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> Nobody is saying Mozilla has to die, whatever that means. To die means having so few users that development is abandoned and the teams disbanded. It could ha
by bambax 5y ago
> Nobody is saying Mozilla has to die, whatever that means.
To die means having so few users that development is abandoned and the teams disbanded. It could happen; I wish it doesn't; you seem to wish it does... because it would make the life of web developers a little simpler?
But I don't think that's true; I think it's the opposite: web development would be a little more difficult if/when everything is controlled by just one company who decides unilaterally what can be done and what can't.
- roenxi 5y agoThere is no risk of everything being controlled by one company. That is why it is acceptable for there to only be one browser engine. Observe that Brave, inc is using the chromium engine in a way that opposes Google. Mozilla has developed a bunch of great features in the last few years. If they were developing on Chromium, most of the internet would have access to them. Instead, only a minor subset do. This is a bad strategy.
- roca 5y agoI don't think you understand how Chromium works. Google makes all the important decisions. People have advocated for independent governance (e.g. some kind of Chromium Foundation) but Google isn't interested. E.g. Brave opposes Google in some ways but they have no say in the development of Web standards implemented by Chromium.
- roenxi 5y agoIt is open source. If someone doesn't like a decision they can fork the codebase. Mozilla's Gecko has been beaten down to sub-double-digit market share, they're less relevant right now than when IE6 was >75% of the market. They have no power to influence the direction the web moves in. And yet life is going on better than ever. If you want a counterbalance to stop Google making the important decisions, Firefox has failed spectacularly. And yet Google doesn't have any power to move the web in a direction it doesn't want to go - because their engine is open source and that is what actually matters here.
- matrus 5y agoTo make any dent to Google's dominance over the web a potential fork would first have to gain any noticeable traction. This seems highly unlikely if well funded companies like Microsoft or Mozilla weren't able to leverage their properties (Windows in Microsoft's case) or their brand (Mozilla) so far. Plus, any major fork of Chromium would have to compete with Chrome's vast development budget.
- roca 5y agoBrowser vendors can carry small patches against Chromium but significant changes are very costly to carry long-term as the code changes under you. Furthermore, Google controls how heavy that burden is for you. In practice browser vendors who choose Chromium don't challenge Google's Web platform decisions except in very narrow cases like FLoC. In contrast Mozilla and Apple examine every Google-proposed Web platform feature or change to see whether it makes sense. Mozilla's influence over the Web platform is much lower than it was but it is also far from zero. Lots of major sites still test in Firefox. Apple has even more influence. That is why Google doesn't yet has absolute power over the Web platform.
- roenxi 5y ago> Browser vendors can carry small patches against Chromium but significant changes are very costly to carry long-term as the code changes under you. Furthermore, Google controls how heavy that burden is for you. This is fundamentally wrong; at any point anyone can hard fork chromium and then the long term costs of maintenance and rate of code change are completely out of Google's control. > In practice browser vendors... This is because Google generally makes great choices with Chrome that don't need to be second guessed. One of the reasons for Chrome's ubiquity is Google makes a great browser.
- roca 5y agoNo-one is going to hard-fork Chromium. The reason you adopt Chromium is because you don't want to pay to maintain your own browser engine.