23 ms·

I use Firefox everywhere I can, warts and all, just to avoid the Chromium monopoly. It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chrom

I use Firefox everywhere I can, warts and all, just to avoid the Chromium monopoly. It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium; having a giant like Microsoft support a third browser engine would really have been a boon to the health of the ecosystem.

KingOfCoders 3y ago
Me too. I wonder though what would have happend if we had given $7B to Andreas Kling. I guess with WebDRM this point is moot though.
- Tade0 3y ago
  You would need to spend at least a billion to clone him first - this whole project is moving forward because the man is an exceptional programmer.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    I think now with the sponsorships he’s hired one of the contributors full time, and I think Linus Groh was also going full time so that makes three people dedicated to working on it as well as the other contributors. Better than nothing, and just incredible what they’ve achieved so far!
yummypaint 3y ago
I do the same thing but it isn't much of a sacrifice. It feels icky to use google's software knowing it's actively working against my interests.
- ReptileMan 3y ago
  Kinda like Brave.
  - Calamitous 3y ago
    How is Brave working against the user’s interests? Not being snarky, I’ve been using it for a while and it seems fine.
    - baal80spam 3y ago
      It isn't, but on HN the agenda is "Brave bad".
      - input_sh 3y ago
        Anything Chromium-based bad, Brave is no different than Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Samsung Internet etc. We need more engines, not browsers. If every other engine dies, Google gets to dictate what the web is even more than they do right now.
    - sdfghswe 3y ago
      Crypto.
    - some_random 3y ago
      Yet another Chromium browser contributing to Google's massive market share which enables them to push all the anti-consumer shit Brave is supposed to fix.
    - iLoveOncall 3y ago
      It's heavily tied in with crypto, but even if you don't care about that they have done extremely shady shit like inserting their own referral code in registration forms.
echelon 3y ago
Write your legislators and tell them it's unfair for Google to control the web's leading browser. Google dominates web search, controls mobile as part of a duopoly, pays the other mobile provider to feature their search, dominates mobile advertising, ranks websites based on ads and chrome performance, increasingly takes over functionality from the websites they index, etc. They use their money and power to transform the web into a platform they own and control with AMP, Manifest v2, WEI, WHATWG, and repeated attempts to kill the URL bar. Chrome is a key instrument of their monopolization. Their business units need to be carved up, and Chrome needs to go its separate way, kept apart from search and ads.
- tudorw 3y ago
  so Microsoft adopting chromium as it's engine, would, erm, make this more likely or less?
  - echelon 3y ago
    Microsoft, in third place, barely has a 5% market share. I don't think they contribute to the present situation. I hope they gain in browser market share alongside Firefox and all the other non-Chrome, non-Safari browsers.
- pwython 3y ago
  Probably a very unpopular opinion, but it seems any time a business/product reaches the point where they have majority of market share, people say it's a monopoly. At what point are businesses forced to scale down because their products are TOO successful? I still don't understand what the big deal was with Microsoft having IE bundled with Windows. If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies. Imagine an amateur boxer fighting a pro twice their size and saying "it's no fair, they're stronger and have more experience." Well, the pro put in all the work to get to where they're at.
  - coldpie 3y ago
    Good question! Speaking in legal terms, not popular usage, generally the problem being addressed is not "you have too much market share," but rather, "you used your dominant position in one market to then dominate a different market." To stretch your analogy, it'd be like your pro boxer entering an amateur tournament and taking all the prize money. In the case of Microsoft's IE bundling, they were using their dominant position in the Operating System market to become dominant in the Web Browser market, by bundling IE with the OS and providing specific OS integration hooks which were unavailable to other browsers. > If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies. The trouble comes when the entity in the dominant position squashes competition unfairly. In the IE case, Microsoft included a browser with every copy of the OS, so consumers had to overcome hurdles to even try a competitor's browser. Additionally, as I mentioned above, Microsoft provided secret hooks into the OS that were unavailable to other browsers, so it was impossible for a competitor to create a superior product. Those actions limited fair competition in the browser space, which usually results in worse outcomes for consumers or the market as a whole, hence the laws forbidding monopoly abuse. Hope that helps give some idea of what happened there. Of course, you can read much more detail about the case & anti-trust law in general elsewhere.
tudorw 3y ago
can they afford to turn on a dime at some point?
_coveredInBees 3y ago
Same here. Then again, I'll never leave Firefox as long as Tree Style Tabs[1] continues to be supported as an extension. It's been a life-changer since I discovered it well over a decade ago and makes every other browser pretty much unusable for me as a daily driver. [1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- knd775 3y ago
  There are multiple chromium alternatives for this extension.
  - gowld 3y ago
    And they are all terrible. One of them is called TabFern, get it? It's like TabTree but it doesn't have branches.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      > And they are all terrible. For other Chromium-based browser users, Tabs Outliner is great, more powerful (but with a steeper learning curve) solution.
- twobitshifter 3y ago
  It’s not a one for one replacement but edge has vertical tabs and tab groups built in. I have to use edge for work and it’s a decent compromise.
- sdnas211 3y ago
  Have you given Sidebery a try? Also for firefox.
yomlica8 3y ago
Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. Nothing like the crazy 90+% it had at its height but certainly not a browser you can ignore. Now they're at about 10% and it seems like they have to use every manipulation tactic in the book to get it. But I agree, that third browser engine kept things interesting even if I didn't use it. Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there. I don't use Apple products personally but benefit from the diversity of ecosystem it provides.
- cptskippy 3y ago
  > Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. The only reason IE retained any marketshare was because it was required for legacy enterprise and government applications. For security this was bad all around and Microsoft was right to kill it off even to their own detriment.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mywittyname 3y ago
  I think the problem with Edge was two-fold: - People were trained to automatically install a new browser on their computers when they got it. - Edge is a never ending nagfest and that became another prompt to go and download Chrome. Less is more was probably the better strategy to take with Edge.
  - softfalcon 3y ago
    > Less is more... You hit the nail right on the money. Every time I accidentally open Edge through the Windows search, it never ceases to shut up about itself. There is fanfare, there are notifications for details I don't care about, popups showing me all the features that are standard in any web browser. You know what would make me use your browser Microsoft? Getting the hell out of my way. I do not care that it's Edge, I don't care that it's new, I don't care that it has 7 ways to input and take pictures and who knows what else. Just show me the search result. Contrast this to how Safari behaves when it pops up to show you something. It just gives you the web page. That's it.
tapoxi 3y ago
Firefox has lost about 20 million users since the announcement of Chrome moving to Manifest v3. It can't avoid the monopoly even with the press in their favor. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform that everyone can rally behind.
- burkaman 3y ago
  I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following technical browser announcements, they won't care until their stuff actually breaks.
  - comte7092 3y ago
    Have to agree here. Most people have no idea what manifest v whatever is and have no reason to switch. Not to mention, google pulls its own underhanded tactics.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior So 59% of current Firefox users could switch to Chrome without being affected by the Manifest V3 change at all. I don't know how many Chrome users use add-ons that would become less useful after the change, so it'll definitely be interesting to see whether Firefox's numbers will show a sudden uptick at some point.
    - arp242 3y ago
      I expect that number to be biased since more tech-savvy users tend to disable/block telemetry, and they're also the sort of people who install add-ons. I have no idea if it's biased by 1%, 10%, or 50% though.
m_a_g 3y ago
I tried migrating from Chrome to Firefox with the recent developments. The user experience of Mozilla could be better, imo. After not liking Firefox, I tried four more browsers: Orion, Arch, Brave, and Vivaldi. I finally landed on using Brave. After you turn off everything related to crypto, it becomes a great and user-friendly browser with adversarial interoperability with Chrome. It's the only browser with an actual chance of beating Chrome by convincing its users to migrate. I'm hoping they can continue maintaining the Chromium fork (it's an actual fork, by the way), as it'll get harder and harder as it diverges more and more.
- Novosell 3y ago
  It's not an actual fork, by the way. Them saying so doesn't make it so. It uses chromium as a base and applies quite a lot of patches. Otherwise every chromium based browser is a fork, despite all pulling in more or less all upstream patches?
  - gowld 3y ago
    OK it's a branch.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    More importantly: being a fork or not doesn't matter! As long as the Brave team is not able to write their own browser engine that could compete with chromium, they are stuck with whatever development goes into chromium. "Oh it's just patches and things", but it won't be forever, and we WILL see work go into chromium that is deep enough to be difficult to untangle and subtly designed to to force you into whatever path google wants. There will be a day where Brave is unable to degoogle chromium to a useful point. Participating in a chromium browser is only helping google, and there's no way around that.
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    … Taking an upstream project, and then applying your own patches to it, along with a commitment to not ship anti-user changes (like manifest V3) is a fork by any objective definition.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
The real shame is Mozilla cutting back on Firefox development despite being a billion dollar corporation. Google would have had no leverage to push stuff like WEI if Firefox was the dominant browser.
- toyg 3y ago
  Tbf, they cut back because they thought that, strategically, they needed a competitive mobile OS. Unfortunately, regardless of whether it was the right decision, they then mismanaged development of such OS (particularly on the commercial side).
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Not sure in which reality you're living, but FirefoxOS was developed at Mozilla from 2011 to 2016, before any cut back. Mozilla Corp actually grew a lot during that time. About FxOS being mismanaged, well... you have to understand that if you follow a model where you rely on others for distribution (carriers and open market OEMs), you are bound to their constraints. In that case, it was a chicken and egg situation where selling devices without a WhatsApp app was very difficult, but WA didn't want to develop an app for a new OS until it grew to tens of millions of users. Then Moz top management lost some key proponents of the project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish. I still don't understand why Mitchel Baker didn't agree to support a community based project (like Thunderbird) or try a strong privacy based spin.
    - cxr 3y ago
      > Moz top management lost some key proponents of the project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish That's an interesting way to say that the people who foresaw its imminent failure were correct—but (conveniently) does so in a way that not only downplays[1] the correctness of their prediction, but also maligns them by ever-so-subtly suggesting the reader consider whether blame for the resulting failure shouldn't perhaps be shifted onto those who made the prediction [1 again, unfortunately]... 1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20201022224913/https://www.colbyrussell.com/2018/10/11/mozilla-and-feedback-loops.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201022224913/https://www.colby...>
Justsignedup 3y ago
Personally I think ms did the right thing. Edge compatibility is no longer an issue and their maintenance cost plumetted. I still love Firefox. Not seeing ads anywhere is worth whatever warts I hit
nomilk 3y ago
What are firefox's warts ooc?
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Usually it's some nitpick about the time they advertised Mr. Robot "breaking our trust", or buying pocket, a bookmarking utility that lots of people liked and used and integrating it into the web browser, which is clearly a user-hostile move, to buy and integrate functionality that might be useful. With such horrible missteps, you should obviously instead use the browser that has pushed MULTIPLE APIs with negligible real world use and significant fingerprinting capacity, lead the change to limit add-on functionality, makes it harder to block ads (BECAUSE THEY ARE AN ADVERTISING COMPANY), sends most of what you do to their advertising engine, and FUCKING WEI. Or, oh no, the CEO of the foundation makes more than they do as an engineer at google, that must be corruption! Meanwhile Firefox is faster, less buggy, has never stopped being a very good browser and the only one made by a group that can't subsidize it, and doesn't get to shove it's advertising down your throat on every single website that Google owns.
px43 3y ago
> It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining. It was a massive indication that in the end, open source software will always win in any market. We just needed Google to dump in billions of dollars to help accelerate the process, but they did that, and now we're all better off for it. Now we just need Windows, OSX, and iOS to die out, and the whole world will be running on open source software.
- xibo9 3y ago
  Hard pass. Monocultures are bad.
  - px43 3y ago
    What monoculture? There is an incredibly rich ecosystem of Chromium forks, all playing with different ideas for how the web should work. There's a nice, clean, stable base for people to work with, and extend upon. This seems like the ideal scenario.
- theallan 3y ago
  I think the GP is more disappointed that Microsoft choose to use Blink rather than Gecko as their rendering engine. Not that they abandoned the closed source EdgeHTML.
- ragnese 3y ago
  Free software and open source software are great. But, web pages are "you get what we serve". So, if there's a hostile standard that web pages all start using, having an open source implementation of the thing working against you is a very small consolation...
- cxr 3y ago
  > I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining. Microsoft announcing an open source "Edge Core" (cf .NET Core, ChakraCore) would have satisfied the same criterion.
behringer 3y ago
Me too. I find the vast majority supports it fine. I find those that do not are happy to fix the problem, often within a few days or maybe a month.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

KingOfCoders 3y ago

Me too. I wonder though what would have happend if we had given $7B to Andreas Kling. I guess with WebDRM this point is moot though.

Tade0 3y ago
You would need to spend at least a billion to clone him first - this whole project is moving forward because the man is an exceptional programmer.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  I think now with the sponsorships he’s hired one of the contributors full time, and I think Linus Groh was also going full time so that makes three people dedicated to working on it as well as the other contributors. Better than nothing, and just incredible what they’ve achieved so far!

yummypaint 3y ago

I do the same thing but it isn't much of a sacrifice. It feels icky to use google's software knowing it's actively working against my interests.

ReptileMan 3y ago
Kinda like Brave.
- Calamitous 3y ago
  How is Brave working against the user’s interests? Not being snarky, I’ve been using it for a while and it seems fine.
  - baal80spam 3y ago
    It isn't, but on HN the agenda is "Brave bad".
    - input_sh 3y ago
      Anything Chromium-based bad, Brave is no different than Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Samsung Internet etc. We need more engines, not browsers. If every other engine dies, Google gets to dictate what the web is even more than they do right now.
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    Crypto.
  - some_random 3y ago
    Yet another Chromium browser contributing to Google's massive market share which enables them to push all the anti-consumer shit Brave is supposed to fix.
  - iLoveOncall 3y ago
    It's heavily tied in with crypto, but even if you don't care about that they have done extremely shady shit like inserting their own referral code in registration forms.

echelon 3y ago

Write your legislators and tell them it's unfair for Google to control the web's leading browser. Google dominates web search, controls mobile as part of a duopoly, pays the other mobile provider to feature their search, dominates mobile advertising, ranks websites based on ads and chrome performance, increasingly takes over functionality from the websites they index, etc. They use their money and power to transform the web into a platform they own and control with AMP, Manifest v2, WEI, WHATWG, and repeated attempts to kill the URL bar. Chrome is a key instrument of their monopolization. Their business units need to be carved up, and Chrome needs to go its separate way, kept apart from search and ads.

tudorw 3y ago
so Microsoft adopting chromium as it's engine, would, erm, make this more likely or less?
- echelon 3y ago
  Microsoft, in third place, barely has a 5% market share. I don't think they contribute to the present situation. I hope they gain in browser market share alongside Firefox and all the other non-Chrome, non-Safari browsers.
pwython 3y ago
Probably a very unpopular opinion, but it seems any time a business/product reaches the point where they have majority of market share, people say it's a monopoly. At what point are businesses forced to scale down because their products are TOO successful? I still don't understand what the big deal was with Microsoft having IE bundled with Windows. If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies. Imagine an amateur boxer fighting a pro twice their size and saying "it's no fair, they're stronger and have more experience." Well, the pro put in all the work to get to where they're at.
- coldpie 3y ago
  Good question! Speaking in legal terms, not popular usage, generally the problem being addressed is not "you have too much market share," but rather, "you used your dominant position in one market to then dominate a different market." To stretch your analogy, it'd be like your pro boxer entering an amateur tournament and taking all the prize money. In the case of Microsoft's IE bundling, they were using their dominant position in the Operating System market to become dominant in the Web Browser market, by bundling IE with the OS and providing specific OS integration hooks which were unavailable to other browsers. > If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies. The trouble comes when the entity in the dominant position squashes competition unfairly. In the IE case, Microsoft included a browser with every copy of the OS, so consumers had to overcome hurdles to even try a competitor's browser. Additionally, as I mentioned above, Microsoft provided secret hooks into the OS that were unavailable to other browsers, so it was impossible for a competitor to create a superior product. Those actions limited fair competition in the browser space, which usually results in worse outcomes for consumers or the market as a whole, hence the laws forbidding monopoly abuse. Hope that helps give some idea of what happened there. Of course, you can read much more detail about the case & anti-trust law in general elsewhere.

tudorw 3y ago

can they afford to turn on a dime at some point?

_coveredInBees 3y ago

Same here. Then again, I'll never leave Firefox as long as Tree Style Tabs[1] continues to be supported as an extension. It's been a life-changer since I discovered it well over a decade ago and makes every other browser pretty much unusable for me as a daily driver. [1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

knd775 3y ago
There are multiple chromium alternatives for this extension.
- gowld 3y ago
  And they are all terrible. One of them is called TabFern, get it? It's like TabTree but it doesn't have branches.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > And they are all terrible. For other Chromium-based browser users, Tabs Outliner is great, more powerful (but with a steeper learning curve) solution.
twobitshifter 3y ago
It’s not a one for one replacement but edge has vertical tabs and tab groups built in. I have to use edge for work and it’s a decent compromise.
sdnas211 3y ago
Have you given Sidebery a try? Also for firefox.

yomlica8 3y ago

Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. Nothing like the crazy 90+% it had at its height but certainly not a browser you can ignore. Now they're at about 10% and it seems like they have to use every manipulation tactic in the book to get it. But I agree, that third browser engine kept things interesting even if I didn't use it. Selfishly I hope Apple continues using its iron grip on iOS to prevent anything other than Safari's engine there. I don't use Apple products personally but benefit from the diversity of ecosystem it provides.

cptskippy 3y ago
> Edge seems like a blunder in general. Prior to the initial Edge introduction IE seemed to have 20-25% of the desktop browser marketshare. The only reason IE retained any marketshare was because it was required for legacy enterprise and government applications. For security this was bad all around and Microsoft was right to kill it off even to their own detriment.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mywittyname 3y ago
I think the problem with Edge was two-fold: - People were trained to automatically install a new browser on their computers when they got it. - Edge is a never ending nagfest and that became another prompt to go and download Chrome. Less is more was probably the better strategy to take with Edge.
- softfalcon 3y ago
  > Less is more... You hit the nail right on the money. Every time I accidentally open Edge through the Windows search, it never ceases to shut up about itself. There is fanfare, there are notifications for details I don't care about, popups showing me all the features that are standard in any web browser. You know what would make me use your browser Microsoft? Getting the hell out of my way. I do not care that it's Edge, I don't care that it's new, I don't care that it has 7 ways to input and take pictures and who knows what else. Just show me the search result. Contrast this to how Safari behaves when it pops up to show you something. It just gives you the web page. That's it.

tapoxi 3y ago

Firefox has lost about 20 million users since the announcement of Chrome moving to Manifest v3. It can't avoid the monopoly even with the press in their favor. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity Call me a pessimist but I don't think Mozilla is managed well enough to actually compete against Chrome. We'd need the Linux Foundation or some other large neutral standards body to fork Chromium at this point and create a vendor-neutral platform that everyone can rally behind.

burkaman 3y ago
I wouldn't expect Manifest V3 to have any effect until Manifest V2 is actually disabled and ad blockers stop working. Approximately 0% of Chrome users are following technical browser announcements, they won't care until their stuff actually breaks.
- comte7092 3y ago
  Have to agree here. Most people have no idea what manifest v whatever is and have no reason to switch. Not to mention, google pulls its own underhanded tactics.
- yorwba 3y ago
  Even among Firefox users, only about 41% have add-ons installed in the first place: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/usage-behavior So 59% of current Firefox users could switch to Chrome without being affected by the Manifest V3 change at all. I don't know how many Chrome users use add-ons that would become less useful after the change, so it'll definitely be interesting to see whether Firefox's numbers will show a sudden uptick at some point.
  - arp242 3y ago
    I expect that number to be biased since more tech-savvy users tend to disable/block telemetry, and they're also the sort of people who install add-ons. I have no idea if it's biased by 1%, 10%, or 50% though.

m_a_g 3y ago

I tried migrating from Chrome to Firefox with the recent developments. The user experience of Mozilla could be better, imo. After not liking Firefox, I tried four more browsers: Orion, Arch, Brave, and Vivaldi. I finally landed on using Brave. After you turn off everything related to crypto, it becomes a great and user-friendly browser with adversarial interoperability with Chrome. It's the only browser with an actual chance of beating Chrome by convincing its users to migrate. I'm hoping they can continue maintaining the Chromium fork (it's an actual fork, by the way), as it'll get harder and harder as it diverges more and more.

Novosell 3y ago
It's not an actual fork, by the way. Them saying so doesn't make it so. It uses chromium as a base and applies quite a lot of patches. Otherwise every chromium based browser is a fork, despite all pulling in more or less all upstream patches?
- gowld 3y ago
  OK it's a branch.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  More importantly: being a fork or not doesn't matter! As long as the Brave team is not able to write their own browser engine that could compete with chromium, they are stuck with whatever development goes into chromium. "Oh it's just patches and things", but it won't be forever, and we WILL see work go into chromium that is deep enough to be difficult to untangle and subtly designed to to force you into whatever path google wants. There will be a day where Brave is unable to degoogle chromium to a useful point. Participating in a chromium browser is only helping google, and there's no way around that.
- Karunamon 3y ago
  … Taking an upstream project, and then applying your own patches to it, along with a commitment to not ship anti-user changes (like manifest V3) is a fork by any objective definition.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

The real shame is Mozilla cutting back on Firefox development despite being a billion dollar corporation. Google would have had no leverage to push stuff like WEI if Firefox was the dominant browser.

toyg 3y ago
Tbf, they cut back because they thought that, strategically, they needed a competitive mobile OS. Unfortunately, regardless of whether it was the right decision, they then mismanaged development of such OS (particularly on the commercial side).
- fabrice_d 3y ago
  Not sure in which reality you're living, but FirefoxOS was developed at Mozilla from 2011 to 2016, before any cut back. Mozilla Corp actually grew a lot during that time. About FxOS being mismanaged, well... you have to understand that if you follow a model where you rely on others for distribution (carriers and open market OEMs), you are bound to their constraints. In that case, it was a chicken and egg situation where selling devices without a WhatsApp app was very difficult, but WA didn't want to develop an app for a new OS until it grew to tens of millions of users. Then Moz top management lost some key proponents of the project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish. I still don't understand why Mitchel Baker didn't agree to support a community based project (like Thunderbird) or try a strong privacy based spin.
  - cxr 3y ago
    > Moz top management lost some key proponents of the project, and the FirefoxOS haters got their wish That's an interesting way to say that the people who foresaw its imminent failure were correct—but (conveniently) does so in a way that not only downplays[1] the correctness of their prediction, but also maligns them by ever-so-subtly suggesting the reader consider whether blame for the resulting failure shouldn't perhaps be shifted onto those who made the prediction [1 again, unfortunately]... 1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20201022224913/https://www.colbyrussell.com/2018/10/11/mozilla-and-feedback-loops.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201022224913/https://www.colby...>

Justsignedup 3y ago

Personally I think ms did the right thing. Edge compatibility is no longer an issue and their maintenance cost plumetted. I still love Firefox. Not seeing ads anywhere is worth whatever warts I hit

nomilk 3y ago

What are firefox's warts ooc?

mrguyorama 3y ago
Usually it's some nitpick about the time they advertised Mr. Robot "breaking our trust", or buying pocket, a bookmarking utility that lots of people liked and used and integrating it into the web browser, which is clearly a user-hostile move, to buy and integrate functionality that might be useful. With such horrible missteps, you should obviously instead use the browser that has pushed MULTIPLE APIs with negligible real world use and significant fingerprinting capacity, lead the change to limit add-on functionality, makes it harder to block ads (BECAUSE THEY ARE AN ADVERTISING COMPANY), sends most of what you do to their advertising engine, and FUCKING WEI. Or, oh no, the CEO of the foundation makes more than they do as an engineer at google, that must be corruption! Meanwhile Firefox is faster, less buggy, has never stopped being a very good browser and the only one made by a group that can't subsidize it, and doesn't get to shove it's advertising down your throat on every single website that Google owns.

px43 3y ago

> It was actually a huge bummer for me when Edge gave in and switched to Chromium I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining. It was a massive indication that in the end, open source software will always win in any market. We just needed Google to dump in billions of dollars to help accelerate the process, but they did that, and now we're all better off for it. Now we just need Windows, OSX, and iOS to die out, and the whole world will be running on open source software.

xibo9 3y ago
Hard pass. Monocultures are bad.
- px43 3y ago
  What monoculture? There is an incredibly rich ecosystem of Chromium forks, all playing with different ideas for how the web should work. There's a nice, clean, stable base for people to work with, and extend upon. This seems like the ideal scenario.
theallan 3y ago
I think the GP is more disappointed that Microsoft choose to use Blink rather than Gecko as their rendering engine. Not that they abandoned the closed source EdgeHTML.
ragnese 3y ago
Free software and open source software are great. But, web pages are "you get what we serve". So, if there's a hostile standard that web pages all start using, having an open source implementation of the thing working against you is a very small consolation...
cxr 3y ago
> I don't get it.. that was the day that open source won the web. There are now no major closed source browser engines remaining. Microsoft announcing an open source "Edge Core" (cf .NET Core, ChakraCore) would have satisfied the same criterion.

behringer 3y ago

Me too. I find the vast majority supports it fine. I find those that do not are happy to fix the problem, often within a few days or maybe a month.

deleted 3y ago

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