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Comment by brianpgordon | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft still makes a browser; they just don't make their own rendering engine anymore. Which makes sense because it's hard and Blink works just fine. I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing. The Vivaldi folks are using that strategy and managing to make the best web browser out there with what I assume must be a microscopic fraction of $500 million/yr.

And I don't share your opinion of how far a $500 million budget goes. They're not rewriting the entire thing every year.

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> I wouldn't mind if Mozilla did the same thing.

Then there would literally be no point to Firefox existing as a counterbalance to Google deciding the web's future.

Theoretically they could still focus on developing a privacy-first browser on top of the core engine, and continue to influence web standards by implementing them as plugins with some glue patches maintained as a running fork on top of the Chromium code. As it is now, the fact that Firefox uses Quantum instead of Blink and SpiderMonkey instead of V8 isn't really a differentiator for the vast majority of users. There's a vague sense that a technology monoculture is unhealthy, but I would argue that the real threat is a browser monoculture, and Mozilla apparently can't stop that from happening with their current strategy because Firefox is losing.

I disagree, it's a good thing that Mozilla develops their own engine, this way, when we give either browser some data, we can verify that both engines are doing what they're supposed to be doing by comparing the results, and they should be the same.

If we switch to a single, universal engine for all browsers, bugs, faults and errors in that engine may slip through, and no one would really notice for absence of comparison.

Given the rise of devices with many cores that are not particularly powerful, technology that moves web page rendering to a multithreaded model, like Servo and WebRender will only become more important, no?

Brave is trying that approach. It feels like an uphill battle, but time will tell.

Chromium based Edge is definitely much more than the rendering engine. Do they use their own networking, process management, Javascript engine, extension system? It is probably still 80-90% chromium.

Rendering/layout engine is an admittedly sloppy term referring to the whole stack, except for the JavaScript engine.

I think my point is still valid, that Microsoft hasn't given up on their browser, just most of the technology underlying it - which their users don't care about. The fact that Edge is a pretty decent epub reader (for now... https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/microsoft-edge/2...) isn't necessarily tied to the fact that it's EdgeHTML based. If they wanted to, Microsoft could implement the same feature set on top of Chromium.

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