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The problem with that argument is that browsers don't compete on engines but on features, UX and integration (and bundling). All an engine is about, is webcompa

The problem with that argument is that browsers don't compete on engines but on features, UX and integration (and bundling). All an engine is about, is webcompat (and Chrome wins here). It's literally not a differentiating feature. A good engine is an engine that never, ever fails to render a webpage (again, Chrome wins here). Even if Gecko was fully on-par with Blink (I keep hearing from Firefox users that they struggle with some websites, though admittedly very few, but Chrome obviously works fine with them), they'd have just invested millions in man-hours to get to the starting line, and have webpages not fail to render. A lot of companies might switch to Firefox if they switched to Blink and webcompat was never an issue. I've argued before that Firefox would benefit from switching to Blink (and gain better security, webcompat, enterprise support, and on and on), save tons of manpower and money, and compete on privacy, features, integration, and things users actually care about, as well as keeping Manifest v2, and patching out other Chrome-badthings. But that's basically Brave.

perryizgr8 4y ago
> The problem with that argument is that browsers don't compete on engines but on features, UX and integration Not always. Firefox lost much of its userbase not because it had less features or integration or was failing to render pages. In fact it was the preferred browser for most sites, with devs targeting it and testing on it. It lost because the engine was just inferior, which made it slower than the competition.
- concinds 4y ago
  Yeah, you can extend my argument beyond webcompat to speed, security, etc. An engine that is better on these metrics is a better engine. My point (which I somewhat misstated) was that having the best engine is the bare minimum; it just brings you to the starting line. And if you don't have the best engine you'll always lose. (Sidenote: Evernote learned that lesson the hard way. Focus on core product, not marketing. Chrome's dominant, not just because of its marketing, but because it was a fundamentally superior product from the start; you can dominate a market with an inferior product based purely on marketing, as Evernote showed, but never durably). Hence why trying to compete on engines makes little sense to me. Since so many top corporations are contibuting to Chromium (Samsung, Intel, Microsoft, more), it's difficult to call it "Google's browser engine" anymore. The "engine competition" model makes sense if all engines are proprietary. Then, competition is the only way to push for improvements. But with every major browser engine open-source, it's better to concentrate efforts onto one engine. Imagine if every Gecko dev was contributing to Chromium instead of (somewhat) reinventing the wheel? Would Chrome not get faster/safer? It's a bit like if there were "multiple Linuxes", developed independently, that all rigidly had to be compatible with the same APIs/userland (/implement web standards). No, there's just one Linux. Google still wouldn't control the web (actually, they'd control it less if Mozilla's a stakeholder in Blink than with Mozilla doing their own thing and becoming increasingly irrelevant), since each browser dev can patch things into and out of Blink for their own browser (like Brave does); while still sharing all common contributions back with all other Chromium browsers. Win-win.

perryizgr8 4y ago

> The problem with that argument is that browsers don't compete on engines but on features, UX and integration Not always. Firefox lost much of its userbase not because it had less features or integration or was failing to render pages. In fact it was the preferred browser for most sites, with devs targeting it and testing on it. It lost because the engine was just inferior, which made it slower than the competition.

concinds 4y ago
Yeah, you can extend my argument beyond webcompat to speed, security, etc. An engine that is better on these metrics is a better engine. My point (which I somewhat misstated) was that having the best engine is the bare minimum; it just brings you to the starting line. And if you don't have the best engine you'll always lose. (Sidenote: Evernote learned that lesson the hard way. Focus on core product, not marketing. Chrome's dominant, not just because of its marketing, but because it was a fundamentally superior product from the start; you can dominate a market with an inferior product based purely on marketing, as Evernote showed, but never durably). Hence why trying to compete on engines makes little sense to me. Since so many top corporations are contibuting to Chromium (Samsung, Intel, Microsoft, more), it's difficult to call it "Google's browser engine" anymore. The "engine competition" model makes sense if all engines are proprietary. Then, competition is the only way to push for improvements. But with every major browser engine open-source, it's better to concentrate efforts onto one engine. Imagine if every Gecko dev was contributing to Chromium instead of (somewhat) reinventing the wheel? Would Chrome not get faster/safer? It's a bit like if there were "multiple Linuxes", developed independently, that all rigidly had to be compatible with the same APIs/userland (/implement web standards). No, there's just one Linux. Google still wouldn't control the web (actually, they'd control it less if Mozilla's a stakeholder in Blink than with Mozilla doing their own thing and becoming increasingly irrelevant), since each browser dev can patch things into and out of Blink for their own browser (like Brave does); while still sharing all common contributions back with all other Chromium browsers. Win-win.