All that said, I’m surprised nobody is talking about Apple in all of this as they have a huge portion of the mobile browser share.
The way to keep it thriving (because it is, 9% market share is tens to hundreds of millions of users) is to empower developers to keep it relevant and users to escape the Google ad Imperium and universal tracking.
The day Mozilla announces chromium support, there will likely be a hard fork. It will also be the day where they fire/lose most of their team. That would be after users walk away from it. It would be suicidal. It would kill Mozilla the organization but you can bet somebody will keep the browser going.
Worst case, Google pulls their funding at some point. They are under no obligation to keep on funding it. Mozilla might need to diversify their income at some point or scale down their operations.
Apple and Mozilla being around will force Google + MS to play nice. Also the latter two are frenemies so the most natural place for them to cooperate is through open source and standard bodies. MS has had a big impact on web standards historically and they are unlikely to leave all that to Google. So, it's going to continue to be a four way discussion in the standards bodies. Chrome as a reference implementation will become even more important than it is today of course.
The real question is whether Apple will continue to keep Safari alive. With shrinking sales and many mac users option for Chrome/Firefox anyway, they have a problem there. They might decide to join MS and retire webkit. Right now it's usage is inflated because Apple bans competing browsers from their app store.
I really do not get it, Edge moving to Chromium changes absolutely nothing wrt Mozilla's "peril".
Web developers perpetrated this cycle once before with IE6. It's easy to look back at how bad IE6 was because MS became complacent. In its day, however, IE6 was easily the best browser out there. And MS decided waiting on a standards body hindered the speed of progress, so they forged ahead with their own features and hoped the standards bodies would later incorporate them. If not... oh well. And since 90+% of the Web used IE6, developers developed their sites for IE6, rarely ever testing in anything else.
It's likely Chromium won't stagnate the same way that IE6 did. But in a way, that makes it even harder for Firefox to regain market share. As a Firefox user, it's a bit embarrassing how many sites & apps I encounter that are Chrome-only. Or, if I report an issue to a developer they tell me to just switch browsers.
If Firefox numbers drop below a threshold, we can only pray, Google doesn't alter the deal any further.
Not to mention Google gets carte blanche to basically control Web Standards as they see fit, since they are the only implementer (that counts).
- Don't want PNaCl? Too bad.
- Dart on the Web? You can't remove it even if you want it. Oh and you better support it, cause if your browser doesn't have feature parity with Chrome, you are doomed.
- Rust in browser? You can only dream.
- Browsers that use more GPU and SIMD? Too much of a hassle.
People keep repeating this, but it is not true. I addressed this in my OP and yet here you are repeating it again. They do not get a free license to do whatever, because other people have the code.
This is just so strange, I didn't expect the developer community to succumb to FUD and hysteria like this.
Even if Firefox disappeared, Apple is still around.
Apple cares about web in the same way Windows cared about web. They want to move you to their native silo apps (for windows it was Windows application).
I.e. Apple wants to rename your Web Browser to App Store. It's already in some regards, the new IE.
because they want Mozilla's users to use google search / services, not out of the goodness of their hearts. what if mozilla had 5000 users left tomorrow? think big G would still write that check?