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Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts i

by xnx 2y ago

Microsoft, a company that competes directly with Google, thought it was a good idea to use Chromium as a base for Edge. Why doesn't Firefox switch its efforts into improving Chromium for users instead of reimplementing so many pieces?

vasachi 2y ago
Microsoft doesn't compete with Google.
- inglor 2y ago
  Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many others. Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.
  - notRobot 2y ago
    > for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome This is not true
    - xnx 2y ago
      Doesn't a fresh Chrome install add those shortcuts to Windows' desktop?
    - inglor 2y ago
      Lol they just hide it very well - go to chrome://apps and check what's there :)
- andix 2y ago
  Azure vs GCP Microsoft 365 (Office, Exchange) vs. Google Workspace (Gmail, Office Apps) Windows/Surface vs. ChromeOS/Chromebooks Bing vs Google Search ...?
peppers-ghost 2y ago
Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing. If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be in trouble.
- rrgok 2y ago
  Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway. Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
  - Kichererbsen 2y ago
    If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent implementations to become standards. I think that would be a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda crucial for that.
  - palata 2y ago
    I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it. > At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway. Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP. That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users. Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.
tux3 2y ago
Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple as it sounds. Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically). At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome. Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.
- _bent 2y ago
  How is solving merge conflicts harder than developing an entire browser engine? Plus Igalia, MS, Mozilla, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi etc could maintain a shared fork that kept stuff like Manifestv2 if they wanted.
  - cosmic_cheese 2y ago
    The problem is that the difficult not only increases with time unbounded, but is on a steep curve. Eventually the manpower and resource required to keep up with upstream will eventually match and outstrip that required to develop and maintain a new engine.
  - mistercheph 2y ago
    Have you ever met a team that maintained a fork of a legacy codebase with more than 6 figures of code?
regularjack 2y ago
Having all the eggs in the same basket is not a good thing.
NotYourLawyer 2y ago
Linux users should just switch to Windows too.
- xnx 2y ago
  Why would they do that?
  - NotYourLawyer 2y ago
    Exactly my point! They wouldn’t, and shouldn’t.
  - timbit42 2y ago
    They left off the sarcasm tag.
- jhasse 2y ago
  Windows isn't FOSS. Chromium is.
bad_user 2y ago
Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense, Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's. Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford. To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard. Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows. Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/ And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.
- andix 2y ago
  Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.
  - bad_user 2y ago
    > Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?
    - andix 2y ago
yndoendo 2y ago
I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all the numerous open source solutions. Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong. Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing. China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.
Propelloni 2y ago
Why did Google in 2008 chose to built its own browser instead of helping to improve Firefox, which was around since 2002?
- layer8 2y ago
  They wanted a browser they have full control over. And you can move much faster when you don’t have to negotiate every change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0 were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn’t that established yet. The main competition at the time was Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.
  - keyringlight 2y ago
    I'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some nice byproducts along the way of course.
  - kasabali 2y ago
    Firefox 1.0: 2004 Chrome 1.0: 2008
    - layer8 2y ago
      Whoops, you are right, I misread one source.
  - culi 2y ago
    > They wanted a browser they have full control over Yup and they got it. Now we see them using that power and market dominance to further their business goals with their attempts to kill Manifest V2
- xnx 2y ago
  You can read the comic that explains some of the reasoning here: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html IIRC one of the biggest reasons was a single misbehaving tab in Firefox being able to take down the whole browser.
culi 2y ago
Wow you really don't remember what it was like to have a single browser engine dominate the landscape. Imagine a world where the state of the web ecosystem's faith is down to just Google and Apple.
- xnx 2y ago
  > Wow you really don't remember what it was like to have a single browser engine dominate the landscape. My memory is definitely fuzzy, but I remember Netscape Navigator 4 wasting years on a scratch rewrite, and Internet Explorer becoming complacent. Why would it be a problem for an open source browser engine to become dominant? At what point should we be worried if Linux becomes too popular?

by xnx 2y ago

vasachi 2y ago

Microsoft doesn't compete with Google.

inglor 2y ago
Sure it does, it competes on many fronts like Office (vs docs), Sharepoint (vs Google Drive), Azure (vs GCP) and many others. Most of these have a direct relationship to Chrome vs. Edge - for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome whereas Office Online needs to be downloaded like any other website by the user.
- notRobot 2y ago
  > for example the Google workspace suite (docs, sheets etc) comes pre-bundled with Chrome This is not true
  - xnx 2y ago
    Doesn't a fresh Chrome install add those shortcuts to Windows' desktop?
  - inglor 2y ago
    Lol they just hide it very well - go to chrome://apps and check what's there :)
andix 2y ago
Azure vs GCP Microsoft 365 (Office, Exchange) vs. Google Workspace (Gmail, Office Apps) Windows/Surface vs. ChromeOS/Chromebooks Bing vs Google Search ...?

peppers-ghost 2y ago

Having one browser engine dominate the web is not a good thing. If there was ever a terrible zero day found everyone would be in trouble.

rrgok 2y ago
Why not if everybody at the end will implement the same spec? I would understand if Firefox wanted to implement its own spec, but what is the purpose of having N different implementation of the same spec with their own idiosyncrasies? At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway. Sorry, I don't know how I missed day zero-day.. Anyway my point still stays..
- Kichererbsen 2y ago
  If I remember correctly, RFCs need at least two independent implementations to become standards. I think that would be a good idea for web stuff too. It's a way to make sure the spec isn't just blindly following the implementation.
- nemomarx 2y ago
  Mozilla often disagrees with Google on what should get into web standards and the design of the spec, especially apis that give hardware access or seem to make privacy harder for the user. Having their own implementation is kinda crucial for that.
- palata 2y ago
  I don't think that zero-day is really an argument, given that the vast majority of users are on Chromium. If there is a zero-day on Chromium, most people have it. > At the end of the day, the engine of the major browser engines is open-source anyway. Open source is not enough. The question is: who controls it? AOSP is open source, Chromium is open source. But Google controls both. It means that Google can push for what is good for Google... even if it is bad for the user. E.g. preventing users from blocking ads. Not that it does not have to be with evil purposes (though Google has been shown to be evil enough already): it's enough for Google not to care about something for it to impact Chromium/AOSP. That's the whole point of competition: you want the users to have choice, so that it pushes the companies towards building a better product. Monopolies never serve the users. Now you say: "ok but it's open source, so if you're not happy you can fork away!" -> which precisely brings us to two browsers, like now with Chromium and Firefox.

tux3 2y ago

Everything that makes Firefox different would be lost, and have to be rebuilt. But let's talk about a different reason why forking Chromium to keep the features you like isn't as simple as it sounds. Imagine upstream Chromium makes a decision like dropping Manifest V2 (hypothetically). At first it is easy to simply not apply that patch series, and keep it enabled. But eventually things will start diverging, refactor after refactor, churn after churn. This creates merge conflicts for downstream forks, who very quickly stop being able to keep up with the firehose of changes from upstream Chrome. Leashing yourself to a moving car driving in the wrong direction does not always get you to your destination quicker. Even if it saves you the cost of having your own car.

_bent 2y ago
How is solving merge conflicts harder than developing an entire browser engine? Plus Igalia, MS, Mozilla, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi etc could maintain a shared fork that kept stuff like Manifestv2 if they wanted.
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  The problem is that the difficult not only increases with time unbounded, but is on a steep curve. Eventually the manpower and resource required to keep up with upstream will eventually match and outstrip that required to develop and maintain a new engine.
- mistercheph 2y ago
  Have you ever met a team that maintained a fork of a legacy codebase with more than 6 figures of code?

regularjack 2y ago

Having all the eggs in the same basket is not a good thing.

NotYourLawyer 2y ago

Linux users should just switch to Windows too.

xnx 2y ago
Why would they do that?
- NotYourLawyer 2y ago
  Exactly my point! They wouldn’t, and shouldn’t.
- timbit42 2y ago
  They left off the sarcasm tag.
jhasse 2y ago
Windows isn't FOSS. Chromium is.

bad_user 2y ago

Microsoft can push Edge on Windows users that don't know any better. They also aren't concerned about the web, as long as Edge is a vehicle for Bing and their ads. In that sense, Microsoft's interests align very well with those of Google's. Chromium is controlled by Google and their interests. It is Open Source; however, Google has complete control over it, even though it has other contributors as well. Yes, it can be forked, should Google's stewardship go entirely wrong, but doing so would mean spending many resources that most companies can't afford. To give an ancient example: ActiveX. Which Google almost copied in Chrome via NaCL / PNaCL. Mozilla with Firefox stood their ground and proposed Asm.js: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asm.js — out of all this effort came WebAssembly, which is more well-defined and at least smells like a good standard. Other examples that Google would've wanted to push as de facto standards — Dart, and AMP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages Now, of course, depending on where you're coming from, you might view these efforts as being good. ActiveX was good as well, many apps were built with it, it's where XmlHttpRequest (AJAX!) comes from. It also locked people into IExplorer and Windows. Yet another example that should speak for itself — the deprecation of the Manifest v2 APIs that make good ad-blockers work: https://ublockorigin.com/ https://ublockorigin.com/ And yet another example: Firefox for Android supports extensions, whereas no Chromium fork does. There was a Chromium fork that tried doing it (Kiwi?) but at this point it's discountinued, as the burden was insurmountable.

andix 2y ago
Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome. Not integrating upstream changes from Chromium anymore and develop their own browser based on one specific Chromium release.
- bad_user 2y ago
  > Microsoft can always decide to fork Chrome Sure, but they gave up on developing their own engine, so why would they?
  - andix 2y ago

yndoendo 2y ago

I see these statements as "Everyone should be like me!". Same statement is always applied to KDE & Gnome & Xfce and of all the numerous open source solutions. Chromium maybe open source but the "Chromium" standard code branches are still controlled by Google. This is why Chromium is/has removed Manifest v2 extensions, used by ad-blockers. They are using the narrative "it is less secure". While Mozilla / Firefox is proving them wrong. Which should it be in the market, a monopoly or a competition? I vote for a competitive market because the ladder leads to a stale and stalled mentality. Advancements don't progress when everyone things and does the exact same thing. China showed how stale the mentality for ML is in the USA and why that mentality of "be like everyone else" needs to be looked down upon.

Propelloni 2y ago

Why did Google in 2008 chose to built its own browser instead of helping to improve Firefox, which was around since 2002?

layer8 2y ago
They wanted a browser they have full control over. And you can move much faster when you don’t have to negotiate every change with third parties. Also, Firefox 1.0 and Chrome 1.0 were released within months of each other (though Firefox 0.x had existed for a little while), so Firefox wasn’t that established yet. The main competition at the time was Microsoft Internet Explorer with over 90% market share.
- keyringlight 2y ago
  I'm fairly sure pretty much everything at google since the doubleclick acquisition has been a loss-leader in order to give users good 'viewers' for advertisements, there's some nice byproducts along the way of course.
- kasabali 2y ago
  Firefox 1.0: 2004 Chrome 1.0: 2008
  - layer8 2y ago
    Whoops, you are right, I misread one source.
- culi 2y ago
  > They wanted a browser they have full control over Yup and they got it. Now we see them using that power and market dominance to further their business goals with their attempts to kill Manifest V2
xnx 2y ago
You can read the comic that explains some of the reasoning here: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html IIRC one of the biggest reasons was a single misbehaving tab in Firefox being able to take down the whole browser.

culi 2y ago

Wow you really don't remember what it was like to have a single browser engine dominate the landscape. Imagine a world where the state of the web ecosystem's faith is down to just Google and Apple.

xnx 2y ago
> Wow you really don't remember what it was like to have a single browser engine dominate the landscape. My memory is definitely fuzzy, but I remember Netscape Navigator 4 wasting years on a scratch rewrite, and Internet Explorer becoming complacent. Why would it be a problem for an open source browser engine to become dominant? At what point should we be worried if Linux becomes too popular?