Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

The world would have been a better place if Microsoft's latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem.

Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft & Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla/Netscape - one of the biggest battles in technology history, which Microsoft won following a savage no-holds-barred battle. There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox - such a move would have been truly ironic.

View on HN

I really disagree with this perspective. Frankly Google needs a counter-balance in the browser market.

Microsoft can easily act as Google's counter balance. Microsoft is one of the few companies that have the resources capable of maintaining a hostile fork of chromium (at a loss) and have it competitive enough that users will switch. Google has lost it's one advantage in the web-space too as now they can't exactly hamper the experience of edge without hampering chrome too.

Chromium needed this counter-balance.

If Microsoft chose a Gecko forked browser, they would dominate and take over. Like what Apple did with KHTML. This step is better.

I agree, I think this is generally better. It feels like google needs some pressure to listen to people. Oddly enough Microsoft didn't do some things that would be instant wins, like support plugins on mobile so you can install things like ublock origin ( biggest reason why I use firefox on mobile ).

It's almost as if there are technical reasons for not supporting the current extension api on mobile! (Battery, performance, ...)

Ublock Origin/uMatrix on mobile significantly increase website performance and battery life on the average site, by blocking a a lot of advertising and tracking content.

Potential problems could be mitigated pretty easily by warning about or throttling extensions that use too much CPU/memory on mobile.

Not allowing extensions on Chrome for Android might have been an acceptable excuse in the early days of Android, with very weak single core CPUs. But not for years.

And yet extensions work on ChromeOS on machines with no more power or memory than my phone. In fact my phone beats my ChromeOS machine at many benchmarks, has the same amount of ram, and more storage.

Larger laptop form factor provides better sustained performance due to better cooling, as well as larger batteries.

Also, even though you can run Android apps and Linux containers these days, Chrome OS is still built around using the browser in a way Android is not. Your phone has to balance the needs of the browser against other demands and apps.

And you probably need to run a virus scanner and it eats batteries for breakfast.

It’s all trade offs....

It takes some doing to get a virus on a Chromebook.

Forgive my skepticism that that is the reason Google doesn't make it available.

Almost! But not quite. Extensions work fine on mobile Firefox and battery life and performance are improved when ads are blocked.

Anecdotal, but my 4 year old Android phone (Sony Z5 Compact) runs Firefox and uBlock Origin with no issues at all.

Probably not because both given reasons are plainly wrong.

> The world would have been a better place if Microsoft's latest move was to adopt Firefox instead of Webkit - it would have encouraged diversity in the browser ecosystem.

It would, but at the same time while there's been long-term work at making Gecko embeddable (though primarily on mobile, in the form of GeckoView), it's still the case that it's much easier to embed Chromium or WebKit into a larger product today.

Arguably, one of Mozilla's biggest mistakes was never really caring about making Gecko embeddable. (Okay, GeckoView is now a thing.)

Linux is on Windows. A few people might have did a little chuckle, but I don't think anyone would be angry :) I'd bet the Chromium choice was more about Electron than Edge.

I heard part of the Chromium choice was that Edge developers felt they were already spending too much time in the Chromium codebase to support Windows initiatives even before the decision was made. For instance, Microsoft wanted to make sure all the browsers to support ARM64 on Windows natively, Mozilla did the work themselves (and it was basically already in their build farm when Microsoft asked), and Google asked Microsoft to PR it (which they did).

Not sure if this is accurate but when put like that it sounds like the worst possible reason.

It's not a great reason, but it is an interesting failure [1] case of the open source model, when someone else's open source project becomes your own liability because so many of your own customers use it.

[1] Arguably a success case in some viewpoints; it's sometimes why people promote open source.

Beats having to maintain bug compatibility to keep popular proprietary code running though

Though at least when Microsoft was doing that they were documenting those bugs and bringing them all to web platform standards boards for review. Now they are more likely to contribute such bugs to the web platform again without documenting them, leaving probably poor Mozilla the only ones left to notice.

Tech doesn’t exist in a vacuum. When team W is tasked with X, and has the possibility to use tech Y, which they are seriously acquainted with, and tech Z, which they barely touched, it makes perfect sense to go with tech Y as it’s much more efficient to get to speed and evaluate risks. In fact, as long as risks are evaluated and cleared regarding Y, there is no reason not to go with Y.

As for actual risks, remember, this is MS, not some random shop: at any point if they’re dissatisfied with Chromium in any way, they have enough firepower to fork Blink, just like Google forked WebKit from Apple, and like Apple forked WebKit from KHTML, and do whatever they want.

Microsoft has never been shy about partnering with former enemies/competitors. We tend to forget Apple would probably be gone if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out in 97 (not out of altruism but because of antitrust). Linux is also first class on Azure. I don't think they would care about the Netscape thing.

We tend to forget Apple would probably be gone if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out in 97 (not out of altruism but because of antitrust).

What “saved” Apple was the iMac in 1998, not Microsoft.

Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock in Apple as a show of good faith. Apple made Internet Explorer the default browser for the Mac and Microsoft committed to Office for the Mac. At the time, Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac was the best browser on any platform.

After the 5 year period, Microsoft sold those shares, making a huge profit.

At the end of the 5-year agreement, Apple shipped Safari 1.0, based on the KHTML codebase and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ironically, Microsoft's browser is now based on a fork of the engine of the browser that replaced IE on the Mac back in the day.

>Microsoft bought $150 million in non-voting stock in Apple as a show of good faith.

Well there was the legal battle going on between the two as well. So you could think of IE, Office, 150M stock was part of the package.

Webkit and blink is not the whole browser engine however but just a HTML/CSS layout engine.

"if Microsoft hadn't bailed them out in 97"

This is a myth. Apple always had massive amounts of cash even at their low point when people considered them worth barely more than their cash.

Don't forget that the re-engineered Microsoft Office was made available on OSX not long afterwards.

That move alone (plus Bill Gates' appearance at an Apple event) might have saved the platform, not only by making it more attractive to users, but also by giving the platform more credibility with larger enterprises.

Microsoft was one of the first developers for the Mac. Word, Excel and PowerPoint were on Macs since the 80s.

Excel 1.0 shipped on the Macintosh in 1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel#Apple_Macintos...

They even started on the Mac before being ported to Windows. At least Excel did, not sure about the other two.

"bail out" doesn't necessarily mean lending cash in this case, but getting them back into business in general.

Short answer: the Gecko codebase wasn't very good back then and it certainly wasn't designed to be embedded elsewhere.

Think about it—Nokia, Google, Blackberry, Samsung could have picked Gecko back in the day but they all chose WebKit instead. That should tell you something.

Google forked WebKit to make Blink in 2013 and since then, Opera, Vivaldi and now Microsoft are using Blink. Not even the creator of Firefox and former head of Mozilla Brendan Eich, ended up using Firefox--Brave also is using Chromium/Blink.

This is a pretty uninformed comment.

Gecko was absolutely originally designed to be embedded—it just never did a particularly stellar job of fulfilling those goals.

Brendan also didn't create Firefox.

Technically Brendan Eich was part of the creation of "Firefox" in 1998-2002, because the browser was previously known as Netscape (closed source) and Mozilla (open source).

Brendan Eich was a co-founder of Mozilla (although not of Netscape).

Brendan co-founded mozilla.org. Brendan is not the "creator of Firefox".

Your correspondent said that I was part of "the creation of Firefox" and that's true. Twisting his words to advance a straw man you knock down does nothing to erase my role in the creation of Firefox.

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1210621157201727489?s...

Brendan, uh, wtf?

You're implicitly reading my comment as some sort attempt to diminish your involvement, and explicitly claiming that I'm the one twisting words. You're wrong about both.

"Part of the creation of Firefox" is the second iteration of the wording in play here, which means it's you and jannes who are twisting words here. I know that moving the goalposts is one of HN's favorite pastimes, but it's a stupid one.

The point where I joined this conversation was to correct someone who referred to you as "the creator of Firefox". I was right to do so. (More than that, it's something you should have been glad to see...) If you want to see this as an insult despite it not being one and then move in to attack me over it with ironic accusations of strawmanning, you can go piss up a flagpole.

We agree I’m not “the” or even “a” creator of Firefox, but the iteration I saw was from “part of” to implied “none”. That is the impression left in Mozilla and other wiki sources unless you check web.archive.org, and it is a bigger wtf for me than my misreading of your intent here. I hope so, anyway! There is an effort to erase me, by others (not you), which is not only dishonest — it won’t work. Sorry for misreading you.

Chromium (and Edge) are using Blink, not Webkit. They have been developed separately since 2013.

It is just more beneficial for MS to use webkit. They neuter Googles ability to use its dominance to give preference to its own services and interests. Having a minority browser engine (which Mozilla would still be) gives no strategic advantages at all. IE was only strategically useful when it was dominant. Now it is just a resource sink.

MS supports linux now. They don't care about past rivalries, they just do what makes business sense to them.

The lack of diversity might be bad for the web at large though.

Firefox and lack of diveresity in the browser ecosystem?

http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX...

“ Here is final copy of the memo we sent to BillG for think week about what we should do to get to 30% browser share. Pls do not distribute broadly.”

“ Clone and Supernet Netscape. PSD needs to get serious about cloning Netscape. We must have a plan to clone all the features they have today, plus new ones they will add between now and our next release”

“We will bind the shell to the Internet Explorer so that running any other browser is a jolting experience. Shell/Browser user model becomes the same.”

That's an interesting document, but I think it says "superset" instead of "supernet" (purely because of the context).

>There would have been alot of people very unhappy if Microsoft has adopted Firefox

Who? Shareholders? Open source advocates?

As an avid Firefox user, privacy tinfoil hat and all-round Stallman-esque interjector, I wouldn't mind if Microsoft contributed to Gecko, Quantum and SpiderMonkey - provided it didn't interfere in any way with my abilities to do for example ad- and tracker blocking.

As far as I understand it, the Chromium codebase is deeply intertwined with the Google ecosystem in a way that makes it hard to guarantee privacy the way Firefox does.

Google? :-)

By the way, it occurs to me that Microsoft is now doing better what Google was doing with the Chrome Frame for IE extension a few years ago.

13 years ago, I asked myself, why Microsoft doesn't just embed WebKit instead of keeping using their annoying web engine. It turns out they are now doing a variant of that now, something that seemed impossible back then, and (amazingly) I am not too happy with this... I guess I did not predict the collapse of my favorite browser's market share at the time, and the dominance of Chrome, which did not exist. Google seemed good anyway.

Google building a web browser was strange to me back then: why would Google do that when we already have Firefox, an excellent browser? But now, it is obvious. And Microsoft does not care that much apparently. They don't care about having an edge over this area anymore.

There were plenty of technical reasons at the time, remember Firefox/Mozilla devs were strongly against the multiple processes model that Chrome devs really wanted. Chrome has redefined what it means to build a secure browser and I'm happy this is getting adopted now. Ofc, in the meantime Chrome isn't just a better technical alternative to existing browsers anymore, it's a strategic asset with all that entails.

I fail to follow, given that actual Microsoft is one of the major contributors to the Linux kernel, and they are now also contributing to OpenJDK (take that Google).

So they could do that, but I guess Chrome VM has won.

In a couple of years job boards will ask for Chrome developers instead of Web developers.

> Unfortunately given the history of Microsoft & Firefox this was of course impossible due to Firefox being a derivative of Mozilla/Netscape

So, all that cakes was for nothing?

People romanticize a rivalry but in reality most browser vendors are friendly with each other. The cakes are a great example of that. They cooperate on standards and work towards common goals.

The top-level comment is disappointing. Blink (not WebKit) was chosen because it was the better technical decision. That's all.

Microsoft moved to we kit cuz they own Electron and this way they can build web it into the os, and have electron call the os, instead of each app shipping with a copy of blink. It's a battery thing.

Teams, their flagship Office app, is electron.

The world would have been a better place if Microsoft had doubled down on Edge. Then there would be three viable browser engines.

Did you mean 4? There are 3 now: Gecko (tangentially including Servo), Webkit, and Blink.

webkit, blink, gecko. There still 3 guys

Reply on news.ycombinator.com