Mozilla should give up on Firefox and go with Chromium too | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla should give up on Firefox and go with Chromium too

zdnet.com

9 pointsmariushn26 comments

I believe that Mozilla is technologically superior to Google and Microsoft. Mozilla managed to create a great community around firefox and rust, they keep their development processes open and they are moving reasonably fast with a steady pace without breaking things. Google and MS will not be able to keep up with Mozilla, after the major parts of firefox will be reimplemented in rust.

The only thing Mozilla needs to break a dominance of Google and MS is a some significant shift on the market of browsers, when abilities to adapt will be more valuable than ability to ship a specific browser to all users of Windows and Android. IT moves fast, so in decade or so a shift like that will happen almost inevitable.

Not happy with Microsoft handing more control of the web to Google, he now wants Mozilla to do the same.

If you're reading this Kenneth: Fuck you very much. You're a modern-era collaborator, in the WW2 sense of the word. And yes, I mean that Google are 'the enemy' and you're doing active harm by working with them.

How unbelievably short-sighted. This is how you end up with the situation that happened with Internet Explorer in the 90s most of the 2000s. (Of course, I'll readily admit Chromium is far better than IE, but the comparison still holds.)

It's not in the best interest of the users or developers for there to be a single web browser. Chromium is not the world wide web.

I've seen several articles like this lately and it surprises me that developers aren't aware of the fields in which Mozilla is leading the charge. WebAssembly, for example, is seeing a large portion of development coming from Mozilla.

Is Mozilla perfect? Of course not. I could list probably a dozen mistakes and missteps they've made just off the top of my head. But I'm not advocating for everyone to switch to Firefox.

I simply prefer options and competition in the browser space. In fact, I wish there were more meaningful browser alternatives out there instead of just a bunch of different GUI wrappers around Chromium.

> I'll readily admit Chromium is far better than IE

This is the part that's often forgotten. IE is how we got XHR. You could even argue IE is how we got `box-sizing: border-box;` (which is essentially IE's legacy box model).

IE was once considered better than Netscape (the only real competitor at the time).

Not considering speed/efficiency, I don't recall scripting being the worst in IE. (Although, alerting users to scripting errors with alert modals was pretty unforgivable.)

My biggest gripe was the poor CSS support. And though it gave us the border-box model, as you mentioned, it was legacy IE's normal box model, which didn't comply to standards.

Which is the whole point. Because IE was the most popular browser by a landslide for many years, developers would code specifically to deal with IE's non-standard interpretations of web standards. It was a sad time. Either your site looked like crap in IE or in everything else. Depending on the year or era, that meant developers would make it look right in IE and shrug their shoulders for everyone else since they were just playing the odds. But no matter your outlook on which users you defer to, that's not a choice any developer should have to make.

It was better, in the early days. IE3 and IE4 were a dream, at least as an enduser. It wasn't until closer to IE6 that it truly became shit

The more we approach a monoculture, the more innovation stagnates. It was a serious, possibly fatal blow already when Microsoft threw in the towel. If safari and firefox were to follow suit, we'd enter a dark age.

How do you compare this to the Unix vs Linux kernel?

It's not as though Linux is the only Unix in town. There's also MacOS and BSD.

edit: and probably a whole bunch of other Unixes (Unices?) that I don't know about.

Personally, I think FF and Gecko are superior to Chrome in most ways. Better and more powerful add-ons, less memory usage, and faster performance. Before quantum, FF kind of sucked, but now it’s amazing. Also I haven’t noticed many situations in which a site doesn’t work under FF.

In regards to his arguments about fragmentation, you could just as easily conclude that MS shouldn’t make Windows anymore. Also, monocultures are bad for everyone: true innovation always occurs through fierce competition.

With how much we depend on the web, we cannot just have one browser engine. Plus firefox despite not having the fancy budget of Google & Microsoft, they are delivering a kick ass product.

Plus with HTML5 & open standards, multiple engines MUST not be an issue at all.

Ofcourse, I don't need to convince why monopoly is bad in this forum.

Yes of course! Monopolies are so efficient! We should absolutely leave ourselves no alternatives to one option!

How brain dead is microsoft collectively to not realise that we already faced the perils of a browser monoculture and it was terrible?

I think that was discussed already a couple of months ago. The tweet is from January.

I think Mozilla is awesome and Firefox will one day win back the web.

I like to think about this like the Linux kernel. If everyone worked on the same core, then the browser would be better and safer. My job when writing client side code would be far simpler too!

Except there are other kernels, and the world is better for it.

Why does it actually matter what Web browser most people use? In absolute terms there are probably more Firefox users now than there ever were. Who cares about the percentages?

In the early 2000s IE6 "dominated". I think we all agree that was awful, with many websites out there only built for and tested with IE. We Firefox users got through that. We'll get through this too.

If developers rely on 'features' added just to Chromium, without any kind of standards involved (i.e. imagine if Chrome said they're going to ship a Dart VM in chromium) then users of every other browser are shit out of luck.

This makes sense to me. There are over 10,000 open bugs on Core and over 10,000 open bugs on Firefox, not to mention Dev tools and mobile versions.

If switching to Chromium, Mozilla could focus on

* standards

* Mozilla accounts integration instead of Google (including extensions store)

* important features such as enabling extensions on mobile

1) Standards are meaningless if there is effectively one rendering engine.

2) Why would Mozilla want to mimick Google’s account integrations? I switched to FF and miss nothing about Google accounts.

3) Firefox extensions already work on Android. Do they not on iOS? FF and all other browsers are just Safari on iOS due to Apple restrictions, so maybe extension support is impossible.

> 3) Firefox extensions already work on Android.

True. Chrome doesn't support extensions on mobile though, hence the proposal that Mozilla could implement that.

So you're arguing that Mozilla should stop developing FF so that they can improve an inferior, competing product?

That still makes no sense for either Mozilla or us. Just use FF on mobile.

> There are over 10,000 open bugs on Core and over 10,000 open bugs on Firefox

According to https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/list, there are 60K+ open issues against Chromium, so maybe Google should drop it in favour of Mozilla's engine then?

Standards are dead the moment there is one rendering engine. It doesn't matter what W3C says it only matters whst Chromium does. That was the status quo we had with IE6.

That's the point of having multiple browsers. You took one of the strongest arguments against a browser engine monoculture and made it into an argument in favour of browser monoculture? We've ALREADY HAD browser monoculture and it resultee in the death of standards.

My thinking was that Mozilla could have a significant market share (30%+) through a better browser, therefore having a say in standards. It would also implement and adapt the Mozilla Chromium branch in its best interest.

Vs now having Google do whatever it wants as most people use Chrome anyway.

Having 0% control over the engine limits their influence inherently. Maket share of the gui wrapper would give them control over... themes? Extensions?

I also think Firefox would be less appealing without Quantum.

I’m not sure open bugs is a metric that anyone cares about.

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