Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

I'm still shocked that they went the Chromium route here. This would have been their chance to really, well, for lack of a better way of putting it:

stick it to Google [0]

I think it would have been far, far more impressive to use Quantum (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum) or WebKit (https://webkit.org), with the added benefit that nw.js is already up and going for the Webkit engine (and likely would have sufficed as an Electron replacement that they could drive forward, but I suppose they own Electron now with Github acquired)

For its not Apple anymore and certainly not Mozilla that is the prime competitor nowadays to Microsoft, its Google (With Chromebooks in the schools, and their small business and cloud offerings) and Amazon's Web Services division that are their main competitors now.

While I don't know how all the business logic went into this and ultimately came up with this being the best calculation at hand, I think this would have played better in the media too (especially if they leaned on Mozilla)

[0] I know Chromium != Google, but its pretty hard not to see that most of Chromium's development is downstream from Google and Google employs and/or otherwise has had some direct influence over the core team

Google does an insane amount of very deep work all the ways down to the compiler level getting Chromium compiling on Windows and compiling on different architectures. These teams are very well staffed.

It makes strategic sense to go with Chromium if they're aiming for ARM64 support if they can get a huge amount of work for free directly (as opposed to incidentally) from Google to support clang on Windows – which is a much bigger undertaking than it seems at first glance.

As opposed to Quantum? https://www.techrepublic.com/article/mozilla-and-qualcomm-un...

Yes.

The technology that article mentions is Microsoft's Intel->ARM translation, which is surprisingly good, and entirely unrelated to Firefox.

The "optimized" build they're talking about is almost certainly natively-compiled ARM64, and the reason it's hard is because Rust is built on an older llvm version...which doesn't have Google's patches that improve support for Windows ARM64.

Firefox's internal code is a dumpster fire. I say that in the nicest way possible. Look at their 'jsapi' mailing list, they just break compatibility at will and don't properly version things. It doesn't have the same features v8 has with regards to isolation.

I'm not sure if quantum is actually all that different from pre-57 minus servo, however servo isn't magic, and only a small portion of that is really rust.

Overall firefox's codebases aren't meant to be used by anyone else. Chromium and v8 are.

V8's API is also highly unstable.

So much so that the Node developers now maintain a separate project dedicated to providing a stable wrapper API around it, now dubbed N-API:

https://github.com/nodejs/abi-stable-node

I'm pretty sure Microsoft has done their homework and evaluated the performance, portability, code base, etc. It is a big change after all, and they probably have carefully planned it.

With a strong Microsoft voice on the Chromium project, it will probably act as a counter to the Google voice. And Quantum and WebKit are nowhere close to Chromium, they're picky to a fault about HTML and CSS, it's just annoying to develop for them.

Nobody is competing on browser market share any more, that's a lost cause. With so much traffic going to mobile and apps now, it just doesn't make sense to be re-inventing the wheel when they could be investing in features that actually matter.

Google forked Blink off of WebKit because they couldn't dictate the pace. I highly doubt that Microsoft is going to have much of a voice in the matter.

I imagine they'll appreciate Microsoft essentially making Chrome work better within Windows, but that's about it. They'll accept pull requests, but doubt they'll give up much of anything in the way of control.

Microsoft is always free to fork Chromium.

Given how nodejs is still not fragmented (remember io.js), and things are getting along well, I am positive it can be done.

Microsoft has really shown it can do Open Source well and is willing to let go of its ego if it means more developers/users on their platform.

Also Google makes a shit ton of money off chromium through the search bar. Edge is chromium + bing bar.

If Edge doesn’t do stupid shit like log you in the browser, blast ads in your face, I am very willing to consider another browser.

Chromium won. It has the largest market share. V8 powers both chromium and nodejs. Google showed Microsoft that Open Source can be insanely profitable if there is a money making engine complementary to it.

Microsoft’s money makers are Azure, Office, Bing and surface devices. Open source software brings them a ton of good will and new users.

I don't disagree with anything you're saying here, but I don't know what it has to do with Microsoft having a say in how Chromium/Blink is developed or what directions it may take.

This move is about electron. Offering a drop in replacement that doesn’t brutalize you on perf and battery life

Is quantum that much closer to chromium than edge?

Shocked? Really? Everyone seems to be choosing a Chromium base lately, including Opera and Brave.

One thing that’s worse than Microsoft not adopting a technology is Microsoft adopting a technology.

Historically, they’ve used the “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy quite often, and maybe that’s what’s happening here. But maybe I’m being overly skeptical/borderline cynical...

This would be the situation where EEE would be a good thing for the community. Now if you were talking about Firefox, then I'd agree that that would be bad.

The opposite is happening. They have such a small market share that developers didn't have enough incentive to actually support/test on their browser so all their work was just trying to get edge to be chrome-compatible. Turns out making your browser a chrome clone is an easier way to do that.

EEE only works when you're much bigger (or flexible, if you're a snake) than your target.

Microsoft was 2-5-10x the size of its EEE targets. Oracle, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. these days are equals. And equally ruthless.

Old quotes need to be adapted for the present day.

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