As a firefox fax, I hope this isn't true. The dominance of chrome isn't good for anyone. This will lead to (even more) sites not bothering to be made compatible with Firefox. We are headed back to the "designed for IE" days.
(Obviously, MS will maintain their own fork and can permanently fork away whenever they want/need to, I guess, so it's not like they've locked themselves in forever, but still)
I actually wasn't aware of the problems with Edge. This is the first I've heard of them... I hadn't heard much about it from either devs or users, so I assumed lots of people were more or less happily (or at least uneventfully) using it as Windows' default browser.
Never thought I'd be sad to see Internet Explorer (or its descendant) bite the dust, given what a plague upon humanity IE was for so many years, but I'm not sure this is the happy ending we might've wished for.
Same, but neither of us actually use Edge. Just like nearly everyone reading this comment.
Chromium != Google. Chromium is the FOSS project that Chrome is based off of.
Microsoft is of course free to diverge from it as much as they like but, like any other Chromium-based browser, they are either going to be joined at the hip to Google's decisions, or they'll be downstream consumers. The bottom line is that while MS will be contributors to Chromium they won't be in the driver's seat.
Regarding the problems with Edge, mainstream websites don’t face problems — but you hit the edge cases (no pun intended) when you try to use it for smaller sites — and especially sites meant for limited audience — e.g. internal websites built by enterprises. They are often tested for Chrome and Firefox only — and maybe Safari if there are significant number of Macs in use.
I can’t really blame the developers for not wanting to waste their time on a browser with limited usage and — especially since it often presents challenges not posed by other browsers.
What are your objections to modern Firefox? Most of the criticism I've heard is that it's become too much like Chrome. I'm quite happy with it personally.
That said, my comment was directed towards that FF’s market share is plunging rapidly and unless things change drastically, it might become another Opera — a niche browser at best. We need something that can counter Chrome and by extension, Google — something that developers have to support in addition to Chrome. FF has been playing that role nicely so far, but for how long? FF is not cutting it in terms of adoption — in terms of challenging the might of Chrome.
* No spellcheck in form fields (without a plugin, and I hate plugins).
* It feels slower. There's something about it that just doesn't feel as fast. Mostly things like opening windows etc.
* There's some annoying defaults.
* Dev tools aren't as good.
* Updates aren't installed automatically.
I mean, it's close to Chrome, which is good (for me), but it just feels about 5% less polished. It's good enough that I'll stick with it, after all there was a driving force for me to leave Chrome too.
It seems to me that spell checking of form fields should be a basic feature integrated into the browser.
1. Why not Firefox?
2. Why do I have to jump through some undocumented hoops to get something that should work out of the box?
I understand this is my fault for having 10-30 tabs open at any point in time, but still, chrome will generally manage that at 2-4gb ram. FF often breaks 10gb.
I understand Jira is a pig of an app (Atlassian software is generally shit), but I unfortunately need to use it all day long. Chrome seems to be able to handle 2-4 each of jira, gmail, google cal, github, aws console, and slack. FF couldn't last time I tried, a couple months after they released Quantum.
This would, of course, be less of a problem if the cheapest macbook with 32g ram didn't cost $3k...
And Google sites are actually slower on Firefox, which I assume is not their fault but still doesn't work in their favor.
edit To clarify, I'm used to Chrome seemingly just updating itself in the background. Firefox needs a restart, and so far the restart behaviour with Firefox has been less reliable than Chrome (losing opened tabs sometimes, for instance).
This is increasingly not true. Between Bing and adding ads[1] to various parts of Windows 10, I expect Microsoft’a long term business strategy will be increasingly ad-heavy. And you can’t make them un-collect the data they’ve already collected on you.
[1] https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/192251/microsoft...
Maybe someday they'll do that but it's hard for me to believe that's the plan they're starting off with.
I wouldn't be too sad if Firefox was switching to chromium either. Then developers would only need to worry about rendering into one engine, and users would have all their sites always working.
Apparently I called for this over four years ago:
That would be a terrible day for the open web. Damn it, somebody inject some IE6 into these people stat.
Keep in mind that, for quite a few years, developers welcomed the oncoming Microsoft browser monopoly; IE3/IE4/IE5 were generally better and faster than their Netscape counterparts and Opera was so niche as to be irrelevant. Then Netscape (the for-profit enterprise) folded and there was no viable competition to IE for a while, and the broken mess known as IE6 became a serious problem for years since it had something like 98% market share.
Trusting any company, even Google, to be the de facto sole steward of the web is insane. They are a for-profit company. That may not make them intrinsically evil, but they sure as hell aren't intrinsically good.
IMHO, I personally think it's a good thing to consolidate on one engine to render HTML cross-platform for these two reasons:
1. Web developers no longer need to worry about supporting CSS and other edge-cases across various browser engines.
2. The Chromium engine itself is open source. There are other browsers (Vivaldi, Opera, etc) that run on top of it.
3. While I think it's great the engine underneath is the same, I think it's equally great that there is a variety of UIs and browsers built on top of the same engine - the innovation happens in the browser space, not the engine, anymore.
Being open source is a red herring in this instance.
Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. You fork the browser and remove that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so your fork doesn't work with those websites.
Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. You fork the browser and add the feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use your feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and your fork is no better off.
The insidious part of a web monoculture is allowing Google to dictate the standards of the web platform. Being able to fork the codebase only gives one the power to change things that are strictly client-side.
Say that Chrome implements a web feature you don't like. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that doesn't have that feature. But websites expect Chrome, and they use that feature, so MS Edge doesn't work with those websites.
Say that Chrome refuses to add a feature you want. MS use their own MSengine for their Edge browser that has that feature. But websites expect Chrome, so they don't use MS Edge feature so as to not break for their Chrome users, and MS Edge browser is no better off.
Any feature that requires a site owner to do something to support it isn’t going to be added.
That's not quite true. This happens all the time with things not standardised (yet). With time those either get wide adoption because people want them, or get dropped, or get standardised in a different widely agreed form.
So long as the players are well behaved, having a single dominant browser is beneficial. How much time, energy, productivity, and money has been lost on cross-browser (in)compatibility wrangling?
Not sure if that should have been Blink, or if you're making a subtle point about how Blink was forked from WebKit (which was in turn forked from KHTML).
Personally, while I can see why some may react to this news with concern about a monoculture, I find it hard to feel sorry about the end of the last significant closed source browser engine.
If Microsoft gives up IE and Edge then all the major browsers will have an open source foundation. With Gecko, WebKit, and Blink there remains a healthy range of options, too.
And as the history of KHTML/WebKit/Blink demonstrates, derivatives will appear if there's enough interest. Perhaps someday Microsoft will follow the examples Apple and Google have set by creating their own fork, if the circumstances warrant it.
As with anything, you always need somebody (or a group of somebodies) to help something new gain traction. There's no magic pixie dust that will let you develop a major new platform without commensurate resources. What open source does do is lower the cost of entry and make it easier to build up to a level where you can make an impact.
The entire point of this subthread is that it doesn't matter that you can take Webkit and do whatever you want, because the web is a client/server (browser/site) protocol, and having the ability to fork the client is irrelevant when this makes you incompatible with every server. Technical capital isn't sufficient; it takes social capital to pull off a hard fork.
> So long as the players are well behaved, having a single dominant browser is beneficial.
I've been on HN long enough to remember this tired argument from back before the Blink fork. The gain in efficiency from having a unilateral dictator is not worth the loss of mutual counterbalancing oversight. It is completely without foundation to give Google the benefit of the doubt that they will be well-behaved when there are no consequences for misbehavior. Google is not your friend, nor is Google's mission to make the web better. Google is a corporation whose purpose is to maximize profit by selling advertisements. You might as well hand stewardship of the web over to Comcast.
Web devs will have to build for the lowest common denominator so this change improves that slightly.
An actual downsides is it increases the power of the Chromium team to make defacto changes.
It might also reduces innovation but I can't really see Microsoft deciding to drop a feature because it would take them further from the chrome trunk.
So, as the OP said - back to the bad old days of IE6 dominance.
I was doing some webdev back then, and whilst everything you said was true it was the lack of cross browser CSS and Javascript testing which led to the real frustration.
Back in 2002/03 IE6 had over 90% marketshare, and justifying testing in anything else was a constant battle.
That's exactly the same situation with Chrome. It's faster than Firefox, has less CPU issues etc (and I say that as a long time Firefox user).
The mono-culture is the problem, and it's embarrassing that we've forgotten this.
Using the same engine across multiple browsers, open source or not, just doesn’t cut it.
Sometimes innovation is at odds with whatever Google's Chrome team feels like doing. That is why engine diversity is a good thing.
> Suggest it to them?? If it's really faster, why wouldn't they merge it?
How many major software projects do you know of that will casually add a programming language?
I mean, it makes sense—Google has an enormous team on Chromium and they don't want to have another language to support. But that is precisely why it's important to not have the entire Web under Alphabet's reporting structure.
Take your pick.
I look forward to this...
Mozilla is Poland and is destined to get f*cked as their market share drops and any negotiating leverage they have to get Google TAC money disappears (they're more like Saudi Arabia is to the US, a vassal state, rather than a Great Power).
These are dire times for the web. Only Vestager can save us now.
Not that I know that well, my work that forces my Windows usage still makes me use IE.
- Without competitors, innovation is dead. If there was only one web-engine, why bother improving it further? Given that it's open-source, it could theoretically be forked, but in that moment you again have two different web engines or more. Also, Mozilla would have to fork Blink from day one, because many things in it, they do not consider acceptable.
- A monoculture means one security problem makes everyone vulnerable.
- Multiple implementations challenge standards. You still would want a definition of a standard, or an API if you will, to point web developers to. But those are only going to point problems out after you've already implemented it, and likely also after other websites are already using the feature productively. They also can't point out stupid specifications that aren't going to allow you to update your browser engine in the future. So, you'd be much more likely to have to break compatibility, which doesn't play well with the web.
I rarely see people saying that there need to be competing kernel projects with completely separate code bases but all trying to conform to the same ABI, etc.
(Yes, I know there are other kernels out there, but my point is that people don't complain that Linux is so dominant like they do about Chromium vs Firefox)
Google's motivations include learning everything about you, and how to serve you more ads.
Linus' motivations include writing solid code and flipping people the bird.
It's not just about the current situation, either.
When Linus finally goes to the bitbucket in the sky, there are so many companies, organizations and private individuals with an incentive to keep Linux operating and free from backdoors, we can somewhat rest easy at night.
But with Chromium/Chrome - there are only a handful of organizations in the world that can keep up with the rate of patches coming out of Google. Google de-facto controls the direction of Chromium.
I'm not saying that's worse than the alternative. Maintaining something like that is a hell of a lot of work. Unfortunately, things have become so complex and monolithic that there are only a handful of viable browsers.
At least two of them have source available, so we can start over if we absolutely have to.
Ultimately it's about the client driving the protocol. We don't want that. It means there will be only one client.
We have an ISO C standard and many different C compilers. We have a standard for C++, and many different C++ compilers. With things like Matlab and Go, you have an implementation. There is no standard. The implementation defines the standard. And there is only one implementation. That's not good for anybody.
If I had my way I'd test on Chromium and Firefox only. And only the latest versions.
I already don't bother with Egde. Safari is the only pain I still have to bother with. Apple should just make a Chromium browser as well.