Plus their browser would be faster.
Firstly, I'm paraphrasing here, but FF isn't as much a business as it is a religion (re: privacy). You can read a lot in to that, but I understood the gist of what they were getting at.
Secondly, somewhat relatedly, but consider FF's primary funding/revenue: it's Google. MS building on FF could mean Google would reduce their search deal, meaning MS might end up being forced in to increasing their funding for FF to help keep it an entity capable of operating at its current size. Or, FF simply becomes smaller, and MS has tied themselves with a shrinking partner.
However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors, and ends up losing share, so why fight that?
> However you look at it, MS has not had a good run in promoting their own browser tech against competitors [...]
Recently, yes. Because they screwed up their MSIE market dominance with embrace & extend. With which market dominance they put the WWW in a dark age of incompatibility. From which Mozilla and Firefox (and Konqueror, Safari, and Google Chrome) eventually flourished.
It's also concurrently a massively profitable business.
I don't get that one because Chromium IS Google, it's not even a primary funding, there's just no separation between the two. They just handed the web business directly to their competitors, no matter how they try to spin it. At least with Firefox, MS could still have influenced the web, with Chromium, there's just no way, they are insuring that MS will have no influence whatsoever and Google is even closer to a monopoly.
Certainly a brilliant move by Microsoft, since 0 money is made by the browser itself it really doesn't matter to them.
Firefox is my favourite browser, I use it every day but I often have to work around bugs in websites caused by this lack of testing. I think Microsoft don't have a choice if they want their browser to be popular it has to just work and the only way that is possible is basically for it to be Chrome.
I work in a web dev shop and nearly everyone here uses Firefox as their main dev browser. We do run tests on other browsers as well but we mainly develop with Firefox and its tools.
Although part of the reason could be that we know most of our customers use it instead of Chrome. Don't ask me why, but if I had to venture I'd guess it's because Firefox is quite popular in my country for some reason.
While not 100% representative of reality, Google Trends gives that view of Chrome vs Firefox: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore/GEO_MAP/1554809400?...
They're going to replace gecko piece by piece until it's all servo.
I'm not sure why people are saying they like or don't like gecko. It's just old tech and they're replacing it from the ground up but doing it in a sustainable way.
In the end servo will be dropped and gecko will just be gecko newer version.
Concrete plans lead to making hard to change decisions before you need to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Usage
Other web browsers using Gecko include Airfox, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox, HP Secure Web Browser, Oxygen and Sylera (for mobile).
Other products using Gecko include Nightingale, Instantbird and Google's picture-organization software Picasa (for Linux).
Mozilla used to support embedding, and this is what largely powered Camino and K-Meleon back in the day (embedding Gecko within a native widget toolkit), but disabled this in 4.0 due to maintenance concerns in the service of making it a brave new XULRunner world.
Virtually all of the remaining Firefox and Mozilla derivatives are still essentially XULRunner applications even though XULRunner itself has gone by the wayside. Also do note that many on the list someone else posted are actually forks. TenFourFox, for example, is a heavily modified Firefox 45; Waterfox, Pale Moon and the UXP project are based on Firefox 52. Even K-Meleon today is XUL-based.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox, it's released under MPL. But sure it's more restrictive than most code in Chromium.
As for whether there's a lot of MPL or a lot of BSD code probably doesn't have much practical effect for compliance. In order to comply, it's easier to publish all the code than to try to do the minimum for each component on a per-license basis.
MSHTML and EdgeHTML are also used as embedded components in non-browser windows software. (E.g. you can write UWP applications powered by JavaScript and rendering UI using EdgeHTML). Gecko supposedly doesn’t work well for embedding in that context.
Just look at how successful chromium has been in this space, stuff like Chromium Embedded framework, Electron, the myriad of chromium based web browsers etc...