Could WebKit be a viable alternative to Blink, should Mozilla bite the dust?
And yes, it is absolutely bigger than Gecko. No question. But are you going to tell me with a straight face that WebKit has the same amount of traction with third-parties as Blink? Because sorry, that’s not the case. That was the case for about 5 years, when post iPhone, everyone and their brother decided to use WebKit to power their mobile browser for whatever mobile OS they were building for (Android, BlackBerry, Symbian/Maemo/Meego, webOS, Tizen) or for whatever embedded systems they were designing for in-car systems or whatever, but after the Google fork became demonstrably different, the surviving players in that arena switched to Blink because Google was faster at iterating and easier to work with for upstream commits (easier does not mean easy).
But on the whole, Blink is still more similar to WebKit than it is to Gecko.
Brendan Eich IIRC said they looked into building Brave on top of Webkit but it was so hard to compile and embed across all three platforms that they went with Chromium. Same story with Gecko.
So that's another reason why we now have a Blink monoculture: because the alternative engines didn't spend any effort in making them usable by third party applications.
But it's been stagnating for years and it's still not a viable replacement for Gecko and Chromium (broken scrolling on scaled screens, WebAuthn is unsupported so I can't login to my email account, etc.)
In any case, if I recall correctly Eich's comment, the biggest difficulty was building webkit for Windows. The documentation was very out of dated, and it's understandable given Apple's focus on its OS. Even this GitHub says it's a web engine for "macOS, iOS and Linux".
And even if they did, I think Gecko has enough of a fan base that it would live on for a very long time. NetSurf and Dillo are still around after all.
I'd say that the issue with Google's control of web standards stem from their surveillance capitalism business model.
MS's anti-user was in the form of ensuring that necessary sites would not work in other browsers (including the Mac IE engine, whose name I have forgotten, and therefore IE mobile). They didn't block ad blockers, etc because they didn't support any kind of extensions :D
Google is still doing this today.
> Pop-ups were universally reviled
Just as universally reviled as auto-start video, audio, and ads that move around the screen as you scroll today.
Also IE didn’t support any extensions for MS to block (that was a big argument from Mozilla)
Of course, Firefox and later Chrome came around, so in the end the Web kicked Microsoft's ass anyway.
I think it was a bit more general: "We want to keep a stranglehold on the Apis used to write general software". The ability to write software once for the web and have it work on web browsers on any platform was viewed as an existential threat.
However, the observation that they only developed IE as long as they were worried about that threat and then left it to rot afterwards is spot on.
Their strategy was aimed against their competitors interests, not their users interests. Microsoft in the bad old days still saw their users as paying customers and not just a source of data to be exploited.
Yes, exactly. This is what I meant with 'before the Web kicks our ass'.
They each do the vast majority of the dev work in their respective engines, so it's "control" only because if they want a feature they'll just implement it. Similarly neither implements things that aren't of interest to them - I can't speak for blink but webkit isn't going to oppose people contributing support for new features unless the implementation is not good (I assume this is a universal across all projects), or it's considered harmful (features that are inherently insecure - a la SVG raw socket access - or inherently harmful - e.g. new tech to aid tracking).
So in short, no. If Mozilla dies, then there will be trouble and would need someone to carry on their work as the last remaining 'freedom' blessed engine.
2. No
I think the real problem is the gecko and spidermonkey seem to be falling significantly behind on real user experience. This is ignoring the Firefox application itself which I find super irksome.
But as their gross built in tracking+advertising shows they are at least somewhat hurting for cash which does not help, and encourages gross stuff like said spam+tracking.
It doesn't help that the google folk keep shoving out half-assed specs for whatever some google team has decided they want/need with specs but little thought of generally of how to make more universal solutions. That just means you've got constant pressure to implement ever increasing numbers of standards just to stay in place - if apple (and technically MS in the past) has difficulty keeping up with the constant "spec" spam it's hard to see Mozilla managing in the longer term.
> bite the dust
If I were ceo of Mozilla I would have cut off Firefox development like 5 years ago. It doesn’t look pretty, but AOL and Yahoo changed assets, they don’t look as ugly. But I also hate a lot of what they currently stand for, and they don’t really have assets. They’re like some NPR for web standards documentation, and while it is the best, it’s not very valuable. Google seems to have a lot of leading control while Mozilla is angry outside, with a megaphone, and red-orange dyed hair.
They’ve always been open source, they’ll die of natural causes.
What exactly out of this this you hate so much? https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/advocacy/
I think an open source foundation has to stand on the shoulder of a valuable product to get noticed. GNU has all of its things, Mozilla is an acoustic guitar busker playing “bulls on parade by Ratm” outside of a Barnes and Nobles.
Also Mozilla: We need more than deplatforming [of those we disagree with and already attempted to deplatform]
None of Mozilla's virtue signalling serves to bring back the Firefox of yore. Firefox has instead followed Chrome's heels at every turn to the point I might as well just use the real deal rather than a third-rate knock off.
I want a lean, effective browser that I can tailor to my specific needs and desires, and Firefox has been not that for at least 20 years.
Mozilla is (supposed to be) a collective of computer programmers, not activists and lobbyists. So fuck their advocacy, more accurately virtue signalling. All of it. The specifics don't matter. Fuck all of that noise. If they go back to making some good software I might be more supportive and respectful of them again, but not a step before.
FWIW, Firefox was released just under 20 years ago