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Comment by fencepost | Hacker News Reader

I really wish that if Microsoft was going to abandon having their own engine that they'd gone to Mozilla instead.

They really can't, though. There's a pile of corpses of people who tried to embed Gecko, because it turns out Netscape/Mozilla is really bad at keeping a stable ABI. I doubt anybody remembers K-meleon anymore, for example. As far as I know Servo was supposed to be the new, embeddable engine, but that's mostly cancelled now and the Rust bits are just being rolled into Gecko (via Project Quantum).

I believe that's why Webkit was based on KHTML… the Mozilla developers Apple hired realized that had a better chance of working.

Maybe Mozilla has changed since all that happened and they're more friendly to embedders now? I've been out of the loop for a few years at this point. I don't think I've heard anything though, and they've built up a reputation…

For what it's worth, Mozilla now has GeckoView, which has a stable embedding API. But yeah, it took about 15 too many years to get there...

I thought GeckoView is Android-only? Which means Microsoft couldn't exactly use it for Edge…

Yes. GeckoView is Android-only. GeckoView is currently used in Firefox Focus, Firefox Reality VR, the upcoming "Fenix" browser, some Mozilla test apps, and a couple third-party apps.

For now yeah, I believe the plan long term is to move the desktop version to it as well

Well, they are not embedding Blink to build a new browser either - they just fork Chrome. They could have forked Firefox the same way and customize it to their liking.

But that would not have solve their web compatibility issue in such an easy way.

> Servo was supposed to be the new, embeddable engine, but that's mostly cancelled now

You mean the plan to embed Servo, or Servo itself?

I thought Servo itself was mostly de-funded outside of Quantum; was that not correct? I'd love to hear otherwise.

What benefit does Microsoft have by using Mozilla instead? Earnest question.

Electron, the software framework VSCode uses, runs on Chromium. Github maintained and developed the framework and they are currently owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft contributes to Chromium and improves performance they benefit in a lot of places: their new browser is improved(Edge Chromium), their own framework(Electron), and their own product (VSCode).

One benefit would be to reduce dependency on Google. Huawei used Android that was owned by enemy country, it backfired.

They aren't really dependent on Google with Blink, though. They have developer resources that can maintain a fork of it. If Google does something Microsoft doesn't like they can just remove it form their tree or implement an alternative of their own design.

They can diverge from Chromium around the edges but they are dependent on Google for long-term Blink evolution. That includes not just the internals but also APIs. E.g. if/when Google removes powerful content-blocking APIs from Chromium, Microsoft is would struggle to maintain their own different API. Especially for APIs that have architectural implications ... converting something from sync to async or vice versa. Significant architectural divergence would get expensive pretty fast.

Then again, they would face the same issues had they adopted Gecko. Maybe less so because Mozilla could be more easily influenced than Google (in some ways). The main argument for adopting Gecko would have been that giving Google complete control over Web evolution is a threat to Microsoft and that adopting Gecko would reduce that threat. I'm a big Mozilla fan but I think it would have been a weak argument.

Huawei depended on the proprietary bits of Android ("Google Play Services"?). In contrast, Microsoft is knowledgeable enough to use only the permissively-licensed parts of Chrome as the point of departure for their fork.

Also, if Huawei were to fork Android they'd be responsible keeping their fork of a huge code base secure by push security updates, and Microsoft is much more likely to be able to do that competently than Huawei is.

Without giving it much thought, I do too.

Anyone know what MSs stance on Rust is?

They use it for some Azure things, IIRC.

I'm aware of some Rust in the Azure IoT gateway, but that's more due to the desires of the specific team lead than to any organizational drive toward Rust. (he's the author of Actix, among other things)

There are experiments incorporating it into the OS and build system, but they've barely begun. Some teams use it for internal tooling. To make Rust work in Windows there would need to be a lot of work put into incorporating it into the build system, as well as writing libraries for RPC, COM, and other Windows specific technology.

No thanks. Keep Embrace, Extend, Extinguish away from my user agent.

I’m no Microsoft fan, but that isn’t really a thing anymore is it? Of the tech giants, MS seems the least noxious now.

For Christ's sake, it's not like Microsoft-written code is just irreversibly cursed.

It's corporations in a monopolistic position that let EEE happen - you know, like what Google is doing with Chrome right now.

If Internet Explorer's engine released under GPL or MIT can break Google's monopoly without simply handing it over to Microsoft, then all the power to it.

Jeez not this trope(|tripe) again. It's boring and it's tedious. It's in the past. Under different management. Sure MS are no angels, but they seem to be doing far less harm these days than Google/Facebook et al.

I'm no MS fan but in this case it's Google that's doing the 3 Es. First they bundled their own adblocker in Chrome (embrace), then they're making their own standards to dictate what 3rd party ad blockers can do, under the guise of improving performance (extend) and now they're making it harder to make efficient 3rd party adblockers (extinguish).

It's pretty clear what the plan is here, Google naturally sees ad blocking as a threat and they know that they can't outright disable ad blockers so they take the long route to take it over. Make it functional enough that most users won't bother looking for an alternative but make sure that it can't threaten your business model.

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