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That's hardly fighting Chrome's dominance. The people who Google hired to write Chrome came from Mozilla. Also Mozilla pays its own developers with money that

That's hardly fighting Chrome's dominance. The people who Google hired to write Chrome came from Mozilla. Also Mozilla pays its own developers with money that comes from a deal with Google. The online advertising industry, Google's customer base, is supporting and indirectly controlling both of these browsers. Those "evil" things that Googles does are done to offer services to that customer base. Whatever "fight" you might imagine between browsers is, with respect to end users, illusory. Neither browser can pull the plug on the online ad business, they both depend on it. That is the source of the "evil".

oarsinsync 6y ago
The GP was talking about browser engines, and the hegemony that is Chromium. A third major browser engine is valuable.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  What is the second one?
  - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
    The one Safari uses (WebKit?)
  - ntp85 6y ago
    WebKit, I suppose.
    - frabcus 6y ago
      How different are Blink and WebKit these days? My impression is they share patches enough, that they can't really be counted as different browser engines. But perhaps that has changed?
      - SahAssar 6y ago
        They are very different, it's been seven years of heavy development since forking. For comparison that's longer than the time between apple forking kHTML to make webkit and the the first release of chrome.
        wayneftw 6y ago
        The passage of time alone does not make changes. The question was: What are the differences?
        freediver 6y ago
        Start Safari and Chrome on a mac, open several tabs and observe: - Memory usage - Energy usage Then open https://browserbench.org https://browserbench.org and do the benchmarks. Webkit will dominate Blink (and for that matter Gecko) in all categories.
        SahAssar 6y ago
        The question was "How different are Blink and WebKit these days?" and "But perhaps that has changed?". My answer was "they are different" and implicitly "yes", partially because of the heavy development work that has been done since the fork seven years ago. If you look at the featuresets and when they introduce features I think it's reasonable to conclude they have diverged enough that they can't just pull patches from each other. Also, there was a webkit mailing thread back when they introduced their cut-down version of service-worker that said that most of the code from blink was basically unusable for them because of the differences.
djaychela 6y ago
I don't agree. While mozilla is taking money from Google, their products don't have tracking built in to them the way that Google products do. They make users aware of the choices they are making and the implications of them. They make plenty of functions available that protect users online from Google, Facebook and other bad actors in this area. The fight is not illusory, and while Firefox may depend on advertising for financial reasons (although I'm not sure how much it currently is), it is not fundamental to its existence. If someone came along and replaced that money, they would leave it behind. Google on the other hand, is built solely on its ability to gather information about its users and exploit that as much as possible. The two are not the equivalent that your argument claims.
- MrGilbert 6y ago
  > The fight is not illusory, and while Firefox may depend on advertising for financial reasons (although I'm not sure how much it currently is), it is not fundamental to its existence 95% of Mozilla's 2018 revenue were generated by Royalties [0], of which 91% are generated by search engine providers. That's a whopping $391 million USD - it will be pretty difficult to fill this gap if Google pulls the plug. [0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
  - bad_user 6y ago
    It might be difficult but how is that in any way relevant? Mozilla's behavior is consistent. Except for a few mistakes that were in my opinion minor, they proved trustworthy repeatedly. Also let's get the facts straight... all major browsers today are financed from ads, all of them, including Edge, including Safari, including Brave discussed here, all of them. The ones that aren't financed by ads are simply leaching off the work of others. Of course Brave is a leech while generating revenue from ads too.
    - nailer 6y ago
      Edge is financed by ads? How?
colordrops 6y ago
The original comment wasn't even talking about google or the advertising business. Their point was addressing browser engine heterogeneity.
nine_k 6y ago
All eggs, one basket. What could go wrong? Having an independent, unrelated implementation of the Internet's most popular client software is important.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  No it’s not. That’s just a thing that some people say... but it’s actually not true. There is only one of many things in technology and everybody gets along just fine in those situations.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
> The people who Google hired to write Chrome came from Mozilla By that standard no FAANG is fighting any other FAANG.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  From a user privacy perspective there is not much difference between FAANG. They are all competing for user data. They all want to collect and store it in their data centers. The "significant differences" that some users might think they see are likely a reaction to the lack of viable alternatives. There is no FAANG which is not competing for user data. Similarly, there is no major browser that deliberately lacks the feature set necessary to facilitate that data gathering. From a user privacy perspective, the difference between "major browsers", or FAANG, is not as significant as it is portrayed by many commentators. The major similarities far outweigh the minor differences, and I think Mozilla would agree they are not looking to go in a profoundly different direction than Chrome or other major browser. They seek market share and so they will always match the others' feature set. As other comments in this thread elucidate, all these browsers are funded by advertising. As such, we cannot expect the differences to be significant. If the majority of users are not concerned with things like telemetry, search box queries forwarded to Google, auto-loading resources, complexity, etc., then that is the user base to which Mozilla will cater. The small minority of users who find the status quo unacceptable are not important to Mozilla. Mozilla has enough cash they could prepare a separate, stripped-down bare bones browser in addition to Firefox for those few users who really take privacy seriously who want zero data collection by default. They won't. That is why we see a user going through all this effort to "un-Google" Chromium. It would similarly take substantial effort to "un-Mozilla" Firefox. Both Google and Mozilla gather user data by default. They each phone home early and often. The question is how many users would actually be interested in a radically different browser that, by design, made data collection and serving ads much more difficult. Perhaps that number would grow over time as word spread. We will never know. While this could be an experiment of great interest to some privacy-conscious users it is not an experiment of interest to Mozilla, chasing advert-funded "major browser" market share.
emayljames 6y ago
If Google did not have a dominance in browsers, that would mean they would need Firefox more, and would at least make Google need to play a lot nicer.

oarsinsync 6y ago

The GP was talking about browser engines, and the hegemony that is Chromium. A third major browser engine is valuable.

jay_kyburz 6y ago
What is the second one?
- 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
  The one Safari uses (WebKit?)
- ntp85 6y ago
  WebKit, I suppose.
  - frabcus 6y ago
    How different are Blink and WebKit these days? My impression is they share patches enough, that they can't really be counted as different browser engines. But perhaps that has changed?
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      They are very different, it's been seven years of heavy development since forking. For comparison that's longer than the time between apple forking kHTML to make webkit and the the first release of chrome.
      - wayneftw 6y ago
        The passage of time alone does not make changes. The question was: What are the differences?
        freediver 6y ago
        Start Safari and Chrome on a mac, open several tabs and observe: - Memory usage - Energy usage Then open https://browserbench.org https://browserbench.org and do the benchmarks. Webkit will dominate Blink (and for that matter Gecko) in all categories.
        SahAssar 6y ago
        The question was "How different are Blink and WebKit these days?" and "But perhaps that has changed?". My answer was "they are different" and implicitly "yes", partially because of the heavy development work that has been done since the fork seven years ago. If you look at the featuresets and when they introduce features I think it's reasonable to conclude they have diverged enough that they can't just pull patches from each other. Also, there was a webkit mailing thread back when they introduced their cut-down version of service-worker that said that most of the code from blink was basically unusable for them because of the differences.

djaychela 6y ago

I don't agree. While mozilla is taking money from Google, their products don't have tracking built in to them the way that Google products do. They make users aware of the choices they are making and the implications of them. They make plenty of functions available that protect users online from Google, Facebook and other bad actors in this area. The fight is not illusory, and while Firefox may depend on advertising for financial reasons (although I'm not sure how much it currently is), it is not fundamental to its existence. If someone came along and replaced that money, they would leave it behind. Google on the other hand, is built solely on its ability to gather information about its users and exploit that as much as possible. The two are not the equivalent that your argument claims.

MrGilbert 6y ago
> The fight is not illusory, and while Firefox may depend on advertising for financial reasons (although I'm not sure how much it currently is), it is not fundamental to its existence 95% of Mozilla's 2018 revenue were generated by Royalties [0], of which 91% are generated by search engine providers. That's a whopping $391 million USD - it will be pretty difficult to fill this gap if Google pulls the plug. [0]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
- bad_user 6y ago
  It might be difficult but how is that in any way relevant? Mozilla's behavior is consistent. Except for a few mistakes that were in my opinion minor, they proved trustworthy repeatedly. Also let's get the facts straight... all major browsers today are financed from ads, all of them, including Edge, including Safari, including Brave discussed here, all of them. The ones that aren't financed by ads are simply leaching off the work of others. Of course Brave is a leech while generating revenue from ads too.
  - nailer 6y ago
    Edge is financed by ads? How?

colordrops 6y ago

The original comment wasn't even talking about google or the advertising business. Their point was addressing browser engine heterogeneity.

nine_k 6y ago

All eggs, one basket. What could go wrong? Having an independent, unrelated implementation of the Internet's most popular client software is important.

wayneftw 6y ago
No it’s not. That’s just a thing that some people say... but it’s actually not true. There is only one of many things in technology and everybody gets along just fine in those situations.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

> The people who Google hired to write Chrome came from Mozilla By that standard no FAANG is fighting any other FAANG.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
From a user privacy perspective there is not much difference between FAANG. They are all competing for user data. They all want to collect and store it in their data centers. The "significant differences" that some users might think they see are likely a reaction to the lack of viable alternatives. There is no FAANG which is not competing for user data. Similarly, there is no major browser that deliberately lacks the feature set necessary to facilitate that data gathering. From a user privacy perspective, the difference between "major browsers", or FAANG, is not as significant as it is portrayed by many commentators. The major similarities far outweigh the minor differences, and I think Mozilla would agree they are not looking to go in a profoundly different direction than Chrome or other major browser. They seek market share and so they will always match the others' feature set. As other comments in this thread elucidate, all these browsers are funded by advertising. As such, we cannot expect the differences to be significant. If the majority of users are not concerned with things like telemetry, search box queries forwarded to Google, auto-loading resources, complexity, etc., then that is the user base to which Mozilla will cater. The small minority of users who find the status quo unacceptable are not important to Mozilla. Mozilla has enough cash they could prepare a separate, stripped-down bare bones browser in addition to Firefox for those few users who really take privacy seriously who want zero data collection by default. They won't. That is why we see a user going through all this effort to "un-Google" Chromium. It would similarly take substantial effort to "un-Mozilla" Firefox. Both Google and Mozilla gather user data by default. They each phone home early and often. The question is how many users would actually be interested in a radically different browser that, by design, made data collection and serving ads much more difficult. Perhaps that number would grow over time as word spread. We will never know. While this could be an experiment of great interest to some privacy-conscious users it is not an experiment of interest to Mozilla, chasing advert-funded "major browser" market share.

emayljames 6y ago

If Google did not have a dominance in browsers, that would mean they would need Firefox more, and would at least make Google need to play a lot nicer.