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Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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?

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.

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

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