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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

WebKit has a problem that nobody of consequence ships it on Windows and Android, the two largest operating systems by usage share. Until someone fixes this, Firefox is the only meaningful alternative.

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Right, and it makes me wonder if it'd be better for Firefox and diversity of browser engines for FF to use WebKit.

Looking at the StatCounter Aug 2020 stats [1], ignoring browsers less than 2% usage share (because I'm lazy), it looks like:

Chromium based = 74.53%. Safari = 16.82%. Firefox = 4.09% (but effectively 0 on mobile).

And that's with Apple forcing WebKit on Apple mobile devices.

Throwing Firefox's 4% into WebKit could be like strategic voting to strengthen the opposition, stop splitting the vote, and reduce Mozilla's cost of maintaining FF (keeping their recent layoffs in mind).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Su...

I remain unconvinced that a Blink-WebKit duopoly would be a better situation than what we have now. For one, Apple has more than enough money to fund WebKit development, and I am not sure the sudden addition of the Firefox team would be welcomed or beneficial there. And while Gecko and WebKit share many of the same goals, they diverge in parts of the browser I consider critically important, such as extensibility. Even if Firefox has low market share I consider their contribution to the browser space to be much more than their usage share would imply.

> such as extensibility

That's a fair point. I very much value FF's extensibility.

if it'd be better for Firefox and diversity of browser engines for FF to use WebKit.

Of course not. If all browsers effectively turn into slightly different UIs for WebKit, that is zero diversity.

To be fair, I never advocated for "all browsers" to use WebKit.

My suggestion is in terms of "strategic voting" [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting

It may no longer be the case but didn't chromium start as a webkit fork? would Firefox being another Webkit fork be as usefull as a fully seperate implemntation of the standards?

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