 7y ago
evmar 7y ago
I have liked the other posts in this series, but I find the reasoning in this one confusing. (Disclaimer: Perhaps it is because I am familiar with the Chrome code.) In the context of a browser fork, these statements make no sense: "Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does [...] Chromium on the other hand does not expose certain areas that are sensitive to Google’s business." In the context of changing the source code, how are some APIs "open" and others not? How can the Chrome code possibly "protect" (their words) the address bar from modification relative to any other code? I think what they're instead talking about is the available extension APIs from JavaScript maybe? But in that case, why call the project a fork, instead of a browser extension or something?
- zamadatix 7y ago
  The statements make a lot more sense if you put back the parts you excluded: "Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does—a majority of Firefox “application” code is written in JavaScript. Chromium on the other hand does not expose certain areas that are sensitive to Google’s business. The most notable example is the address bar (where Cliqz search lives). Google has no interest in making it easy for others to take control of the address bar; the flow to the default search engine (Google) is protected. Of course one could create new APIs, but that would imply creating them on top of the source-code. This is not a big issue, we have already created a prototype, but then there is the problem of maintaining it." For the question of "why not call it a browser extension or something" because "browser extension" already means something completely different. It's also a bit wonky to think choice of language should decide if you call something a fork or not in the first place, doubly so considering significant portions of the browser are already written in that language.
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    I still don't know what that means. I run chromium. It has an address bar. I can change the search engine.
    - Retric 7y ago
      It means you can change how the address bar behaves in a complex fashion without changing the rest of the browser’s code. Suppose you wanted a deeper change like it to automatically add .com .org etc to the address entered as long as that’s not a phishing website. Now you needed to maintain that patch going forward and reapply it to every new version of the base browser. That’s much safer if the address bar’s code is isolated from the rest of the browser.
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
I don't want to read anything about Cliqz and their shitty products
- jasonvorhe 7y ago
  Then don't. It's really that easy.
sproketboy 7y ago
Anyone using Cliqz? How is it?
yellowapple 7y ago
The unstated motivating factor here is that Mozilla made a minority investment in Cliqz back in 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History
- slipheen 7y ago
  Isn't this article about stuff that happened in 2015 though? It seems like the investment followed from using FF, not the otherway around.
djsumdog 7y ago
> EdgeHTML Why doesn't Microsoft open source their engine if they're not using it any more? It can't possibly still have any of the NSCA code in it. Microsoft is still a scumbag, claiming to support open source, releasing some of their middle-wear and buying GitHub, yet refusing to release something that could actually make our web community more diverse.
- rcfox 7y ago
  One argument I could think of is that it can take a long time for typical users to upgrade their browsers. If they've stopped development on the old version, then open sourcing it could help people find vulnerabilities that will never be addressed.
- babypuncher 7y ago
  They are abandoning it outright. I'm not sure what good open sourcing a failed browser renderer would accomplish. Between Gecko, Webkit, Blink, KHTML, and others, there are already plenty of FOSS options out there.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    > Between Gecko, Webkit, Blink, KHTML That's kinda just two browser engines. Blink is a fork of WebKit, and WebKit is a fork of KHTML. Though I'm partial to the argument that provided the main options are at least FOSS, diversity of implementations is of minimal concern.
  - t0astbread 7y ago
    Are there? I've only seen the major ones you mentioned and Mozilla's Servo which look remotely fit for the modern web. And of those, only WebKit is _really_ easily embeddable.
- sedatk 7y ago
  Open sourcing huge code bases is not straightforward. Some of the code could be licensed from other parties who Microsoft needs to bring together and convince on the effort. The code needs audit for any potential legal risks. It's not like "hey I'm just gonna put it on GitHub". It's a tremendous investment.
jaggirs 7y ago
I never heard of Clikz, so I checked out their website, and their mayor sales pitch seems to be that it is european? I mean, as an european I suppose I would rather use european products, but I'm not going to use a different search engine just because of that. (Just talking about the sales pitch here, I haven't used it so I don't know if it offers anything more)

483 points by nikbackm 7y ago

Does Google still provide a "significantly worse" experience if the user agent is Firefox? I recall that was true on Gmail and Youtube for a while.

tsukurimashou 7y ago
they did it on purpose, I don't see why they would stop doing this, it basically means less money for them, not that I agree it should be a thing.
Wheaties466 7y ago
I just downloaded their browser 10 min ago and I can't really tell any difference in search. Haven't really tried any other g products yet. They claim to be open and most things are opt in but im not sure why their "human web" is not opt in.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  Have you tried a re captcha yet? They're awful on firefox (read: non-chrome), especially if not signed into a google account.
  - true_religion 7y ago
    Is there any good alternative to recaptcha?
    - ben509 7y ago
      That question has come up a few times, lots of good discussion in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058697 And the back and forth on whether you really need it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20158386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20158386
  - bifrost 7y ago
    Recaptcha works fine on FF...
    - vorticalbox 7y ago
      Sure it works be Google will make ff do more steps and even load the images slower on the "click till non match" ones
    - jcranmer 7y ago
      It's not that it doesn't work, it's that there is an anecdotal bias towards making you do more work to prove you're not a robot. I don't use Chrome, so I can't tell how bad it is on a comparative basis, but (especially in private browsing mode) Recaptcha can make you cycle through a half-dozen different images looking for the traffic lights or what not before letting you continue.
      - __jal 7y ago
        > Recaptcha can make you cycle through a half-dozen different images That's when I just leave. If I'm feeling nice, I'll drop the site owner a note explaining why, but usually not. Nobody's site is that great.
        boring_twenties 7y ago
        I had to stop ordering from Newegg because they wanted me to recaptcha just to log into my account. It seems to be fixed now, though.
  - Wheaties466 7y ago
    This seemed to work well. I can't find a better test. https://patrickhlauke.github.io/recaptcha/ https://patrickhlauke.github.io/recaptcha/
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
whelming_wave 7y ago
It is very different on mobile. I just took some screenshots of Google search on Firefox on Android before and after enabling an addon that sets my user agent to Chrome on Google sites: https://imgur.com/a/P9zDn7B https://imgur.com/a/P9zDn7B
- tyingq 7y ago
  Oh wow. That seems very deliberate.
  - notatoad 7y ago
    It looks deliberate but it's also not clear to me which is the "better" version. It doesn't look like one has more features or is obviously newer or better. (i personally like the second screenshot better, but i think the rounded boxes in the first screenshot is actually google's latest design fad) You can sometimes trigger similar changes in appearance to the search results view by switching to incognito or clearing your cookies - Google often A/B tests or performs slow rollouts of changes like this, a difference in appearance could just be because a new user agent string got you placed into a different release group.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      I was reacting to "just today's stock price" versus "today's price plus some history".
      - bagacrap 7y ago
        In the first screenshot you see third party news stories above the fold and in the second story there's nothing but knowledge cards above the fold. Both are presenting relevant information (and no ads) but which format is preferable? My guess is that certain knowledge cards (like stock price history) are subtly less functional on FF so they are omitted.
        emn13 7y ago
gsnedders 7y ago
Depends on the Google property and depends on device type (there's many more differences between Chrome on Android v. Firefox on Android compared with Chrome on Windows v. Firefox on Windows). Mobile really is still diabolical.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
There's still breakage in small areas: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601831 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601831 https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25270 https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/25270 IIRC though the main issue with YouTube was a slow polyfill library which has been fixed since they updated to the standardized version of Shadow DOM.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Ah, that's good news then. I am somewhat worried about the Chrome monoculture with Edge going that direction and Chrome marketshare continuing to grow.
  - Dolores12 7y ago
    Vivaldi reports itself as Chrome now, making Chrome numbers even higher
  - The_rationalist 7y ago
    Firefox will eventually die in 5 to 10 years if the marketshare trend continue. Firefox for Android already has a negligible number of users and as a consequence webmasters stopped to worry about making their mobile websites compatible with the limitations of Firefox.
    - staplers 7y ago
      I would reckon a lot of those statistics are based on analytics rather than polling. In which case Firefox blocks a lot of trackers so naturally their marketshare appears less than reality.
      - The_rationalist 7y ago
        Adblock plus + uBlock == 6.5 millions of users for Firefox. While this is not nothing, this should be a few 0.x % of global browser marketshare
mauvehaus 7y ago
I switched to the basic HTML version of gmail a year or so ago for that reason. If you don't need the advanced features, I highly recommend it, especially for occasional use. I do most of my email through Thunderbird.
StuffedParrot 7y ago
It’s certainly clear they haven’t spent an oz of effort improving it outside of chrome, that’s for sure.
alpaca128 7y ago
Considering YouTube(comments, notifications etc.) has had bugs constantly in recent years I don't think using one browser or the other would make a big difference on that site. Even after more than one year you can still not make a one-line space between paragraphs in YT comments without editing the comment afterwards because YT will always insert additional empty lines for whatever reason.
- tyingq 7y ago
  "don't think using one browser or the other would make a big difference on that site[YouTube]" It did though. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826191
bifrost 7y ago
Every time I retry chrome/chromium I switch back to FF. Its just not worth it, turning off all the background pinging home/etc is really annoying too. I ended up DNS blackholing a bunch of stuff. I use user agent switcher sometimes to poke around on sites, YT is totally broken and I ditched using google search about a decade ago due to their policies.
- vorticalbox 7y ago
  I'm the same I used brave for a while and fully support what they are doing just wish they had forked from firefox so it would actually have a functional sync rather than the pipeline rubbish they have current
bonestamp2 7y ago
I use Chrome and Firefox and I've never noticed a problem with youtube. That said, I love how firefox actually prevents youtube from autoplaying (not even the youtube autoplay switch can seem to do that 100% of the time).
- wolco 7y ago
  Have you tried vimeo? Doesn't work on firefox.
  - aidenn0 7y ago
    I've been using firefox for years and never had a problem with vimeo; is the vimeo breakage recent? [edit] picked the first video from "staff picks" on vimeo and it worked fine in FF: https://vimeo.com/378423659 https://vimeo.com/378423659
  - blacksmith_tb 7y ago
    Hmm, I just got a Vimeo video to play in FF Dev, but I had to solve two recaptchas to get there (probably because I am coming from my VPN endpoint, not just because they want to torture FF users).
  - catalogia 7y ago
    [right click] -> Open With -> mpv https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/ (If your desktop environment supports drag and drop, you can also drag and drop vimeo or youtube URLs into mpv.)
mhd 7y ago
If I remember correctly, the big Youtube issue were with the "recent" redesign that involed a lot of web components code using the Polymer Material Design framework. And Firefox just wasn't as performant with that (polyfills required?) I've always found the old design better (just like reddit), so I disabled polymer for YT and got both more performance and better UX out of that deal. To try it out, just append &disable_polymer=1 after any YT video url.
abaga129 7y ago
play.google.com/books can't be used from Firefox at all last time I checked.

mikece 7y ago

"Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does—a majority of Firefox “application” code is written in JavaScript." While it makes hacking on Firefox easier, isn't this a liability for performance? Is this, perhaps, partly why WASM is such a focus for Mozilla?

Ygg2 7y ago
Yeah, but when you look at it what is the alternative? To write the same thing as JS in Chromium, right?
jraph 7y ago
My intuition is that most of the code for which performance really matters is written in Rust and C++ (the web engine, Gecko, and the Javascript engine, SpiderMonkey).
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  I personally consider UI responsiveness to also be something that really matters. It's great that part of the UI handling code is fast, but that doesn't mean all of it shouldn't be fast.
  - kevingadd 7y ago
    When it comes to responsiveness, raw compute throughput (the thing you get most out of say, vectorized C++) is not especially important. You care about latency and JavaScript can provide good latency if it's been JITted. If part of your flow is already in JavaScript, porting more to JS can actually improve latency because it cuts native<->JS transitions out of the call stack, so you're running less code in total even if the code you run is a bit slower (due to being JS instead of C++). In general Chrome and Firefox have both moved a lot of stuff from C++ to JS (this is referred to as 'self-hosting') because it allows inlining across more calls and eliminates native<->JS transition overhead.
paulintrognon 7y ago
Why is this question downvoted? I thought that was an interesting question.

tommywiseausmom 7y ago

but why???

rasvj 7y ago

I urge the mods to take a look at how often the "0x65.dev" domain, which is just Cliqz, ends up on the front page. Of special note (and I bow to them) is how they've used such a domain name to spam their services. If they had used "cliqz.com" or whatever their actual domain is, fewer people would click, but when I see this I'm inclined to think this is some personal blog of a fellow software developer, and not blogspam of a shady ads company.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kick 7y ago
If you have concerns with Hacker News moderation, please send them a message at hn@ycombinator.com. They'll see it faster, and it's better than polluting the site with accusations. Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Speaking as a person who's done as much, and definitely is no fan of Cliqz: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21724844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21724844 They're really responsive, and they're very proactive about these things.
- thedaemon 7y ago
  One must know what "astroturfing, shiling, brigading" are to follow that rule. As such, astroturfing is the labor in putting fake grass down. Shiling, I'm guessing is giving the money item, a shilling, to someone. Brigading, I guess is starting a brigade. My point is that making up, or using new words(not in the dictionary) and using them in a guideline without defining them, nullifies the rule to most of the populous. Also, dang is super responsive to HN comments that he finds incongruent with the rules. He'll be here shortly to chastise OP and me.
  - kick 7y ago

evmar 7y ago

I have liked the other posts in this series, but I find the reasoning in this one confusing. (Disclaimer: Perhaps it is because I am familiar with the Chrome code.) In the context of a browser fork, these statements make no sense: "Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does [...] Chromium on the other hand does not expose certain areas that are sensitive to Google’s business." In the context of changing the source code, how are some APIs "open" and others not? How can the Chrome code possibly "protect" (their words) the address bar from modification relative to any other code? I think what they're instead talking about is the available extension APIs from JavaScript maybe? But in that case, why call the project a fork, instead of a browser extension or something?

zamadatix 7y ago
The statements make a lot more sense if you put back the parts you excluded: "Firefox has open APIs for everything the browser does—a majority of Firefox “application” code is written in JavaScript. Chromium on the other hand does not expose certain areas that are sensitive to Google’s business. The most notable example is the address bar (where Cliqz search lives). Google has no interest in making it easy for others to take control of the address bar; the flow to the default search engine (Google) is protected. Of course one could create new APIs, but that would imply creating them on top of the source-code. This is not a big issue, we have already created a prototype, but then there is the problem of maintaining it." For the question of "why not call it a browser extension or something" because "browser extension" already means something completely different. It's also a bit wonky to think choice of language should decide if you call something a fork or not in the first place, doubly so considering significant portions of the browser are already written in that language.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  I still don't know what that means. I run chromium. It has an address bar. I can change the search engine.
  - Retric 7y ago
    It means you can change how the address bar behaves in a complex fashion without changing the rest of the browser’s code. Suppose you wanted a deeper change like it to automatically add .com .org etc to the address entered as long as that’s not a phishing website. Now you needed to maintain that patch going forward and reapply it to every new version of the base browser. That’s much safer if the address bar’s code is isolated from the rest of the browser.

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

I don't want to read anything about Cliqz and their shitty products

jasonvorhe 7y ago
Then don't. It's really that easy.

sproketboy 7y ago

Anyone using Cliqz? How is it?

yellowapple 7y ago

The unstated motivating factor here is that Mozilla made a minority investment in Cliqz back in 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz#History

slipheen 7y ago
Isn't this article about stuff that happened in 2015 though? It seems like the investment followed from using FF, not the otherway around.

djsumdog 7y ago

> EdgeHTML Why doesn't Microsoft open source their engine if they're not using it any more? It can't possibly still have any of the NSCA code in it. Microsoft is still a scumbag, claiming to support open source, releasing some of their middle-wear and buying GitHub, yet refusing to release something that could actually make our web community more diverse.

rcfox 7y ago
One argument I could think of is that it can take a long time for typical users to upgrade their browsers. If they've stopped development on the old version, then open sourcing it could help people find vulnerabilities that will never be addressed.
babypuncher 7y ago
They are abandoning it outright. I'm not sure what good open sourcing a failed browser renderer would accomplish. Between Gecko, Webkit, Blink, KHTML, and others, there are already plenty of FOSS options out there.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > Between Gecko, Webkit, Blink, KHTML That's kinda just two browser engines. Blink is a fork of WebKit, and WebKit is a fork of KHTML. Though I'm partial to the argument that provided the main options are at least FOSS, diversity of implementations is of minimal concern.
- t0astbread 7y ago
  Are there? I've only seen the major ones you mentioned and Mozilla's Servo which look remotely fit for the modern web. And of those, only WebKit is _really_ easily embeddable.
sedatk 7y ago
Open sourcing huge code bases is not straightforward. Some of the code could be licensed from other parties who Microsoft needs to bring together and convince on the effort. The code needs audit for any potential legal risks. It's not like "hey I'm just gonna put it on GitHub". It's a tremendous investment.

jaggirs 7y ago

I never heard of Clikz, so I checked out their website, and their mayor sales pitch seems to be that it is european? I mean, as an european I suppose I would rather use european products, but I'm not going to use a different search engine just because of that. (Just talking about the sales pitch here, I haven't used it so I don't know if it offers anything more)